“Nothing is ever really lost to us as long as we remember it.”
―
This week my paternal Aunt, Marilyn Ruth (Manley) Kilbourn, my father’s sister, emailed me a document she’d written of her childhood memories growing up in Tecumseh, Michigan in the late 1930’s through the 1940’s. I have read the many pages at least half a dozen times and with each reading, I’m transported to a captivating past. My Aunt Marilyn’s words not only provide a glimpse into her daily life and the lives of my father and paternal family, but they also drop the Manley/Maynard family into American history as a whole.
Tecumseh, Michigan was one of the original pioneer settlements in the Michigan Territory (one of the first in Lenawee County) and came into existence via a communal log cabin in 1824. By the 1930’s Tecumseh embodied typical small town America where everyone knew one another and life hummed along through prosperity and lack, bound together by the deep and binding connections between families and the community as a whole.
Marilyn, named after her oldest brother’s ‘girlfriend’ and my grandmother’s sister, Ruth (Maynard) Oswald, was the third and last child of Charles Judson Manley and Elizabeth (Maynard) Manley As she mentions others in her memoirs, I will provide further detail on those individuals at the end of the blog entry in a footnote versus breaking the flow of her writings. For those people that she records that were part of the Tecumseh community, I will do my best to find out a little more about them via Ancestry.com.
On a final note, I am beyond-words grateful that my Aunt not only took the time to pen her childhood memories for the sake of our future descendants, but that she has permitted me to share them here. It is an honor to be the gatherer and keeper of the family history and I am humbled to be entrusted with this important task.
Mother and Dad telling me that I was so small that I fit in the palm of the doctors hand when I was born. They never knew for sure exactly how much I weighed. They wrapped me in blankets and put me in a shoe box on the open oven door of the old wood cook stove to keep me warm. I had to be force-fed with an eye dropper every two hours to keep me alive. Mother’s best friend, Lois Johnson, didn’t even know that she was pregnant when she came to tell mother the good news that she was pregnant with Linda. What a surprise she got.
Charles was an only child until he was eight years old and then Bob was born. When I was born eleven months later, it was almost more than he could take and told his teacher. Miss LaPointe. that if it happened again next year, he was going to leave home. I think he was glad I was a girl because he begged mother to let him name me after his “girlfriend”. I always knew I was special to him.
We didn’t have a bath until I was older, so on Saturday nights mother would haul out the galvanized tub and we would take a bath in the kitchen. We used the same water for all us kids and I suppose being the girl I got go first.
Charles was always very loving, kind, caring and generous. And all of the neighborhood kids loved to play in our yard. We were very poor growing up during the war and depression. One day mother scrapped enough money to buy a special treat…a pint of ice cream. Charles was so excited that he yelled for all his friends to come on over and have ice cream with us. Of course there was nothing mother could do, but share it with them.
Charles was also “all boy”. One day when mother had the diapers on the clothes line for two babies, Charles and his best friend, Clyde Smith, took a muddy stick and managed to strike every diaper on the line with mud. Our overworked, tired mother had to re-wash them all in the wringer washer and hang them back out.
Marilyn (Manley) Kilbourn – Childhood Memories
Linda mentioned in first paragraph is Linda (Johnson) Chase, wife of Ashley Chase. Charles Maynard Manley (1930-2008). Robert James Manley (1938 – )
Little Acorns & Mighty Oaks 