| Mary Lou's Father
Calvinistic Methodist Church
Si: About
1891, when I was a baby, about 1891, my father and another
man in the community, who had a brother in the hospital who
had lost a leg in a railroad accident. They went to Chicago
to visit this man. He got on a train Saturday night. He didn't
arrive in Chicago until Sunday morning. Sunday night, they
got on a train and came back home. And the same Sunday, two
other men from the community got on a train and went to Lima,
Ohio to call on their sick sister who was in the hospital.
The
following Sunday, the four were excommunicated from the church.
And my father would not have admitted that he was wrong, and
gone back into the church, had it not been that he didn't
want to embarrass my mother, and have her be pointed out as
a lady in the community whose husband had been excommunicated.
There
was no newspaper read in our house on Sunday. There was no
work done of any kind, except my mother would see to it that
maybe it would be all right to make banana pie for the boy
on Sunday, because the bananas would discolor if they stood
over Saturday night. And no meat would be put in the oven,
nothing done of that kind. No stories were read, unless they
were stories from the Bible.
I got
caught one time Sunday morning with Peck's Bad Boy,
and wham! It was a bad Sunday morning for me. No games of
any kind were played on Sunday. The only recreation would
be a walk, you were allowed to take the walk. Two of the boys,
one of them the doctor's son, took the old man's horse, and
drove to Delphos, about seven miles away to see a ball game
on Sunday. And on the way home, the horse slipped and broke
a leg. Everybody in the community realized that was punishment
to the boys for going to a game on Sunday.
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