© Copyright 10-31-2007 By Dana Shino, The Purple Phoenix, LLC www.thepurplephoenix.com My grandparents, my family, my stock, grew out of the ground, literally. They were Midwestern sharecroppers, farmers and people of the soil, the land. They did what they had to do to survive. They were the epitome of ‘pull yourself up by the boot straps and go to church every Sunday – get it done – no complaining – don’t ask – your reward is heaven’ kind of people. Stalwart. Stubborn. Surprisingly independent for the social climate of their communities. Methodist. Church of the Brethren. Consistent. Strong. Intelligent. Reliable kind of people. Yet, even for being these by-the-books kinds of folks, they had their own creative streaks about living. They had their own brilliance. I grew up with stories like this about my grandparents: “Well, Grandmother and Grandfather Judy (my father’s parents) didn’t really get married. They eloped.” Grandfather Judy took Grandmother Judy (at the time, Ann Casper) on a trip with him and a few friends from Indiana to West Virginia. While they were there, they married. Grandmother wasn’t much over sixteen and grandfather wasn’t much over twenty. When they returned to Indiana, they didn’t tell a soul. Grandmother returned to the Casper Farm and grandfather worked until he had enough money together for the both of them. When grandfather arrived at the Casper Farm to collect grandmother, telling old man Casper that he’d come for Ann, Great Grandpa Casper said, ‘Well, if I’da known you were gonna do that, I woulda never let Ann go.’ Ann, my grandmother, was next to the youngest of six daughters; six daughters who spent the rest of their lives passively aggressively infighting with one another. My Grandmother Judy is a master at pie making, hypochondria, stretching pennies and turning regular phantoms into enemies. She can make doctors and ministers alike want to spit nails, and yet she holds her own with brilliant charm, her mind running squirrel nuts around most others in a fraction the time. Fortunately, she married a man whose middle name resembled something in between ‘patience’ and ‘diplomacy.’  Out of all of my grandparents, I knew my Grandfather Judy the least, but I still understood him as the gentlest, kindest, most patient and least aggressive of the four. He plodded through life with quiet, unassuming humbleness, though he cut a good funny bone with his wit (looking uncannily like Bob Hope) and always played an unmatchable bluff in Euchre (Midwestern card game). He spoke the loudest when he said nothing at all. He was easily swallowed up in the family he grew up in, surrounded by louder, more aggressive siblings. Even the family he raised with grandmother, he was not known as the disciplinarian. Yet, he was the one chosen to settle the Casper family estate, no small deed among six quibbling sisters. Grandfather’s greatest dream was to one day go to college and become a professor. It never happened. World War II broke out and he was eventually needed farming in northern Indiana. When my mother asked him about it once, he said, “Well, some things never work out.” He and grandmother raised three kids on a northern Indiana farm — and all three, my father, my Aunt Gale and my Aunt Pat, graduated from college.I grew up with stories like: “Great Grandfather Peacock (my mother’s grandfather) didn’t always own his farm.” He sharecropped, tenant farmed and scratched and scrimped and saved his entire way into owning a farm at the outbreak of The Depression. (He planted his first crop at the age of twelve in about 1896. His mother was dead. His father was a dead-beat drunk and his grandmother raised him.) When everyone else was losing their farms during The Depression, Great Grandfather Peacock secured his. This is how the story goes about how the banker negotiated the transaction between the seller and my Great Grandfather Peacock. In a meeting between all three, the bank told the seller “write on this piece of paper the lowest amount you can sell your place for.” Then he told my great grandfather “write on this piece of paper here the very most you can pay for his property.” When the banker took the two sheets of paper in his hands, the numbers both men had written down were the same. My Great Grandfather Peacock walked out of the meeting owning his farm.  The wedding photo of my Peacock great grandparents, hanging in my parent’s living room, depicts a young man, looking as though he’ll leap out of the photo, ready to work. His wife’s expression already holds a vacant stare, as though much of her soul is already gone. Great Grandfather Peacock did not change through his life one iota from his wedding photo. It was as though he knew what he’d come for in this life and no one was going to keep him from it. He worked through World War I, The Spanish Influenza, The Great Depression, World War II, the death of his wife nearly fifty years before is own, The Korean War, The Vietnam War, the social revolution of the 1960’s, television, electricity, the walk on the moon, and the Space Shuttle flights, building one of the top producing Jersey dairy herds in the state of Indiana, and accruing the financial value on his farm that even he couldn’t believe. He lived to one hundred years old – long enough to tell me some about it. His was the work ethic in the family that put everyone else’s to shame, drove his wife to an early grave, and his only daughter was the one in the family who had the iron will and stamina to match his own. A photo taken of the family in the late 1920’s or early 1930’s in front of a now vintage vehicle shows my Great Grandfather Peacock and his daughter,  my Grandmother Newby, standing firm footed and square shouldered to the camera, while the rest of the family is slump shouldered and barely looking at the camera. My Grandmother Newby once told me that during World War II, when she was living at home with her new born daughter (my mother), her mother pulled her aside and told her “I can’t stand him anymore (meaning her husband and his workaholism).” She showed my grandmother the dress she wanted to be buried in, and during my own mother’s third year, my Great Grandmother Peacock died.I grew up with stories like: “Well, your Great Grandfather Peacock wasn’t going to let your grandmother (my mother’s mother) go to college”...  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