whereupon Will barked, “My God, Billy, how much syrup do you need?!"
Another afternoon I was to meet my grandfather at the ball park to see the
Shriner circus (my mother surmised that he had wangled passes). On my way I had
a horrifying experience. At the Fayette Street railroad bridge a small crowd was
watching the activity on the tracks below. On the ground was a man who had fallen
from the roof of a boxcar and had been run over, cut in half! He was dead of course.
When he was lifted up by the arms, his insides rolled out. Then his lower half was
picked up—same thing. I felt sick and thought of going back home, but Will would
wonder why I didn’t show up so I went on to meet him. I told him my experience.
“My God, Billy!" he said.
Shortly after that, Will left Cumberland again. About 12 years later he
somehow learned my address and wrote to me. He was working in a hotel in
Abingdon, Virginia. He said he had not been successful in contacting his wife and
children and asked me to fill him in on them. By that time, his wife, daughter Jeanette
and son Charlie were dead; his son George was still living. I wrote this to him, he
wrote to me again, and that ended the brief contact.
In 1946 or 1947, Will returned to Cumberland. Ill with chronic nephritis, he
went to the county infirmary to live. I was living in New York then and did not have
an opportunity to see him. He died in June 1948. Will’s son George had him buried
on the L. D. Rohrer lot at Fairview Cemetery in Keedysville where his remains would
be in the company of those of his father, his mother and his son Charlie.
iii - Claribel Shuck Rohrer
Ma - my grandmother Rohrer - was a dear lady, as I trust I have conveyed
before. Born in Cumberland in 1871, she was the second of seven children of George
Edward Shuck and Mary Virginia (Marks) Shuck.
The Shucks in Cumberland went back to 1790 when the first George Shuck
(actually Johann Georg Schuch) brought his family there from York, Pennsylvania.
Johann Georg, with his parents and siblings, had immigrated to this country from
Reihen, Germany, in 1751 at the age of four. Johann Georg was a carpenter, as was
his son Joseph, as was Joseph’s son Thomas, as was Thomas’s son, my great-
grandfather George Edward.
G
e
o
rge was a skilled craftsman. To pursue his trade, he moved his family from
Cumberland to Sandusky, Ohio, between 1870 and 1900, and there he made the ornate
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