inflammation of the gall bladder and “senile decay.")
Pershing and I got to ride in the 75-mile funeral trip to Keedysville
(Washington County), Maryland, where Lorenzo Dow Rohrer had lived and two
miles from the farm where he had been born 86 years earlier. After the burial,
relatives, whom I met for the first time, hosted a marvelous dinner. The wound was
soothed but Grandpap’s memory would remain precious.
ii - So Long, 216 Baltimore Avenue
Not long after Grandpap’s death, Ma, Jeanette, Mother and I moved several
blocks up the street on Baltimore Avenue to an ample apartment at number 422. My
father had moved elsewhere and my grandfather, Will, was still living out of town. It
was fun moving to a new environment, even though I no longer had a big yard to play
in. However, the few blocks’ distance didn’t keep me from going to Alan Trevaskis’s
to play after school and on Saturdays and no one seemed to care if we played in my
old yard at 216.
But then came the day when workmen began razing our big house. It had
been taken over by the city to make way for a connecting roadway. I don’t remember
feeling sad. In a way it was exciting! After the building was demolished, it was fun
to climb around in the rubble and go down into the pit that had been the cellar - until
I fell into the pit one day, escaping, luckily, with only scrapes and bruises. But what
a finale to my first home, the opening chapter of my life.
iii - Mother
Katherine Anna, as my mother was baptized in 1901, was the fourth of the
Wallace children. (She would eventually adopt the “Kathryn" spelling.) By the time she
was ten, there were already nine persons in the household. All hands had to pitch in, so
early on Kathryn learned what it meant to work. In the summer, when she wasn’t doing
her chores at home, she went door to door selling vegetables from her grandparents’
garden. She loved to tell this story on herself:
I went to this house for the first time and knocked
on the door and the lady came and said she didn’t want
any vegetables. Then I went around the corner and
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