Our Horatio Alger House

Although the Smiths were our close neighbors, our paths almost never crossed. Neither woman would ever have dreamed ofjust dropping in on her "almost next door neighbor" as was likely to happen with my mother and the other women of the neighborhood. My two ;older sisters and the Smith girls did play together occasionally. Oscar Smith was the cashier of the local bank, a Republican, an elder of the United Presbyterian Church, a member of the Xenia Country Club. My mother said he always looked as if he had just stepped out of a "band box." Our father was a Democrat, Methodist, and in his spare time milked his cow and tended his chickens. Even in his Sunday clothes, he never achieved that dapper appearance clothes-loving men have. Oscar's wife, Blanche Smith, was a formidable, proud woman, who, along with her expensive clothes, always seemed to be wearing a necklace, ear rings, bracelets and finger rings. She wore a long fur coat in winter and drove a Cadillac. A full-time maid, almost unheard of in Cedarville, did her household work. Our mother did all the usual cooking, cleaning and laundry needed to sustain a husband and four children. In addition, she churned butter and made cottage cheese with the surplus milk, canned fruit and vegetables in the summer, cold-packed eggs in the spring for the winter. Cheap house dresses made up most of her wardrobe and, like Pat Nixon, many years later, she wore a plain cloth coat in the winter. She never learned to drive a car. She did dress up on Saturday afternoons after she had packed a supper for herself and my father. With the supper in a market basket, she walked down to the store where she would stay until midnight helping my father wait on his farmer- customers who came to town on Saturday night. It was an irritation that some of them would put off shopping until after the second movie was over but money was scarce in those days and my father wanted to accommodate them all. The store stayed open until midnight. Oscar and Blanche Smith were members of the "old Presbyterian families" who had founded these southern Ohio towns in the early 19th Century. The story I had always heard was that Oscar's mother had given him the money to build his "dream house" and had told him to spare no expense. Blanche -- and probably Oscar as well -- came from those wealthy families in nearby Xenia so well described in my Cedarville College English professor's novel, AndLadies ofthe Club... Blanche's sister, who still lived in Xenia, was a local celebrity since she was president of the Greene County WCTU, a position of some prominence in those prohibition days when the Anti-Saloon League was the single most powerful political lobby in Ohio. My mother came from a working-class family in Cincinnati. Her father had died at a young age. None of the ten children could complete even a grade school education since they had to go to work. My paternal grandfather was a fann owner. But his only interest in life was creating an estate so that each of his six sons could inherit a farm at the time of his death. To achieve that, he cruelly exploited his wife and children. My father never wore underwear, pajamas, or an overcoat nor did he see the inside of a barbershop until after his 18th birthday. The children