Stories and Memories from My Mother, Dolores Olar

DIXON -- Dolores Frances Olar, 71, of Dixon, died Saturday, Nov. 10, 2007, at KSB Hospital. She was a retired registered nurse and owned and operated Olar's Sewing Service in Pekin and Dixon until 2006.

Mrs. Olar was born Aug. 15, 1936, in Amboy, the daughter of Sherman Linn and Frances (Miller) Shaw. She married Joseph Olar on Dec. 22, 1962, in Lombard.

Survivors include her husband; five sons, Ethan Olar and Jason Olar, both of Dixon, and Jared (Christina) Olar, Derek (Kim) Olar and Caleb Olar, [all of central Illinois]; and seven grandchildren.

Memorial service is at 10:30 a.m. Thursday at Preston-Schilling Funeral Home, Dixon, with Galen Morrison, pastor of United Church of God, Beloit, Wis., officiating. Burial of cremated remains is at Woodside Cemetery, Lee Center. Visitation is from 6 to 8 p.m. Wednesday at the funeral home.

A memorial has been established. Condolences may be sent at www.prestonschillingfuneralhome.com.

BY TARA BECKER 
SVN REPORTER

Although she was a jack of many trades, many remember Dolores Olar as a talented, self-taught seamstress for local residents.

Olar owned and operated Olar's Sewing Service on U.S. Route 30 in Dixon until 2006.

"She was very talented," said her son, Ethan Olar, of Dixon. "I always tell people that her talent for sewing is a gift from God. She figured out how to do things that a lot of other tailors wouldn't think to do."

Dolores Olar, of Dixon, died Saturday at KSB Hospital; she was 71. The daughter of Sherman and Frances (Miller) Shaw, she was born in Amboy and grew up on her parents' dairy farm. Olar, whom her son says was a "typical country girl," was active in 4-H, showing cattle and winning awards at state fairs. She attended Dixon High School and graduated in 1954.

"She was an extremely impressive lady and impressed everyone she met," Ethan Olar said. "She had a huge heart and helped anyone in need."

In 1957, Dolores graduated from Swedish-American Hospital in Rockford and became a registered nurse, although her nursing career was short-lived.

"I think she realized that this wasn't what she was meant to be," he said.

She married Joseph Olar, whom she met in Chicago through the former Radio Church of God, in 1962, in Lombard. They had five sons: Ethan and Jason, both of Dixon, Jared, Derek and Caleb, [all of central Illinois], and seven grandchildren.

The family moved to Pekin around 1970, where Olar opened a sewing shop in the front room of her home. She also had a contract with bigger stores in Pekin, including Christian Brothers Western Store.

"She liked to do men's clothing -- her forte," Ethan said.

After Dolores' mother died in 1993, the family moved to Dixon, where she continued her sewing business, gaining many loyal customers over the years.

"She wanted to move back home because she loved Dixon and the people," Jared Olar said. "Her family has been in Lee County since the 1840s."

One of his mother's proudest achievements was her work with the Noteables Swing Choir at Pekin High School, where she sewed costumes for the choir in the 1980s, he said. Working with the choir director, she wanted to design a new look for the choir and created sequined vests and skirts, which impressed other show choirs in the state and around the country.

"The next year, a lot of other groups showed up in sequins," Olar said. "It was something brand new that she pioneered."

Olar also enjoyed singing, favoring barbershop, choir and religious music, Jared Olar said.

Her faith also was a prominent part of her life. "She tried to pass on her good morals and values onto the kids," he said. "If anyone got up before 7 a.m. any day of the week, we'd see her in her chair, praying."

DOLORES FRANCES SHAW, daughter of Sherman Linn and Frances Mae (Miller) Shaw, was born at 11 a.m. on 15 Aug. 1936 in Amboy, Lee County, Illinois; died of congestive heart failure on 10 Nov. 2007 in Room 452 of the Intensive Care Unit at Katherine Bethea Shaw Hospital, Dixon, Lee County, Illinois; her cremated remains were interred 15 Nov. 2007 in the grave of her parents at Woodside Cemetery, Lee Center, Illinois; on Sunday, 23 Dec. 2007, a memorial Mass for the repose of her soul was offered at St. Joseph Catholic Church in Pekin, Illinois, with the stipend provided by Merlyn and Tina Sondag, friends of her son and daughter-in-law Jared and Christina Olar.

Dolores was given her middle name in honor of her mother. From her Christian name "Dolores," her father would refer to her by the nickname "Dolly." She was very close to her father and appreciated the nickname as a sign of her father's affection, but otherwise she did not like people calling her "Dolly," which felt to her somewhat condescending (albeit unintentionally so) when coming from anyone besides her parents.

The winter following her parents' marriage on 22 March 1935 was one of the harshest, coldest winters in living memory, and the pages of The Amboy News in late 1935 and early 1936 are filled with stories and notices that attest to the ways in which the heavy snow and brutal sub-zero temperatures affected the residents of Lee Center. One of those items appeared on the Lee Center society page of The Amboy News, 20 Feb. 1936, which says:

"Sherman L. Shaw Jr. visited his wife Saturday and Sunday [Feb. 15-16] at the home of her grandfather, Bailiff Frank Young in Dixon, where she has been staying on account of the weather conditions."

These safety measures of my grandparents were especially prudent given the fact that my grandmother was then pregnant with her first child, my mother. My grandparents had been married for about a year-and-a-half when my mother was born 15 Aug. 1936 at Amboy Hospital, in nearby Amboy, Lee County, Illinois. My grandmother gave birth during the hottest summer on record in Illinois (which followed on the heels of one of the worst winters). On the audiotape of my mother's personal memories that I made on 28 Nov. 1998, this is what she said about the ordeal that her mother went through in the final month of her pregnancy:

"August of 1936 was the hottest temperature records ever recorded in history. Years later, I asked my mother how in the world she could ever get through having a baby in the heat of August -- because I [too] had a baby in August. I said, 'There was no air conditioning! How did you do that?' She said, 'Ice cubes and a fan -- and your grandmother was sure that you were going to be an ice cube!' And to this day I like to chew on ice cubes."

My mother's birth was first heralded in The Amboy News, 20 Aug. 1936, page 3, column 4, where the following note appeared in the Lee Center news section: "Mr. and Mrs. Sherman L. Shaw Jr., announce the arrival of a seven pound daughter, Saturday morning at the Amboy hospital." A second announcement was printed on the front page of the 30 Aug. 1936 Amboy News, under the heading "HELLO WORLD!" It read, "Mr. and Mrs. S. L. Shaw Jr. of Lee Center are the parents of a baby daughter born Saturday, Aug. 15 at Amboy hospital." Remarkably, neither announcement included a name for Sherman and Frances' first child. Only in the 3 Sept. 1936 Amboy News, in the Lee Center news section, was it at last announced what they had decided to name their daughter: "Mrs. Sherman L. Shaw Jr. returned home from the Amboy hospital last week with her infant daughter, Dolores Frances." My grandmother's extended stay in the hospital after giving birth is an indication that it had been a difficult delivery and that there probably were post partum complications -- not at all surprising given that it was her first pregnancy and the area was gripped in an unprecedented heat wave.

On the left is a vintage postcard of the old Amboy Public Hospital, where my mother Dolores Frances Shaw was born on 15 Aug. 1936. On the right is a photograph of the old hospital that I took during a visit to Amboy on 29 Aug. 1998. The former hospital was then an apartment building, but has since been torn down.

This is the earliest photograph that we have of my mother, taken when she was about a month old or less.

Shown here are two photographs taken in Lee Center, Illinois, in 1936 apparently in the autumn. These are among the earliest photos we have of my mother. At the left, my mother Dolores shares a baby carriage with her cousin Eddie Baylor, who was only two-and-a-half months older than Dolores. At the right, Dolores and Eddie share a little red wagon while Eddie's older brother Jack prepares to pull them. Although my mother grew up as an only child, she grew up in Lee Center with her male Baylor cousins, with whom she was very close, thinking of them as her own brothers.

This photograph taken in 1937 in Lee Center, Illinois, shows my mother, Dolores Frances Shaw, firstborn and ultimately only surviving child of Sherman Linn Shaw II and Frances Mae (Miller) Shaw. Her parents saved the baby shoes that Dolores is wearing in this picture and later had them bronzed. Her bronzed shoes, as well as three of her infant gowns, are still in the possession of Dolores' family.

At left are my mother's bronzed baby booties, with a pair of her knitted booties that my grandmother saved. At right are all the sets of my mother's baby clothes that my grandmother saved. Grandma also saved all the congratulations she and Grandpa received from their friends and relatives, and prepared a very detailed baby book of Mom's first few years.

A few months after my mother's birth, Sherman and Frances arranged with his parents to rent the old Shaw farm in Lee Center. The 22 Oct. 1936 Amboy News reported that "Mr. and Mrs. Sherman L. Shaw Jr. have moved from the Mrs. Hattie Lippincott house to the S. L. Shaw home, where they have rented the farm for the coming year. Mr. and Mrs. Shaw [i.e. Sherman's parents] will soon move to the George Brewer property on Second street, now occupied by Earl Carlson." My great-grandparents' move to the George Brewer place was completed by early November, as reported in the 12 Nov. 1936 Amboy News, which says, "Mr. and Mrs. S. L. Shaw are now occupying the Brewer residence on Second street, owned by Mrs. C. W. Ross." Sherman and Frances would continue to work the old Shaw farm in Lee Center for the next few years.

Though my mother was born in the summer of 1936, it wasn't until the spring of the following year that my grandparents had her baptised in the Christian faith. In her baby book, my grandmother wrote that Dolores was baptised and formally named on 28 March 1937 at First Presbyterian Church of Dixon by Rev. Herbert Doran. Perhaps my grandparents were then considering membership in the Presbyterian Church in Dixon (although they were then living in Lee Center). On the other hand, the decision to have my mother baptised in the Presbyterian Church was perhaps something of a compromise on the part of my grandparents, since my grandfather Sherman was brought up in the Congregational Church while my grandmother Frances was baptised and raised a Lutheran. Did they come to the mutual decision that, rather than one of them having to give up his or her denominational affiliation, they would try to find a Christian community to which they and the children whom God would give them would all belong? Whatever their reasons for having Dolores baptised by Dixon's Presbyterian pastor, however, my grandparents' actual practice was to attend Lee Center Congregational Church during the years in the 1930s and 1940s when they were living in Lee Center. Later, when they were living in or near Dixon for a few years during the 1940s, they presumably attended First Presbyterian Church. Be that as it may, after moving to Dixon in the latter 1950s, my grandparents did attend First Presbyterian Church in Dixon and maintained their membership there until their deaths.

The photograph on the left was taken in June 1937 in Lee Center, Illinois, and shows my mother, Dolores Frances Shaw, age 10 months, with her parents, Sherman Linn Shaw II and Frances Mae (Miller) Shaw, and her grandparents, Sherman Linn Shaw I and Grace Esther (Bender) Shaw. The middle photo shows Dolores with her mother Frances in 1937 (probably in the summer or autumn). The photo on the right is also from 1937, probably the summer -- the wagon could be a present for her first birthday.

As mentioned previously, it was during the 1930s that my great-grandfather Sherman gathered genealogical information about his family which he sent to his cousin Evangeline Linn Halleck (1886-1963), who included that information in her book, Descendants of George Linn (1941). The Shaw branch of the Linns may be found in Halleck's book on pages 142 and 167 -- it is on the latter page where my mother and grandparents are listed. At the time that Halleck's book was published, my mother was about 5 years old. She was my grandparents' first child, and, sadly, would end up being their only child, because my grandmother and grandfather had six other babies who were delivered preterm, either dying through miscarriage or who were stillborn. In the taped interview of my mother from 28 Nov. 1998, she told me:

"I always wanted a brother or sister, since I was the firstborn, but it wasn't meant to be. Later on in life, I learned that my mother lost six pregnancies, and two of them were little boys. But she never talked about it, so I didn't know what had happened. Except she did say, while she was working at the City National Bank, one of her co-workers had to go in and have some surgery done, in order to hold a pregnancy, because she had torn so badly when the first one was born. When the reconstruction was done, she was able to carry to term. And mother thinks that that may have been what happened to her, and the doctor thought so too. She did tell me that. But she never told me about losing any of the babies. I remember some of the times when it happened. But my Aunt Eleanor was the one that told me that two of the babies were boys. So I would have had a brother, and we would have had a Sherman Linn Shaw -- but, not this time. We also were told that the Rh factor may have contributed to the problem that they had, but both of them were Rh+. Dad was an O+ which was a universal donor, and she was AB+, and lo and behold their daughter came up A-. So I shouldn't have been able to have successful pregnancies with five children with a B+ husband, but we did, and no problems. I think the Rhesus monkey got blamed for a lot of stuff he didn't have anything to do with."

It seems that, per the usual practice in those days, the six babies that my grandparents lost were not given funerals. In any event, they were not buried in the Sherman Linn Shaw family plot in Woodside Cemetery, Lee Center, Illinois. It is presumed that their bodies were cremated, which then and now is commonly the disposition of the remains of stillborn or miscarried babies. As my mother indicated, in those days, and even today, miscarriage and stillbirth are usually shrouded in silence -- they're intensely painful events that we just don't talk about. The loss of so many babies undoubtedly touched my grandparents deeply, and inevitably affected the spiritual, psychological, and emotional contours of their family, subtly influencing the kind of upbringing my mother had. My grandmother's interior anguish of losing six babies, maybe unresolved and perhaps not wholly acknowledged, cloaked in the silence of privacy and etiquette, perhaps helps to explain the somewhat strained relationship that my mother and grandmother had -- for my grandmother was not quite at ease around small children, and that in turn is probably one of the main reasons why my mother ended up being much closer to her father than her mother. Being an only child, my mother also often felt lonely -- but that was ameliorated by the fact that her first cousins, the Baylor boys, Jack, Eddie, and Ronnie, also lived in Lee Center. They were her playmates growing up, and she felt very close to them, looking upon them as her own brothers. Indeed, my mother was thankful for all of her Baylor cousins, but was closest to the three eldest boys since they were close to her in age.

In the summer of 1937, a fire broke out in Lee Center that threatened the old Shaw place where my grandparents and mother lived. My grandfather Sherman helped the Amboy Fire Department fight the fire, which occurred on Monday, 16 Aug. 1937, the day after my mother's first birthday. The following report about this incident appeared in the 19 Aug. 1937 Amboy News:

Call Amboy Firemen to Lee Center on Monday

Amboy firemen were called to Lee Center at noon Monday to fight a fire which threatened the Sherman Shaw property in the east end of that village. A barn on the old Henry Herrick place, now owned by Mrs. Tom Coryell of Amboy was entirely destroyed and for a time it was feared that the flames would spread to the Shaw property.

The barn which was built of lumber, contained a quantity of dry cobs and the heat from the flames was intense. The value of the building was estimated at $300 and there was no insurance.

Dolores' mother Frances was mentioned in the local news in the 27 Jan. 1938 issue of The Amboy News, which includes the following brief notice under the column headline of "HOSPITAL NEWS" -- "Mrs. Sherman Shaw, Jr., of Lee Center underwent a minor operation Wednesday morning." In the next issue, dated 3 Feb. 1938, we read, "Mrs. S. L. Shaw, Jr., is in the Amboy hospital where she submitted to a minor operation last week. She is making a satisfactory recovery and will be able to return home soon." The operation evidently was of a delicate nature, since hers is in only one listed in those issues of the newspaper in which the precise nature of the operation is not described. It's quite likely that this was the first of my grandmother's six miscarriages or stillbirths.

My mother said that one of her earliest memories was of being placed on the back of a large draft horse named Silver Mane at the old Shaw farm in Lee Center, Illinois. These two photographs from the late 1930s are in our collection of old Shaw photos and mementos.

In the 1998 audiotape interview, my mother recounted some of her childhood memories. One of her earliest memories is her Grandpa Shaw dropping her on her head outside his home in Lee Center:

"All I know is there were flagstone steps coming out of the house, and he dropped me on my head, and I have a little mark in the center of my scalp, that if I want to part my hair down the center, you find that thing and it's perfect. But I don't remember any other details, because Grandpa and Grandma died in '41 and '42, within six months of each other, and I was just a little girl. I don't remember how old I was, but it was one of my first memories. One of the other first memories I have is riding on a big old draft horse -- his name was Silver Mane -- at the Shaw farm. But I don't remember anything [in detail]. Dad had a pony named Pam, but I never got a chance to ride him, because he was too old by the time they got him, and he didn't live very long after they got him. I don't remember the details. I do remember Grandma Shaw having a collection of salt-and-pepper shakers that we were not allowed to play with. She had them on glass shelves in the window as you come into the living room. Because she was a diabetic, she ate a lot of cottage cheese, and back then they had real pretty colored cardboard containers that they put it in. She would save all those things and let the grandchildren play with those, but you stayed away from the salt-and-pepper shakers, which was more fun. But we played with the cottage cheese containers. That's about all I remember of Grandpa and Grandma Shaw, I'm sad to say. I was too young to remember them."

My mother recounted these same memories in the 2006 audiotaped interview:

"Dad's mom died when I was just about 6 years old -- she died in 1942. All I remember about her is that she ate a lot of cottage cheese, and back then they had very pretty containers that they put on. We were allowed to play with those containers. She kept them in a special room, and then when we came all the cousins could come and play with those pretty cottage cheese containers -- because she didn't want us to play with the salt and pepper shakers that she had arranged on the glass shelves in her window. We weren't allowed to touch them: we could look-a but no touch! I don't remember too much about her, but I knew she was a music teacher. She taught people music and she played piano. I don't remember ever hearing her play the piano, but I know that she did that. The other thing I remember, on the farm that we lived in that had been the Shaw farm, and it's burned down in Lee Center, that big old house; and I do have a picture of my Dad putting me up on top of that big draft horse called Silver Mane -- little bitty girl up on this huge horse. He was a big sorrel draft horse with a silver mane."

Presumably it was while my grandparents were living at and working the old Shaw farm in Lee Center around 1940-41 that my mother had an attack of appendicitis, when she was about 3 years old. There is some uncertainty about the chronology of our Shaw family history on this point, however, because my mother seems to have conflated or confused the time that she had appendicitis with the time that she was quarantined with the measles. In both the 1998 and the 2006 tape-recorded interviews of my mother, she said it was while they were living at and working the Cortright place in or near Dixon that she got appendicitis, and in both interviews she said she was about 3 years old at the time -- but if that is right, then they could not have been living at the Cortright place, because the 1940 U.S. Census and our Shaw family records show that my grandparents and mother were living in Lee Center at the time. On the other hand, they certainly were living at the Cortright place when she got the measles later in the 1940s. In any case, in the 1998 interview, my mother said, "I was about 3 years old and I had an appendicitis attack. I had my appendix removed on Easter Sunday morning by Dr. John Sullivan." She went into greater detail in the 2006 interview:

"I was two years old. I think I was three. I remember grabbing my tummy and said, 'Mommy, my tummy hurts!' and I rolled down the stairs. They took me to Dr. Sullivan, and he was in Amboy, but he was Catholic so he was in Mass, so they took him out to the hospital -- took my appendix out that morning. I don't remember going to the hospital, but I remember grabbing my tummy and going down the stairs."

My mother turned 3 years of age on 15 Aug. 1939, and if her appendectomy took place on Easter Sunday when she was 3, then it must have happened 24 March 1940, a rare year when Easter fell unusually early. It must have been about two weeks later, then, that my grandparents and mother were enrolled in the U.S. Census. The census returns for Lee Center, dated 9 April 1940, show my grandparents and mother as "Shaw Jr. L. Sherman," age 27, a farmer who was renting the farm he worked, "Shaw M. Frances," age 23, a stenographer working in an office environment, and "Shaw F. Dolores," age 3. During the week prior to their enumeration for the census, Sherman had worked 75 hours and Frances had worked eight hours. Curiously, the record shows only a blank for the number of weeks that my grandfather had worked in 1939, and also a blank for his income for 1939. My grandmother, on the other hand, reportedly worked for five weeks in 1939 and earned $60. Notably, the census says that in 1939 my grandfather had earned or received income of more than $50 from other sources than his farm work -- some of that no doubt would include money from playing the trombone in the dance band. The census record says my grandmother had lived in Dixon in 1935 (but, per the census, reportedly not on a farm, even though she was then living on her parents' farm in rural Dixon), and that the residence of my grandfather and mother in 1940 was the same house where they'd been living in 1935. To be accurate, my mother in 1935 was then still living inside my grandmother, and my grandparents and mother in 1940 were not living in the same place as they had lived in 1935. As mentioned above, in October 1936 they moved from the Hattie Lippincott house to the old Shaw place in Lee Center. The 1940 U.S. Census says my grandfather was renting the old Shaw place for $8 per month. At the time of the 1940 census, my grandparents' nearest neighbors on one side were the James T. Starnes family, and on the other side was Margaret Ullrich, age 79, living alone. Also, as mentioned previously, around this same time, the 5 April 1940 U.S. Census returns for Lee Center show my mother's grandparents as "Shaw L. Sherman," age 76, an insurance agent, and "Shaw E Grace," age 61.

In the following year, on 12 May 1941, my mothers' grandmother Grace Shaw suddenly died of a heart attack at the age of 62, at home in Lee Center. Grace's obituary, published on 15 May 1941, lists among her survivors "one daughter, Mrs. Eleanor Baylor, one son, Sherman L. Shaw, Jr., of near Dixon, . . ." However, both my grandfather Sherman and his sister Eleanor were living in Lee Center at the time, so it's somewhat puzzling that this obituary characterises the locations of their homes as "near Dixon" rather than, say, "near Amboy." Her obituary also says she was survived by seven grandchildren -- that included my mother. After suffering the grief of his mother's death, it was not many months before my grandfather also lost his father, who died at home in Lee Center on Friday, 9 Jan. 1942. In her unpublished notes on Lee Center history, Aunt Eleanor wrote, ". . . dad, after being sick all fall and winter, died on January 9, 1942." He was laid to rest between his wives in Woodside Cemetery, Lee Center, Illinois, on Sunday, 11 Jan. 1942. My grandfather "Sherman L., Jr., of Lee Center" was listed among the survivors in my great-grandfather's obituary published the day of his death in the Dixon Evening Telegraph, and the obituary again says he was survived by seven grandchildren (which included my mother).

Judging from the information that I have been able to gather and present above, my grandparents and mother stayed in Lee Center until 1942. Then, probably after my great-grandfather's death that year, they moved to the Cortright place, the farm of Wilbur and Mary Cortright, who were relatives of my grandmother on the Young side. [Mary Cortright's full maiden name was Mary Etta Smith, daughter of Joseph Clarence and Amanda Elizabeth (Young) Smith, whose younger brother was Franklin Lincoln Young, father of Bessie Mae (Young) Miller, mother of my grandmother Frances Mae (Miller) Shaw. The late Queta Kathryn (Cortright) Wainscott, daughter of Wilbur and Mary Cortright, was a dear cousin and friend of my grandmother.] I am uncertain where the Cortright place was located, but the 1940 U.S. Census says Wilbur and Mary were then living on and working a farm in South Dixon Township, Lee Center. Confusingly, though, this census record also says the farm was on Route 4, "Amboy Road." However, Amboy Road is not in South Dixon Township, but rather is in Amboy and Marion Townships. Did the census-taker make a mistake, or were the boundaries of South Dixon Township changed after 1940?

The years spent on the Cortright farm mostly coincided with World War II (1941-1945). My grandfather was never drafted and did not fight overseas during World War II. That was because he was a married father of an only child, a little girl (my mother), and was the primary means of support of his wife and child. Besides that, during the War he employed by the Dixon State Hospital as their own farmer, with the responsibility of working the hospital's farm (perhaps that was before the move to the Cortright place). So, instead of serving overseas, he enlisted in the Illinois Reserve Militia and served his state and country in helping to defend "the Home Front." Here are my mother's memories of her dad's enlistment in the militia, from the audiotape of the interview at her home south of Dixon, Illinois, on 11 April 2006 --

"I remember one time, when we lived on the Cortright farm -- that's when I had the measles and I was quarantined -- your granddad came back in a uniform, and I thought he was going to the Army. But he was in the Illinois Militia, which was the forerunner of the National Guard now. So he didn't have to go, to leave, because he was farming the State Hospital's grounds for them. So he got to stay home."

Following the War's end in 1945, in 1946 my grandparents and mother moved from the Cortright place back to Lee Center, living in the old George Brewer place on Second Street in Lee Center where my great-grandparents Sherman and Grace Shaw had formerly lived. The old Brewer place was (and still is) adjacent to Lee Center Congregational Church and later, in 1948, the church purchased the house to use as a church parsonage, for which reason my grandparents and mother moved from the house in April 1949. The house had formerly had been the home of Othniel M. Clark and his family. Othniel Clark was the father-in-law of my great-grandfather Sherman Linn Shaw's younger brother George Harry Thornton Shaw, who was married at the Clark home.

Dolores Frances Shaw

Three scenes from Dolores Shaw's life as a farm girl in Lee County during the 1940s and early 1950s: The left and middle photos were apparently taken within a few weeks (days?) of each other on the same farm, one of them after a snowfall -- the younger girl in the photos is identified by the writing on the back as "Louise," but is otherwise unknown. The photo on the right shows my mother with her older first cousin Elizabeth (Shaw) Schilling, daughter of my mother's Uncle Russell Shaw.

In the audiotape interview that I made of my mother on Saturday night, 28 Nov. 1998, my mother reviewed here childhood schooling in these words:

"I went to first grade at the Red Brick School house, I went to second grade at the White Temple School house, and third grade at Eldena School house, with Mrs. Ruth Floto my teacher all three years -- the schools being closed one after the other after I was there! I went to fourth grade at South Central School in Dixon for a short period of time. Then we moved back to Lee Center, and moved into the house that my grandparents Sherman Shaw and Grace Bender Shaw lived in up to the time of their deaths. They remodeled the house there, and I spent the last part of fourth grade, fifth grade, sixth grade, and seventh grade in Lee Center. Then I had the surgery on the tumor in my leg that they finally found at St. Luke's Hospital in Chicago (it's now Rush Presbyterian -- St. Luke's, all combined)."

Shown here are two photographs of the home located at Lot 1, Block 5 of the Original Town of Lee Center. On the left is an older photo, while the photo on the right shows the house as it was in 1967. My great-grandparents lived in this house for a few years before their deaths. The 1940 U.S. Census says the house where my great-grandparents lived in that year was the same place where they had lived in 1935, so that means they must have moved from the old Shaw place to this house in 1935. In her notes on Lee Center history, Aunt Eleanor said her parents moved from the old Shaw farm about 1936, which generally agrees with the census information -- though she elsewhere said, apparently incorrectly, that her parents only lived at their new home for a year or two before they died. About four years after they died, in 1946, my mother and her parents moved to this house, where they lived until the spring of 1949 -- they moved because in 1948 the house had been bought by Lee Center Congregational Church with the intention to use it as a parsonage.

Among Dolores' most treasured memories were the times she spent visiting her Grandpa and Grandma Miller, who were farmers in Lee County and Ogle County. Though her Shaw grandparents died before she had a chance to get to know them and develop strong memories of them, she was able to enjoy 28 years of memories with her Miller grandparents. In the 2006 audiotaped interview, my mother shared many memories of her Grandpa and Grandpa Miller from the 1940s through the early 1960s:

"I remember when I was little, and they lived out in The Kingdom -- yes, it's called The Kingdom -- on this farm. This is on the way to Grand Detour, you go [near] a place called Lost Nation around the back; on this farm along the river, and it had a long lane with live trees -- they're still there. There was this huge tree in the front yard. The folks would come to get me on the weekend and park that car by that tree, and I'd run back and forth from the porch to that tree, because I wanted to go home with Mother and I wanted to stay with Grandma. I can remember in the one room that they had the China closet, and that clock that's on top there -- Grandpa would wind that clock every day. I remember that as a little kid. Another thing I remember is your great-uncle Don: he'd be getting ready to go on a date, and he'd go in the pantry, and Grandma had this crock of lard, and *fssshht* he'd put that on his hair and slick it down. Ah, and then it would draw flies! (I didn't know that at the time, but I've since thought that now.) But that's all I remember about that place, except for that they tried to teach me how to fish. I'm not a fisherman -- I like to 'fish' at the market.

"Then after that they moved out here on Route 52 to a place called the Draegan place, during the War -- it was called the Draegan Farm. They lived there, oh, let's see -- I'm trying to think whether it was before the War or after the War -- but anyway then they moved to this little farm they bought down in Amboy, and they had their 35th wedding anniversary there. So I must have been about 15 when they were there. I remember that Grandpa and Grandma always had a white cat named Priscilla and a dark dog named Tippy -- he had a black coat, or 'they' always had; and they always had one. Must have had a place where they could get the same dog. And that dog could go and get the cattle and bring them in for Grandpa to milk the cows. Other than that, I don't know that much. He did get taken in by the Travelers that came through, and they painted his shed in the back [inaudible] colors -- one of those kind of deals. And I always thought, 'That looks horrible.' I don't think they were too happy with it either. So I knew about the Travelers a long time ago -- they'll come around and try to swindle the old folks, you know.

"Well, then after that, they sold the farm and built the house there on Galena, 1020 Galena, Dixon. That was 1953, just before I graduated in '54. And after that I went into Nurse's Training after I graduated -- and as they say, the rest is history. Grandma Miller died first. She died in August of '62. Grandpa Miller lived until a year after Ethan was born. It seems like he hung on long enough to see him one more time. He got to see him many times. She had to be in the nursing home -- they had nurses around the clock for her to help her. But she didn't even have a walker or anything like I've got to get around."

Perhaps the most significant memories from the years in the 1940s when my Grandpa and Grandma Shaw lived in Lee Center have to do with my mother's health. Ever since she was little, my mother's right leg between the ankle and the knee had been very sensitive, such that she didn't want to let her mother touch the leg during bath time, because it would cause intense pain. In both the taped interview of 28 Nov. 1998 and that of 11 April 2006, my mother told the story of her leg trouble and her parents' efforts to get their daughter help. Her 1998 account of her leg trouble was relatively brief, and begins about 1948, picking up the story in or just after the seventh grade in Lee Center:

"Then I had the surgery on the tumor in my leg that they finally found at St. Luke's Hospital in Chicago (it's now Rush Presbyterian -- St. Luke's, all combined). Dr. Fred Hart performed the surgery, and found that the tumor was not orthopedic in nature but neurological, and they called in a Dr. Gustafson, who did the surgery the second time to try and remove the tumor -- found they could not, cleaned it up, and did the best I could. I wore a brace for quite a few years. I was told I couldn't rollerskate, and I proved them wrong. However, I did have a bad injury with skating that put an end to that -- in later years, when I went out to the White Pines Roller Rink and sprained my ankle the worst I've ever sprained, while I was in Nurse's Training. And so I decided that they probably knew what they were talking about that I shouldn't be on rollerskates. But I learned to compensate for my handicap -- I proved them wrong."

Mom's 2006 account of her leg trouble, and how her father and mother took her from doctor to doctor, is much more extensive, and full of wonderful details:

"I also remember going to first grade with Mrs. Floto and falling on the ice, and that's why I'm so afraid of ice -- because I fell and I hit my spot on my leg that hurt, the blood spot where the tumor is. And they all thought that that's what caused the tumor. Well, it didn't -- it was just something that was growing. The worst pain! I never let my mom wash that leg -- I would always pull away from her when she going to wash that leg, because it would hurt. She couldn't understand why; she'd get upset with me -- [but] it was growing. . . . [I]t was '47 or '48 when they started to take me around to all these different doctors. . . [T]hey scared me half to death: took me up to St. Anthony's Hospital up in Rockford; I didn't know what nuns were, and these women were swishing around the halls in their black robes and stuff, and I was just a little kid -- I didn't know what, scared me clear out of my wits. They couldn't find anything wrong with me.

"Then they took me to a guy up in Polo -- Grandma and Grandpa Miller took me up there. He was a 'Pow Wow' doctor. He'd hold a light bulb over my leg and rub something on it, and that was supposed to make it better. It didn't. Well, nowadays we'd know that [he was a quack], but at that time, you know -- they were trying to find out what was wrong with me.

"So then, after the War, Dr. Robert LeSage came back -- he opened up his practice here in town, and he'd gone to high school with Mother. So Mother took me to him -- my mom and dad took me to him -- because their son had had polio. He was younger than I am -- he's a dentist in Dixon today. And Dr. Robert said, 'I don't know what's wrong with her.' You see, this thing was so they couldn't tell from the outside -- they just knew that every time they'd touch it that I was in pain. And he said, 'Well, I don't know what's wrong with her, but I'll send you in to the doctor that helped Bobby.' He was an orthopedic surgeon, Dr. Fred Hart on Michigan Avenue. And I don't like to go in those elevators, because they had the elevators in that building, when you started out -- UWAAAH! -- you lost your stomach every time it started up! Oh my! Nowadays, you know, it's just like getting in a conveyer belt and then just [hand motion up]. But then they didn't -- it was an ordeal -- I hated that!

"So he examined me, sent me to this 'well-known' guy [who] had an article printed in the McCall's paper of psychologists. [Note: Dr. Robert J. McCall (1913-1990) was a prominent 20th century psychologist.] He hit me right in that tumor with that hard percussion hammer with the hard end -- you know, the pointy end? -- to prove to my mother that there was nothing wrong with my leg, that it was all an attention-getting [strategy]. Well, needless to say, I was in tears and in pain the rest of the day because of what he did, and it still hurts. [Note: in recalling the pain, Mom began to cry toward the end of this sentence.] How much attention does an only child have to get! That didn't make sense even to me at that age -- I mean, that was stupid! And that's what they felt about him. She showed me that article -- I knew she cut it out, but I don't know whether she ever kept it, because I've not come across it. She said, 'This is the guy that -- ' [laughs like Lou Abbott] [I'd] like to get a hold of him and use a percussion hammer on his head! Knock some sense into him -- or out of him, or whatever.

"He said that there was nothing that they could find. The only thing that they could recommend was that they would do an exploratory operation. So they put me in St. Luke's Hospital -- I was the only kid in that 20-bed ward. And I remember that people in the church down there [Lee Center Congregational Church] got together, and everybody, they made a gift box up for me, and they allowed me to open one package each day that I was there -- you know, the nurses made sure that I did it that way. And I'll never forget that, because Mom and Dad couldn't come but on the weekends. There was just nobody there to come and visit me, and I was too old to be in the ward where the little kids were; they were right next door, I could hear them, but [I] couldn't have any company.

"It was '47 and '48 when this all happened, because in '49 we moved up to [Ogle County]. Fourth and fifth grade, and sixth grade. But anyway, then they did that, and when I came back, that was when we went to see the Sonja Henie Ice Revue -- they had me on crutches. She was a figure skater. We had to go up in the Chicago Stadium and up in the nosebleed seats -- on crutches. I can't even get up two steps today! By myself, let alone on crutches! But when you're little, you do things. So they sent me home, and I can remember we had a terrible ice storm -- that was in January, because I went in on the 27th., the 26th. or the 27th. of December. When they sent me home, we had a terrible ice storm, and the folks had just switched over the furnace from coal to a stoker -- bottom-lighted stoker -- and there was no electricity. Now we're cold! I don't remember how we got warm, but it was cold -- ice was everywhere, everywhere, on everything. But we made it through that.

"And I still was having trouble with my leg. After that surgery I couldn't straighten it out. . . . Every time I tried to straighten it out, I was in even more pain. So it was back to Chicago, and they put me in the hospital again, and put a long cast from the hip to my foot, and it turned up behind my knee, to straighten it out, and they twist/turned a little each day. They straightened it out. Oh, it felt good to have it be able to straighten out! And they cut the cast off -- two days later, it was back to [where I] couldn't straighten it out. So it was back to surgery. But they called in a neurosurgeon this time, because when they got in there they found out it wasn't orthopedic, it was a strawberry birthmark between the nerves, it goes down to outside of the leg and down through the bone to the ankle -- and it had been growing, though when they cut into it they stopped the growth -- that's the nature of those kind of tumors. But somehow or another, in the process, and tissues being what they are, and ligaments and tendons, it left me with that drawing up -- and now I have a drop foot. And I can remember waking up from the surgery and the little nurse standing at the bottom of the bed, and the first thing I told her -- 'I can't feel anything on my big toe.' She said, 'Well, that's alright -- it'll come back.' Well, someday I'll get a chance to say, 'It never did!' [Laughs] That's why I can step on that thing and not realise it -- because I can't pick it up. I can push it down, but I can't pick it up. She said, 'That's alright -- it'll come back.' Well, it didn't.

"I didn't know it at the time, but they were talking about doing another type of surgery, where they would take the nerves and muscles or whatever it is that help you do this, to the side, and put it like this -- you wouldn't be able to turn that foot to the side. And Dad said, 'No.' He said, 'Let it be for awhile. Let's see what happens.' And so they took me home, and like I said, by now I was able to straighten out the leg, so that whatever they did stuck -- straightened that up. What they had planned to do was go in and take all that tumor out of there, but they didn't because of the way it was all intermixed in. That would have left me without any use of it -- they may as well have amputated your leg from the knee down. So, they put me in a little short-leg brace that was -- I think I remember that the folks told me it cost $18.75, which isn't a whole lot of money nowadays, but back then, that was a lot of money to have a brace made. 1949 -- '48-'49. They were made out of spring steel -- it was made with this spring coil, and then it would come up here, and there was a little band that hooked it at the knee. Well, being an active child, like your children are, running and playing, these springs would break. They could have them welded once, then they'd have to get a new one.

"I can remember my first time that I know that God answered my prayer. I was upstairs there in the house by the church in Lee Center, that Grandpa and Grandma Shaw used to live in. I was upstairs, and I had asked God, because I knew that that trip to Chicago and that brace cost more than $18.75. It was such an awful expense to go in and have it fitted, and put on the shoe -- you had to buy a special shoe and other things special. And I said, 'Please God, let me be able to walk so I don't have to use that brace all the time.' And He answered me right away. And Daddy was coming in the front door, and I went to the top of the stairs and I said, 'Daddy, Daddy, Daddy, I can walk! My foot works!' I know it was not my doing, and it wasn't anything the doctors did -- it was God answering my prayer as a little kid. He gave me a big hug, of course. He was right when he told the doctors to wait and see what happened. So, that's what happened there -- I didn't have to wear the brace as often, although my foot would get tired. So I would wear it part of the time, but around the house I didn't have to wear it, and I could get around. [I was off the brace by the time I was in high school] except in high school . . . they scheduled all my classes on the ground floor, the first level, so I wouldn't have to climb the stairs, because it was hard for me. But I would play ball, and I would play in the gym class, and they would have one of the girls run for me, because I could hit the ball further than anybody else -- with either hand. I was ambidexterous. So, we used it to our advantage, but back then, you know, you could bend the rules a little, you know, when you're playing work up (?) or whatever. But that's how it -- But I enjoyed playing ball. I played catch with my Dad and stuff. But I was able to get around."

In another part of the 2006 audiotaped interview, Dolores recalled this related memory about one of her dolls:

"I had this one doll that was a pretty good sized doll, and I was having trouble going downstairs -- and I still do; I've fallen down many stairs -- and I went down and landed on the doll and broke the dolly's right leg. So the dolly ended up having a leg that looked like it had a brace on it like I wore, with the tape that we used to tape him back together."

Now, the U.S. Census returns for Pine Creek Township in Ogle County, dated 14 April 1950, list my grandfather and his family as "Shaw Sherman," age 36 (sic - he was 37 and turned 38 the following month), occupation "farm," industry "farming," with his wife "Shaw Frances," age 34 (sic - she was 33), and their daughter "Shaw Delores," age 13. This shows that my grandparents and mother were living on and working the dairy farm in Ogle County west of the town of Oregon that my Grandpa named "The Ayr-Strip Farm." The Ayrshire breed of cow was my grandfather's favorite, which is why he chose that name for his farm (and it seems most fitting that his own Linn ancestry goes back to old Ayrshire in the western Lowlands of Scotland). In the 29 Nov. 1998 audiotaped interview of my mother, she recounted her memories of life on the "Ayr-Strip" at great length. She again recalled those days rather more briefly in the 11 April 2006 audiotaped interview. Here is a transcript of those memories, interspersed with a few of our family's many, many photographs that have come down to us from those halcyon days. First, an introductory excerpt from the 1998 interview:

"After living there in Lee Center until I was 10 years old [sic -- 12 years old], in April of 1949 we moved to a farm that my folks purchased north of Grand Detour, north of the Babson Arabian Horse Farms, and that is where I spent my last of seventh grade and eighth grade -- at Oregon Grade School. And then high school, I went to Dixon High School because my mother worked at the Pontiac garage right across from the high school. And since I lived in a non-high district, they paid my tuition. So I didn't get to go to school and graduate with my classmates from Oregon, which was kind of tough. So I went to quite a few different grade schools. High school was the only one I spent the four years, and I was very grateful."

Then this excerpt from the 2006 interview:

"In 1949 we moved up north of Grand Detour on the farm, and it snowed and I didn't have to go to school. The snow was up to my hips. [I was in the] seventh grade. But April -- can you imagine that? Snow in April! [We had moved in the middle of the school year], in the Spring -- farmers always moved around the first of March or the first of April -- up north of the Babson Horse Farms; where I spent my last years in grade school going to Oregon. The neighbors took us for a ride, and then I went to high school at Dixon High School for four years. . . . I remember that snow. I think that's the last time I ever enjoyed snow -- because I didn't have to go to school. After that snow was always a chore."

On the left, my Grandpa Sherm tends a pair of Ayrshire calves, while in the rightmost photo my Grandpa shows one of his registered Ayrshires, with his farm truck proudly displaying his farm's name.

A few views from The Ayr-Strip, including one of my grandfather's Ayrshire steers, and a wintertime vista -- perhaps taken during one of the brutal winters or snowfalls my mother remembered?

Continuing with the transcription of the 1998 interview:

"The years when I was on the farm there above Grand Detour were some of the best memories I had. I was in 4-H and showed cattle. We had registered Ayrshire dairy cattle, and my dad liked the red and white cows. He used to tell me a poem when I was little by Robert Louis Stevenson. All I can remember are a couple phrases: 'Oh friendly cow, all red and white, I love with all my might, gives me cream to take with apple tarts,' I think. I can't remember just how it goes. I'm sure you could find it in some book of poetry."

Here is the poem to which my mother referred -- it's by Robert Louis Stevenson:

The friendly cow all red and white,
  I love with all my heart:
She gives me cream with all her might,
  To eat with apple-tart.

She wanders lowing here and there,
  And yet she cannot stray,
All in the pleasant open air,
  The pleasant light of day;

And blow by all the winds that pass
  And wet with all the showers,
She walks among the meadow grass
  And eats the meadow flowers.

On the left, a photographed dated (or developed on) 23 Oct. 1950 shows my mother, her cousin Jack Baylor, and my Grandpa Sherman Shaw showing Ayrshire cattle at what I believe to have been a 4-H event. In the photograph on the right, dated from about 1950, my mother and grandfather show Ayrshire calves in the yard at the Ayr-Strip Farm, rural Oregon, Illinois.

In this 1998 audiotaped interview, my mother said how much she appreciated that her parents got her involved in 4-H, because as an only child she didn't have a lot of social contact with kids her own age, and felt a little bit like an outcast. Of her high school years in Dixon, she commented that as an out-of-towner going to school in town, you didn't really date the boys in town, so she felt a little bit like she didn't belong, a bit like a "geek" (as she put it). But continuing again with the 1998 interview:

"My mother, who was not really interested in livestock as much my dad and I were, wanted to have some sheep. They went up to Friendship, Wisconsin, and bought seven head of Karakul sheep, which is the Persian lamb coat sheep, the black curly hair -- they kill the little baby lambs while they're still a few days old to make those beautiful coats. But the mature animals have long hair and they have wool that had to be sent to Pendleton, Oregon, to be woven into material. We had some auto robes made, some plaid ones, and we had some material (that might still be in the cedar chest) to make a coat or a jacket from.

"Anyway, these animals were housed in the same yard where the chicken house was. We had a gate we had to go through to go collect the eggs. The buck of this group of animals was a mean buck -- and he would chase me! I went to the henhouse to get a couple of eggs, and I had one in each hand. I was walking towards the gate, and all of a sudden he comes to greet me at my rear! Dad says, 'Dolly, watch out! There comes that buck!" And I do not jump -- I cannot jump -- but I high-jumped the fence. And my Dad said as I landed -- on both feet, and I didn't break the eggs, they were still in my hands! -- he said, 'I want to see you open that gate that fast again!' Never could, never did!

"We also had a big red rooster, and he was as mean as the buck was -- and you know they were the best of friends? That old red rooster would ride on the back of that buck around that yard. They would gang up on me! If it wasn't the buck chasing you when you went to get the eggs it was the rooster chasing you, so we had quite a time with the two of them. They finally killed him and put him in the stewpot, but he lived a good long time."

The story of the buck and mom high-jumping the fence is one of the best-remembered tales in our family lore. My mother recounted it again in the 2006 interview:

"When we lived up there north of the Babson Horse Farm, the chicken house was in this one place where these Karakul sheep, they were out there with them. We had a Rhode Island Red rooster who was mean, oh he was mean! And he and that buck! This one afternoon I went out to get a couple eggs that were in the nest. Dad was standing in the yard. We had this gate that you had to reach over -- it's a little higher than the fence, but you know, you had to reach around and pull the hook up. And the fence was kind of sagging a little bit, but it kept the sheep where they needed to go. And this old buck had a tendency of chasing after people. Well, Dad saw him coming, and he says, 'Watch out, Dolly, here he comes!' And I had an egg in each hand, and I high-jumped that fence! I've never high-jumped anything in my life! Amazing what adrenaline will do to you. And I landed on both feet, and I had the eggs in my hands and I didn't break either one. Never be able to do that again! Dad says, 'I want to see you open that gate that fast again!' Such a time! But that old rooster and that old buck -- the rooster would ride around on his back. He was a mean old thing! He'd come at you with his feet up in the air. You take a board and whack him on the head -- you thought it would have killed him, but it didn't. He'd keep coming!"

On the left, Dolores' father Sherm holds a Karakul lamb in the sheep pen on The Ayr-Strip Farm, about 1950. On the right, a photo dated (or developed) 23 Oct. 1950 shows my grandparents' Karukul sheep. The ram, or buck, of this small herd was notoriously aggressive.

Continuing where we left off with the 1998 interview:

"Then Grandpa and Grandma Miller moved to town, and they gave us two Muscovy hens and a drake, and two Mallard hens and a drake, because Grandma always used to raise duck, and my favorite at Thanksgiving time was always the Mallard duck, because it was all dark meat. I don't know why I like white meat the best, but I liked that duck, and I guess it was a tradition along with the turkey. My Dad always liked the oyster dressing, and I thought, 'Oooh yuck!' But anyway, she would make two kinds of dressing so that I could have the good stuff and dad could eat that . . . oysters?! Yuck! She used to make oyster soup for him too, and I could never understand why. Anyway when we got up there, we were having a dry season, and the little fox came up and they took off the Mallards because they were small and they could carry them away, but the big Muscovies -- they're the size of the Pekin ducks, they're big white ones -- were too heavy, and so they couldn't catch them. You know, they were bigger than the fox. So these two hens had laid all of these eggs. We went out over there and counted them, and there were 31 in one nest and 30 in the other. There were so many eggs that the hens couldn't sit on them all -- they would rotate them underneath them with their bills. My mother was sure that those eggs were going to be rotten. There were just too many. She would mention that to Grandpa, and Grandpa would say, 'No, no, Peg!' (He always called her 'Peg' instead of by her name, which was Frances, because of his sister's name being Margaret, and her nickname was Peg.) 'If they're rotten, the hens will come off the nests by themselves. Just leave 'em be.' 'Well I don't think we're going to have any ducks.' 'Yes, just leave 'em be.' Sure enough they hatched out. We had 60 ducks running around there, all little yellow balls of fur! You couldn't step without watching where you were going.

"So, at the time, when [I was] in high school, we had a Pinochle group that my parents were involved with, with Harlan and Dorothy Fraza [of Swissville, Illinois], the Rutts (Wes and Ruth Rutt -- of Dixon), Harriette and Kelly Wesner (sic - Carl, not Kelly) , John and Elaine Cramer [of Swissville], Bruce and Ellen Wojtas [?] -- and all these people, if we weren't playing cards at some time, we would go square dancing. Well these people would get together, 'Well, Frances, we'll get together and help you. We'll have a duck-plucking party. We'll get them all ready for the freezer.' Well, what these city folks didn't know is the difference between plucking chickens and plucking ducks is quite a procedure. The pin feathers on the ducks don't come out when you scald them. When you scald the chickens, the feathers just, you can just peel them right off, and they're gone, and you're done, and you singe them and you're ready to go. But you have to pluck out the feathers on the ducks one by one. That's why they could use them for pens, for quills, because they're very sturdy. So they didn't get as many ducks plucked as they thought they were going to get. But we had a lot of duck to eat, and it was good. We do have somewhere pictures of these little ducklings in various trails going across the barnyard. It was about the time we lived on the Harrington place, after we moved from Grand Detour and while I was in Nurse's Training. But that was an interesting part of our history."

In the leftmost photograph, dated 8 Aug. 1949 (the first summer at The Ayr-Strip Farm), Sherman L. Shaw shows an Ayrshire cow. The middle photo is identified simply as "Top Ayrshires." In the photo on the right (developed at Dundee, Illinois), my grandfather shows a registered purebred Ayrshire.

Dolores Shaw shows a calf during a winter at The Ayr-Strip Farm in the early 1950s.

In another part of the 2006 audiotaped interview, my mother recalled how as a teenager she learned how to cook from her grandmother Bessie Miller, and also told of some of her favorites kinds of foods and flavors:

"Grandma Miller taught me how to cook. I can remember in high school, we had Delicious and Wealthy apples in the pasture outside the house. They had three trees there. 'Wealthy' apples, they were called -- they make the best pies! They're tart, sweet, and juicy. They taste good with the cooking. They're an eating apple and they make pies. Well, Grandma Miller had taught me how to make pie crust. Your grandmother would always get the Pilsbury stick from the store and make it that way. And they never tasted the same. So after she found out that I knew how to make pie crusts, every summer she'd have me make the apple pies. She'd say, 'Can you make an apple pie for a weekend?' That's when we didn't have a deep freeze like we have in our homes. We had to have our meat in the locker plant. Friday night she'd go in town. You rented a locker, you butchered your animal, and you put your meat in the locker plant -- and you'd go in and freeze when you go to your locker, got what you wanted out, and get out of there quick -- because it was cold! A lot of people [would rent lockers at a plant] -- there is one right in town, not too far from where Grandma and Grandpa lived, there at 1020. It'd be nice, but it isn't a locker plant any more. But we'd take the meat home, and you'd have your meat for the weekend to [inaudible]. So then, she liked me to make the pies, so I made them an apple pie back then.

"Grandma taught me mostly about the cooking, because Mother was working. She'd come home -- I remember one of the things she'd make that I always liked -- and it scared me half to death, and still does -- is a pressure cooker; but it made the best meat and noodles! It was tender, tasty, and I had a hunger for that flavor all summer long -- but I'm not comfortable using a pressure cooker. So I've never learned -- I've watched them on the t.v., you know, how they do it. I thought, 'No.' I know it works, but me, I'd have it all over the ceiling.

"I like iron skillets -- those are the original non-stick pans. Your brother [Ethan] doesn't know how to use my non-stick surfaces, and he fusses every time he comes up here: 'I'm going to get you a non-stick pan.' I've already three of them over there; I don't need any more. They worked for my Grandma, and they worked for -- well, I don't know whether my Mother used the iron skillets so much, although she had them. She used the electric fry pan a lot, and that pressure cooker because she could get it done really quickly. I know the flavors I like, and it's hard to get them when you can't cook them yourself any more. He tries -- I will give him credit; he does try. I don't know what are the ones that he used, but I've been hungry for what they call the nacho bell grande at Taco Bell -- that kind of a dish. And I said, 'But can't you make it with . . .' -- he'd brought up some flavored corn chips, and I said, 'Why don't you make it with them?' He said, 'Well, you have to use just corn chips for that dish.' And I said, 'No, that's flat. I've never liked those plain corn chips.' So he made one up himself. Oh, it was delicious! He puts the taco seasoning in it, so that works well. But sometimes I get hungry for that type of food.

"The other thing is the chicken. My mother used to fry it on the stove. Well, we always oven-fried ours, and I do that. So what we do is get the thighs and the drumsticks, and we'll put them in the oven and bake them with [something] like Shake-n-Bake for baking them."

Fond though my mother's memories were of her years on The Ayr-Strip, my grandfather Sherm was unable to make the dairy farm profitable. My mother told me that her father turned to his older half-brother Russ for help, since Russ had made a fair amount of money working in the oil business in Kansas. But Russ did not believe the farm was a wise investment and declined to help keep it afloat. My mother said that in her youth, for many years she blamed her Uncle Russ and thought he was mean for "making" her Dad have to give something he loved so well, which meant they had to sell the farm and move. (As an adult, of course, she understood why Russ made the decision he did.) With the loss of the Ayr-Strip, my grandparents moved to a farm that my mother referred to as "the Harrington place." I have not been able to determine where that farm was, however.

As indicated above, during these years while living east of Oregon, my mother attended Oregon Grade School and Dixon High School. Here are some of her school memories and other memories of her youth that she shared during the 2006 audiotaped interview:

"Oregon Grade School -- now it's the Nash Recreation Center. Yeah, it's no longer even a school. Miss [Gladys] Thomas was the principal, and Miss [Flora] Blomquist, the lady who [taught] the only sewing class I ever had. And I frustrated her because I was so left-handed -- I'd pin things backwards and she'd stick herself, and she'd correct what I'd done, and I'd have to go back and I'd stick myself. It was 'Backwards Marie'! But she's the only one that taught me anything about sewing, other than my grandmother [Bessie Miller]. You know, I watched my mother do a lot of sewing, but I mean, they never sat down and taught me, 'This is how you use the machine,' or, 'This is how you use a pattern.'

"I wasn't too fond of school in the sense [that] I liked things when I was in grade school better than others. I do remember one teacher, Mrs. [Bernice] Frost in Lee Center, in the fourth grade, the statement that she made to us -- all of us: 'The word "can't" is not in your vocabulary. We do not use "can't."' And that stuck in my mind, and I guess that's why I learn how I am today, because part of my frustration [is] because there are things that I can't do that I, well, I can do but circumstances won't let me. Oh, my Irish dander -- you put that with the English stubbornness, you get all of it together -- oh, what a mess!

Anyway, in high school I liked singing. I took music lessons, but I couldn't get my left hand in [sync with] my right hand [when playing the piano], even though I'm ambidextrous. I could do one hand, I could do the other, but when I put them together for some reason it just never worked -- piano playing. Now, typing, it doesn't seem to have the same effect, and you'd think it would . . . . And I would struggle and struggle with it.

Well, when I discovered that I could sing, and sing harmony . . . And so I liked being in choir. And I took the science courses -- I did kind of like that: physiology and natural science (or General Science, they called it), and chemistry. Physics was hard for me because there was too much math. I've always had difficulty with complicated math. I need all 10 toes! Algebra was just awful -- I said, 'No, no, no, no, no.' I took a Commercial Law course, which was good -- it was very interesting and I enjoyed it and I got an 'A' in it, but I didn't want to be a lawyer. I said, 'No offense, not me.'"

Photograph of Lee Center School's Intermediate Room from my mother's copy of the 1947 "Epoch" yearbook, when she was in the fifth grade. The teacher was Mrs. Bernice Frost. The black arrow indicates my mother, Dolores Shaw, the blue arrow points to her first cousin Jack Baylor, while the red arrow indicates Dorothy Shaw, their fourth cousin, a descendant of Henry Champion Shaw of Amboy, Illinois. Jack Baylor's younger brother Eddie is seated two desks up from Mrs. Frost.

A display of Dolores Shaw's report cards from first grade through high school, along with her good attendance commendations and her eighth grade diploma.

Dolores Shaw's senior year photograph scanned from her copy of the 1954 Dixon High School year.

In both the 1998 and the 2006 audiotaped interviews, my mother spoke about the special place that music and singing occupied in their home life during the late 1940s and the 1950s. Many times over the years, our mother told us Olar boys how much she and her father loved to sing and harmonise together. Here first are the memories from the 1998 interview:

"We used to harmonise together, and he was a bass. He liked to harmonise, and so do I, but because I wanted to harmonise he always had to sing the melody, so I could harmonise with him. We sang a lot of different numbers back then when we'd drive in the car. Car radios weren't the best quality that they have today, [but] we didn't have to worry about a radio, because mother would just holler out a tune name, and he'd start singing and I'd start harmonizing. You know, 'When the Saints Go Marching In,' or, 'Put on your old grey bonnet with the blue ribbon on it, / While I hitch old Dobbin to the shay.' Now you've gotten me singing melody. Those were back at the turn of the century ones. He liked barbershop harmony. He would practice some of his numbers. Just different ones that were popular at the time. Right now I can't even think of any that we did, but there were just a lot of them. There was a 'Community Sings' book. If you ever get a chance, get a hold of one in a library. They have 'Camptown Races,' 'Oh! Susanna,' 'Dixie' -- those type of numbers . . . .

"We had a piano. Mother would play the piano. She didn't have a very nice singing voice, but she would play the piano, and I and Dad would sing together. 'Mairzy doats and dozy doats and liddle lamzy divey. A kiddley divey too, wouldn't you?' 'Ragtime Cowboy Joe' -- '. . . highfalutin', high shootin', Ragtime Cowboy Joe.' I don't remember all of it, because he knew them, and I would just pop in there and start harmonising with him. But I don't remember all of it. But I remember, 'You got a horse, you got a great horse . . .' I don't remember all of those. It might be in that box in there. We might have some in there. It might be there.

The lyrics to "Ragtime Cowboy Joe" that my mother was trying to remember actually go: "He always sings, raggy music to the cattle, / As he swings, back and forward in the saddle, / On a horse, that is syncopated, gaited, / And there's such a funny meter to the roar of his repeater. / How they run, when they hear that fellow's gun, / Because the Western folks all know, / He's a high-falutin' scootin', shootin' son-of-a-gun from Arizona, / Ragtime Cowboy Joe."

"And then there was one, 'He made the night a little brighter / Wherever he would go / The old lamplighter / Of long, long ago' He'd go around and light the lights in the park. And then there's a part in the verse, if he'd see lovers in the park, 'He'd pass a lamp and leave it dark.' It was pretty, but we could sing that. Another one was, 'Beautiful Ohio.' You probably have heard that one. 'Drifting with the current down a moonlit stream.' I can't remember all these things. You probably have heard it. 'Beautiful Ohio, . . . Visions of what used to be.' Those type of songs you could sing a counter-melody to. One would do, 'Drifting with the current down the moonlit stream,' and then somebody would start in, 'Beautiful Ohio.' And it was counter, and it would be harmony, but singing a different thing. I mean this is what I miss. Another one is, 'Whispering Hope.' You've probably heard that one. And of course we did all of the carols, and they were pretty -- they were pretty, if sung at the proper season . . . if we're allowed to do that anymore. I can't remember any of the other ones right now, but there's, 'When Irish Eyes Are Smiling,' 'Too-ra-loo-ra-loo-ral,' 'Galway Bay,' and 'Danny Boy.' There was music from 'Chocolate Soldier,' which was a thing, and from 'Oklahoma.' . . ."

And these are my mother's memories of singing with her family from the 2006 interview:

"Well, when I discovered that I could sing, and sing harmony -- your Granddad and I used to sing all the time. I know he didn't like to sing the melody, because he liked to harmonise too. But I liked to harmonise and I just have a natural ear for it -- I could pick it out. So we would sing a lot of things -- I just that part, and Mother would play the piano. And we'd ask her please not to sing -- she 'made a joyful noise.' But she could play the piano, you know -- so she could play the piano, a little bit for us. But she enjoyed listening to us sing. And same way with Grandma Miller: she had an interesting sound when she'd sing. She could play, and she'd sing, 'What A Friend We Have In Jesus,' and that was an experience listening to her sing. She'd be on pitch, but she had a -- I can't explain quite the sound she that made, but Mother and she were pretty much alike. So we decided that it was best that they just listen to us. Some people don't have all of the overtones and things in there when you have sound, sound when you make it. They enjoyed listening to us."

A review of the Dixon city directories from the 1950s shows five entries that mention my family. First, the 1951 Dixon City Directory says: "Shaw Frances (Mrs S L) 1 (H) bkpr Terminal Pontiac res Organ [sic - Oregon] Ill RD 2." At this time my grandmother had a job working as a bookkeeper for a Pontiac dealership in Dixon, which is why she appears in the Dixon directory, but Grandpa worked the Ayr-Strip Farm in Oregon in Ogle County, which is why he is not listed in Dixon's directory. It was during this time that my mother was a student at Dixon High School, graduating with the Class of 1954. Next, the 1955 Dixon City Directory shows: "Shaw Frances (Mrs S L) bkpr City Natl Bk r RD 3." Once again, my grandfather himself does not have his own directory entry, suggesting he was working a farm elsewhere in Ogle or Lee counties -- and I suspect that farm, located on Rural Route 3 in Lee County, was the Harrington place. Two years later, the 1957 Dixon City Directory includes this significant entry: "Shaw Sherman L (Frances) 1 (H) Reynolds Wire Div h 907 W 7th." From this we learn that my grandfather's days as a farmer had come to an end. He and my Grandma had moved to Dixon and were now living at 907 W. Seventh St., and Grandpa had taken a job with the Reynolds Wire Division.

Now, this move to Dixon was while my mother was at Nurse's Training at the Swedish American Hospital in Rockford, having begun her studies there in the fall of 1954. After my mother's graduation from Nurse's Training in 1957 (she obtained her Illinois registered nurse certificate on 30 Dec. 1957), she moved back home and worked for three years as a registered nurse at the Dixon Public Hospital (now Katherine Shaw Bethea Hospital). Meanwhile, my Grandma had taken a job at City National Bank in downtown Dixon. This is reflected by two entries in the 1959 Dixon City Directory: "Shaw Dolores reg nurse Dixon Pub Hosp r RD 1," and "Shaw Frances Mrs emp City Natl Bk In Dixon r RD 1." Curiously, there is no entry for my grandfather that year. Perhaps that is because he had recently begun working as a kennelman for the Dixon Veterinary Hospital, which was located on Rural Route 5 outside of Dixon -- for my grandfather always had a deep love of animals and must have missed the farm life terribly. A farmer from his youth, a farmer at heart, he made sure he could find ways to continue animal husbandry one way or another.

Concerning my mother's three years at Nurse's Training, she shared these memories in the 1998 audiotape interview:

"By the time I graduated from high school, I didn't know what I wanted to do with my life, other than I wanted to be on the farm. I thought I wanted a dairy farm. But money was tight and I couldn't afford college, and so I ended up in Nurse's Training -- which I knew I didn't want to do, but there I was: three years in nurse's training. I tried many times to figure out something else I could do or be and didn't know really what. Couldn't join the service because of my leg -- I would never have been able to pass a physical, because I couldn't march. So joining the Navy or the Marines or the Air Corps as a nurse, that was all out. I lamented it to my Dad one time as we were up there, and he said to me one of the most important pieces of advice that I can ever remember having or being given. He told me, 'I don't understand what it is that you want, but,' he said, 'I know you don't like it, being in Nurse's Training. I know that you probably want to do something else. But you started this.' He said, 'You should finish it.' And I looked at him, and I respected my Dad's opinion very much, and I decided, you know, he was right. So I finished it. Because he told me he didn't care whether I nursed a day after I graduated or not, 'but please finish it.' So I did. And I've got that certificate to this day, and I worked for three years after I graduated . . . ."

At left are Frances, Sherman, and Dolores Olar dressed for Easter Sunday services in 1956. At right is my mother's 1957 official Nurse's Training graduation photo from Swedish American Hospital in Rockford, Illinois.

At left is the Swedish American Nurse' Training Class of 1957 Graduation group photograph -- Dolores Shaw is in the third row, fourth from the right. At right is her Registered Nurse's license, issued by the State of Illinois on 30 Dec. 1957.

During the three years Dolores worked at Dixon Public Hospital, she learned something about her Grandpa Miller's religious faith that is most curious and remarkable. I myself first learned this amazing story from her in the first week of May 1993 during the days immediately following her mother's death. It was long understood that all of my Grandma's genealogical records and books would come to me, so I began to look through her collection at Grandma's house at 404 Devonshire in Dixon, Illinois. That's how I found two or three old, worn King James Bibles kept in a plastic bag. I took them out of the bag and saw that one was so worn that the cover had all but come off -- it was tied with a black shoe string to keep the cover on. I untied the shoe string and found that this was the personal Bible of my great-grandfather Norman Chester Miller (1887-1964), my grandmother's father. Interleaved in the Bible were a couple devotional cards with prayers, and the funeral receipt for my great-grandmother Bessie Mae (Young) Miller (1890-1962). Sitting down in the living room at Grandma's house, I gently paged through the Bible and found a bookmark at Ezekiel chapter 16, where I saw three small "x"s written in pencil at the top of the page, and a couple arrows written at verse 6. My mother was there with me in the living room at 404 Devonshire, so I asked, "Mom, would you happen to know why your Grandpa Norm wrote 'x's in pencil next to Ezekiel 16:6?" She asked me to read the verse. It says:

"And when I passed by thee, and saw thee polluted in thine own blood, I said unto thee when thou wast in thy blood, Live; yea, I said unto thee when thou wast in thy blood, Live."

That's when Mom told me the wildest story about our family that I've ever heard. She said it was for the times when there were people or livestock who were hemorrhaging and the bleeding couldn't be stopped by natural means. They would go to her grandfather Norm and ask him to come. He would grab his Bible and go to the person or animal, and then read aloud Ezekiel 16:6, and the hemorrhaging would always immediately stop. Hearing that, my jaw dropped to the floor. Mom proceeded to explain that as she understood it, it was an ability or gift that was passed down in the family. In each generation one person in the family would be "chosen" somehow to have the gift of stopping hemorrhages through praying Ezekiel 16:6. Mom said one time back in the late 1950s she was there at her grandparents home in Dixon, Illinois, and told them of a patient who had been hemorrhaging and the doctors were having great trouble getting the bleeding to stop. My great-grandmother Bessie said only, "Norm, treat him." He got up, fetched his Bible, and left without saying a word. Mom asked her grandmother what was going on, and that's when Mom learned the story. She later witnessed other occasions of her grandfather going to "treat" people who were bleeding, and the bleeding also stopped those times. Mom also said she was given to understand that she herself was to be the next to receive the gift. However, Mom said it felt to her like a superstitious way to use the Bible, so she never tried it -- it wasn't how she understood one ought to pray. But she thought that by her becoming a Registered Nurse, in her own way she was carrying on the tradition.

When I first saw that page of my great-grandfather's Bible marked as it was, I could see that this was a special verse for Grandpa Norm for some reason. When I asked Mom if she knew anything about it, she said it was something she hadn't thought about for decades. Only my question with the Bible in my hands brought the story back to her memory. Ever since, I've wondered how the tradition got started and how my family knew this was something that was handed down to each new generation. My maternal grandmother's family's religious traditions are Lutheran, "Dunker" (Church of the Brethren), and Presbyterian (from her Ulster Scots roots: Miller, Burnside, and Patterson). What was this tradition's lineage of descent? Who had the gift before Grandpa Norm? I asked Mom those questions, but she said she didn't know. Some of those mysteries to be answered only in Heaven.

I made sure to ask her to tell the Ezekiel 16:6 story again in the April 2006 audiotaped interview. This is how she recounted the story in that interview:

"That's back when they had supposedly passed these things on from man, one generation, to a woman of the next generation or whatever, and there was supposed to be this Bible verse that if you repeated it in prayer that you could stop the bleeding of a person or an animal. And I didn't know -- well, Grandpa told me what it was. But I can remember that one time when I came home from, I was working at the hospital, and Mr. Willet -- Chuck Willet from the engineering place -- his son has the trucking firm called Whatever Right Now Anyhow [?] -- his son was a year ahead of me in high school. Anyway, his dad had had surgery, and he was hemorrhaging, and they couldn't get the hemorrhaging to stop. And I just mentioned it when I came home when they asked how he was, because he's gone to their church. And I said, 'Well, he's apparently having some difficulties, that he's bleeding and they can't get it to stop.' And Grandma said, 'Norm, treat him.' And I said, 'What's this?' So later he told me what it was, and it was this verse in Ezekiel 16:6 that was supposed to stop the hemorrhaging. Well, when I went back to work, they said that the hemorrhaging had stopped -- he'd stopped bleeding, he was getting better. So I don't know what was going on there, but it's something that I didn't feel it was appropriate for me to continue, even though I knew that it was what it was, because I believe that God will heal you when you don't have to recite a verse over and over and over -- you know, because I'd since learned that. But I thought that was interesting. But the hemorrhaging had stopped. I had not really heard of my Grandpa doing this before. He just told me what the verse was, you know, and that that's what they did. I don't know of anybody else in the family who could do it. They just said it would work on the livestock too. So I don't know when he began doing it or how the practice arose. I don't believe that that's the way God does things, but I don't know -- there are a lot of questions we have in life that won't get answered now; they'll get answered later. As I said, those are those questions that you put up on the shelf, and when the time comes to get the answers, I take it down and get the answer. If it isn't answered now, it'll be answered later. It's like there are people who can lay hands on people and take pain away from them, and they take the pain into their own body. There was a girl in Nurse's Training that could do that. We don't know why, but she did -- and I still don't know why."

I still have Great-Grandpa Norm's Bible, and I've told this story to my kids. I've never had an occasion to try this to see if it works, to see if I have the gift. But maybe I or one of my brothers have it. I don't know.

Four images of the old, worn Bible that my great-grandfather Norman Chester Miller had received as a Christmas present in 1905, with a bookmark, "x"es, and arrows indicating Ezek. 16:6, just as I had found them when I discovered this Bible among my late grandmother's things a few days after her death in early May of 1993.

As indicated by the 1959 Dixon City Directory, in the late 1950s my grandparents and mother moved out of Dixon to a new place on Rural Route 1 in northwestern Lee County. It was about that time that my grandfather got involved in breeding, training, showing, and racing registered Shetland ponies and hackneys. At this same period of time, my mother experienced a religious conversion to a strict Sabbatarian Adventist sect called the Radio Church of God (later called the Worldwide Church of God), which had been founded in the 1930s by Herbert Armstrong, a former minister of the Church of God (Seventh Day), after that denomination had expelled him for heresy. She became a member of the Radio Church of God in June 1960, and then, since the nearest Radio Church of God congregation at the time was in Chicago, my mother decided that year to move to the Chicago area, taking a job as an industrial nurse working for E. I. Dupont in Lincolnwood, Illinois. Her religion was profoundly important to her and shaped the rest of her life, and had a great influence on the upbringing that I and my brothers had. Therefore, during the audiotaped interview of my mother on Tuesday, 11 April 2006, I asked her to tell her story of her religious conversion and how she came to join the Radio Church of God. Here is her story, in her own words, which also tells of how she came to move to Chicago and found work there:

"I was working at Dixon Hospital, 3-11 shift, and the daughter of the people that we had bought that farm [from] up north of Babson's in Grand Detour had been going down to Jacksonville to this so-called Presbyterian college, you know, religious college, and this is back in 1959. One afternoon she came in, or one evening she came in, and she was all upset [and] concerned, and she said, 'Dolores, I've got to talk to you.' And I said, 'Well, Sherry, I'm working till 11,' and I said, 'We've been running late because we've been so busy.' She said, 'That's alright, I'll wait.' Her name was Sherry Graff. And she went in the waiting room -- this is in the old part of the hospital; I think they've since torn that part down and remodeled it, but I mean, at that time, on the first floor; and she waited for me until I got off, and then we up to Dementown -- over across town, the only place that was open that late at night, a little restaurant there -- and we sat and talked. And she was so concerned.

"She was asking about, 'How do you know there's a God? People say there isn't a God,' and all this stuff that was scaring everybody about building bomb shelters, and everything was going to blow up, and all this, and the end of the world was coming. She was wanting to know the answers. She was very worried -- I wasn't troubled. I just said, 'Sherry, you've got to have faith.' With my intelligence, all I know is, 'Well, Sherry, you've got to have faith. Jesus will take care of all that sort of thing, and that's it.' We talked and talked and talked, and I never accomplished anything, of course. What did I know? What does she know?

"So she went back to school, and she came back at Thanksgiving time. Well, in the mean time, I had gone down to Lee Center, to the Baylors, and Aunt Eleanor was a Sunday School teacher, and she ought to have answers, and I asked her about that. 'How do you know?', etc. . . . I knew there was a minister named Uncle Will Yard -- he was a circuit preacher like Conrad Bender. And she said, 'Well, he always said that it's in your heart -- the Kingdom of God is in your heart.' I thought, 'Well, I'm sorry, but that was no answer either, and I'd been reading the Bible, and I'd been wondering, you know, this didn't jibe and that didn't jibe, and, you know, how come this and how come that? No answers there either.

"Well, on Sunday nights they had what was called the Mannion Forum on -- kind of like the Fox Reports today, the Tim Russerts and -- what's the other guy that's got -- you know, they sit and they talk over all the problems of the world and they're going to solve them? I thought, 'Oh, I'm not going to listen to this, because they don't have a clue either.' And I turned the dial, and I heard this man say, 'Does God exist, and can you prove it?' 'Oh! I'll listen to this -- maybe this will have Sherry's answer!' That was Garner Ted Armstrong. And so I began listening to this broadcast. I got home and found out it was called 'The World Tomorrow,' sponsored by the 'Radio' Church of God at that time. And I sent away for the articles that they'd described at the end, especially 'Does God Exist?' And then the next series things that he went in[to] was the Ten Commandments. I mean, how basic can you get? That's the foundation of the whole life right there! So, I sent for that and then plenty of the other articles and stuff, and I read and I studied -- and I began getting the answers that Sherry needed!

"So at Thanksgiving time, I had all these answers to give her, and we got together, and I wanted to know [what she thought.] She was not interested! She was fine, she had no problems, everything was hunky-dory with her. Now I'm puzzled! Because now I have something tangible, that makes sense to me [after] all these years, but it doesn't make sense to Sherry! What's with this? Then I kept reading and kept studying, and the thing that made me understand that it wasn't just some guy doing this to me, is because he would say, 'Don't believe what I say. Prove it to yourself in the Bible.' Believe the Bible -- prove it. [If] you know what you stand on, nobody can shake you away from it -- nobody. Well, your grandmother found that out. She even told your Dad that: 'Don't ever try to get her out of there. She studied too long and searched too long and too hard -- she's not going anywhere.' She was right.

"So, after that, I wrote to them about baptism, you know, and I wanted to keep the Sabbath, and there was nobody out here doing it. It's interesting how God works in your life, to make you move whether you want to move or not. Now, I had no desire whatsoever to move to Chicago. I hated that town. I had to be there on abiliation [?], I had to have this surgery done on my leg -- you think I want to go to Chicago? I'm going to work around there? Uh-uh! But all of a sudden one night I could not get the broadcast. It wasn't there any more -- they'd sold the station and some junk music started coming on. Aaaugh! Now what do we do? So I wrote out to them, I asked about baptism, and I met a Baptism Tour in June in Morrison, Illinois, in June 1960, and was baptised here in the Rock River. We had a dry summer that year, and there wasn't any water over there that we knew of, so we came back to the river, and was baptised there. They gave me a packet of Good News magazines, and in that I found Mr. Dean Blackwell's name, and that he pastored the Chicago church and lived in Joliet. Well, one of the ladies where I was working at the hospital, one of the patients had worked for E. I. Dupont, and she said, 'Well, they use industrial nurses. Why don't see you about getting a job with them?' I said, 'But that's in Chicago.' She said, 'No, that's in Lincolnwood.' [Laughs] It's still Chicago. Anyway, so I went in and talked to them, and they hired me -- and then I was going to have to do things that I wasn't comfortable with, and so then I was out of work.

"But I called Mr. Blackwell about coming to services, and I went to Wozniak's the first time -- that was the first hall I went to. And there were quite a few people -- there must have been a couple hundred people there. That was right at 26th and Blue Island, right down there in, not too far from where the jail is. But it's just that -- one of the reasons that I'm grateful not to be in nursing today is because of all the shots and stuff you had to give, and I wasn't comfortable doing that. You didn't have a way of checking for allergies or things, and I wasn't comfortable doing some of that, and I still am not. You know, I'm very leery about that, because they have you doing things, and once I was out of training I didn't want to take them myself -- well, I didn't want to give them to anybody else, you know. That's a whole different story.

"So anyway, I was out of work, and Mr. Lowell Foster said at one time he'd worked as a janitor for Rand McNally. He said, 'They're a good company.' He said, 'Go in and talk to them.' So I went over and I talked to them. I put my application in at several places -- I didn't know what I wanted to do; I'm a farm girl, right; and I had this nurse's training, but that wasn't going to help me get a job in those circumstances. Well, anyway, I went in and talked to the gal in personnel. She described the kind of job that they were looking for, but it didn't even pay close to what my expenses were, my rent and all that. And I started to pick up my coat. All of a sudden, somebody came down, handed a piece of paper, and said, 'Wait a minute. Sit back down. I want to talk to you yet.' So she got a little more acquainted with me. And she said, 'We just had a lady who had transferred into this one department who could type a gazillion words a minute.' I mean, it was astronomical. Man, I'd be lucky to get 80, you know! She said, 'What they're looking for is somebody to do manuscript typing, who will be accurate, who takes her time, and it slowed her down, and she didn't like that.' So she said, 'Why don't you go back and talk to the managing editor?'

"So I did. Oh cool! They were putting annotations in geography textbooks, so the teachers would know how to teach their subject to the kids. Interesting, right? Anyway, I had to type up these sentences, you know, and these things, and the fellow would work on the light table, and would what they call 'strip them' onto the pages they made before they print them. So that's where I learned a lot about my printing and layout and things like that. I thought, 'Oh, I'd really love that.' I would have loved to have done that type of work, if I had stayed there. But the interesting thing about it is that the job paid $5 less a month than what I had been making, but they gave me overtime, and let me come in on Sundays to work, because with everything they had a schedule to get this out.

"We did a Spanish book. I would proofread. One girl could understand what we were reading, and I could read it. [Laughs] That was fun! And I was there 2 1/2 years before your Dad and I got married. And I enjoyed that kind of work. And they were doing some changes around, and they were going to put the layout into the art department, and because I didn't have any art classes at all, any art background at all, I couldn't go with them. So I couldn't continue there -- which is just as well, but I would have liked to have done that.

"So after I got all those typing things done, it has helped me with what I am doing. But all I had was the knowledge of the keyboard and the typewriter class that I had in high school, and they hired me on. Well, it wasn't till a couple years later that I was talking to one of the editors of one of the books. Her name was Ruth. She said, 'Dolores, how did you get hired again?' I told her the circumstances. She said, 'They never hire people off of the street here. They always hire through a temporary service.' So, Who has been guiding my life all these years? Did it again! Your grandmother always said, 'Well, Fate gave you that, found you that job.' I said, 'No, His name is God. Not "Fate."' So, you don't have to come to me and say that God doesn't answer prayer, because I know you're wrong! Anybody who says that. I have seen too many examples in my own personal life, and in the lives of others. It may not be the answer that you want, but it's the answer you need."

Though she only worked there for three years, my mother was always proud of her time at Rand McNally in Chicago, and saved some examples of the text books that she annotated, as shown in these photographs -- these books are still in my possession. In the case of "The River," it was apparently the text itself, not merely red-letter marginal annotations, that she typed.

It was through her membership in the Chicago congregation of the Radio Church of God that she met the man she would marry, JOSEPH OLAR, who was almost 33 when they first met in late 1960. My father had never been married, or even engaged, before -- he was a very shy and quiet man, well on his way to becoming a confirmed bachelor, and he then lived in an apartment in Lombard, Illinois. After a courtship of several months in 1962, they decided to marry. Because the Chicago Radio Church of God did not have its own church building (indeed, that sect avoided building permanent church buildings for its congregations because of their belief that the Second Coming of Jesus Christ was likely to take place as early as the 1970s), the wedding ceremony was held 22 Dec. 1962 in the home of the Raymond Roenspies family in Lombard, and was presided over by Mr. Dean Blackwell, their pastor, with Mr. Roenspies and my mother's friend Lorene Fellows as the witnesses. It was Mr. Roenspies who had encouraged my father and mother to begin courting.

Soon after they had met as fellow members of the same church, my mother and father experienced an obstacle in their relationship that temporarily impeded further attempts to get to know each other better. In the 2006 audiotape, my mother told that story, as follows:

"Mr. Savela was in charge of the library that they had in the back of the [rented hall at Wozniak's]. People over in the Chicago area had all these different backgrounds. They were Polish and German and Irish and Greek, you name it, it was there. And I was talking to him one day -- he was very, very hard to talk to. Of course he would stand in the back and talk with the men, but he wouldn't go around and talk with the ladies. But I went up to him and talked to him. I said, 'Do you happen to know where your people are from?' Because I knew where mine were, you know, at least ways some of them. So he took me back to this map, and he showed me where Romania was, and I thought, 'Oh, cool! He knows!' Because some of the people didn't have a clue where their people had come from, but he did. And then he never talked to me for several weeks after that. He was afraid that I would be like his father had told him, that 'If the American people find out where we're from, they won't have anything to do with you.' And I thought, that's a really sad kind of feeling. . . . I mean, I understand where it came from, but, like I said, it wasn't true, and he was surprised that it didn't deter me from talking to him, you know."

In a previous audiotaped interview of my father, on 29 Nov. 1998, I had asked him the story of how he and my mother met and came to be married, and in that portion of the interview both of them told their story together. Here is the transcript of their story, which began with my Dad asking Mom a few questions to help refresh his memory:

Dad: When was it we met in Chicago that time? 1960. You were in Chicago at the time, right? You were living with Lorene Fellows? How many were at the church at that time? At Kedzie Avenue? Was that on Kedzie Avenue? Something like that. There weren't very many -- there were about 13 people. Mr. Schlitt and --

Mom: That's about how many there were when you came in.

Dad: Was that right? Oh that's right. I came in, started going in '56. In '57 I went down to Big Sandy, first Feast, by myself. I met you at this one church on . . . Wozniak's! That was it! Well anyway, all my life -- let me tell you a history about my love life. All my life, I've ever -- I have never met a woman who agreed with me. You know what I mean? I met these girls, and they looked at me, 'Oh!' -- at that time there was a familiar term called 'Schmo' -- it's like a jerk today, you know. Well, all these women, I went with them for awhile, they didn't like my -- oh I don't know, I wasn't a tall, dark, and handsome guy, with a lot of muscles. I was skinny. Anyway, they didn't like me all that much. And I've gone with about two or four girls, I guess. And she [Mom] comes up to me and talks to me, you know. I'm there by myself, and she's interested! [Dad fights back tears] But nobody was interested in me up to that time!

Mom: His Dad had told him that the American girls wouldn't be interested in him because he was the son of immigrants, and that if they found out where he was from that they wouldn't have anything to do with him. I had asked where he was from. You were standing in front of a map there at the [church] library . . .

Dad: I was looking at these maps. She asked me where I came from, or where my father came from. I told her my father came from Romania -- around Czernowitz or Bucharest, in that area, Transylvania -- my mother came from Transylvania. [sic - Tereblecea] And she seemed to be interested -- didn't care, you know, whether I was a foreigner or not. And it just struck me as being good.

Mom: I was interested in history and genealogy, and so was curious to find out where he was from, because there were a lot of people in the Chicago church of different ethnicities and different races.

Dad: A lot of nationalities settled in Chicago, everyone you could think of: from Chinese, to the Russians, Germans, Polish, everything, Czechs, Serbians. And these people in this church were 'foreigners' -- and she was one that wasn't, and it struck me as being odd that she would care for me. Anyway, I was rather hesitant about it at first -- I was kind of scared of getting too close to her. She did most of the moving -- I didn't. When a man sees a woman cares about him, he kind of 'submits' after awhile. It's up to the woman many times, you know -- the woman doesn't want you, she'll tell you. Like I told you before, these women I met: we got to know each other for awhile, and then they just, 'Get out of here,' you know. Well, anyway, she's asking me out all the time, see, I was skeptical about anything happening. Anyway, she asked me to dinner once, and I went along, and after that it developed from there. But we only knew each other three months before we got married -- September to December.

Mr. Roenspies was instrumental in getting this thing going, too. He was kind of pushing me: 'Come on now, you're 35 years old! Hurry up!' It was getting late for me. I talked to a minister once -- I've forgot who it was, Mr. Blackwell or somebody else. I said, 'I don't like being this way. I'm 35. I think I have to get married -- to somebody.' Anyway it all happened to us -- we got together.

Mom: Apparently Mr. Blackwell sent Mr. Roenspies to talk with him. Mr. Blackwell was known as 'Marryin' Sam' -- he wanted everybody in his church married. There were only about three eligible couples anyway.

Dad: There was one girl [at church] I was talking to for awhile, Stacy Rekkie. But I got to talking to her, and she didn't like me and I didn't like her. They just weren't matches. She was a nice girl and everything, just as a friend, but that's about it. You see, you have to understand, that my father was raised by an uncle [sic - older brother] at a young age -- he was 7 years old when he lost his father, he was 17 when he lost his mother, and [my] father's brother raised him from that time on. You have to understand, the living conditions over there were so bad, people become bitter. Meat was hard to come by. The government would take all the cattle away, leave you with a few vegetables and there was very little to eat. Papa was mean -- let's put it that way: he was just plain old mean. Mama wasn't much better. So we were raised in kind of a household with strict rules -- you did this, you did that, and you didn't say anything opposing it. You know, your opinion was nil. So when I met her and she showed interest, in a different way, with more love and emotion, you know -- that's what struck me as being different about her. We were taught to control our emotions -- to show love for someone was a weakness.

Now, my mother's parents were certainly unsettled, even worried, due to their daughter's new religious beliefs, especially because the Radio Church of God departed from ancient, historic Christian teaching on several crucial articles of Faith, including the insistence that Christians should gather for worship on the Jewish Sabbath (Saturday) rather than on the Christian Lord's Day (Sunday). This sect also did not believe in celebrating birthdays. Seeking to base itself solely on the Bible, this sect rejected traditional Christian holy days and festivals, and instead celebrated the Jewish festivals and holy days mentioned in the Old and New Testaments. These beliefs and practices were perhaps the most difficult for my grandparents to understand (and it was especially hard on my grandmother), because it meant that their daughter, their only child, would no longer be celebrating Christmas with them, nor celebrate her birthday nor the birthdays of any children she might have. Nevertheless, they tried their best to be understanding, patient, and tolerant. My mother said that they had hoped she would have a traditional wedding at First Presbyterian Church -- and one of the things that most disappointed my Grandpa is that the Radio Church of God's wedding service did not include a special moment found in traditional Presbyterian weddings that recognised that marriage unites not just a man and a woman, but also their families: the moment when the minister asks, "And who gives this woman away?", to which the bride's father (or brother, etc.) would answer, "I do." Grandpa had so looked forward to the time when he could proudly give his daughter in marriage to the man she loved. He had to content himself with merely escorting my mother up to the minister and then silently relinquishing her to be married to my father.

At left is the wedding invitation that Dolores sent to her parents. At right is the wedding reception invitation that her parents sent out to family and friends.

My parents' nuptials were announced in the Dixon Evening Telegraph on Saturday, 29 Dec. 1962, page 5, as follows:

"Miss Shaw Is Bride of Joseph Olar

"Mr. and Mrs. Sherman L. Shaw, Rt. 1, Dixon, announce the marriage of their daughter, Dolores Frances, to Joseph Olar, Lombard, son of Alex Olar and the late Mrs. Olar, Berkeley. The couple exchanged vows in an evening wedding performed last Saturday in Lombard, where they are residing. A reception to honor the newlyweds, is being arranged by Mr. and Mrs. Shaw and will be held in their home from 2 to 5 p.m. Jan. 6."

Shown here are three photographs from my parents' wedding on 22 Dec. 1962 at the home of the Roenspies family in Lombard, Illinois. On the left, Sherman Shaw leads his daughter Dolores in as the organist plays a wedding march. In the middle photo are my just-married parents, now Mr. and Mrs. Joseph Olar. The third photo shows my paternal grandfather Alex Olar, then my maternal grandparents Frances and Sherman Shaw, and finally my maternal great-grandfather Norman C. Miller, father of my grandmother Frances.

Because my parents had chosen to have a simple and inexpensive wedding in a private home in Lombard (which was, in any case, all they could afford), most of my mother's relatives and friends from Lee and Ogle Counties were unable to attend the wedding, nor could they hold a proper wedding reception. Therefore my mother's parents planned and held a very special, formal wedding reception for them in Dixon, Illinois, on 6 Jan. 1963.

These three photographs, showing my parents Joseph and Dolores (Shaw) Olar on the left and in the middle, and Dolores' parents Sherman and Frances Shaw on the right, are from the 6 Jan. 1963 reception that my grandparents held to celebrate their daughter's wedding.

After their wedding, Dolores and Joe at first lived in Joe's apartment in Lombard. Before long, they moved in with Joe's father in the Olar house on York Road in Elmhurst, Illinois. It was in that house that their first child, a son whom they named ETHAN JOSEPH OLAR, was born on Thanksgiving Day, 28 Nov. 1963, just 11 months after the marriage. My mother had considered the name "Ethan" as a name for her child ever since she was a girl, when she read Allen Chaffee's story, "How Ethan Found a Pet," in her Elson-Gray Basic Readers - Book Three textbook in grade school (I still have Mom's Elson-Gray Basic Readers, Books Three and Four, and a few other of her grade school books). Speaking of Ethan's birth in the 2006 audiotaped interview, my mother said, "At first we lived in Joe's apartment in Lombard. And then we went to where Papa [i.e. Dad's father Alex Olar] had built that house in Elmhurst -- that's where Ethan was born. And from there then we went to Peoria. Ethan was born on Thanksgiving Day -- he ruined my dinner, and I didn't get my dinner until after 3:30. It hurt! I don't know [how long labor took]. Maybe about 12 hours. I don't even remember that. All I remember is that I was glad when it was over. He weighed 8 pounds and 6 ounces. I think he was two weeks ahead of time, but whatever. Who was counting by then? He was right on time." In her old Bible family record, however, Mom wrote that Ethan weighed 8 pounds 2 ounces, and that she was attended by Dr. Gregory White. In the 29 Nov. 1998 audiotaped interview with my father and mother, my mother commented that "soon after Ethan was born, then Papa left because he didn't want to be around the baby." But before he moved out to live with his daughter Virginia, they did photograph my Grandpa Alex holding his newborn grandson.

My father and mother welcome their first child, their son Ethan Joseph Olar, born 28 Nov. 1963 at home in Elmhurst, Illinois.

My mother's maternal grandfather Norman Chester Miller meets his great-grandson Ethan for the first time, the first week of December 1963. Great-Grandpa Miller got to meet Ethan several more times before his death at age 77 on 11 Nov. 1964 in East Moline, Illinois, when Ethan was less than three weeks shy of his first birthday.

In another audiotaped interview with my father, dated 16 Nov. 2008, my father the story of where he worked after he and my mother married, and how they ended up moving to Central Illinois in the year after Ethan's birth:

"I was primarily working at the Chicago Rivet Company, 20th Avenue, Bellwood [Note: the address of the Chicago Rivet & Machine Co. was 9616 W. Jackson Blvd., Bellwood], and that didn't work out too well. I think I quit, or whether I was laid off, I'm not sure. Previous to that, I had gone to school. Before I met Dolores I had gone to drafting/engineering school on South Michigan Avenue, Chicago, when I was single, before I met her. After I got out of school, we were living in Chicago. I got a job at the Northern Illinois Gas Company on Washington Street in Bellwood. I worked there for about a year, and they gave me two weeks' vacation every year. I decided I wanted to go to California to visit my brothers Marion or John -- they were living close to each other. I stayed an extra week, and they didn't like it, so they fired me. Then after I was laid off, I was idle for about a week or so. We were going to the church at the time -- Worldwide -- and there were people from Peoria. [One of them], Dr. Erlander, gave us a hint about a job. Let's see, where was it? Northern Illinois Gas Company, and I worked at Darst Street in the treatment plant there as a draftsman while we were over there in Peoria. Anyway, we moved down to Peoria, we got a hint from Dr. Erlander that there was a job opening at the Greater Peoria Sanitary District. So I went down there and checked it out, and sure enough. We moved down there from Chicago. We rented a house in East Peoria across the river, on Springfield Road, and I started -- it was kind of crazy, too; the guy who was leaving left Friday, and I started at the division Monday to fill his position."

On a previous occasion, I asked my mother about how they came to move to East Peoria from Elmhurst, and she told a story much the same as the one Dad recounted in the above 2008 interview excerpt, only she added that they did not go directly from Elmhurst to East Peoria -- instead, they moved to Dixon and stayed with her parents for about a week or so, until they had arranged for housing in the Peoria area. She said they first rented a house in Peoria from Dr. Erlander for about six months, then rented the three-bedroom house at 1218 Springfield Road, East Peoria. That house is still there today, though it no longer has the yellow ochre color that it had when they lived in it, and that it kept for several years after they moved out. It was repainted grey, and kept that color until a few years ago, when the house's exterior received a very welcome repainting and residing.

It was while they were living on Springfield Road that Dolores and Joseph had their second child, another son whom they named JASON SHERMAN OLAR after Dolores' father. Jason was born 11 Aug. 1965 at Proctor Community Hospital in Peoria, Illinois. In the 2006 audiotaped interview of my mother, she said, "Jason was born a month early. He was born at Proctor Hospital, and he was premature. He weighed 7 pounds and 15 ounces. He was just too big. He couldn't breathe and nurse at the same time. He would nurse for a while and then we'd have to snap his feet to get him to breathe and get some air into him. Mr. [Jack] Pyle came over and he went ahead and asked the Blessing of [Little] Children on him right then, and not to wait till after the Feast that year, and a week later he was pink and gaining weight, and he was fine -- he didn't have any breathing problems after that."

In her family Bible record, Mom also noted that Mr. Pyle, who was their Radio Church of God minister, also conferred an anointing of the sick to ask for God to heal Jason. As for the Blessing of Little Children to which she referred, that was a special annual ceremony of the Radio Church of God, following the example of Jesus Christ's laying hands upon the heads of little children and blessing them. The Radio Church of God did not believe in infant baptism, but this ceremony was somewhat analogous to certain aspects of the traditional Christian baptism of children. In those days, the Radio Church of God had developed a custom of having an annual Blessing of the Little Children service on the first Saturday Sabbath following the church's annual observance of the Feast of Tabernacles which occurs in late September or early October. It is because Jason's condition was so serious that their minister got permission to give Jason the blessing in August. Thankfully Jason's health soon improved markedly in the week after he was anointed and blessed.

And then two and a half years later I came along -- another son, born at Proctor Community Hospital at 12:36 a.m. on 6 Feb. 1968 and named JARED LINN OLAR, again in honor of my mother's father. In the 2006 audiotaped interview, Mom had this to say about my birth:

"Then you were born at Proctor Hospital, and the doctor didn't get there in time, and I told the lady -- she was the same lady that was there when I had Jason -- she said, 'Well, let's get on this delivery room table,' she said, 'We've got to get you on this table.' And I got somewhere on it, sideways or whatever, and then all of a sudden you came. Oh man, I tell you! She said, 'That place was a mess in there!' and I said, 'I'm awfully sorry for you.' And then they told me how much you weighed, and I was, Oh! I just could not believe that you weighed that much: 10 pounds and two ounces! I've still got a sore spot up here in my gall bladder where your foot was, because you were 23 inches long! You footed me! Well, there was no room for that long of a baby. And I was so worried that all those baby clothes I made wouldn't fit you, because you were so big. They fit, though. But, you know, when you're laying in a bed, and you've been through that kind of an ordeal, strange thoughts go through your mind."

In her family Bible record, Mom wrote that the nurse who assisted at my birth was Mrs. Prill, RN.

In the year after my birth, my parents bought their first house -- a new-built home at 1819 Columbus Drive in the still-new subdivision known as Holiday Hills. Then in the following year, Mom and Dad had their fourth child, a son whom they named DEREK ANDREW OLAR, born 5 Nov. 1970 at Pekin Memorial Hospital. In her family Bible record, my mother noted that Derek was 21 inches long and weighed in at 9 pounds 5 1/2 ounces, commenting, "Easiest delivery -- came home next morning." In the 2006 audiotaped interview, she said of Derek's birth, "Then with Derek, we were living in Pekin -- he and Caleb were both born in Pekin Memorial Hospital. And I went -- going up there, and of course I always would go home right away. At that time they didn't have the same procedures that they've got now, where they kick you out before the ink is dry on the birth certificate almost. It was, 'Oh! Why do you want to go home?? What would you do if something happened?' I said, 'Uh, you go to the emergency room where you come back to the hospital; but if you don't need to be here, why take up a bed?' You know, that's silly. I said, 'My bathroom is a lot closer than the one you got here.'"

Dolores at home in Pekin in 1971, with her four sons -- holding Derek, and Ethan, Jared, and Jason standing with her.

The next major event in Dolores' life was the death of her father SHERMAN LINN SHAW II from complications of leukemia at the age of 61 on 14 Sept. 1973, of which you may read in his biography. About a month or so after my Grampa's death, Mom and Dad conceived their fifth and last child, once again a son -- she ended up having only boys, no girls -- named CALEB ALDEN OLAR, born 28 July 1974 at Pekin Memorial Hospital. Of Caleb's birth, Mom noted in her family Bible record that he was close to my own birth size and weight -- 21 1/2 inches and 10 pounds 1 1/2 ounces, commenting, "Born 6:53 p.m. Sunday; came home Monday at 11 a.m.; most difficult delivery - BIG shoulders." Now, up until Caleb's birth, Dolores hadn't had to take any drugs during labor or delivery. That was not the case this time, though. This is what she had to say about Caleb's birth in the 2006 audiotaped interview:

"Well, with Caleb I had to take something, and there was reason. Anyway, we went home and everyone of you guys were tummy-sleepers, except Caleb -- he would not sleep on his tummy; he slept on his back. You other guys would not go to sleep the other way. So I laugh at these people who say, 'You have to sleep them on their back. It's better for them that way.' Well, sometimes the kid knows better what he wants to do than you do. When I went in to have Caleb at 3 [2?] in the afternoon, and I think it was a Sunday afternoon, because we took Derek and you kids down to the Lawsons -- they were living down in South Pekin -- and I told the nurse, 'Now, I'll be leaving tomorrow morning after the baby is born, and I'll be [inaudible] at home.' And I could hear them out at the desk say, 'She thinks she's be going home in the morning after she has that baby!' About that time, Dr. Colson came through the swinging doors. He says, 'Oh, by the way, go ahead and release her -- she's going home in the morning.' That shut them up! Anyway, after I had Caleb, and I was in the ward over there, the one nurse came in, and she said, 'Do you have a little boy at home about 3 years old?' 'Yeah. Why?' She said, 'Well, you're the only woman in my 18 years of my working here in this hospital, taking care of the babies in the nursery, that has come in and had the baby and gone home the next day.' The only one -- it was me. She remembered. I thought, 'Why would she ask me that question?' With Caleb, I did have to take some Demerol, because it turns out that he has the broadest shoulders of any of you boys. He's got a big head, but the shoulders are even worse. And I still think that my fingerprints are in the handles on that thing, and I know that Mrs. Frederick heard me working so hard, all the way out to Tremont. Your Dad said, 'Oh, it's good now -- the head is out!' (He was there at all our births.) The head is out, usually the rest is easy. But the next statement the doctor says is, 'But now we've got to get these shoulders out of here.' And I thought, 'Oooooh!!' He said the head was nothing compared to the shoulders. That's what your Dad's comment was -- 'It's alright now, the head's out.' Because he knew that once the head was out with the rest of them, the rest of you would just come out like a shot out of a cannon. Well, he didn't! He required a little 'Umph!!' And I was in pain, so I did have to take something else. But it was minor, where it didn't affect his breathing any. I was the kind of person that every time you would go in to have a baby, and they asked you, 'Have you had stitches?'; I said, 'No.' 'Oh no! You'll drop it out like a baseball!' Or a basketball, in Caleb's case. He was 10 pounds 2 1/2 -- but he was only 21 inches long; he was two inches shorter than you. He was broader, and that's all that shoulder thing. Derek was 9 - 5, I think -- and he was two weeks early. You were right there [on schedule], and so was Caleb."

Not long before Caleb's birth, my Grandma Shaw and her sister-in-law Aunt Eleanor (older sister of my Grandpa Shaw) discovered that through our Sherman ancestors, we are descendants of the Mayflower Pilgrims John Alden and Priscilla (Mullins) Alden. This was the first time we had ever found any Mayflower Pilgrims in our genealogy, and since the line goes through the Shermans, and because of the 14 Sept. 1973 death of our grandfather Sherman Linn Shaw, whose Christian name was a memorial to our Sherman ancestors, my mother decided to give Caleb the middle name "Alden" in honor of John and Priscilla.

Dolores and her husband Joseph and their five sons in 1974, in clockwise order beginning at the left: Jared, Jason, Ethan, Caleb, and Derek.

Now, as I mentioned above, my mother ended up having five boys, and no girls. She regarded that as providential, because my mother had always felt she would relate better to sons than to daughters (and she and her mother were not quite "in sync" the way she and her father had been). Mom also mentioned several times over the years that even as a girl, she preferred boy dolls to girl dolls, even to the point of asking her mother to make boy clothes for her girl dolls. She mentions that again in the 2006 audiotaped interview: "I always remember, whenever any of the gifts that were given to me that were dollies, that I didn't like the clothes they had on them -- I'd take it to Mother and ask her to make me boy clothes. And she would do that." And though this is an anatomical rather than psychological consideration, she would also comment that she found men's clothes easier to tailor and alter than women's clothes.

Sewing, tailoring work and doing alterations to clothes was, after all, were the chiefest of her practical skills. She was, in fact, very creative and interested in crafts, learning how to build shelves, and I remember well how she learned how to build cardboard cars and trains for us, and to paint them, since they often didn't have enough money to buy brand-name toys for us. It was when I was still a baby that she began to put her sewing skills to use to supplement our Dad's income from his job at the Greater Peoria Sanitary District. After I was born and my parents bought their first house in Pekin, Dad and Mom saw the need for additional income. However, with three young boys at home and soon a fourth on the way, my father didn't want us to not have our mother at home to give us the care we needed, so Mom taking a job outside the home was not an option. That is how our mother came up with the idea of Olar's Sewing Service. The front room of our house at 1819 Columbus Drive was turned into her sewing room for her home sewing and alteration business, and she continued that business wherever we or she lived, until the last few years of her life. While living in Pekin, Illinois, she would do alteration work for the different clothing stores in town, such as A. J. August at the Pekin Mall, or Christian Brothers on Derby Street. Her sewing skills were also of very practical benefit for her husband and sons, for she learned how to make suits and even tuxedos for us to wear to church or on formal occasions, and she would quickly repair or patch our clothes.

One of her favorite work agreements, however, was making the outfits for the Pekin Noteables Show Choir. She starting designing and making the Noteables' costumes in the late 1970s and continued doing so into the very early 1990s. It was something of a big event for the Olar family each year whenever Noteables Fitting Season came around, as our house would fill with Pekin Community High School students coming for Mom to measure them for their outfits. And each year, when the costumes were ready and the Noteables would have their official group photograph, Mom would get a copy of that photograph and have it framed. Each year she proudly added another Noteables photograph to her sewing room walls. Mom had a positive relationship with the then director of the Noteables, Don Valenti, and one of her favorite accomplishments during her Noteables years was when she and Mr. Valenti came up with the idea of adding shining colored sequins to the boys' vests and the girls' skirts. When the sequined outfits were first debuted, the Pekin Noteables' costumes, sequins flashing and sparkling under the stage lights, earned many an "Ooh!" and "Ah!" and won awards -- and then the very next year, all the other schools' show choirs showed up at the competitions wearing sequins too! So, Mom and Don Valenti helped set the fashion style for high school show choirs for a few years.

At left, a 1974 photograph shows the Olar boys -- clockwise, Ethan holding Caleb, then Jared, Derek, and Jason -- modeling their suits that their mother made them, standing in the driveway of their home at 1819 Columbus Drive, with the family station wagon displaying the Olar's Sewing Service logo and magnetic sign that their mother designed and made. In the middle, an example of our mother's tailoring skill, with another view of her Olar's Sewing Service sign. At the right, an advertisement for her expanded home business venture called "Olar Services" dating from the early 1980s.

Two of the Pekin Community High School Noteables group photographs that my mother had framed and displayed in her sewing room. On the left, a photo from the early 1980s showing an example of her "pre-sequin" costume designs, and on the right, an example of one of her sequined designs, from the mid-1980s.

In the 28 Nov. 1998 audiotaped interview, my mother offered a few remarks about how she moved on from working as a Registered Nurse and an annotation typist at Rand McNally, instead picking up sewing and making a livelihood of it. That also reminded her of how much one of her great aunts on her maternal grandmother's side also love to sew, with regrets that she didn't get a chance to know her Young relatives better when she was growing up. In the 1998 interview, she said that after she was married, she --

". . . thankfully was able then to move into the new area, which is the sewing, which I dearly love to do -- and which I found out years later that my great aunt, that's all she ever wanted to do and could have taught me, but we didn't know because of family squabbles that happened. That was Aunt Irene, Aunt Irene Allen. Because of the difficulties, none of us know to this day what it was between Grandpa Young and my grandmother Bessie, that they didn't speak to each other to the day he died. So I didn't have the opportunity to know the other great aunts. I wish I could have. Esther, and Irene, and Clark who died very young -- brothers and sisters. So that part of the family is kind of a little bit obscure. I don't know, like I said, what really happened, but some day we will -- but not now."

Though my mother never knew what had caused the falling out between her grandmother Bessie and her great-grandfather Frank -- and in fact in the 11 April 2006 audiotaped interview, my mother said she thought it was because Frank disapproved of Bessie's choice of husband -- I later learned the full story of this sad estrangement in an August 2010 phone conversation with my grandmother's first cousin Grant C. "Jack" Young (1921-2015), son of my great-grandmother Bessie's's younger brother Clark C. Young. The following account comes from the notes that I took during that conversation:

Aunt Bess lived on her Dad's farm with her husband Norm and kids Frances [my mother's mother] and Don. Just before and during the Depression years (about 1928 to 1933), she and Norm lived on the farm -- but couldn't afford to pay her Dad any rent. However, at one point during those years, Aunt Bess and Uncle Norm bought a new Chevrolet Coupe with a rumble seat: this car purchase was one of the reasons they couldn't afford to pay rent. Finally, after they'd been on the farm for five years without paying even a dime toward rent, Bess's Dad decided to rent the place to Grant's father Clark. Learning of this, Bess was so hurt and offended that during a big noon-time meal at her father's house in Dixon, she stormed out, saying, "I'm sorry I'm your daughter!" She left her Dad crying -- "My Dad said he'd never seen his Dad cry like that before," Grant told me. Bess and Norm thus had to move . . . and they got a bigger farm to rent from someone else! Bess and her father Frank never reconciled: she never spoke to him again. When her father died, he directed in his will that her siblings were each to pay her $1,000 . . . so she could pay the debt she and Norm still owed for the five years of unpaid rent.

So, it wasn't anything horrid or shameful or scandalous, but just a dispute over money owed, with pride and hurt feelings bringing about a sorrowful silence between father and daughter. This isn't to blame either my great-grandmother or my great-great-grandfather -- for when these things happen in families, there is no doubt plenty of blame to go around, and God is the Judge, not any of us -- but just to explain something that my mother had always wondered about, which is, after all, an important episode in our family's story.

But returning to the subject of my mother's sewing talents, in the 2006 audiotaped interview which I did at her home south of Dixon, Illinois, she offered these reflections on her sewing career and an anecdote of her customers:

"I'm just grateful that I've been allowed to have a kind of job that I've enjoyed all these years, and be able to use some creativity that God gave me; be able to fix things that other people have no clue. I have a job, a very simple job for me, that a lady's brother brings -- a [inaudible] from Atlanta, Illinois, who shows sheep, whose daughters have showed sheep, and they've got these blankets. He can't find anybody down in his area that knows how to mend them or repair them like I do, and he likes what I do. His sister lives just down the road -- Dr. Collins' wife. So I said, 'Where does Steve live?' And she told me. I said, 'Does he come all the way up here?' And she said, 'Well, he can't find anybody down there that can sew like you do.' 'Thank you!' When people like what you do for them, you know, they spread the word around, and that's the best advertising in the world."

In this same interview, Mom credited some of her tailoring skills to some things that her own mother had taught her as a child:

"Other things I remember with Mother when I was real little -- that she would teach me how to color. And she wasn't mean about it, but she insisted that I stay inside the lines, and do it neatly and carefully. And when I would cut things out, she taught me to do it very carefully. And I guess that's why I do tailoring today -- because I cut my patterns out with precision. The instructions tell you, 'You don't have to cut off all that stuff -- you can do that as you cut.' You don't get a precise cut if you do that. So I always trim mine first -- because Mother taught me to. Sometimes I tried to do what my Mother said. So I did have a few things that Mother did with me."

Among the life events that we experienced during our years on Columbus Drive, one of the most significant -- and harrowing -- for my mother was an automobile accident on Sheridan Road in Pekin that occurred on 17 Oct. 1972, when I was 4 years old. We owned a '57 Chevy at the time, red with a white top, and being an older model it had no seat belts. That morning Mom had to run some errands. I was in the front passenger seat, while my brothers Ethan, Jason, and Derek, and the two kids who lived across the street at 1818 Columbus Drive, Jeff and Cindy Furkin, were all in the back seat. While heading westbound on Sheridan, at 8:17 a.m. as she approached where Florence Avenue ends at Sheridan, another car on Florence made a left turn onto Sheridan and cut us off (Mom said it was driven by a woman, but it all happened so fast that she couldn't identify the car and the driver was never identified), forcing Mom quickly to swerve right to avoid a collision -- and that sent our car right into the utility pole on the north side of the road at 1907 Sheridan Road, snapping the pole and leaving it dangling. From the force of impact, my brothers and the Furkins hit the back of the front seats and suffered some minor bruises and abrasions, but Mom was rendered quite sore for quite a few days afterwards. As she was helped out of the car, stunned from impact, she saw me lying still on my right side on the floorboard in front of my seat. At first, thinking of how I had been in somewhat of an ornery mood that morning, she wondered if I was pretending to be asleep. She told me it was okay, it was over, and I could get up -- and just then she saw blood pooling under my head, and, as she told me afterwards, she had the dreadful thought, "Oh no, I've killed him!!"

Front page Pekin Daily Times article, dated 17 Oct. 1972, reporting on the car crash in which I was severely injured when I was 4 years old. Our mother's name was misspelled, and my name and my brother Derek's name were misreported.

Two photographs of the 17 Oct. 1972 car crash, taken by Mary Becker, from Pekin Public Library's Pekin Daily Times photo negative archive.

An ambulance rushed us to Pekin Memorial Hospital, where my brothers and the Furkins were treated and released, and Mom was held overnight for observation. As for myself, though, it was clear that I had been injured very severely beyond the capability of Pekin's hospital to treat, so I was rushed from Pekin Memorial Hospital to St. Francis Hospital in Peoria and admitted to the intensive care unit there -- and Mom said they were afraid I would die on the way. Upon impact with the utility pole, my body was slammed against the dashboard, and x-rays showed that my impact against the '57 Chevy's metal dash had inflicted head injuries with a hairline fracture on my right jaw with a semi-circle fracture over my right ear, with profuse bleeding out my right ear and mouth. My face was swollen and with much bruising on the right. My mother says she called our pastor Mr. John Mitchell to ask him to come and anoint me and pray over me -- he had just come back from another sick call and said he'd drop by the hospital later in the day, but when he learned that I might not live he immediately came to confer anointing.

And The next morning I awoke in the intensive care unit, apparently fine, except for a bit of light bruising on the right side of my face. I remember everyone making a fuss over me, and them taking x-rays of me. They kept me one more night -- I remember Mom and Dad saying goodbye to me, and I wanted so badly to go with them, but they said I had to sleep there that night. They gave me a sawdust-filled zebra they'd bought for me in the hospital gift shop, but I lay on it during the night and it broke, spilling sawdust in my bed. The morning of 19 Oct. 1972, Dad picked me (borrowing his boss's blue compact car) and brought me home. Mom then got a pattern for a stuffed zebra and made one herself using zebra-print fabric to replace the one they'd got me, and I had that stuffed zebra for several years afterwards, until it wore out and I threw it away.

The follow-up story on the crash from the 18 Oct. 1972 Pekin Daily Times, page 2, column 7, reporting that my condition had remarkably improved overnight, and that my mother was also still at Pekin Memorial Hospital. She was released that same day, and I was released the next day.

Now, although I have several very clear memories of my short stay at St. Francis, I have never had any memory of the car crash nor of that morning before we got in the car. When I regained consciousness, I thought I had been in the hospital for a very long time. A few years later when I asked Mom to tell me the whole story, I was shocked that I was only there for less than 72 hours -- and amazed when she told me that my severe injuries had disappeared overnight. Mom said the second set of x-rays (which are the ones I remember them taking) showed absolutely no skull fractures, and the bleeding had stopped with most of the swelling and bruising gone. The doctors and nurses were baffled, and even though I seemed to be fine, they kept me that extra night just be make sure I was OK. Mom says the doctor who had charge of me at St. Francis (he had red hair, she said) actually telephoned us at home maybe two or three weeks after the accident, inquiring about my health, and in words like the following, said: "I can't explain this. I've checked the x-rays again, and there's no doubt there are fractures in the first x-rays, but not in the second!" As for me and my mother, we have had no doubt that God, hearing the prayers being offered for me by our family and fellow church members (and no doubt those offered by the Sisters at St. Francis Hospital), intervened to miraculously save my life, a wonder that has proved a great consolation for my mother and me. I have had no lasting after effects from my injuries -- except that before the crash, I had the weird ability to loosen my jaw on both sides of my face and move my jaw in a way that I could make the joints "pop"; but after the crash, I found that I could only do it on the left side (and I can still do it today), but not on the side that God healed.

We lived at 1819 Columbus Drive for eight years in all, and during those years our family grew from five members to seven. As nice as that little house was, it got quite crowded during that time. When it was first built in 1969, it had just three small bedrooms, a front living room, a kitchen/dining room, bathroom, a laundry area, and an attached garage -- but it was single level and had no basement. With the front room turned into our mother's sewing room, a new living room was built onto the back of the house, and a bit later, a new laundry area and a new spacious bedroom where we three youngest boy slept while the two oldest brothers got rooms of their own. That served us well, but it was clear that as we boys got older and bigger we would outgrow our rooms, and Mom also needed much more space for her sewing business.

That is why we moved to a new house in the summer of 1977, at 1212 Parkway Drive. That house had a basement that had a double garage was, with the garage door at the same level as the road out front, and it also had plenty of space for Olar's Sewing Service, with a door next to the garage when our mother's customers could come into the basement. The upper level had a layout quite similar to our old house on Columbus Drive with its additions, and there were concrete stairs leading from the driveway up to the house's front door which opened onto our living room or front room. The house was large enough for the kitchen and dining areas to be distinct, unlike the old house where the kitchen was the dining room and vice versa (an arrangement that explains why even today I habitually refer to my own dining room as "the kitchen" even though they're distinct and set off). This house served us very well, and we lived there for the next eight years.

One of the more notable events in my mother's life (and the life of her family) is that her mother, who had been widowed at the age of 56 by our Grandpa's death in Sept. 1973, met a very kind and decent widower in his 70's named ARTHUR CLEVELAND KEITHAHN ("Art"), born 6 Sept. 1900 in Bureau, Illinois, son of William Fredrick and Mary E. (Dunn) Keithahn, a retired appliance store owner. They soon developed a genuine friendship, and Art asked my grandmother's hand in marriage. I remember that Grandma was somewhat uncertain about remarriage, wondering if she was being rather silly, and was concerned that my mother might not approve and might think she was trying to replace her father -- but our mother put those fears to rest, assuring her that she was very happy she'd found a good and honorable man to be her companion. They seemed to be well matched in their temperaments, interests, and values. Grandma, age 60, and Art, age 77, were married 12 Jan. 1978 by Dr. Frank Hamilton at Church of the Palms in Delray Beach, Florida. Though it felt somewhat awkward for us boys that our Grandma had a new husband, we welcomed him, and we asked him if we could him "Grandpa Art" -- he said that OK with him. Art owned a Florida condominium in Boynton Beach where the two of them lived during the winter months, returning to their home at 404 Devonshire in Dixon each Spring. A few months after their marriage, in May 1978, we took a big family vacation to Florida, where we visited Grandma and Art, and also visited our Dad's siblings who lived in Florida -- and also spent a day at Disney World in Orlando (well before the Epcot Center, when Space Mountain was still relatively new). Sadly, their marriage lasted only a little over three years, for Art developed liver and pancreatic cancer, and complications of that disease coupled with other conditions of his age caused his death in Dixon on 31 May 1981. He was buried next to his first wife Nell in Walnut Cemetery, Walnut, Illinois.

During the 1980s, the four older of Mom's sons graduated from high school, and as a graduation present Mom made each of us tuxedos. About a year after Ethan's graduation, he enrolled in an automotive trade school in Wichita, Kansas, where he studied autobody repair and repainting. Upon his graduation in Wichita, he returned to Pekin. That prompted my mother to consider ways to help Ethan get started doing autobody. Ethan did a few jobs in our own garage, but that was obviously not an ideal location, so Mom found a house in Pekin that had a garage specially built for car repair and autobody work, at 201 Sabella Street. We moved there in early July 1985, just before I went off to summer camp in Orr, Minnesota -- upon my return from camp I had to unpack my things and finish moving in to my new bedroom. For a while, my parents kept our old house at 1212 Parkway Drive as rental property, but the experience as landlords was not a pleasant one for them -- the renters very soon became delinquent in their rent, and when they got the deadbeat renters out, they found that they had violated the lease by bringing in a few dogs that completely ruined all of the carpet and flooring in the house. Mom and Dad turned to our Grandma for help, and Grandma very kindly agreed to help her daughter and son-in-law and take the property off their hands -- she fixed up everything the renters had wrecked, put it on the market, and sold it. That soured my parents on being landlords for quite a few years.

The Olar family, 23 July 1987. Ethan, Jason, Jared, and Derek are all wearing the tuxedos that their mother Dolores had made for them.

Our grandmother, who had a very good head for money management, also looked ahead and made sure to provide for her family in the future, setting up a trust for our mother. However, to ensure that the trust could flourish and benefit her daughter and grandsons for a good many years, Grandma prudently added the stipulation that Mom would not get direct control over the trust until our mother's 65th birthday (15 Aug. 2001). In the event that my grandmother passed away before that date, my mother's trust would be managed by a bank trust officer until her 65th birthday. This provision was wise, because while Mom was a very creative person, she was not the most financially disciplined kind of person (that was more our Dad's strength).

When our grandmother was widowed a second time in 1981, she inherited Art's condominium in Boynton Beach, and so she kept up her practice of wintering in Florida and return to Dixon each Spring. In the early months of 1993, however, Grandma found herself really beginning to feel her age -- she turned 76 on Feb. 18 that year, and about that time she commented to her daughter that she wondered how many more times she would be able to manage the long drive from Dixon to Boynton Beach. But that proved to be her last stay in Florida. She returned to Dixon by May 1, and we all looked forward to driving up to Dixon to see her again on Mother's Day (which was May 9 that year). She had even written a letter to me a few weeks before, but I did not reply to her letter prior to her return to Illinois, thinking I would be seeing her again. But I never got to see her again. On 4 May 1994, while having breakfast and playing cards with a few of her friends, she suffered a subdural hematoma and a massive vessel burst in her brain, and was rushed, unconscious, to Katherine Shaw Bethea Hospital. Mom and Dad drove up to Dixon, where they found that Grandma's condition was very grave -- she was only breathing thanks to artificial life support, and so our mother made the agonising decision to tell them to disconnect life support, whereupon Grandma (or her body) stopped breathing. The news of her death was devastating to me, for I didn't get a chance to tell her goodby, and to this day I still regret not replying to her letter. But I acknowledge that God was merciful to her in the kind of death that she died, for she had long worried about succumbing to a series of strokes like her older brother Don had -- instead, God granted that her death was sudden and almost immediate.

Grandma's funeral was Friday, 7 May 1994, at Preston-Schilling Funeral Home, where the funerals of her parents and our Grandpa had been held, and Rev. Lincoln Richardson, her pastor from Dixon's First Presbyterian Church, gave a very good funeral homily and tribute. To ensure there was enough space in the family lots at Woodside Cemetery in Lee Center, our mother had Grandma's body cremated and the urn interred with Grandpa. Most of Grandma's genealogical records and other family history materials then came to me, though Mom kept a portion with her.

Because Grandma left the house at 404 Devonshire to her, our mother conceived a great desire to return to the county of her birth. Our father had retired a few years prior to this, and all of us Olar boys had finished with high school by now. So they made the decision to move to Dixon and live in Grandma's old house, while Derek and I remained in Pekin at 201 Sabella St. Mom then re-established her sewing service in Dixon in a building at 739 N. Brinton Ave., with room for her son Jason to do upholstery -- Jason had inherited his special artistry and crafting skills from her.

Now, beginning in 1992 and continuing in 1993, I had been saving my money for a trip to Dunoon, Scotland. I had planned to travel there by myself, but after Grandma's death, my mother decided to come with me on my Scotland trip. My mother had never traveled outside the United States before, nor had any desire to travel internationally (unlike her mother, who took trips to Canada and Europe in the 1970s and 1980s after our grandfather's death). Even so, our mother, like her father and her grandfather Shaw before he, was aware of her Scottish descent, and now with both of her parents gone, she wished to take just one overseas trip to visit the land whence many of her ancestors had come. In particular, she hoped to see some Ayrshire cattle -- her father's favorite breed -- in Ayrshire itself, which was her own way of confirming her personal lineal ties to Scotland. I, of course, hoped to learn about this ancestral home of ours and do some genealogical research. Her decision to come with me to Dunoon -- for which I did not ask, but which I gladly welcomed -- made travels plans much easier, and also meant we'd be able to stay in Scotland longer than eight days and be able to afford to do and see much more than I'd originally expected to do.

We planned this trip to coincide with the Worldwide Church of God's annual fall Feast of Tabernacles, an eight-day religious retreat that for us and for most of our fellow Worldwide Church of God members was each year's big family vacation. Over the years our family celebrated the fall festival at Gladewater (Big Sandy), Texas; Jekyll Island, Georgia; the Lake of the Ozarks, Missouri; the Wisconsin Dells; and St. Petersburg, Florida, with most of our Taberacles trips being to the Ozarks in the 1970s or the Dells in the 1980s. (Among the great joys that our mother had during these religious celebrations was singing in Festival Choirs, especially in the 1970s at the Ozarks -- something that later inspired my brother Derek and me to do the same at the Dells, and I also sang in the choir in Scotland.) We had also taken family trips to San Diego and Pasadena, California. This trip to Scotland would be the only time she or anyone else in her family celebrated a Worldwide Church of God Feast of Tabernacles outside of the United States.

Our flight -- American Airlines Flight 52 -- departed from Chicago O'Hare the night of 28 Sept. 1993, landing in rainy weather the next day at Glasgow; then we took a bus to Gourock, where we caught the ferry across the Firth of Clyde to Dunoon. We checked into the Albany Hotel, and then both of us slept off our jet lag. We awoke that evening and found that the rain had stopped. The next morning the weather was perfect -- sunny and mild, with gentle breezes off the Firth -- and it remained that way the whole two weeks we were there. We were told that it had snowed just a few days before our arrival, and learned that that was perfectly normal weather for Scotland that time of year.

At the left, Dolores Olar's 1993 passport. In the middle, Mom stands upon Scottish ground at the Glasgow Airport. At right, her stamped passport page.

Business card of the Albany Hotel in Dunoon, Argyllshire, Scotland, where we stayed for two weeks. It's no longer a hotel, but the building is an excellent state and still in use.

During those two weeks, we toured Cowall and the Loch Lomond area, went to Greenock and Inverkip, had the Shaw Stewarts' forrester show us around the Ardgowan property (though the House was closed since the Shaw Stewarts were then in Japan), caught a glimpse of Ayrshire cattle in Ayrshire. I also took trains, taxes, and buses out to Glasgow, Linlithgow, Bathgate, and Edinburgh and then back to Gourock a few times (with an unintentional side trip to Lochwinnoch that almost caused me to miss the day's last ferry from Gourock to Dunoon!), doing some sightseeing at Edinburgh Castle and walked the Royal Mile to Holyrood House, and did some genealogical research at the Mitchell Library in Glasgow and the Scottish Records Office on Prince's Street in Edinburgh. My mother came along on the tours of Cowall and Loch Lomond, but stayed in Dunoon while I took my trips across the Scottish Lowlands -- and on one of our tours, we stopped at Strone north of Dunoon, where I was fitted for a feileadh beag (kilt) in Royal Stewart tartan (since my mother's Stewart ancestors were a branch of the Royal Stewarts), and my mother very generously paid for the kilt, jacket, Glengarry, Stewart and Shaw clan pins, belt, sporran, wool socks, flashes, and sgian dubh.

Dolores' son Jared reveling in his Scottish heritage after his return from Scotland, 1 Dec. 1993.

The day that we toured Renfrewshire and Ayrshire, my mother was struck how very much like Northern Illinois that part of Scotland is, and she wondered if some ancestral memory is why they came to settle in Lee County. But besides the great beauty of the country, and the weighty sense of deep history that shrouds the whole land, Mom and I found the Scottish people to be the best part of our visit. They were a generally warm and welcoming people, friendly and good humored. The Scots are a very easy people to like, and with my mother's outgoing personality and her easy way of starting and engaging in conversation, she really felt like she had come home. And a very special part of our visit to Scotland was dinner time at the Albany, with good food and good company from Scotland and abroad.

Of all the people she met there, her favorite was a somewhat older fellow from the Glasgow area named Mr. Robert Storier -- he reminded her of her own father in many ways. Each night at dinner time at The Albany, Mr. Storier's presence was perhaps the most treasured by all of us American guests staying at that hotel. We were especially tickled by his way of taking his leave of us each night: he would announce, "Well, I think I'll go out now for a wee dram" (usually leaving with a friend from a Glasgow-area Worldwide Church of God congregation). It seemed fairly clear to us Americans that his "wee drams" tended not to be all that "wee." Mr. Storier, like us, was in Dunoon for the Worldwide Church of God's Feast of Tabernacles, which concluded that year on 7 Oct. 1993. That night, then, was our last evening together for most of the Albany's guests (though we and others planned to stay in Scotland or head south to England for a while longer). Because Mr. Storier had become very dear to us all, we American guests decided to play a little prank on him: as a parting gift, one of us went to a tourist shop and bought one of those novelty miniature bottles of Scotch whiskey -- quite literally a "wee dram"! And then, why, what else but a giant bottle of mineral water as a chaser! We had the waitress bring it out Mr. Storier toward the end of the meal, much to his amazement and amusement, as everyone else in the hotel restaurant erupted in glee. As a native Scot, he understandably wasn't in the habit of visiting tourist shops and had never seen anything like it, commenting that it would barely even wet his throat on the way down. Mom and I never saw Mr. Storier again after that glorious night, and after all this time I suppose he passed away long ago, but I'll never forget him, nor his "wee dram."

Two photographs of our "Wee Dram" prank on Mr. Robert Storier, taken by our friend Lisa Morie, who was from the Chicago area and had taken the same flight to Glasgow that my mother and I did.

After two wonderful weeks, Mom and I said our final goodbyes to Leonard and Barbara Tilbury, proprietors of the Albany Hotel and the very finests of hosts, and then departed for Glasgow Airport the morning of 15 Oct. 1993, taking American Airlines Flight 53 amd chasing the sun westward back to Chicago O'Hare, where we landed about 4:20 p.m., exhausted and missing Scotland but glad to be safely back in the U.S. Then it was back to Dixon for my mother, and back to Pekin for me. In less than a year, though, I would begin another adventure, moving down to Springfield to get a bachelor's degree specialising in medieval European history at Sangamon State University (which became the University of Illinois-Springfield while I was there) -- and my tuition and housing and other costs were all paid for by the trust that my grandmother had set up.

Another very significant development in the lives of all of us Olars during the 1990s was the implosion and schismatic fragmenting of the Worldwide Church of God, whose leaders had introduced radical doctrinal changes following the 1986 death of the sect's founder Herbert Armstrong, transforming the sect from a Seventh-Day Sabbatarian or Adventist kind of religion into a generally Evangelical Protestant group. Many church members, including my mother, resisted or rejected these doctrinal changes, and sooner or later departed from the Worldwide Church of God's membership, most joining one of the new offshoots that sought to preserve Herbert Armstrong's teachings. The collapse of the only religious home we'd ever known, and the spiritual disorientation and loss of trust that it brought, were grievously painful experiences -- in many cases, Worldwide Church of God members lost all faith in God and Jesus Christ. In any case, eventually my brother Derek and his family joined one of the largest of the offshoots, the United Church of God, and were soon followed by our parents. I took a very different path, at first being resistant to many of the doctrinal changes, then being drawn to Messianic Judaism, but ultimately converting with my wife to Catholicism in 2000. Given my parents' religious beliefs, they could not approve of our decision -- but they always remained respectful and loving, even if they did not understand why we took the road we did. But in this matter, my mother was adhering to principles she stated in the 2006 audiotaped interview, when discussing how her Grandma Miller had become estranged from her father:

"It is weird how the parents don't think their children make the right choices, and they don't understand that when they get to be adults it's 'none o' ya business!' You can advise. You can say, 'Well, I don't think it'll work out.' You can give them your reasons why. But after that it's out of your hands. But not have this -- what do you call it? Animosity; or just downright hatred, really -- that's what it is, though they may not understand that. . . . Life is too short for that kind of stuff. I mean, I may disagree with the lifestyle of some of you guys and what you do and everything -- but it's not my business any more. My business was taking care of you until you were of age, and then you've got to make the decisions and stand before God -- I can't do it any more. I've tried to protect you, and teach you what I understood, and as much as I understood while you were at home with us, and after that it's in your court. I can't change you now. I couldn't change you then!

Just two years after the visit to the old homeland of her Linn, Anderson, Clark, Ayers, Forsyth, and Stewart ancestors, which focused our minds on our family's past, there came a major life event that refocused our attention on our family's future: on 6 Oct. 1995, Dolores became a mother-in-law! In a ceremony held at Pekin Church of the Nazarene and officiated by Pastor Jeff McGowan of the Peoria Worldwide Church of God congregation, her fourth son Derek married KIMBERLY MICHELLE BARNETT, born 24 Oct. 1971, daughter of Jimmie Reed Barnett and the late Barbara Jean (Parish) Barnett. Derek and Kimberly met as co-workers at Pekin's Pizza Hut. I served as one of the groomsmen, but come the day of the wedding another young man they had asked was unable to attend, so our Dad gladly stepped in and donned a groomsman's tuxedo. When they were pronounced man and wife, Derek, who like me is a lover of the late John Denver's music, played his acoustic six-string guitar and sang "Annie's Song" to his new bride.

Derek and Kim Olar at the wedding, 6 Oct. 1995, with Derek's parents Joseph and Dolores Olar. Derek's father stood up as one of his son's groomsmen, as did Derek's brother Jared.

Mom got her second daughter-in-law a year and four months later, when I married CHRISTINA CARLENE SPENCER, born 7 July 1972 in Des Moines Iowa, on 2 Feb. 1997 at the Jerome Civic Center, Jerome, Sangamon County, Illinois. Elder Jeff McGowan of the Worldwide Church of God again stepped up to officiate the wedding, and my brother Derek served as one of the groomsmen while Christina's sister Gina was one of the bridesmaids. Christina and I had both been raised in the Worldwide Church of God and met at church in Springfield and also had been Sangamon State University (University of Illinois-Springfield) students together.

Three photographs from the wedding of Dolores' son Jared: at left, Dolores Olar with her two daughters-in-law, Christina and Kim; middle, Dolores and her husband Joseph with their new daughter-in-law Christina; at right, Dolores and Joseph with their newly married son Jared.

Almost a year later, our mother had the great delight of becoming a grandmother when God blessed her son and daughter-in-law Derek and Kim with their first child, a son named ANDREW MICHAEL OLAR, born 9 Jan. 1998 at Pekin Memorial Hospital. A year and a half after that, the second grandchild came along when I and Christina had our first child, a son named ALEXANDER JAMES SHAW STEWART OLAR ("Alex"), born 13 July 1999 at Pekin Memorial Hospital, baptized 22 April 2001 at St. Joseph Catholic Church in Pekin. Alex was given names in honor of his paternal grandmother's family and her Stewart ancestors (with a double entendre commemorating Dolores' remote kinship with the Shaw Stewarts of Blackhall and Ardgowan at Inverkip, Scotland).

The new grandparents Joseph and Dolores Olar meet their first grandchild, Andrew Michael Olar, born 9 Jan. 1998, at Pekin Memorial Hospital.

At left, Dolores Olar speaks with her daughter-in-law Christina in the recovery room after an unscheduled Cesarean section delivery of Dolores' second grandchild. In the middle, Dolores holds her grandson Alexander James Shaw Stewart Olar, born 13 July 1999 at Pekin Memorial Hospital. At right, Dolores and Joseph Olar hold their second grandchild Alex.

Mom's third grandchild arrived about two years later, when Christina and I had a daughter named JULIA MARCELLINA ROSE OLAR, born 3 April 2001 at Pekin Memorial Hospital, baptized 22 April 2001 at St. Joseph Church, Pekin. Julia's second name was suggested by one of her remote Scottish ancestresses, Marcellina Stewart, daughter of Robert, 1st Duke of Albany. Later that year, on 19 Oct. 2001, our mother's fourth grandchild, a son named DAMIEN ANTHONY OLAR, was born at OSF Saint Francis Medical Center in Peoria. Damien was Derek's and Kim's last child.

At left, Joseph and Dolores Olar meet their third grandchild, a daughter of Jared and Christina named Julia Marcellina Rose Olar, born 3 April 2001 at Pekin Memorial Hospital.

At left, Derek and Kim Olar welcome their second child, a son named Damien Anthony Olar, born 19 Oct. 2001 at OSF Saint Francis Medical Center, Peoria. At right, Derek and Kim with their sons Andrew and Damien in 2004.

The year 2001 was significant to our mother not only for the births of two more grandchildren, but also because she acquired her third daughter-in-law that year. Her youngest child Caleb married on 26 May 2001 at Club Mo-Kan in Davenport, Iowa, to ANNETTE MARIE THEDE, born 25 June 1973, daughter of Alan Thede Sr. The couple lived in Davenport, but the marriage did not even last a year, and they divorced in 2002, having had no children.

Dolores' next three grandchildren, born to Jared and Christina, were JOSEPH SPENCER BLACKHALL OLAR ("Joey"), born 30 Dec. 2002 at Pekin Memorial Hospital, baptised 26 Jan. 2003 at St. Joseph Church; ELIZABETH PAULINE FRANCES OLAR, born 24 March 2005 at home, baptised 17 April 2005 at St. Joseph Church; and STEPHEN CARL MAXIMILIAN OLAR, born 21 Feb. 2007 at home, baptised 11 March 2007 at St. Joseph Church. Stephen, my mother's seventh grandchild, ended up being the last of her grandchildren that she got to meet. Regarding these children's names, Joey's third name was given in honor of Mom's distant ancestor Sir John Stewart, 1st of Blackhall, Ardgowan, and Auchingoun, illegitimate son of King Robert III of Scotland. Elizabeth's third name was of course given in honor of her paternal grandmother and great-grandmother. Stephen's third name was given partly in reference to one of the Habsburgs to which our mother was distantly related, and partly for the Martyr Priest of Auschwitz.

At left, in the Spring of 2003, Dolores meets her fifth grandchild, a son of Jared and Christina named Joseph Spencer Blackhall Olar, born 30 Dec. 2002 at Pekin Memorial Hospital. In the middle and right photographs, taken in June 2005, Dolores meets her sixth grandchild and second granddaughter, Elizabeth Pauline Frances Olar, born 24 March 2005 at home in Pekin.

Of her 11 grandchildren, the last one that my mother got to meet was her seventh grandchild, my fifth child (and third son) Stephen Carl Maximilian Olar, born 21 Feb. 2007 at home in Pekin. This photograph was taken on Mother's Day, 13 May 2007.

By the time Stephen had been born, his grandparents had sold their home at 404 Devonshire in Dixon, and moved out to a property at the northeast corner of the intersection of Illinois Route 26 and U.S. Highway 30 in South Dixon Township, Lee County. When our mother turned 65 in the summer of 2001, she got direct control of the trust she'd inherited from her mother, and she chose to use the money from the trust to purchase and improve that property at Route 26 and Highway 30, where an old, vacant motel had stood for many years in great need of repair and remodeling. Her sons Ethan and Caleb fixed up the property, turning the old motel rooms into small rental efficiency apartments, and helped to build a house atop an adjacent structure, into which our mother and our brother Jason moved Olar's Sewing Service and Upholstery from the Brinton Avenue building. Until the upper level home was ready for occupancy, Mom and Dad lived in one of the efficiencies -- that's where they were living in 2003 when they first met their grandson Joey. Once the upstairs home was ready, Mom and Dad moved in there (which is where they were living when they met their grandson Stephen), while their sons Jason, and Ethan, who worked as the property manager and did all-around maintenance, and Caleb occupied three of the efficiencies. Mom also wanted to install an elevator to make it easier for her to get up and down from the upstairs home -- but there wasn't enough money for that.

With these big plans and changes in her life beginning in the summer of 2001, our mother experienced another, unwelcome change in her life: at the same time that she came fully into her inheritance, she was also diagnosed with congestive heart failure, a condition that had resulted from years of obesity -- for she had long struggled with weight, had difficulty walking due to the childhood leg tumor, and her sewing business did not provide her much exercise, all of which led to her developing obstructive sleep apnea. Her illness continued to progress over the next few years, weakening her and reducing her ability to work, and to climb the stairs to and from the upper level home she and Dad now lived in. She'd often lament that she couldn't visit her grandchildren as often as she wanted, or do all the others things she wanted to do, but Christina and I did our best to take our grandkids up to Dixon to see their Grandma and Grandpa -- just as our parents used to take us to Dixon to see our Grandpa and Grandma Shaw.

I should also mention here how very devoted my Dad was to Mom during these years of her continuing poor health, patiently and promptly providing her the care she needed, without complaint. It had not always been that way. During the course of the 1970s and 1980s, their marriage hit very rough seas -- a very difficult time for Mom and all us kids, not to mention our Dad, and for a while the fear was ever present that our parents would divorce. Now, it is true that more often than not there is blame on both sides when a husband and wife experience marital conflict and misunderstanding, and there is no need to go into detail about their marital troubles except to say that there was never any violence nor extreme emotional abuse, nor any adultery. I will just say that there were many times that Dad brought Mom to tears. But by the grace of God, they weathered the storms of their life and had nearly 45 years of marriage together -- and now at last came this time of our mother's life when Dad was, as it were, given a chance to make it up to her for those past times he'd failed to show her the love he should have. In her ongoing poor health, he showed her his love in deeds, dutifully and diligently tending to her every day, with Ethan's help.

In the audiotaped interview of my mother that I made on Tuesday, 11 April 2006, Mom compared her own debilitating health problem to her Grandma Miller's final illness:

"She had to be in the nursing home -- they had nurses around the clock for her to help her. But she didn't even have a walker or anything like I've got to get around. Least ways I can get around a little bit, so far. I just can't get as far as I want to go. If I'd been able to get the elevator thing on the outside there, or the lift put on the outside, with your Dad I could go around; but we weren't able to do it. We'll let somebody else do it. If I could get down to the [ground] level, you know, I could get in the car."

As I mentioned above, in 2007 Mom had the pleasure of meeting her seventh grandchild, my son Stephen. And then, not long after, in May of 2007, she received the news that her son Derek graduated from the Methodist College of Nursing in Peoria, having followed in his mother's footsteps in studying to become a Registered Nurse. Derek and Kim took their boys up to see their Grandma and Grandpa Olar soon after his graduation, and then Derek was issued his Registered Nurse's license from the State of Illinois on 2 July 2007. (And more recently, her first grandson, Andrew, in his turn has kept up the family tradition, deciding to follow the path walked by his father and grandmother, going to the same nurse's school as Derek, and then receiving his RN license from the State of Illinois on 28 July 2020.)

Two registered nurses, one retired and one just starting: Dolores Olar (with Joseph Olar) and her son Derek Olar, in the summer of 2007.

Finally, in the autumn of 2007, I was able to begin searching through the microfilms of the Orthodox Church parish records of Tereblecea in Bucovina, and quickly began to find numerous records of my father's Romanian ancestors and relatives. My mother had always been delighted to learn of any new genealogical discoveries that I made, and had long been curious about her husband's family in the Old Country that had long been cloaked in mystery -- so she and Dad were both very happy when I shared the news of what I had begun to learn.

I think those phone calls telling her and Dad about the Tereblecea microfilms were the last moments of joy I got to share with her in this life. Her health had grown poorer throughout that year. For perhaps a week or so prior to her death, Mom had been having a lot of trouble sleeping and eating. Nothing she ate was sitting well on her stomach, and she would only take a few bites of her food. On Wednesday night, 7 Nov. 2007, probably around 10:30 p.m., Mom had to go to the bathroom. As Dad was getting her out of bed, she slipped and fell to her hands and knees, and neither she nor Dad had the strength to get her back up. Paramedics had to be called to help her up, but she was on her hands and knees for about 15 minutes before they arrived. Seeing her condition, they asked her if she wanted to go to the hospital and be checked. She agreed, so she could be tested and see just what her condition of health actually was.

It was on Thursday that I was told Mom had fallen and hurt her knee and had gone in to KSB Hospital Wednesday night, being checked into Room 411. Dad called Derek to tell him Mom was in the hospital. Derek then called my wife Christina, who called me at work. I then called Derek to find out more, and he told me Mom had low blood pressure and her lungs weren't working very well -- one lung (the right one, I believe) was at 50% -- the hospital had an oxygen mask on her and had the oxygen turned up as high as it could go, but even so the oxygen levels in her blood were still too low. Derek told me he would go up on Friday to see Mom and find out how things really stood with her, saying that he wanted to convince her to agree to go to a nursing home or assisted living when she got out of the hospital. We could not know just how grave her condition had become -- and at that time not even Mom knew.

Thursday evening around 5 p.m., while I was still at work, I called Mom at the hospital and spoke to her briefly, to let her know we were concerned about her. She was exhausted and very short of breath and we couldn't talk long, but she told me the doctor wanted to do some tests before discharging her. She expected to be going home on Friday. I told her that I would be coming probably on Saturday, and told her I loved her. She said, "I love you too."

But her health did not improve and she couldn't be discharged on Friday. Derek went up to see her, and his wife Kim and his sons Andrew and Damien got to see her Friday evening at the hospital. Mom signed a release so the doctors could talk to Derek about her medical care, so Derek was able to learn that Mom's condition was more serious than she or we realised. When they got back, I talked to Derek on the phone to find out what he'd learned. He said Mom had been moved to the Intensive Care Unit, Room 452, and that her heart was in an arhythmia, so it couldn't pump blood very well, resulting in poor circulation and the beginnings of kidney failure. She also had low blood pressure for some reason. The doctors wanted to shock her heart to try to get it back into a proper rhythm, but they would first have to do an esophageal electrocardiogram to make sure the arhythmia wasn't causing blood clots to form in her heart, because shocking the heart could cause any clots to break loose and cause a stroke. However, Mom would have to be anaesthetised to do an internal ECG, and her respiration and blood pressure were so low that anaesthesia would kill her or at least put her into a coma.

Derek also said that our mother was getting so little oxygen that the hospital had to put a BiPAP breathing apparatus and tubes on her, to get oxygen right into her lungs and keep the alveoli or air sacs open so oxygen could get into her bloodstream. He didn't put it in these words Friday night, but the next day he told me that Mom's lungs failed Friday night. It didn't quite register with me what that meant -- that if she had not been in the hospital at the time, she would have died at home, and most of us would not have had a chance to see her one last time and say goodbye.

So it looked like I would be visiting Mom in the hospital on Saturday after all. I called Dad Friday night to let them know we would be coming up. I still didn't know just how serious Mom's condition was. I knew it was pretty bad, and I knew she could die very soon, but was thinking that she might hang on for several more days or even a few weeks -- or she might even recover sufficiently to be discharged and then live for a few more months. I had been hoping to do some more Tereblecea genealogical research on Saturday morning in Peoria -- but when your Mom is gravely ill, every thing else, especially genealogy, takes a back seat. We went up on Saturday not really knowing what we would find, how long we would stay, whether or not we'd leave that day and have to come back a few hours later, or the next day, or a few days later.

We arrived out at their property south of Dixon and talked to Dad. He and Ethan had been at the hospital that morning, but Dad had left and gone back home. He said that the lack of oxygen was making Mom confused, and that she didn't recognise anyone -- but he was probably talking about the way Mom was on Friday before the BiPAP, which was getting enough oxygen into her bloodstream that her levels were still too low but almost normal. We continued to the hospital, and Dad said he and Ethan would follow us later. Jason had left for the weekend with his friend Jamie and wasn't expected back until the next day.

At the hospital, we found Mom lying in her bed with the BiPAP strapped over her nose and face. It was not at all attractive, but it enabled her to breathe. However, it prevented her from breathing through her nose, and only allowed her to talk in short sentences or statements. Still, she wasn't confused or dizzy. Derek and Kim arrived after a while, as well as Dad and Ethan. Before anyone else in the family had arrived, I went in to see her alone, and then I watched the kids while Christina went in to talk to her. Mom said she wished I didn't have to see her like that, and said how tired she was, and that she just wanted to sleep.

But I knew she didn't mean just ordinary sleep.

She also told me once again about her funeral and burial wishes: in order to save a plot at Woodside Cemetery, she wanted to be cremated as her mother was, and have the urn buried on top of her Dad's burial vault and next to her Mom's ashes. As she had done a few times before, she again respectfully expressed her profound and sincere disagreement and concern that I had converted to Catholicism, and she told me to get right with God and return to the teachings of Herbert Armstrong. Troubled that the size of our family was more than we could manage, she told my wife Christina to stop having kids and that we already had more kids than we needed or could afford. Mom also told me about certain heirlooms that were to go to some of her relatives, and told Derek and me where to find other family heirlooms so we could make sure they weren't lost or stolen, and told us we would have to meet with Dixon attorney David Badger about her will and her estate.

Around the noon hour, we began to bring in our kids one at a time so they could see their Grandma and she could see them. It was important that they got to see each other again, since we didn't know if it would be the last time they'd see each other other not, but I didn't want to create any unneeded stress or disturbance by having all five kids in her room at the same time. We brought in Alex and Julia, and then it was time to give Mom a chance to rest and try to take a nap. It was also well past time to give the kids some lunch, so Christina and I and our children went out to the hospital parking lot and had a picnic lunch in our van. Then we all went back to Mom's floor.

While we had been away for lunch, Mom and the doctor and Derek had talked, to get a better idea of her condition and find out what could be done. When I came into the room, Derek was with her and was crying. He showed me her feeding tube -- there was blood in it, indicating she was bleeding through her intestine or stomach lining -- a perforated intenstine, Mom called it. That explained why her blood pressure was so low. It also showed just how grave her condition was.

It meant that there was simply nothing else that could be done. Death was drawing very near.

Mom understood exactly what it meant, and had told the nurses and doctor to stop -- that she wanted them to remove the BiPAP, the only thing keeping her alive. It was time to gather everyone together and say goodbye. The physician who had been caring for her, Dr. Tammy Homman, expressed her sorrow and regret, but Mom offered Dr. Homman some of her trademark motherly encouragement -- there was my mother, on her own deathbed, trying to cheer up her doctor, and thanking her for everything she'd done!

I asked Mom, "The next thing you know, you'll be there before Jesus Christ. What will you say to Him?"

"Put me to work!" she said.

She also expressed regret that she wouldn't be able to make her last project, her venture out at "the Corners" south of Dixon, a success, and lamented that she had lost her inheritance. "I just thought I would have more time," she said. I tried to offer solace, telling her that her children and grandchildren were her lasting legacy and heritage. (Dad was unable to make payments on the property at the corners, and in 2009 it had to be given up to the bank that held the loan. He would end up surviving Mom by 13 years.)

Caleb had driven back home that morning, and Dad and Ethan had left the hospital while I and my family were eating lunch. Ethan had walked down to a nearby tavern, and Dad had gone home. Dad was uncomfortable sitting and waiting for death to come, and when Derek called him he said he didn't want to come back. In tears, he gave me his phone and asked me to talk to Dad. I explained that it was time, that Mom wanted them to take off the breathing apparatus so she could die. He said he would be back. We also got a hold of Ethan, and he walked back to the hospital. At this time I also brought in Joey and Elizabeth, and last of all Stephen, to see their Grandma alive one last time. Derek tried repeatedly, it seemed to me almost frantically, to find a way to reach Jason, but he just couldn't find out what Jamie's new cell phone number was. Derek was pretty shaken by that, but Jason would not learn of his mother's passing until Monday. But we were able to call Caleb and let him know the news, and we gave Mom the phone so she and Caleb could share their last words together. Then we told Caleb that we would call him again when it was over.

Christina and I decided it was best not to introduce our kids directly to death at their age, so she stayed with our kids in the next room, where they prayed for their Grandma Olar until she died. The rest of us gathered around her bed -- holding her hand, silently praying, and waiting, telling her we loved her. About 4 p.m. the BiPAP was removed. Mom's breathing gradually slowed and shallowed. She fell into unconsciousness after a few minutes, and in about an hour she was dead. There had not been much if any sign of pain: just a few grunts, and then her very last words: "My back hurts." She looked at us all, calmly, in peace, until at some point she was no longer aware even though her eyes were open. She was officially pronounced dead by Dr. Homman at 5 p.m.

I have always been grateful that God granted my mother a peaceful death, surrounded by loved ones (only her sons Jason and Caleb absent), without pain. In great contrast to the way I broke down when told of my grandmother's death in 1993, this time there was no shock, nor did I shed uncontrollable tears or experience helpless regret. I am so thankful that I and most of my family were able to be there with Mom when she took her last breaths.

After her death, Dolores' visitation was Wednesday, 14 Nov. 2007 at Preston-Schilling Funeral Home, Dixon, Illinois, where her funeral was held the following day, 15 Nov. 2007. Galen Morrison, pastor of United Church of God, Beloit, Wisconsin, presided at the funeral. Later the day of the funeral, her cremated remains were interred in the grave of her parents during a brief graveside service at Woodside Cemetery, Lee Center, Illinois, the resting place of so very many of her ancestors and kin going back to the mid-1800s. On Sunday, 23 Dec. 2007, a Memorial Mass for the repose of her soul was offered at St. Joseph Catholic Church in Pekin, Illinois, with the stipend provided by my friends Merlyn and Tina Sondag.

Dolores Olar's family at her funeral reception, 15 Nov. 2007: back row (left to right) -- Kim and Derek, Caleb, and Ethan; middle row -- Andrew, Jason, Jared, Stephen, and Joseph; front row -- Damien, Joey, Christina, Elizabeth, Julia, and Alex. Photograph taken by Dennis Lafferty, family friend and honorary pallbearer.

Shown from left to right are tribute flowers at Dolores Olar's funeral reception, sympathy cards on display at her reception, and funeral flowers and ribbon at my home after the reception -- I still have the dried petals of the flowers in the photo on the right.

In the years following her death, four more grandchildren of our mother Dolores Frances (Shaw) Olar were born to me and my wife: our daughter, ANNA MARIE DOLORES OLAR, born at home 17 March 2009 and baptised 19 April 2009 at St. Joseph Church, Pekin, whom we named in memory of the grandmother she wouldn't get a chance to meet in this life; then TIBURTIUS SUSANNA OLAR, a miscarried baby who was born and died at 12 weeks gestation 10 Aug. 2011 at Pekin Memorial Hospital, and was buried 27 Oct. 1011 in St. Mary of the Woods Cemetery, West Peoria, Illinois; next, our "rainbow baby," our son MICHAEL ANTHONY DAVID OLAR, born 13 June 2012 at OSF Saint Francis Medical Center, Peoria; and then Mom's 11th grandchild, our daughter SOPHIA JEAN GRACE OLAR, born 5 May 2015 at Pekin Memorial Hospital, baptised 12 July 2015 at St. Joseph Church, Pekin, whose first and third names were given partly in honor of her grandmother's ancestral aunts Sophia (Shaw) Frost and Grace (Shaw) Leonard. One of the main reasons I have told my mother's story at such length is so that our children and grandchildren who never got a chance to meet or to know her will find out who she was, what she was like, what she cared about, and what she believed.

The family of Dolores' son Jared in Dec. 2015, including three more of her grandchildren, Anna Marie Dolores Olar (named in her honor), born 17 March 2009 at home in Pekin, Michael Anthony David Olar, born 13 June 2012 at OSF Saint Francis Medical Center, Peoria; and Sophia Jean Grace Olar, born 5 May 2015 at Pekin Memorial Hospital. Another grandchild, T.S. Olar, was lost to miscarriage on 10 Aug. 2011. In the back row, from the left, are Stephen, Elizabeth, Joey, Julia, Alex, and Anna; in the front row are Christina holding Michael and Jared holding Sophia.

On the sixth anniversary of Mom's death in 2013, we her family, with several of her Shaw kin including Jack Baylor and her sister Marilyn, Darlene Hinkle, and Nancy and Thornton Pratt, again gathered for a graveside service in Woodside Cemetery to dedicate the gravestone that Derek and Kim had purchased to mark the place of her remains. Her children and grandchildren placed white roses at the base of the gravestone, and I read scripture passages on death and resurrection and eternal life from Genesis, the Psalms, Ezekiel, I Corinthians, and the Apocalypse (Revelation).

Dedication of the gravestone of Dolores Frances (Shaw) Olar, 10 Nov. 2013, Woodside Cemetery, Lee Center, Illinois. Her son Derek and daughter-in-law Kim also had a new base installed for the gravestones of Dolores' parents and grandparents, and our grandparents stone was also turned at that time.

I still think about and pray for her every day, and hope to see her again in blessedness.

Eternal rest grant unto her, O Lord Jesus, and let light perpetual shine upon her. May she rest in peace. Amen.

The children of Dolores and Joseph Olar are:

     --  ETHAN JOSEPH OLAR, born 28 Nov. 1963 in Elmhurst, Ill.
     --  JASON SHERMAN OLAR, born 11 Aug. 1965 in Peoria.
     --  JARED LINN POLYCARP OLAR, born 6 Feb. 1968 in Peoria, married Christina Carlene Paula Olar.
     --  DEREK ANDREW OLAR, born 5 Nov. 1970 in Pekin, married Kimberly Michelle Barnett.
     --  CALEB ALDEN OLAR, born 28 July 1974 in Pekin, married Annette Marie Thede (divorced).

As a happy post scriptum: Dolores' first great-grandchild, WOLFGANG BONIFACE JACKSON, son of my daughter Julia and her husband Jeffrey Austin Jackson, was born 9 Sept. 2022, and baptised 18 Sept. 2022 at Sacred Heart Church, Springfield, by Father James Isaacson. The saga of the Shaws and Olars continues!

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