R.M., A Personal Reminiscence by Delbert E. Wylder Robert Mains Wylder, the author's father, captured by an unknown photographer in his position as a bank examiner. Courtesy of the Author.

Of all the Wylders and their relations, I think my dad, Robert Mains Wylder, had the strongest sense of family Ironically, he, more than anyone, was responsible for the disintegration of the family in the old sense while actually trying to hold it together. He was the one who broke away from the center, which was then in Jerseyville, Illinois, the seat of Jersey County. Dad's father, Thomas Creighton Hamilton Wylder, had been born in Clay County, but the family moved to a farm near Jerseyville before the Civil War, since his father, James R.M. Wylder, had served with Co. D, 61st Regiment of Illinois Volunteers, Union Army, raised in Jersey County. In Jerseyville, this part of the Wylder family settled more permanently, establishing familial connections with the Reddishes, Seagos, Yocoms, Paschals, and Driscolls, and with friendships throughout the community.

"R.M." or "Bob" was born on a farm near Jerseyville May 10, 1897, the first son but the fourth child of T.C.H. and Lucy Mains Wylder. He grew up on the farm and never lost his love of farming. In his later years, as Executive Vice President of Smith Trust & Savings Bank in Morrison, Illinois, one of his favorite pastimes was to come home, change his clothes and, as soon as he was out of the house, shift from his otherwise ever-present cigar to a fresh chew of Red Man or Beech Nut and drive out to the country to visit farms in which the bank had an interest. He always got rid of the chewing tobacco before he got home, knowing what Mother's reaction would be.

When he was a boy, farming was what we'd now call "labor intensive" hard work. Farming still is, but there's a difference. Then, they had horses and mules to pull the plows and cultivators, manure spreaders, and other equipment. That meant tending those animals, plus cows, hogs, and maybe some beef cattle, plus keeping the harness and other equipment in good repair. They picked corn by hand, and threshed wheat and oats with their neighbors, using a steam-powered traveling thresher. They milked cows by hand for milk, cream, and butter, raised hogs for pork and ham, and sometimes fed a calf for beef. And, of course, there were chickens for meat and eggs.

Generally, the women and children took care of the chickens and tended the garden. Farming was labor-intensive for the women, too. They cooked, baked, and preserved food for the winter; making jams and jellies, canning vegetables in glass jars, and meat, sliced thin, in earthenware jars with hot fat poured carefully over it. They "kept" the house, quilted, washed and ironed, patched clothes, darned socks, and took care of the children until they'd grown up enough to help with the work in the fields or the houses.

For the men, farming could also be a dangerous occupation. Cows, horses, hogs, and mules especially mules are not always the most cooperative animals, and certain jobs were frequently risky. Dad often told of the time his hay wagon, loaded too high, flipped over at a turn, and he was trapped beneath the load. Luckily, someone saw the accident and alerted the rest of the crew. Together they dug him out before he smothered, unable to use pitchforks, digging frantically with their hands.

Like his sisters before him Gracie (Aunt Grace Yocom), Elizabeth (Aunt Lizzie Heneghan), and Isabell, Dad attended Jerseyville High School under the tutelage of Professor J. Pike. He, however, was the only one to graduate. Grace started school at a time when country students had to pay tuition, and after only one year of earning excellent marks in algebra, geometry, Latin, and ancient history, she decided it was too much of a strain on the family finances. Later, when country students were no longer charged tuition, the other two girls and Dad enrolled. Not only did he graduate, he was offered a scholarship to the University of Illinois; instead he accepted a position at the State Bank of Jerseyville. He worked there from 1915 to 1917, when he returned to the farm. That same year, he married Blanche Coulthard (her full name was Alice Blanche Coulthard, but she disliked the name "Alice," and had hated being called "ABC" throughout her school days), who had also graduated with the class of 1915 and had also been born in 1897. Their birth

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days were only a day apart, May 9 and 10. Mother's was first, and Dad spent much of that day teasing her about being a year older than he was.

During the years of "the war to end all wars," they farmed the old Wylder place, spending the next few years working hard, going through the difficulties of country life. Blanche's first pregnancy ended in a miscarriage resulting from, she always said, Dad's encounter with a badger, which, while she watched from the buggy, climbed Dad's body almost up to his throat before he was able to throw it off, and frightened her into hysteria. The horse did not run away, however, for her name was Comet. We heard many stories about that heroic wonder horse, some rivaling the story of Black Beauty. When Dad drove Comet, the mare was skittish, shying at any loud noise or blowing leaf. When Mother held the reins, not even the whistle of a steam engine or a sudden squall could make her change her pace. She walked sedately. Years later, Mother could never tell about the barn burning without tears.

For the barn burned and the Wylders moved back to town, and Dad once again worked for the bank. The first living child, Ruth Virginia, was born on the farm in June of 1919. The second child, Jack Duane, was also born on the farm in 1920, and Delbert Eugene, the third child, was born in town in 1923. All were delivered by a Dr. Bohannon, an amazing man who was also credited with saving R.M.'s life during a bout with double pneumonia. Keeping the burgeoning family in food and clothes was not easy for the young couple. What we now call the "extended family" helped immeasurably. Aunt Bess Tobias, Mother's cousin, furnished a new set of clothes for each of us children every year, and there were always "hand-me-downs" in the family and from friends.

The Wylder family at home in Morrison, Illinois, 1938 From left are Jack, R.M., Blanche, Ruth, and Delbert. Courtesy of the Author.

The finances improved when R.M. was promoted to Assistant Cashier, but then in 1925, another opportunity arose, the position of bank examiner in the state banking system under the office of the Auditor of Public Accounts, and the family moved to Princeton, Illinois. I think it can be assumed that with his sense of responsibility and foresight, he recognized that the position offered many advantages: a better salary, a more stable position, and a chance for advancement. He would not have moved from Jerseyville without seriously considering the consequences. This was the first of a series of moves ranging north from Princeton to Geneva and finally to Morrison.

They took with them their hired girl, Pearl Deverger, who had been living with them while attending high school in Jerseyville. In Princeton, Pearl (accurately named) became very much a member of the family, and helped Mother with all the tasks that fell on their shoulders. For, as a bank examiner, R.M. traveled. He was gone Mondays through Fridays, and the women needed to shovel coal into the basement furnace, carry out the ashes, and complete all the other work usually performed by the "man of the house." Dad arrived on Friday afternoons, usually with gifts for us kids, and he often brought his small team of bank examiners. His friends became surrogate uncles to us: the serious, balding Paul Ballance, the witty Charlie McCall, and the tall, bass-voiced Jonesy.

Those weekends were holidays, and Mother and Pearl, with Ruth helping, prepared huge meals. I remember especially the breakfasts, with oranges and bananas sliced up together, or stewed prunes with cream, or kadota figs, and then waffles or pancakes and baked eggs with biscuits, milk for us kids and coffee for the adults. After dinner in the evenings, the family, including guests, would ascend the stairs and gather around the piano, an upright Baldwin, with Mother at the keys and singing in her beautiful contralto, Dad singing tenor, and everyone joining in. It was a great weekend when Jonesy was there with his great bass voice. The songs were a mixture of gospel hymns (like "Rock of Ages") popular music of the time ("My Blue Heaven"), old favorites ("The Old Oaken Bucket"), and what we'd now call "Country" ("When the Work's All Done This Fall").

Dad almost always brought home

gifts for us kids on those weekends. Bought, I suppose, with money he saved by eating sardines and crackers or cheese and crackers for supper and playing rummy in the evenings with his crew rather than spending money on movies or other entertainment. We looked forward to his coming home with those gifts, but there was one drawback. Mother and Pearl would reprimand us at times during the week, but they didn't punish us. That was Dad's job. They didn't spank us; instead, if we did anything they considered really bad, scores were chalked up on a blackboard, and Dad was responsible for meting out severe punishment. Spankings were administered by the hand on our buttocks-no belts, hairbrushes or any other implements. Though they were not severe, we certainly didn't look forward to them. There were times that we were pretty ambivalent about his coming home, but the gifts were always welcome.

Often on Saturday, Dad would buy a chicken, and we kids watched as he would grasp the chicken by the neck, swing it around vertically, then stop with a jerk, snapping the head off. The headless body would careen around the yard for a minute or two before dropping to the ground. Then there would be the garbage can full of steaming water, and Dad dipping the corpse in the nose-fouling smell of wet, hot feathers. He'd pick the feathers and finally take the chicken to the house to be cooked. All mixed feelings disappeared when the chicken arrived on the table, roasted or fried, along with mashed potatoes, green beans, biscuits, and sometimes homemade ice cream in the summers, or pies and cakes any time of year.

Though Dad must have had enough of driving during the week, going from town to town examining banks, he, at every opportunity, drove us all, including Pearl, back to Jerseyville for visits with relatives and friends, trying to hold the family together despite the distance. In the summer, the trip wasn't too bad, with the windows open and Dad's cigar smoke being carried out the window, but in the winter it could be stifling, to say the least. It was seldom that he was without a cigar, preferably a Harvester, in his mouth. Of course, cigarettes were, even then, considered "coffin nails," but cigar and pipe smoke was not considered hazardous. I think if he had known of the dangers, he'd at least have tried to quit.

Actually, we were pretty enured to cigar smoke. It hung in the air around us most of the time Dad was in the house and, even when he was at work, it must have been there hiding in the furniture, the curtains, the bed clothes. Other people must have noticed the smell, but we didn't. It was just part of the atmosphere we lived in.

A Yocum and Wylder family gathering in 1929 on the Yocum family farm near Jerseyville. Courtesy of the Author.

In Jerseyville, we had a number of places to stay. Grandpa and Grandma's house was too small to keep all of us. It was a tiny house, but full of love and good cooking. Grandma would be up early cooking sugar cookies or molasses cookies, letting us lick the spoons and bowls. She'd fix our breakfast and serve sassafras tea. In the dining room, there was a buffet on top of which they kept a silver bowl filled with candy: "orange segments," pink peppermints, and white ones, "chicken bones," and sometimes chunks of chocolate broken off the huge blocks in the dime store. That was the kind of candy we'd carry along to the movies when Grandpa would walk down town with us on Saturday afternoons to watch Westerns Tom Mix and his horse Tony, or my brother's favorite, Ken Maynard, or mine, Buck Jones.

Grandpa was a big man, six feet, when that was tall, with hair gone white and a big thick white mustache. In the evenings, we'd take turns sitting in his lap while he peeled apples for us so carefully that he'd end up with one long curled peeling, then slice the apple, salt the pieces, and give them to us. He'd sing to us song after song. He sometimes started with a song he said he'd written that went like this: "I took my girl to the ball one night, and led her into supper/ she stubbed her toe, fell over the table/ and stuck her nose in the butter." We loved it, but all his songs weren't funny like that one and "Old MacDonald Had a Farm," or his favorite, though he was a teetotaler, "Little Brown Jug." There were sad ones like "The Last

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Letter," "The Letter Edged in Black," "When the Work's All Done This Fall," and his favorite hymns, "When the Roll Is Called Up Yonder," and "In the Sweet Bye and Bye." R.M.'s father, Tom, or T.C.H. was the most kind and gentle man I've ever known, with, evidently, a talent for getting along with everyone. In a country three-fourths Democratic, he, as a staunch Republican, was elected Township Supervisor, appointed Judge of Elections eight years, and also appointed to the Board of Review by a Democratic Judge.

If we didn't stay at Grandpa and Grandma's, we could stay out on Uncle Claude and Aunt Grace Yocom's farm outside of Jerseyville, where our cousins Truman, Stuart, and Marcella lived. It seemed like a huge farm, with a yellow barn that could hold twelve mules, two of them white, and a mare; a huge yellow hay barn; a small cow barn for "Red" and another cow; a small shelter for the hogs; and another barn for equipment and also used as a garage for their big Dodge. The chickens often laid eggs under this last one, but nested usually in the apple orchard near the house. There was also an outhouse, called "Mrs. Jones." One never had to say "I'm going to the outhouse;" instead one said, "I need to visit Mrs. Jones."

Inside the house were two real treasures-first a wonderful Silvertone phonograph, probably bought from Sears & Roebuck. It was bought by Aunt Grace, who'd had piano lessons when a child, and loved music. The phonograph needed two heads, one to play the thin records, and the other to play the older Edisons. We could crank it up, set the needle and listen to Sousa marches, popular songs, or even some Caruso. The Edison records were the Sir Harry Lauder collection of Scottish ballads. The second treasure was upstairs in Stuart's room: what seemed to me to be a library of Boy's Life magazines, some Horatio Alger novels, and, best of all, "Billy Whiskers" books in a series devoted to the adventures of a picaresque audacious goat.

Thomas Creighton Hamilton Wylder and his grandson, Delbert, shown in the yard of the Yocum farm near Jerseyville The photo is dated 1929. Courtesy of the Author.

I, at least, was pretty much in awe of Uncle Claude for, when he was working with the mules, his voice was loud and gruff. Away from the mules and "Old Red," who was a kicker when being milked, he never raised his voice, and he obviously enjoyed having us around the farm. He tried to teach us to milk the cows (I can still see him, sitting on the milking stool leaning against Old Red's flank), or squirted, direct from the source, warm milk into our open mouths. He'd let us help slop the hogs, turn the handle on the cream separator, take turns driving the mules, or at least holding the reins.

Aunt Grace cooked marvelous huge meals, saved old clothes and boots for us to wear "out farming," and treated us lovingly. Stuart was a few years older than my brother Jack, and they played and worked together. Truman, the older boy, ten or twelve years older than I, patiently took care of me, and Marcell and my sister became fast friends. We loved the Yocoms and loved to stay with them.

Sometimes one or two of us would stay with Aunt Eva and Ida Coulthard, the aunts who raised Mother when her mother died. Their house was in town, they had been elementary school teachers and, though rather reserved, were good with children. They spent long hours reading to us, and did their best to find things for us to do. They had a rosewood music box that held a long brass cylinder with tiny steel pegs that struck the ends of metal fingers extending from a long metal plate that acted as a sounding board. We could crank it up, watch the cylinder turn, the little black pegs hitting different fingers, the fingers vibrating, and then hear the music. When it slowed, we'd crank it up again, and again, and again. It played four different songs, only one of which I remember-the waltz from Berlioz's Symphony Fantastique.

We often visited with Uncle Charley Campbell, Grandpa's cousin, who was even taller than he was. Uncle Charley's wife, Aunt Jessie, had to stand on tiptoe to measure five feet. He had started out in a butcher shop, then began shipping in and feeding Western cattle and sending them on to the

Chicago or St. Louis Markets. He and Aunt Jessie had a large house on the outskirts of Jerseyville, with horse barns and a track behind the house where he trained trotters. He was quite successful in his vocation and avocation, having trained such horses as Paderewski, Ima McGregor, Morona J, and Constenero. The Campbell house had a large front room where paintings of horses hung on the walls and over the fireplace, and piles of harness racing magazines I was allowed to cut up and take horse-pictures to Grandpa and Grandma's house. Uncle Charley chewed tobacco and drove a Model A Ford. The driver's window would roll only halfway down, and was streaked with red. When he took us places, we knew enough, when sitting in the back, to keep to the right.

Sometimes there would be informal Wylder reunions when Aunt Isabel would come up from St. Louis, often bringing friends, and Uncle Matt Heneghan would bring Aunt Lizzie and their children from Decatur, where Uncle Matt drove a truck for Standard Oil. Mother's relatives also came for visits to Aunt Eva and Ida's. Grandpa Harlan Coulthard and his second wife, Claud, would bring their dog "Trixie," a Pomeranian, the smartest dog I'd ever seen. Mother's brother, our Uncle Bill, and his wife Elizabeth would come from Ohio. He had been an ambulance driver for the Red Cross in World War I and brought trophies to us. He was the perfect uncle, playing with us, sending gifts to us on all occasions, and special envelopes with money on our birthdays. Uncle Bill and Aunt Elizabeth had no children, and they treated us as if we were their own.

When Dad had a vacation long enough to travel, he'd take us to see relatives: Uncle Billy Mains in Kansas, Grandpa Coulthard in Oklahoma City and Aunt Bess in Tulsa, and once we drove over to Des Moines, Iowa, to see Uncle Charley and watch Jessie Mack race at the Iowa State Fair. He was always concerned about family. But nothing was as enjoyable as the trips to Jerseyville. In that old "Home Town," we kids were not only busy enjoying ourselves, having good times with the Yocoms and the other relatives, we were also cementing family relationships that would, R.M. and Blanche hoped, be important to us the rest of our lives.

Pictured at right, the Wylder children. From left are Delbert Eugene (b: 1923), Ruth Virginia (b: 1919),and Jack Duane (b: 1920). The photograph was taken in Geneva, Illinois. Courtesy of the Author.

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