McHenry County Blog

Saw this headline from WBBM-AM's news feed a couple of weeks ago.

It referred to the quality of postal delivery in Chicago, a recurrent topic.

What it reminded me of was my childhood in Easton, Maryland.

212 S. Aurora Street.

Those days, back in the 1940's, the postman came twice a day.

I remember when he started coming only once a day, but I can't give you a year.

So, whether Post Office delivery has improved or not depends on your starting point.

Labels: 212 S. Aurora Street, Easton, Maryland, Post Office, Postman

It was a combination of things that brings this trip down memory lane.

My wife and I watched the movie Amistad a couple of weeks ago after Pastor David Seyller used a part of it to illustrate the basis story of Christianity at the First United Methodist Church of Crystal Lake.

Yesterday, Pastor Darneather Murph-Heath spoke about Martin Luther King in her sermon. Later my former legislative assistant Pete Castillo used the word “ballast” when we were over to visit him and his mother.

And I thought of how the slave traders on the ship Amistad threw ballast rocks overboard attached to 50 live slaves whom they had concluded they did not have enough food to keep alive on the ocean voyage.

I woke up thinking about what my father had told me while we were on the way to visit my mother’s grave in Church Hill, Maryland, which he was undergoing treatment for lung cancer at Georgetown University. We were staying at my sister Jan's in Severn.

As I drove north past what I think may have been a store (it was a house with an unpainted porch) on the left where a road ran off to the right between Centreville and Church Hill, Dad told me he used to live up that road.

It was one of three places in Queen Anne’s County where he lived. The family was poor and moved around, one time farming west of the James Clayland Stevens’ land near Sudlersville and Barclay where his bride-to-be Eleanor lived.

Dad told me that he and his father were walking down the dirt road toward their home one day when they say a bunch of men making a lot of noise.

They were lynching a black man.

My grandfather told my father not to look and just keep on walking.

I wonder how old my father was and whether the victim lived on the road. Dad told me there were blacks who lived there.

And, I wonder if the historians of Queen Anne’s County know about the lynching. It would have been in the 1920’s, I believe, because Dad was born in 1916.

Interestingly, the Maryland State Archives do not report any lynchings in Queen Anne’s County during the 20th Century and no lynchings in the state during the 1029’s. I’ll send the Archives a link to my story and see what reply I get. The photo is from the Archives' web site on lynching.

Labels: Lynch, Lynching, Maryland, Queen Anne's County

Not the Marlborough Man, although that might be appropriate since my father was a cigarette smoker who died of lung cancer (even though he had stopped for almost 10 years).

This is Cal Skinner, my father, in the early 1940’s.

Today is the day that Addie Watling Skinner gave birth to my father 90 years ago. I suppose that my grandfather Roy Skinner had some role to play that day.

My grandmother was running a little corner store in Wilmington. When she got pregnant the second time, she told me that her girl friends advised that she get an abortion. They told her she could not run the store and take care of my father's older brother George, plus another child.

We’re talking late 1915, early 1916, here.

I learned that when I interviewed my grandmother at age 95 in the late 1980's.

At one point, she asked,

What do you think about abortion?

Out of office, but still in my more or less pro-choice days, I stumbled out this answer:

I don’t know, Grandmom. What do you think?

"Well, I hope you’re against it, because you wouldn’t be here, if I had followed my girl friends’ advice."

That certainly caught my attention.

When Dad was on his deathbed, I asked if he had anything that he would have done differently, if he could do it again.

That’s where this picture comes in. Before my grandparents sold their Eastern Shore of Maryland farm, my grandfather was unable to work it for a couple of years.

My father drove up each weekend to do the farming. My guess is that this photograph was taken during this period in the early Forties when I was a small child. I see this sled is carrying a plow. It looks like the plow that is in our back yard.

Dad’s answer:

I would have spent more time with you during your first years, instead of working the farm every weekend.

So, the messages I derive are at least three-fold:

(1) Spend more time with your children so you don’t have the same regret my father had,

(2) Your family may have some familial memories that have political implications and

(3) Look how far this country has come in the last 60 years.

Here is a picture of Dad and me at the December, 1988, meeting of the McHenry County Board. Dad signed himself out of the hospital so he could come home to vote for Ann Hughes for County Board Chairman. With his vote, she won. (There does seem to be a family resemblence, especially, in the Skinner nose.)

At least, some 45 years later, Dad had wheels.

Labels: Abortion, Addie Watling Skinner, Ann Hughes, Cal Skinner Sr, Maryland, Mule, Roy Skinner