I am going to attempt to make a history of 4 generations of Barnhart history. I will try to be brief because it covers a lot of time and people but I am sure a few extra comments will end up in here.
The Grandparents
My grandpa and grandma were Uria and Bessie Barnhart and Emmet and Rose Beegle. I was told the Barnharts came here from Missouri when grandpa got a job working at Continental Motors in Muskegon. My dad was born around 1925 and attended North Muskegon High School, did not fight in WWII as he was too young and had too bad of eyesight. He did try to enlist. Dad started working as a plumbers apprentice but soon switched over to working at Continental Motors and eventually retired there with an early medical retirement due to poor health. He and my mom had seven children- Bob, Dick, Linda, Judy, Kathy, Mike and Debbie.
The Beegles came from Burr Oak Michigan to Dalton and were mostly farmers. My mom's mom, Rose (or maybe Rosa) was a Dow and a Butterworth, also farmers. Grandpa Beegle once ran a garage in Dalton and worked on Model T's I have been told by several people that he was a very good mechanic. The garage failed during the depression. They had three children, Floyd, Doris, and Mildred (my mom), Grandma Beegle was shipped to live with relatives in Chicago to prevent her from wanting to marry Grandpa Beegle but it did not work and they still got married. The Beegles were dancers and drinkers so the Dows did not approve of him. My dad said grandpa Beegle was an exceptionally good man. However Grandpa and Grandma Beegle repeated history and did not attend my mom and dad's wedding due to not thinking my dad was a good man. In time my dad was well like by grandpa and grandma Beegle. The Beegle grandparents died around the time of my birth so I did not know them.
Grandpa Schotts was married to Ruth, not sure what grandpa Schott's name was, he died fairly young in what was ruled a hunting accident, not sure of the details. The family was very poor and lived off the land in the White Cloud area. I will try to list the children, Bob, Dale, Ken, Carl, Jerry, Art, and Kathy. Dale was in WWII as part of the occupying force in Germany after the war.
Grandma Springer was married to Percy and he was a career army man. They came from the Maryland area. Grandma Springer was a short stout woman who reminded me of an English bulldog in appearance and personality. Grandpa Percy was a tall man with a large belly which he like to keep full of beer. Grandma Springer was the boss of the family. They had a son and two daughters, Jeanette and Ester, I can't remember the son's name. He was somewhat of a drifter in and out of marriages and moved around the county some. Ester was married to a sheriff in the Maryland area and appeared to have a comfortable life. Jeanette met Dale while she was working in an army commissary in the Maryland area and they were soon married. Grandpa Schotts took his new wife to live with his family in White Cloud and Grandma Schotts soon found out what poverty looks like. Grandpa Schotts was self-employed most of his working life. He was an excellent welder and built trailers for many years.
The Barnhart Schotts connection
I will call Sandy mom from now on because I think the only ones reading this are her children. Mom and I attended the same small church in Dalton- Faith Baptist Church, and yes, she and her mother were late for every service even though they lived very close to the church, perhaps that was the problem, deceptively close means you don't have to get ready very early. My older sister Kathy dated mom's brother Pat for years and so I knew her both through church and Pat. One day mom brought me a plate of chocolate chip cookies for no reason and my opinion of her went up immediately. I was enamoured at the time with a 1963 Triumph TR4 sports car and mom feigned interest in it and watched me work on it in our little garage. Our first date was a trip to the blockhouse so I could show mom how to drive a stick shift car and she brought a nice picnic lunch. A pretty young girl who feeds me? I was hooked. We dated though the twelfth grade, graduated in 1973 from Reeths-Puffer high school. I went to work at the phone company as a janitor just before graduation, mom worked as a messenger girl at Hackley Hospital where her mom worked in the Personnel office. I attended two years of automotive training at Muskegon Community College and mom attended one semester of Baptist Bible College in Clarks Summit Pennsylvania. I wrote to her every day and she came home early because she said she was too homesick. We were married September 9th 1975 at Faith Baptist Church. It was a modest but nice wedding. My grandma Barnhart had been moved to a nursing home by this time and so my Aunt Nell who owned grandma's home let us move in to rent it. It was on Duck Lake Rd, and I found out what "mom clean" meant, this was a new experience for me. The house was spotless from floor to ceiling and I got to help. At this time I was still a janitor at the phone company and was itching for a promotion since I was now a married man with a college degree. We moved to Alpena Michigan with everything in the back of my pickup truck (which I had traded to a coworker for a Triumph Spitfire, I got the better vehicle). The move was because the job I wanted at the phone company was going to be open the following year when the old maintenance man retired and I was told if I did a good job as a janitor there I had a good chance of getting the maintenance man's job; Jobs were hard to come by at that time so off we went. One weekend we drove to Alpena and found an apartment in the want ads of the Alpena News, the next weekend we moved in. I believe the address was 301 North Avery St, our landlords were the Wisneski's and they lived in the bottom half of the house. We had the upstairs apartment with an outside entrance, pretty nice place except they controlled the heat and it was really cold in the winter and they got into a big fight and we could hear them shouting and throwing stuff almost every Saturday morning. They had a cute little girl named Janell and guess where that name showed up again?
Life in Alpena
I worked as a janitor second shift and mom got a job as a waitress at the Big Boy restaurant which was a very popular place there at that time. She also worked second shift which was tricky since we only had one car (truck actually). We attended a small Baptist church in Ossineke just south of Alpena where we meet other young couples our age. Ben was born 12-31-1976 in Alpena General Hospital and we found we had been blessed with the most perfect, smartest baby ever. I got off work a couple nights a week for a few hours to attend electrical apprentice training at Alpena Community College then stayed late to make up for the lost time. My goal was to become an electrician, along the way I got the job as a maintenance man. We moved to Ossineke when our Pastor at Northland Baptist Church was forced out as pastor because the older members in the church did not like him. We bought their house which was only a few years old at the time. It was on Hiawatha Lane in Ossineke. It was a bilevel with no garage, I added a small metal storage building, On 2-17-1979 (my dad's birthday) Steve was born, Alpena was the coldest spot in the nation that early morning-negative 36 degrees, and my 1971 Plymouth Duster barely turned over when I went to start it to take mom to the hospital. We found we had another perfect baby on our hands and couldn't believe our good luck. After about 4 years in Alpena I was really loving my job and enjoying the location when my boss's boss came calling to lure me to return to Muskegon as a supervisor. I really didn't want to leave but mom wanted to go back home and she was always very persuasive so we went. I was enticed by the nice pay raise and the fact the company would pay movers to move us.
Back to Muskegon
We moved to Muskegon in 1980, I had a hard time putting my money down on a house, they seemed so expensive! $36,000 for a house? Who ever heard of that? So we moved into the little house in front of Joe and Jean Fodrocy's house. It was kind of rough but I painted it and it got the "mom clean" treatment so it was acceptable for the time until we could find something better. In the meantime we got a new kid and a new car all in the same year! Janell was born 10-3-1981 and we drove a 1981 Plymouth Horizon Gas Mizer. Janell turned out to be the far better and long-lasting deal. My job was on shaky ground almost from the start in Muskegon, for one I hated being a supervisor and secondly our company was cutting back and consolidating and my job was being eliminated. In those days you could just stay on in your job until they found another one for you so eventually I was offered a job in Terre Haute IN. It was sad because now we had to move the kids away from grandma and grandps Schotts and Barnhart. It was the spring of 1982.
Life in Terre Haute was not bad
I transferred as a building maintenance supervisor in Terre Haute and liked the job much better, Ron Jarman my boss was hard to please but he was in Lafayette IN and the local people and my employees were all good to work with so I was happy again. We rented a little house from the Godfrey's -our new neighbors and attended Bible Baptist Church and the kids attended Terre Haute Christian School during the seven years we lived there. Our house was on 25th St very close to the Church which was on 25th and Margret streets. Our pastor was Bert Baker and he and Mary lived just two houses down from us with children that you all could play with. Things seemed to me to go well there, we had David and Lisa born in Terre Haute, by now I couldn't keep track of the dates- so I will not attempt it. We were now a family of 7, a force to be reckoned with. I liked our life but we needed a bigger house for the growing family and mom didn't want to put roots down that permanently so after seven years we decided to move back to Muskegon. It was a tough move, we no longer were being moved by the company since I had taken a job back in Muskegon as an hourly worker and we had to do the U-Haul thing this time. The year was 1989
Back to Muskegon- again
I bought a house at 1208 W. Giles Rd to move the family back to Muskegon while mom and you kids stayed in Terre Haute to finish out the school year. I gave it the "mom clean" treatment, took about a month after work every night. but I was living with my mom and dad at the time and had the time. Being back in Muskegon was hard for me, I loved my new job and as long as there was overtime we could pay the bills but when there wasn't we were in trouble. It got better in time once we pulled you kids from Calvary School but college costs soon came and I was broke for about the next 15 years. To cheer me up, Daniel was born! I think it was 1993. Those were years of working, going to Church and Awana, raking leaves, attending soccer games, band concerts, private music lessons (which we couldn't afford), working on cars- mine, mom's and you kid's cars too, and sending kids off to college. Somewhere along the way mom and I lost our way and she became very attached to another man.
The end of the marriage
It was a very dark time, I am not happy with how I acted. Wish I could have been under control of my emotions but I didn't do that and things got out of hand a lot. After fighting with mom for about a year over the other guy, I filed for divorce in 2002, the divorce was made official about a year later on 11-21-2003. My birthday. We had made 28 years of mostly happy marriage and then it was done.
In the meantime...
Kids were going to college, getting married and having babies! So now it's your turn to see what life brings, I hope it is full of joy for each one of you.
I don't think you could've said it better with more words, Dad. Thanks for taking the time to put this down for the record. There were several things that I had heard but couldn't remember and quite a few things that were new to me.
ReplyDeleteMan! That was fun to read. And also somewhat sobering. Dad, I do think you've captured a dispassionate history, though there's a lot of detail and color here that makes this a pleasure to read. Steve's right--you used exactly the right amount of words.
ReplyDeleteNow that I'm getting older, I forget the years that some things happened in, and so I loved reading about the dates for our moves to Alpena, back to Muskegon, to Terre Haute, and the Muskegon return. And all the life that happened along the way! We did a lot, and we're still doing a lot! It feels a little self-aggrandizing to say this, but I hope you (and mom too) feel proud of what you accomplished in us kids.
There's a lot of detail that I didn't remember (or know very clearly), and only 1 thing that I thought I knew that you don't have here. Though maybe my "knowledge" is just the stuff of legend; I don't know. I'd always believed that my name (Benjamin) came from Samuel Benjamin Schotts, who was Dale Schotts Sr's father. I also thought he died in a hunting accident, but that he was wearing a bear fur coat, and another hunter had mistaken him for an animal. Maybe all of that is just my own imagination, but perhaps you'll recall if any of it's true. I seem to remember learning a few years ago that much of that wasn't true.
Thanks, Dad. This post, especially, feels like a gift. Thanks for taking the time to write it down.
Thanks both Steve and Ben for your comments. I am a little fuzzy about the hunting accident but do remember hearing that same basic story and perhaps a later questioning of it. I think that is a better question to ask a genuine Schotts. And I am not sure if you were actually named for Samuel Benjamin Schotts or if we just liked the name and thought is was nice that you had an ancestor with that name also so it reinforced the decision to name you Benjamin, a good question for your ma.
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