After my mother was put in a nursing home for a broken pelvis, it was my job to go through her house which she had lived in for thirty years. It was a pitch, save type situation which was agonizing to say the least. My mother lived in a mobile home which had a lot of storage space and she had used every inch of it. I found suitcases, boxes, and dresser drawers that I had never seen before.

One evening with tears in my eyes I found myself reading letters that my father had sent to my mother before they were married. I had no idea that my father was such a romantic. At the time he wrote the letters he was twenty seven and my mother was eighteen. He was working in the "Dakotas" combining. I felt like I was eavesdropping on a private conversation that I had no business doing. I couldn't help myself, I kept reading late into the night. I could not imagine how difficult it was for them to not only be separated, but for me to imagine the depression and the effects it had on young people. My father told her in one letter that he had found a cook stove for five dollars. The farmer told him he could have it if he worked for him for a month. He took the job. My mother and father married August,2,1930, My father could not find a job when he moved to Iowa to marry my mother so he hired on with my grandfather, G.D. Banister as a hired hand. There was a basement house on the acreage that surrounded the house yard. That is where my mother and father lived for some time.

While they lived there, my sister Rosella was born. My father needed to make more money than a farm hand paid, so he traveled to Minneapolis, Minnesota to Dunwoodie Institue to lean how to be a linotype operator. At Christmas time he hitchhiked home to be with my mother and sister. He brought with him a tube of lipstick called Tangee for my mother's Christmas present. She said it was the most dear gift she ever had been given because she knew he couldn't afford it. It cost him twenty five cents. I just looked up that lipstick to see if they still sell it. They do. The lipstick sells for fourteen dollars a tube. While they lived in the basement house another child was born to them, my sister Juanita. The love story continued for forty eight years when my father died. My mother continued to love him even though she remarried some years later. His memory lingers on to this day with fond memories of his quiet ways, his love of Bing Crosby, but the most important, the love of his wife and family.