33. Ben–Hur ... THE FARM EAST OF PINE VILLAGE

Robert had been selected as a delegate to the 1971 Rural Electric Membership Corporation Youth Tour of Washington, D.C. The bus taking the Indiana delegation first to Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, was to leave Indianapolis at 2:00 in the morning, so as to arrive at the battlefield by 8:00. The evening before departure, Robert saw the 1959 movie Ben–Hur at the Devon Theater in Attica. He had never seen it before. Joe and Ida reluctantly turned down the opportunity to accompany Robert, as they felt they were too busy just then, so Robert drove himself to the theater.

Many years earlier, Joe and Ida had taken Charles and Robert to see Lew Wallace’s study in nearby Crawfordsville. Lew was the author of Ben–Hur: A Tale of the Christ, which was published on the 12th of November in 1880. Lewis was born in 1827 in Brookville. Lew’s father, David, a lawyer, moved his family to Covington. Lew’s mother, Esther French Test, died in 1834. In 1836, David married Zerelda Gray Sanders. By 1837, David had been elected Governor of Indiana, and he moved his family to Indianapolis. When Lew was thirteen, he was enrolled in a private academy in Centerville, where a teacher encouraged him to develop his talent for writing. While Lew did not see combat, he did serve in the Mexican–American War. In 1849, Lew was admitted to the bar and became engaged to Susan Arnold Elston, with the marriage taking place in 1852. He moved to Crawfordsville in 1853. At the outbreak of the Civil War, Governor Oliver P. Morton invited Lew to recruit volunteers for the army. Lew was soon promoted to the rank of brigadier general. He became something of a scapegoat when the victory at Shiloh came under heavy criticism for the high number of casualties. The injury to General Wallace’s military reputation was a topic he returned to repeatedly during the rest of his life. General Grant eventually modified his earlier criticism, thereby helping exonerate General Wallace. Meanwhile, Wallace distinguished himself by preventing the capture of Washington, D.C., by the Confederacy.

President Rutherford B. Hayes appointed Lew Wallace to the governorship of the New Mexico Territory, where Wallace spent three years. He completed the manuscript for Ben–Hur while living in Santa Fe; he had begun the work while living in Crawfordsville. President James A. Garfield then appointed Wallace U.S. Minister to the Ottoman Empire in Constantinople, Turkey, where Wallace lived for four years.

In 1900, Ben–Hur had outsold Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Between 1895 and 1898, Wallace built a study adjacent to his home in Crawfordsville. As Robert entered the Devon to see the movie Ben–Hur, he thought back to the park-like setting where the brick study with its Byzantine, Greek, and Romanesque influences stands. He remembered the tower and the domed copper roof with its skylight. He also remembered the chair in which Lew Wallace sat while writing Ben–Hur. Most of all, he remembered Wallace’s art, for he was an accomplished painter.

As Robert took his seat in the Devon, he was within a short distance of the location where another writer, Bernard Sobel, had been born in 1887, the same year that Robert’s grandmother Kosie was born. Sobel’s father, Nathan, manufactured cigars at the family home on the north side of Washington Street not far from the corner formed with McDonald. Robert could easily have walked there from the Devon. Nathan and wife, Hattie, moved their family to Ferry Street in Lafayette. Eventually, Bernard attended Purdue, where he played violin in the orchestra. He made his way to New York City, where he became a drama critic for the New York Daily Mirror. Bernard Sobel handled publicity for several Broadway producers. Among them were both A. L. Erlanger, who (with Marc Klaw) produced the 1899 stage version of Ben–Hur as dramatized by William W. Young, and Flo Ziegfield, who held an interest in the 1925 silent film of Ben–Hur. Sobel wrote numerous articles and a handful of plays. Between 1931 and 1961, Sobel published seven books.

In preparation for viewing the movie, Robert had read General Lew Wallace’s Ben–Hur: A Tale of the Christ. Robert even had made for his brother a plaster Nativity set that Robert had painted according to the colorful descriptions given by Wallace.

Robert marveled at the spectacular scenes and the breathtaking action. He particularly enjoyed the music of Miklós Rózsa. Robert exited the theater inspired by director William Wyler’s Ben-Hur, the MGM blockbuster based on a novel by a Hoosier author.

As the movie lasted nearly four hours, Robert had little time to sleep before his parents drove him to Indianapolis for the trip to Gettsyburg and Washington, D.C.   

16. The Old House ... THE FARM EAST OF PINE VILLAGE

The birthday gift that Joe presented to Ida in 1968 was a set of tickets for the family to laugh along with comedians Jerry Stiller and Anne Meara in the Edward C. Elliott Hall of Music at Purdue University on May the 11th. To Robert, one of the funniest moments occurred when Anne walked down the steps into the audience, sat in the lap of a gentleman wearing a mustache, and said, “Do you know there’s a wooly worm crawling across your face?”

Before leaving the farm in Pine Village, Joe had sold the Holsteins—all but Buttercup, who had grown to quite an old age and had passed away shortly before the move. It took Joe, Charles, and Robert a long time to dig a hole that was large enough for her to receive a decent burial. Joe had decided not to spend the fortune required to build on the Williams place a dairy barn conforming to the federal regulations recently enacted to ensure cleanliness of milk: hence, the loss of his small Holstein herd. Robert still had his string tie topped by a Cloisonné Holstein to serve as a reminder of the family’s sweet-tempered dairy cows.

Robert felt sorry to leave the old house that had sheltered his ancestors for two generations before he was born and had watched over his immediate family. He took a last look at the front porch, scene of so many conversations and so much laughter. He looked along the line of the white board fence. He took the time to say silent goodbyes to all the trees, including the giant catalpa by the road. Then he turned to see the tennis court and basketball net that the school had added a few years earlier. There, Joe, Don, Charles, Robert, Matt, and Lon had played basketball together. Joe had made his last examination inside the house and had concluded that nothing was being left behind by accident. He and Robert then slid onto the front seat of the nondescript Bel Air and drove away for the last time.

Robert’s father was pensive. Joe had not slept well in the new home. He felt cut off from the town that had been his secure haven all his life. He feared he might be making unwise decisions.

Ida had been right: Joe felt homesick and scared.

Meanwhile, Robert turned the new leaf. He was eager to discover where the story led. During his free minutes, he roamed the Williams place, taking the keenest interest in every feature. He studied raccoon tracks in the mud around the pools that the spring rains had made in the driveway winding back to the fields. He explored the line of hedge apple trees between Joe’s farm and the McFatridge farm to the east. He walked the perimeter of his father’s 115-acre farm that took the shape of a narrow rectangle stretching almost a mile to the north, where one corner touched that of the Brutus home place. He found gelatinous masses of frog eggs and mudpuppy eggs in the deep ditches along the gravel road.

Behind the original garage—a small open-ended building made of corrugated metal—Robert inspected a set of wooden wheels rotting away in the undergrowth not far from the slough that the Pekin ducks were enjoying. Suddenly, he discovered a large cocoon of a silkworm moth. It was hanging from a ragweed stalk. He saw nothing to suggest that the pupa inside was not viable. He carefully broke the stem and carried the cocoon to his room.

Within a few days, one of the largest luna moths that Robert would ever see emerged from the cocoon and hung suspended until its pale green wings, measuring a full five inches across, had expanded and dried. It seemed to have captured moonlight in its coloring. 

The summer felt uneasy, culminating in rioting against the Vietnam War by protesters in the streets and parks of Chicago during the political convention there.

Cultural changes were occurring at a fearful rate, as could be heard in the music that young people liked, seen in the pages of glossy magazines, and witnessed in the news that the television proclaimed in dark tones each evening. Robert did not feel isolated from these events by living on a farm with the gentle breezes of sunny days and the gleaming stars of summer nights; on the contrary, he often felt that he was not isolated enough!

One of the rare bright spots was the television coverage of the moon landing. After that, Robert looked at the silvery disc in the night sky and wondered.

In the country, Robert could not spend a merry hour on his roller skates with the key dangling by a string around his neck nor squander a happy afternoon on his green Schwinn bicycle. He mused on these facts while he and Charles awaited the bus on a chilly fall morning. The only sounds were those made by Spot foraging among fallen leaves in the fenced yard behind them; otherwise, the world lay perfectly still. Robert thought back to the brief graduation ceremony acknowledging completion of eighth grade. He was now a freshman in high school, after all.

For Freshman Dress-Up Day, the senior who drew Robert’s name for the initiation, wrote, “ … I realized there was a need to let you know what you will be wearing. 1. Old coveralls with ‘69’ painted in red on the front and back part of the upper leg, 2. Workshoes, and 3. T-shirt with ‘Property of Seniors’ written on back. … Consider yourself lucky.” Robert did. Several of his classmates had to wear outrageous getups.

Robert helped his father farm, and he spent evenings doing homework and practicing piano and clarinet. He decided he didn’t mind becoming an adult—which was inevitable—but he missed his skates and his bike.

From far away to the east came the hum of the motor and the crunch of the tires on the gravel. Glen J. Brutus was driving the school bus. In anticipation, Charles and Robert edged nearer to the road.

Eventually, the bus approached but did not slow down. Just as Glen passed the boys, he put on the brakes. Charles and Robert hurried down the road to the west, where the bus had come to a halt. Glen’s smile was infectious. “I can’t get used to stopping back there,” he said to the boys, as they took seats near the front.

Frosty gray fields stretched to either side of the byway. Glen had to make only a few more stops before reaching the school. Robert looked forward to his English class, for he loved to read and fancied himself a writer. Band rehearsal likewise captured his attention every bit as much as English inspired his imagination. Mr. Davis had moved away, and Mr. Tony Boots had taken over the baton of the Marching Pine Knots, who marched in sock feet on the basketball floor during the halfway point of the home games. The school was too small to host a football team, even though the town was known for having had a famous community football team in the early years of the sport

That team of yesteryear made national news. The legendary Olympic athlete Jim Thorpe carried the ball for Pine Village. In 1914, Pine Village beat an Indianapolis team by a score of 111 to 0. As the manager of the team, Claire Rhode, one of Joe’s relatives, began hiring top athletes from Purdue University, Indiana University, Notre Dame, and the colleges of Wabash and DePauw to play a few games as members of the Pine Village team, which was undefeated from 1903 until 1916. The famous Pine Village team was an independent organization that would be called a pro team today.

On the 20th of December in 1971, Robert would publish a story in the Pine Village High School newspaper, which he would serve as editor. Entitled “Football Was Alive Here Then,” his article would feature his interviews with his great uncle Charles “Charlie” J. Rhode and Eli Fenters, who played for the team. The title of Robert’s article would be a quotation from Great Uncle Charlie. What must it have been like to play a game shoulder to shoulder with Jim Thorpe? Thorpe played one game for Pine Village, which defeated the Purdue All-Stars by a score of 29 to 0. An anecdote often repeated when Robert was growing up might have been based on fact. Supposedly, Thorpe complimented Eli Fenters as the best “natural quarterback” Thorpe had ever encountered.

In Robert’s time in junior high and high school, where would there have been enough boys to form a football team? So the band’s halftime shows occurred noisily indoors on the basketball court.

Music filled the life of the family. On the 4th of December in 1968 in the Edward C. Elliott Hall of Music at Purdue, Joe, Ida, Charles, and Robert heard the Man of La Mancha with David Atkinson, who replaced Richard Kiley on Broadway, performing along with the national touring company. The rousing themes inspired Robert. One of his defining characteristics, after all, was to entertain apparently impossible dreams.

On the weekend, the family drove to Lafayette for Charles and Robert’s piano lessons. Miss Beegle had abandoned her studio at Allen’s Dance Studio and had begun teaching from her home, where she had two grand pianos side by side. While Charles had his half-hour lesson, Robert crossed the street to the public library, an impressive building with a long flight of stairs. He passed the circulation desk and entered the open stacks in back. He walked straight to the shelf containing all the books that Hoosier author Gene Stratton–Porter had written, and he selected them one by one, until he had read most of them. He always took a seat in one of the deep window sills on the north wall of the stacks and eagerly opened his book. One of his favorites was Moths of the Limberlost, a nonfiction title boasting many photographic prints that Stratton–Porter had painted by hand in spectacular color. Gracing the pages were luna moths of the same moonbeam hue that Robert had witnessed. Many other large moths in dazzling tints were fully represented.

At the end of thirty minutes, Robert put the book back where it belonged, crossed the street again, and entered Miss Beegle’s lovely Victorian home for his music lesson.

“We’re going for Big Macs,” Joe announced when he and Ida picked up Charles and Robert on the sidewalk in front of Miss Beegle’s porch. Joe drove over the Brown Street Bridge and into the McDonald’s parking lot. The family took a booth while Joe ordered for everyone. Soon, he came carrying a tray filled with Styrofoam boxes. Even though the new, large sandwiches caught the eye, Robert could not be sure if he preferred a simple hamburger with plenty of mustard.

Next, the family bought groceries at Smitty’s. Into the cart went milk and butter because there were no more dairy cows at home. Then there came the eighteen-mile drive back to the farm. Robert liked lying down, so that he could see only the treetops. He would call out to Charles the landmarks that Robert thought the car was passing, and Charles would confirm or deny Robert’s guesses. Catching the Goose Creek Bridge was easy to infer from the sound of crossing, and naming Indian Hill was simple to do from the motion of the car slowly winding around the steep slopes, but the long stretches through the flat countryside were challenging.

“Are we near the road to Otterbein?” Robert would ask.

“Nowhere near it,” Charles would state matter-of-factly.

Robert would wonder where he was on the road that linked the city of pianos, libraries, Big Macs, and milk cartons to the country of moths, mudpuppies, frosty fields, and shimmering stars.     

     

3. Palm Sunday ... THE FARM EAST OF PINE VILLAGE

Earlier that spring—before the exciting trip to Indianapolis for the band competition—the weather suddenly turned hot. It was the morning of the 11th of April—Palm Sunday—and Ida had an idea! Why not take advantage of the warm weather and invite Don and Mary to have a wiener roast in the yard? Don and Mary were Joe and Ida’s close friends. Don and his father had been members of the same threshing ring that included Joe and his grandfather, and Mary Ann and Ida never lacked for conversation.

As Joe and Ida had no telephone, Joe drove to Don and Mary’s house to ask them to come over in the afternoon. They readily consented. It would be three more years before a phone would appear in the Rhode home. Both Ida and Joe considered phones to be expensive nuisances. Whenever they needed to receive a call, they asked (with Beulah’s permission, of course) that it be placed to the phone of Beulah Jones across the street, and Beulah dutifully walked across the highway to deliver a message that she had taken on her phone. Whenever Joe and Ida had to place a call, they asked Beulah if they could borrow her phone. The rest of the time, Robert’s parents got along just fine without a telephone.

In those days, almost every town with a population of a few thousand had everything a person could want; for example, Attica, a town of 4,300 people, boasted several blocks of thriving businesses and professional offices both upstairs and down. There was no need to phone ahead to see if a store carried a certain product. If such a product could not be found in Attica, nobody needed it. Even the smaller villages had plenty of business activity from hardware stores, through blacksmith shops, through lumber yards, through elevators, through feed stores, through electrical supply shops, through grocery stores, to clothing stores.

Before Don and Mary arrived with their family, Robert and Charles picked up limbs and piled them in the ash-covered, brick-lined area of the yard that was dedicated to roasting hot dogs. Soon, the boys had a tall pile of sticks.

“That’s plenty!” Ida said, wiping her hands on her apron as she came through the screen door. “We wouldn’t be able to get near the fire if you would pile another twig on it.”

Don and Mary’s car pulled into the half circle drive by the front gate. With her big smile, Mary flung open the passenger door, jumped out, and turned to reach a casserole dish in the middle of the seat. By the time she stood with the dish in her hands, Joe and Ida had come down the sidewalk to open the gate. Mary arched her left eyebrow and said to Ida, “You’ve been helping Joe in the fields, haven’t you? I can tell by your healthy tan.”

“I could say the same about you,” Ida retorted.

Mary looked shocked. “I haven’t been helping Joe!” she remonstrated.

“I meant Don,” Ida said, laughing.

“I know,” Mary reassured her. “I was just kidding, but I can tell you who’s going to be married this summer. Wayne Whitlow, and, no, I’m not kidding! He’s marrying Peggy Thomas.”

From somewhere in the shadow cast by the brim of his cap, Don winked at Joe. “I believe they’ve already started gossiping, Joe. We may be in for a long evening.”

Meanwhile, Don and Mary’s boys, Matt and Lon, had joined Charles and Robert for a game they had invented that might be described as “hide-and-seek meets Gunfight at the O.K. Corral.” Matt and Lon brought their own cap guns, and Robert and Charles had toy guns resembling a pair of pearl-handled pistols. Wearing cowboy hats, the boys formed two teams that hid far apart among the farm buildings and sought one another while hoping to be the first to fire. Anyone fired at was “dead,” fair and square. About ready to enter the eighth grade, Charles was becoming too old for the game, but he played along just to be neighborly.

The temperature had soared into the eighties. By late afternoon, dark clouds were rolling overhead.

“I think it’s going to rain,” Ida said, after she had stepped into the yard to get a feel for the weather.

Mary said, “We probably should cook the wieners on the stove.”

Joe said, “We could get the fire going in a hurry. It doesn’t take long to cook a hot dog over a fire.”

Ida looked concerned. “We don’t want a wind to come up and blow the embers around. What would you do, Don?”

“I think you should cook the wieners on the stove.” He glanced at Joe. “That was the right answer, wasn’t it?”

“Joe, call the boys,” Ida said.

Joe strode through the gate into the chicken yard and found Robert and Lon hiding near the east chicken house. “We’re ready to eat, so come in and wash your hands,” Joe said. The smiling heads of the second team popped out from concealment behind the twin oak trees.

“Were you there all along?” Robert asked, with every tone of disappointment.

“I knew they were hiding there,” Lon said in a stage whisper. “I was just getting ready to tell you.”

“Sure you were!” Matt said.

The boys filed to the bathroom sink to slip the heavy bar of lye soap over their hands.

While everyone was eating, Ida said, “As bad as it looks outside, I think I ought to turn on the television to see if anybody is saying anything about the weather.”

Ida excused herself from the kitchen table and walked over to the Zenith, which stood high on a green “crushed ice” Formica table with metal legs. She switched on the set just in time for everyone to hear a tornado forecast that had interrupted the regularly scheduled program. The announcer reading the bulletin said there were many reports of tornadoes in northern Indiana.

Mary’s face wore a look of concentration. Then her brows arched up, she sighed, and she said, “Well, maybe we should go home—after dessert, that is.”

Everyone laughed. Joe made the “black cows” with generous scoops of vanilla ice cream covered in Coke, which foamed up and dripped temptingly down the sides of the thumbprint pattern jelly jar tumblers.

The evening ended too early, but, sometimes, the most memories are made when the fun is interrupted at its peak.

Unfortunately, the memories of that evening included the news that came in sad doses the following day. In one of the worst outbreaks of the kind, forty-seven tornadoes had touched down in Indiana and nearby states. Hundreds of people had lost their lives. The closest destruction was around the town of Mulberry. The skies above Pine Village had looked threatening, but no funnels had formed there.

Later, Mary said to Ida, “I feel bad that we were having such a good time.”

Ida said, “News like that makes you want to put your arms around your family—”

“—and hold them tight,” Mary completed Ida’s thought.

     

40. The Surprise ... THE FARM IN PINE VILLAGE

Robert was fortunate to have been in Mrs. Winegardner’s class at that precise moment in history. Her measured viewpoint was exactly what was needed. Her class participated in her deliberate weighing of ideas in the scales of historical truth. Mrs. Winegardner was a gyroscope, keeping everything in balance.

Even with Mrs. Winegardner’s steadying influence, Robert well understood that the country had entered an epoch of upheaval. As Bob Dylan would sing that January, “ … the times they are a-changin’.”

It would remain to be seen whether the children of Robert’s generation could weather the storms that were yet to come. For a little while longer, the kids had to be kids.

When Robert had been in the third grade, the snows had been frequent and deep, but the winter of his fourth-grade year was unusually snowy.

… and cold! Whenever he took the first breath outdoors, Robert felt the linings of his nostrils crinkle as if they might freeze.

Robert had only recently recovered from his annual pre-Christmas flu. The roads were barely passable with drifting snow. The cold air rapidly drew the heat out of the multiple layers of winter clothing that Ida made the boys wear. Even so, she insisted that the family go for a ride.

Robert considered her perseverance remarkable in view of the weather. Robert’s father was all too ready to agree. What could have gotten into his parents?

All bundled up, Robert and Charles squeezed into the Chevrolet, which never felt warm for the entire trip to Attica. Robert wondered why Joe chose Attica, which was ten miles away, when he could have selected Oxford, which was only five miles away. A ride was a ride. On such a bitterly cold day, why go farther away when you could stay closer to home?

In Attica, Joe took roads that he did not typically follow. After a time, he pulled into an icy drive beside a farmhouse close to the town.

“Why are we stopping?” Charles asked, taking the words right out of Robert’s mouth.

“I reckon you’ll find out soon enough,” Joe said with that Bing Crosby twinkle in his eye.

Ida and Joe apparently knew where they were going. They circled the house and knocked on a side door, which a gray-haired man answered.

“I’ll be right out, folks,” he said. “Just need to put on my coat!” In a jiffy, he bounded down the steps of the side door and led the group to a white-painted outbuilding. The glow of red heat lamps lit the frost on the windows.

No sooner had Charles and Robert stepped inside the building than their eyes focused on a litter of black-and-white puppies! The boys ran up to the fenced enclosure that protected the puppies within the structure.

“We’ve already picked out one,” Ida told the boys.

“You mean we get to have one?” Charles asked.

“We’re a few days early, but he’s going to be one of your Christmas presents,” Joe said.

“Which one is ours?” Charles wanted to know.

The owner of the kennel pointed to one of the friendliest puppies. It was standing with its front paws against the wire and was yapping joyously.

“He’s yours,” the gentleman said. He turned to Joe, “And he’s had his shots and is ready to go.”

Without the boys’ knowledge, Ida had concealed in the trunk of the car a stout cardboard box with a blanket in the bottom. Joe brought it, and the wiggling puppy was placed inside. Ida closed the flaps. She carried the precious cargo as carefully as she could over the ice and snow and set the box in the center of the back seat. For once, Robert didn’t mind riding in back because he got to sit next to the box!

On the drive homeward, Charles occasionally lifted the flap a little, so that the boys could see their dog.

“Keep that flap closed,” Ida warned. “It’s too cold for a puppy to be exposed to the air, even in the car.” She glanced worriedly at Joe. “Do you think he’ll survive this cold trip?”

“Oh, sure!” Joe exclaimed. “Animals are tough—even puppies!”

“What kind of puppy is it?” Charles asked.

“It’s a male purebred smooth fox terrier,” Joe answered.

“A fox terrier,” Charles repeated.

As soon as the car pulled in beside the front gate, Ida lifted the box and practically ran with it into the house. She sat on the davenport before the Norge stove in the kitchen and pulled the puppy from the box. She held it in her arms to keep it warm.

“What should we name him?” Ida asked.

Robert looked at the big black spot on the puppy’s back and immediately said, “Spot!”—as if the name were obvious!

“That’s such a common name,” Charles said.

… but Ida intervened, saying, “Robert named him, and so that’s his name!”

After dinner that night, Ida was holding the puppy when it was time for the boys to go to bed.

When they awoke the next morning, they ran to see Spot. Ida was still holding the puppy. Joe had brought her a pillow and a blanket, and she had catnapped on the davenport with Spot in her arms. She had been reluctant to leave the puppy by himself, she had wanted to keep him warm, and she had decided to begin his doggy form of potty training right away.

Spot was a member of the family from that first night onward. On Christmas morning, he shredded wrapping paper, shaking it from side to side and growling. When the weather would permit, he romped with the boys in the yard. Charles and Robert helped him become accustomed to a harness and a leash—just in case he would succeed in penetrating the fence and would have to be chased down.

As Spot grew older and could spend more time outdoors, he proved that he was equal to the task of escaping and running downtown as fast as his legs could carry him. The boys would race after him on foot while Joe would jump in the car and drive after the puppy. Spot would look back and would seem to smile while he led everyone on such merry chases. Eventually, he would permit the boys to catch him, harness him, and lead him to the car—or Joe would simply hold open the car door and Spot would jump in!

When Spot first met Fuzz, now eight years old, the cat bristled to twice his normal volume while Spot, barking loudly, rocked back with his front legs almost flat on the ground. Fuzz slunk to one side before running off and flying through a gap between the boards of the fence. Spot could have caught him, but the dog didn’t even try. He was content to watch the cat make his escape.

He wanted to catch chickens, but the fence was too strong for him to burst through into the chicken yard.

Spot became a frequently photographed dog. Many a snapshot was wasted as he was faster than the shutter and was only a blur in the print that came back from Hinea’s Camera Shop in Lafayette. Other photographs captured him napping while draped over the arm of the davenport or posing with his paintbrush tail wagging beside the hollyhocks.

Spot was often the subject of Robert’s art, as well. Robert depicted Spot in a series of pastels, one of which Ida framed.

Spot was the greatest Christmas gift of Charles and Robert’s childhood.

One day, Joe was scraping the icing from the mixer bowl with a butter knife. In between mouthfuls of chocolate, Joe said, “Ida, I thought Spot would be my dog, but you’ve stolen his affections away from me. I now think that’s why you held him all night long the first night we had him.”

“Don’t keep scraping! You’ll scrape clear through the side of the bowl some day! Go ahead and give me the bowl,” Ida said, “so that I can wash it while I still have suds in the sink.”

Ida smiled as she submerged the bowl. “You may think he’s my dog, but I think he belongs to Charles and Robert.”

“Well, that’s a good thing,” Joe said, “because he’s theirs.” Joe pointed toward the davenport. Ida looked, and there sat Charles and Robert with Spot in between. All three were sound asleep.

THE END