Mark Dunn - Ibid - A Life

7. Jonathan was removed from the Epworth League for making a joke about the Holy Ghost.Reverend Devon Stoddard to Eugenia Sellers, 20 September1904, Sellers Family Papers.

8. Jonathan was voted president of the Pettiville High School Debate Society.Jonathan’s Diary, 12 October1904.

9. Jonathan lost the presidency of the debate society when a rival challenged his legitimacy and he responded with, “Oh, really…must we debate this?”Ibid., 13 October1904.

10. Jonathan considered quitting school and becoming a patent medicine salesman.Interview with Odger Blashette.

11. Jonathan decided not to quit school and become a patent medicine salesman.Ibid.

12. “I’m so glad that you decided not to quit school and become a patent medicine salesman. Your mother is too.”Ibid.

13. “He’s right. I am. Come give Mother a hug.”Ibid.

14. Love finds Jonathan Blashette.Mildred Boyers’s family was relatively new to Pettiville. Her father sold Divine Bain sea sponges throughout a territory that included eastern Arkansas, northern Mississippi, and western Tennessee as well as, curiously, Atlantic City, New Jersey, where, it was said, he had a mistress named Sheila who either (sources disagree) ate lye and died, or ate dye and lied about it, bragging that blue tongues ran in her family. Mildred wasn’t close to her father, but found comfort and solace at the rectory of St. Bartholomew Catholic Church of Ambless where she performed light housekeeping chores and posed as famous Greek statuary for the amusement of Father Dwayne and his toothless assistant Toot. Maise Boyers Gabridge, interview by author, 16 May 2000.

No picture of Jonathan’s first girlfriend Mildred exists (see Note 16.). However, we have been left with several photographic likenesses of “Sheila,” discovered among the Boyers family effects in an old Atlantic City taffy box. In one snapshot she wears a Gibson Girl bathing dress and a big grin. This particular picture was given to me by Sheila’s great-granddaughter and it is now affixed to my refrigerator right next to the Michigan snowshoe magnet that secures my coupons for Mint Milanos.

15. “ Mildred’s my gal.”As happy as Jonathan and Mildred were, they must have known that they were not destined to spend the rest of their lives together. Perhaps this note, slipped into Jonathan’s hand at the Pettiville High School Homecoming bonfire, offers a few clues. JBP.

November 2, 1904

Dear Jonny,

You CANNOT, CANNOT, CANNOT think that I would go on the hayride with you. I simply will not do it. You will horse around as you always do when you get with Bub and Charlie and the Vox, and will pay no attention to me, you may be sure of it. I will sit in a corner of that wagon ALONE and watch the four of you make UTTER fools of one another and wonder why I ever FOR ONE MINUTE thought we’d be cuddling in the moonlight when that is probably THE LAST THING ON YOUR MIND! So you go on without me and I will stay behind and help Miss Britten dust her erasers unless you can absolutely positively assure me that you will pay attention to ME and only ME on the hayride and not act the fool with those ruffian characters you call your pals.

I made you a pie last night and it is waiting for you in the home sciences room and you may have it for the price of a little KINDNESS for HEAVENS SAKE!

Love,

Mildred

PS. Daddy is off in Atlantic City again. He will no doubt try to make me feel better about his absence by bringing home TAFFY.

16. Another favorite pastime was “kodaking” in Donlee Hills. Each of these photographs of Jonathan and his friends (JBP and Maise Boyers Gabridge, Private Collection of Family Ephemera) was taken with Mildred’s new Brownie camera, probably by Jonathan’s high school chum Will “The Vox” Crispen. The oversize thumb-intrusions in the bottom right corner of each are identical.

Though camera-shy herself, Mildred loved her little Brownie and was careful to preserve all of her own efforts, including a photographic essay she entitled “Work, the Curse of the Drinking Class.” Jonathan played one of the roles in this pictorial commentary on Upper Class indolence, dressing up as a moneyed swell, berating (in frozen pantomime) the hired help, and drinking himself into a nightly stupor. The photographic tableau assigned to “nightly stupor” shows Jonathan comically body-hugging a lamppost. I have discovered a number of variations of the lamppost clench. My chief researcher Billy Vivian was quick to demonstrate to me that by placing the photographs in a certain order and flipping them, one may animate the scene, thus producing a peep show of Jonathan dry-humping the post.

17. Both a curse and a blessing was this second sight.Jonathan’s mother didn’t always possess the gift of prophecy, but for a period of ten years, it seemed that almost all of her predictions came true. In early 1912, however, Emmaline’s second sight began to fail her and her back-porch prognostications started to miss their mark by wide margins. For example, she predicted that the Titanic would be drydocked after forty years of dutiful service to the White Star Line and then be turned into a home for old sailors, and that anarchist Emma Goldman would become a Republican senator from New Jersey. Later she predicted that Al Jolson would lose his voice and become a whispering Southern Baptist. Addicus Andrew Blashette, interview with author, 5 October, 1999.

18. “ Graduation comes none too soon! Hip Hip Hoorah! Tah Rah Rah Boom Dee-A! [sic]”Jonathan’s Diary, 25 May 1905.

19. “I am leaving to spend my summer as a counselor at a fishing camp.”Jonathan Blashette to Mildred Boyers, 29 May, 1905, Private Family Correspondence Collection of Maise Boyers Gabridge. Mildred was, incidentally, in Atlantic City looking for her mother who, according to Gabridge, had learned of her husband’s extramarital dalliances and went to either “drag the man by the short-hairs all the way home” or “feed that sorry excuse for a husband and father to the fishes.”

20. “This was my welcome to the Fritz Fighting Camp.”The word “fighting” was a misprint. Jonathan spent his graduation summer paying — along with other members of the camp’s staff — for this glaring promotional brochure typographical error. Given the misleading advertising, few arrived at the Minnesota camp expecting to fish and those who made the attempt usually, in the words of the camp’s beleaguered administrator Trent Littlefeather, “had no sooner dropped their lines in the cool, placid lake water than their boatmate hauls off and knocks the dog crap out of them when they’re not looking.” It was the summer Jonathan learned fisticuffs, a little about lures, and the importance of accuracy in promotional circulars. Jonathan’s Diary, 3 June1905.

21. It was the second tornado to hit Wilkinson County in as many months.According to Blashette’s step-granddaughter Vicka Lovett (interview), Jonathan was in the barn as the twister lifted the roof off the farmhouse. Emmaline was in the kitchen and Addicus was out in the field. Jonathan’s diary disputes this. He places himself in the field, his father in the barn and his mother visiting with Pastor Stoddard’s myopic wife Margaret at the parsonage. By Addicus’s account (letter from Addicus to Lindy Blashette), Emmaline was in the barn, he was in the kitchen and Jonathan was off fishing with his friend Raymond Beams. Raymond (letter to his birth father soliciting funds) said that he was in the kitchen with Margaret Stoddard looking for Emmaline’s canning lids. Pastor Stoddard was in the Blashette barn looking for Margaret’s eyeglasses. Addicus and Emmaline were at Claiborne’s General Groceries and Sundry Dry Goods Store. Pastor Stoddard (church newsletter) said that everyone was seated at the Blashette kitchen table playing Uncle Wiggly. Margaret Stoddard (Bible Methodist Church Missionary Circle Circular) remembers that when the tornado touched down, Raymond Beams was in a barn located somewhere in the tri-county area helping her husband look for her eyeglasses. County historian Ida Sheridan (interview) insists that Pastor Stoddard was at Claiborne’s store buying an Uncle Wiggly game and a comical monocle fob. Everyone else was at the Pettiville ice cream social discussing crop rotation and bungled Montgomery Ward mail orders.