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57
 
House, entered in great hurry, threw off their coats and rushed upstairs.  I recall smiling politely at one of them and of being completely ignored as he hurried by me.  I don’t know how long it was that I stayed around downstairs by myself I can remember now so clearly how I was sitting on the sofa when cousin Nellie Barker came into the room sat beside me.  I seemed to know before she said a word that she was going to tell me Father was dead.  She put her arm around me and held me against her and said very softly, "Forman, God has taken Father away." Although I loved my father very much, I could not cry; and yet I knew that I should cry. So I buried my face against Cousin Nellie’s big, soft bosom and pretended to cry. I had no concept of what this was going to mean to me, how it would change the whole course of my life practically from that moment henceforth. I‘ve never speculated seriously about what my life would have been if my father had lived save to realize that almost certainly it would not have been the same or probably even close to the same.  Probably I would have attended prep school and then gone away to college.  It seems unlikely that I’d have studied engineering.  It also seems likely that I’d have stayed in Syracuse and never would have met Willie but would have married some local girl.  Babbie and Rog would never have been.  However, regardless of the tragedy of my father’s untimely death at age 52, my life has turned out well and as far as my own life is concerned, it has been a happy and satisfactory experience.

Father was buried in Oakwood Cemetery in Syracuse.  I did not attend the funeral, Mother thinking it best that I spend that day with the Wynkoop family.  Mother was to live another 32 years to die in Erie.  A spot had been kept for her beside my father in Oakwood and we took her back there for burial.  My brother is also buried in the same plot.  But I shall be laid to rest here in Erie, which is now and has been home for me for going on half a century.  Mother mourned my father very deeply, feeling that he had sacrificed his life for his patients, which he had done in effect.  She kept a photograph of him on the mantle and under it, she had written: “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.”  He was indeed a fine man and I only wish that I were half as fine.

Although we moved very soon to Douglas Street where normally I would have gone to Franklin School on Butternut Street, Mother got permission for me to complete my grade school education at Lincoln and I graduated from there in June 1916. I have a wonderful photograph of my Lincoln graduating class which I’d like to make part of this record.  In it are so many of the kids I’ve talked about in this record including Bill Dyer, Joe Sanford, Mary Barnes, Katherine Knapp and Ginny Kingsbury.  Sometimes I think I’d like so much to see them all today and then I wonder if it isn’t better to remember Ginny, for example, as she was then.  I rather think so.

Transcription Notes:
Corrected many typos. Transcribers should proof read before making for review.