Page 4 - Demo

Both natives of Young America, Indiana and schoolteachers, Joseph Mendenhall and Lucille Beck were married in 1915. Joe had qualified to teach after taking a 6-week course at Ball State Teachers College. But with two years at Central Normal College in Danville, Indiana%u2014unusual for a woman of her generation%u2014Lucille had far more formal education. The first of their five children, Duncan, was born in early 1917. Eventually, the family moved to Fowler, Indiana where Joe got a job as a rural mail carrier, and Lucille was a homemaker.At the age of 23, Duncan married Betty Dowell, and their daughter, Marsha, was born three years later. Unfortunately, World II intervened, and Duncan was killed in France in 1944. After being a widow for three years, Betty married my father, Gregory Bower, making Marsha my half-sister.Even though Joe and Lucille were, by blood, Marsha%u2019s grandparents, I, along with my 4 younger sisters, considered them our Grandpa and Grandma Mendy as well. After my family moved to Lafayette, we would regularly, one at a time, go back to Fowler for a weekend visit. During her free time, Grandma smoked cigarettes and played solitaire at the diningroom table. Grandpa preferred watching baseball on TV and smoking his pipe. On these childhood visits, I typically rose very early on Saturday morning so I could accompany Grandpa on his rural mail route, which was quite an adventure. While he regularly sold stamps to his patrons, he had little interest in collecting them, but Grandma did. When I told her about starting a collection, she showed me what she had saved over the years. Actually, she was quite the saver, and rarely threw anything out. For example, she kept every birthday card and letter ever sent to her. And, on one dusty bookshelf in an upstairs hallway, she kept some of the books from her brief teaching career. Among them were a variety of foreign-language dictionaries. On one of my visits, Grandma showed me her coin collection, which she stored in a small metal box about the size of a recipe-card box. A miniature treasure chest, it had an arched top and a pirate%u2019s face on the front. From a wide variety of coins, she selected 25 Indian Head pennies, several bus tokens, and a coin about the size of a British penny good for a 50%u00a2 discount toward the purchase a new cooking stove, and gave them to me.While Grandma didn%u2019t have a stamp album, she did have a mixed assemblage of individual stamps and an eclectic stack of covers%u2014and she gave some from each group to me. Generally, she only let go of duplicate stamps and coins, and kept the single items she had accumulated for herself. If I didn%u2019t understand what a particular stamp commemorated, she took the time to explain its background. For example, I recall looking at a Gold Star Mothers stamp, and asking what a Gold Star Mother was. After she said they were women who%u2019d lost a son in a war, I asked if that meant she was one. Yes, she said, she was. On another visit, Grandma introduced me to Pete McNeely, whose first name was actually Ralph. When I met him, he was retired from being Fowler's Assistant Postmaster. Fowler%u2019s most avid stamp collector, he was also a member of the American Air Mail Society. Pete lived less than a block from Grandma and Grandpa, so it was easy for me to walk to his home. The first time I was there, we sat on his living-room couch and he showed me part of his collection. By the end of that visit, he had given me several of his duplicate covers.The following pages include all the covers Grandma Mendy and Pete gave be back in the late 1950s and early %u201860s. They are the covers I have had the longest. I know they would both be pleased that I saved them all these years, have preserved them so nicely on these page, and remember them both so fondly.