Insight: Long Lost Secrets

By Ed Pierce
Managing Editor

I recently listened to a podcast about how to speak with your parents about their past and why it is important to learn about their lives and pass it down to future generations in your family.

A newspaper article from 1924 reveals details
about a violent incident that took place between
Ed Pierce's maternal grandparents that he
never knew about while growing up.
COURTESY PHOTO   

In my case, both of my parents are deceased, but they did tell me a great deal about how they grew up and their experiences during World War II while they were still alive.

I found out quite a bit about my mother just by being a snoop as a child. Once when my parents were shopping on a Friday night, I discovered a bonanza of information I hadn’t previously known by exploring a kitchen cupboard that contained our family’s cups and glasses when I was 8 and in third grade.

Opening the cupboard door to get a glass for a drink of water, I looked up at the top shelf and noticed some papers there. Curiosity got the better of me and I climbed up onto the kitchen counter and was just tall enough to be able to pull the papers down off their lofty shelf.

Sitting on the kitchen counter, I looked through the documents, which were my mother’s divorce papers from her first husband. To that point, I did not know that my mother had been married before, and that she was divorced before meeting and marrying my father. The papers were sent to her by an attorney and the listed reason for the judge to grant the divorce was on the grounds of physical and mental cruelty. And in what was a bombshell revelation to me, the judge had ordered that my mother’s ex-husband was to pay her child support of $10 per month.

I carefully returned the papers to the top shelf where I had found them, climbed down from the kitchen counter and began to process what I had just learned. As it turned out, my older sister was my half-sister, and it now made sense to me as to why her last name was different from mine.

The more I thought about it, the story about how my parents had first met that my father had told me became clearer. While working his way through college to obtain a degree in mechanical engineering, he worked at night as a private detective. He told me he had been assigned by the agency he worked for to investigate a case for my mother. They met, and he asked her to go to a square dance with him. Not long after they got married.

Years later I discovered that the case my father had investigated for my mother involved her ex-husband and his claim that he couldn’t afford child support for several months because he wasn’t working. She hired my father to verify if that was true. My father found out that he was working at night at a manufacturing plant and my mother then reported the details and his employer to the court.

My sister got married when I was 12 and I made the mistake of asking my mother if my sister’s father was coming to the wedding. She wanted to know how I knew that, and I explained how I had discovered her divorce papers years before. As I expected, she got mad and told me to stay out of her personal things.

A conversation I had when I was 16 with my father also revealed a story about him that I didn’t know. It seems when he was a teenager, he and a friend had purchased a pack of cigarettes, and they were caught smoking behind a barn on my grandparents’ farm.

To teach my father a lesson about smoking, my grandfather took him to the barn and proceeded to have him smoke a box of Dutch Masters cigars one by one until the box was empty. The experience made my father sick, and he ended up being admitted to the hospital for nicotine poisoning. After that, he said he never again had any desire to smoke.

Neither my mother nor my father drank alcohol, and I came to understand why they didn’t decades later. I read a newspaper article from 1924 regarding my maternal grandfather getting drunk and then striking my maternal grandmother with a stick breaking her wrist after she threatened him with scissors with my mother watching as it happened.

My father also told me about an embarrassing incident during the Great Depression in which my paternal grandfather was out somewhere drinking when it started to snow. He became drunk, took off all his clothes and went running down the street naked. The police were called, and they soon found him, wrapped him in a blanket and returned him to my grandparents’ front door in front of my grandmother, my father and his siblings.

The incident shamed him so much that my father said that he took a week off from school to avoid being teased by classmates about it. He grew up avoiding alcohol and I can’t ever recall seeing him with a drink in his hand during my lifetime.

No matter what someone’s past experiences might be, they can offer an invaluable glimpse into the person they are now. <