McHenry County Blog

My Grandmother Addie Watling-Skinner had a glass replication of Durer’s praying hands on her coffee table. My cousin has them now.

Nothing expensive, but they probably had more significance than I realized as a youth.

Today is a day that some Christian church’s hold prayer vigils. My First United Methodist Church has done this for several years and is doing again this year tonight through Easter.  (If you have prayers for the vigil, drop them off at the church–corner of West Crystal Lake and Dole Avenues–anytime before or during the vigil.)

That brings me to the Message of the Day–my grandmother’s praying hands, but rendered in chocolate, rather than in glass.

Albrecht Durer’s Praying Hands rendered in chocolate.

My route to grade school, 1948-53.

I got into a conversation at the First United Methodist Church about Harriet Tubman, the Underground Railroad heroine from the Eastern Shore of Maryland, from when my family and I come.

It bought back all sorts of memories of walking to the three-story brick Easton Elementary School 3-4 blocks from our home at 212 S. Aurora Street.  No kindergarten there.  No Velcro either. (Guess who didn’t learn to tie his shoe laces until the day before the first day of first grade.)

There were several routes to school.

The one I took most was straight north on Aurora Street for four blocks, then left for a block and, where the Talbot County Health Department parking lot is now, was the asphalt playground of Easton Elementary School.

That route took me past the edge of a black neighborhood (to the right on the map.)

I wondered why those who lived closer to the school than I didn’t go to school there.

We moved to lily white Salt Lake City as I was entering sixth grade.  Before leaving I attended a couple of days of class with my old classmates at the old high school, which was converted for lower grades.

Well before my time, this photo of what became my Easton Elementary School was provided by the Historical Society of Talbot County. Note the granite "sliding boards" next to the stairs. Of course, our teachers tried to keep us from using them for that purpose.

The only black (I guess it was “colored” then) child I knew was the daughter of our cleaning lady.

We used to play on the concrete-anchored, two-inch pipe swing set my father constructed.  Most of the “colored” section of town was west of the courthouse and library.  And the only time I visited it was when the carnival came.

The door to the left of the main doors was where I paid 16 or 17 cents every Saturday to see the movies.

“20,000 Leagues Under the Sea” was a movie I saw in Easton.

It wasn’t showing at the Avalon Theatre where I usually went to the movies.  It was at the Easton Theater a couple of blocks away.

When we went to the Avalon we liked to sit in the balcony.  I remember being bored by some tap dancer and a magician entertaining on the stage, probably the last gasp of vaudeville.

So, imagine my surprise when I was told only blacks could sit in the balcony.  What a disappointment.

“Weren’t they lucky?” I thought.

That building is gone, but in its place I think there is a museum about local history.  I didn’t see any reference to the predecessor theater and how blacks had not been allowed to sit on the main floor.

Although there were not blacks at Easton Elementary, there was a Chinese boy whose family ran the dry cleaners.  I went over to his family’s apartment one day after school.

One other race-related experience made an impression.  My parents took me to a minstrel show held in the armory.  White guys dressed up in black face.  It was sponsored by some civil organization as a fundraiser.  I remember lots of physical comedy, but nothing specific.

After we moved to Salt Lake City, I was reading Life Magazine one afternoon and saw a picture of the front of my old grade school.  Besides the cut line, it was easily recognizable from the two granite banisters beside the front entrance.

And the reporting was about how someone had blown up a little bomb at the back entrance of the school.

Why?

The Talbot County Board (or Board of Education if there was a sub-board) had decided to implement Brown v. Board of Education by integrating one grade at a time, starting with the first grade.

Some resident obviously did not approve and took extreme action.

More tomorrow.

Lowney's Fruit & Nut Chocolates box. In the lower right corner are the words, "A Crest Package."

I finally opened a Lowney’s Fruit & Nut Chocolates box that contained Valentines and Christmas Cards that I thought my grandmother Addie Watling-Skinner had saved.

Upon closer inspection, I discovered my mother, Eleanor Stevens Skinner, had save the contents.

I knew there were Valentines in there, but I also found Christmas cards, her acceptance letter from Washington College, cards and letters from boys from West Point, Trinity College in Connecticut and Catonsville, Maryland.  Courting by letter is a lot different from doing so by phone or texting, I would imagine.  The letters showed fear of rejection, that’s for sure.

None were from my father.  My guess he was too busy working his way through college, holding jobs of egg candling in a market in Southwest Washington that still has a commercial use and a warehouse in the same area on a main highway.  He did have a car though and attended the University of Maryland, so maybe his courting was in person after Mother took a job teaching on the Western Shore.

It appears my mother was on more than one college boy’s mind.

The Valentine was a complicated one of embossed thin cardboard. This bird was attached by the paper tag at the bottom behind the part that says, "To My Valentine." You can see where below. The bird's image is approximately to scale compared to the rest of the card below.

Her one-time farm neighbor, Calvin LeRoy Skinner, was the winner in the marriage stakes.

A cherub seems to be hammering rings on top of the card.

But, not until I was driving him around Queen Anne’s County, Maryland, while he was being treated for lung cancer (from cigarettes, of course) did I even learn that.  Roy, his tenant-farmer father had rented the land next to the Stevens’ family farm near Barclay for a while when they were both in the same class at Sudlersville High School.

You can see the windmill used behind the more ornate stamped images in front.

I can’t be certain that this Valentine is from my father to my mother.  It is “To Eleanor…From Guess Who…Calvin W.”

If this is not from my father, I wonder who "Calvin W." was.

My Dad’s middle initial was “L.”  So, what’s with the “W?”

Did she know two “Calvins?”

Alexandra feeding the ducks on Lake Michigan with her mother Robin Geist Skinner.

My niece Sarah, now in an artist’s residency in Priarietown, Massachusetts, sent me a letter she found from my grandmother Addie Watling-Skinner last month.

Amazingly enough, the letter was addressed to my daughter Alexandra, 28 years old today.

You can see Grandmom’s note to Alexandra below (click to enlarge), but I’ll re-type it to make it easier to read. The undated letter reads,

Dear Alexandra

I would love to see you before I pass away.

I was 95 last year Nov.

We have had 2 big snows.

I wish you could be with me next Tuesday.

I hope you have a nice birthday. I hope God is watching over you and keeping you well & happy.

Lovingly,

From Grand Mom Addie

1996 letter to Alexandra from her Great-Grandmother Addie Watling-Skinner. (Click to enlarge.)

I have one of these scriptures to read each day.

I love them. (She just references the verses she wanted Alexandra to read and didn’t write them out, but I shall from the newly released “Lutheran Study Bible.”)

Hebrews 13:8 “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever.”

Psalm 27:1 “The Lord is my light and my salvation; whom shall I fear? The Lord is the stronghold of my life; of whom shall I be afraid?”

Psalm 96:4 “For great is the Lord, and greatly to be praised; he is to be feared above all gods.”

Psalm 100:3 “Know the Lord, he is God! It is he who made us and we are his; we are his people, and the sheep of his pasture.”

Thes 2:8 “So, being affectionately desirous of you, we were ready to share with you not only the gospel of God but also our own selves, because you had become very dear to us.”

Math 7:8 “For everyone who asks, receives, and the one who seeks finds, and to the one who knocks it will be opened.”

Math 6:33 “But seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be added to you.”

Prov. 3:27 “Do not withhold good from those to whom it is due.”

James 5:16b “The prayer of a righteous person has great power as it is working.”

Act 4:20 “…for we cannot but speak of what we have seen and heard.”

A shopping list is written on the back.

= = = = =
Since we’re on things Skinner today, I thought these links to a biography I wrote about Cal Skinner, Sr., might be of interest:

in the links below:

Biography of Calvin L Skinner – Part 1 – Second Son, School Years

Biography of Calvin L. Skinner – Part 2 – College, Marriage, First Jobs

Biography of Cal Skinner, Sr. – Part 3 – First House, Elected President of the Easton, Maryland, Town Council

Biography of Cal Skinner, Sr. – Part 4 – Storm Sewer Grates, Miles River Yacht Club, Slot Machines, Chesapeake Bay Bridge

Biography of Cal Skinner, Sr. – Part 5 – Switching Parties, Moving to Salt Lake City, Middletown and Crystal Lake

Biography of Cal L Skinner – Part 6 – The Early Crystal Lake Days, Dipping Feet Slowly into Political Arena

Biography of Cal Skinner, Sr. – Part 7 – Running for County Auditor, Precinct Committeeman, Calling the Meeting that Led to McHenry County College

Biography of Cal Skinner – Part 8 – The Star Reporter, Daughter Ellen Bored in High School, Prohibited from Attending MCC Classes

Biography of Cal L Skinner – Part 9 – Responsible Republicans’ Slate, County Board Reapportionment

Biography of Cal Skinner, Sr. – Part 10 – Unsuccessful County Clerk Try, County Airport Fight, Wife’s Death

It’s too late to meet Grandmom and your Mom-mom and Pop-pop Skinner, but the rest of the family still would like to get to know you as an adult. And we all wish you a “Happy Birthday!”

And it occurs to me that your mother was about 28 when we got married.

Earlier segments of this biography of my father can be found below on McHenry County Blog.

In 1952, my youngest sister Ellen was born.

That was also the year Dad switched his registration from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party in order to be able to vote for Dwight Eisenhower for president. (Maryland has a closed primary, unlike Illinois’.)

And the state was as Democratic then as it is now.

To understand how Democratic the area was and how significant it was for the President of the Easton Town Council to switch parties, let me tell you about the 1952 Halloween paintings I helped put on the barber shop’s front window.

It was a parade to a haunted house. On a wagon was a sign that said,

A day or so after we painted it, my 5rh grade teacher, Miss Ornett, suggested that I should change the sign to

Compliant child that I was, I did.

The Eastern Shore had always been conservative. Today my birth place is firmly in Republican Party control.

But I remember in 1948 when I was six asking my mother why she and Dad weren’t in favor of President Truman. I am not sure of the answer, but that’s the first political thought I remember…unless watching my mother cry when she heard the news that President Roosevelt had died in 1945 when I was two years and ten months counts.

Just as Dad may have been the first to get a student loan, he certainly was one of the first Democratic Party office holders to switch to the Republican Party—all the rage while Ronald Reagan was in office.

My mother, who was the daughter of a Queen Anne County, Maryland, Democratic Party county board member James Clayland Stevens didn’t follow suit until 1954.

Her father was the swing vote who tried to keep the county’s two Democratic Party factions honest after he was recruited by one to run on its slate.

First home in Salt Lake City, Utah: 1265 Harrison Avenue. Remarkably unchanged 56 years later.

In 1953, the family moved to Salt Lake City.
Dad found that he could not get a job at the National Canners Association because the national association did not want to offend its regional affiliate.

So, he looked outside of the food industry.

He found the National Chinchilla Breeders and Marketing Associations in Salt Lake City. It had lots of employees, but was looking to modernize and downsize. Dad did both. The association keep voluminous records of the genealogy of the little animals with the softest fur on earth. He implemented a pre-computer filing and sorting system using cards about the size of 4 by 6 inches with places to punch out indicators around all four edges.

That must have meant there needed to be many, many fewer employees, because by the time he moved the office to Middletown, New York, in 1956, the association did not need very many people.

The office was moved because Dad convinced his board that if the industry was going to survive they needed to sell some pelts for coats and stoles. Since the fur market was in New York City, being fifty miles up the Hudson was close enough to make sales pitches in the city and far enough to avoid the high cost of labor there. The pelt is pretty poor, but the black and gray fur you see above is the natural color. The marketers experimented with dying the pelts blue, among other colors.

After about a year, my father was let go. The board figured his two top assistants earning $5,000 each could do the job he was doing earning $10,000. (My sister Jan covers this much better than I.)

So, Dad was looking for a job while I was a sophomore at Middletown High School. What he found paid less than the NCBA, but it was a job. He was the natural resources man for the National Association of Manufacturers dealing with the big lumber companies, among others.

I suspect he immediately starting looking for a job that paid more and would allow him to see his family more than Wednesday night and weekend. (While Middletown was fifty miles from New York, the same distance as Crystal Lake is from Chicago, the train trip was at least an hour and a half. The track was so bad, the commuters called it the Eire and Lackadaisical.)

Addie Louise Skinner

He stayed in a single room occupancy hotel in NYC, meeting all sorts of interesting people, as he did in Chicago when he preceded us to take his new job as Manager of the Barley and Malt Institute.

“Tell Grandmom—his mother—it’s about malt, like malted milk,” he told me by phone. (You see Addie Watlin-Skinner in her mid-nineties here.)

Addie Skinner was not one who favored alcohol or cards. She and her husband left the Methodist Church about 1944 because it was getting too liberal. My grandfather Skinner built a Holiness Church near Crumpton, Maryland, where they retired.

Dad came to Chicago while us kids finished the school year. He lived in a single room occupancy hotel.

Dad and Mom decided on Crystal Lake as the place they wanted to live. It had a lake that seemed safer than Lake Michigan.

= = = = =
Here are the links to the other stories in this series:

Biography of Calvin L Skinner – Part 1 – Second Son, School Years

Biography of Calvin L. Skinner – Part 2 – College, Marriage, First Jobs

Biography of Cal Skinner, Sr. – Part 3 – First House, Elected President of the Easton, Maryland, Town Council

Biography of Cal Skinner, Sr. – Part 4 – Storm Sewer Grates, Miles River Yacht Club, Slot Machines, Chesapeake Bay Bridge

Biography of Cal Skinner, Sr. – Part 5 – Switching Parties, Moving to Salt Lake City, Middletown and Crystal Lake

Biography of Cal L Skinner – Part 6 – The Early Crystal Lake Days, Dipping Feet Slowly into Political Arena

Biography of Cal Skinner, Sr. – Part 7 – Running for County Auditor, Precinct Committeeman, Calling the Meeting that Led to McHenry County College

Biography of Cal Skinner – Part 8 – The Star Reporter, Daughter Ellen Bored in High School, Prohibited from Attending MCC Classes

Biography of Cal L Skinner – Part 9 – Responsible Republicans’ Slate, County Board Reapportionment

Biography of Cal Skinner, Sr. – Part 10 – Unsuccessful County Clerk Try, County Airport Fight, Wife’s Death

The first part of my father’s multi-part biography ran yesterday. Today, Father’s Day, we’ll

Dad graduated debt free from college in three and a half years.

Somehow I have gotten the impression that he was something of a lady’s man. I don’t know how he had time.

He had to take off one semester to work the farm while he father was sick, which I didn’t know until I read my sister Jan Patel’s memories.

Dad’s goal in life was to become a county ag agent.

One of his part-time jobs was candling eggs at a market in Washington, D.C. The Southeast District of Columbia market still exists and I believe it is now an upscale shopping area.

(Later, during the Richard Ogilvie administration, the McHenry County Republican Party sent out a list of jobs that were open. Dad had been elected Algonquin Township Precinct Committeeman in 1966, when I ran for McHenry County Treasurer, and served until 1988. He had been head of the local Nixon citizens committee in 1960. He lost a GOP primary race for County Auditor in 1964 to Harley Mackeben, McHenry County Board Chairman and Grafton Township Supervisor.

(In any event, “egg candler” was one of the jobs and Dad guessed rightly that no one else would have relevant experience. Don’t know where the job was located, but he didn’t get it. Of course, he didn’t really want it.)

Mom was teaching in Elkridge, Maryland. It’s on the Western Shore. Her first year, she coached her girls basketball team to second place in the state tournament.

My mother and father were married on July 31, 1938, in Wilmington, Delaware. The fancy marriage certificate says it was by a Methodist Episcopal minister named Wingate Daniel Short.

Mother lived in Barclay at the time; Dad in Sudlersville, both in Maryland. Helen Roe Stevens and Addie Louise Skinner were the witnesses.

After college, my father taught agriculture in Cordova, Talbot County, Maryland, but discovered it didn’t pay well enough to support a wife.

Then, he took a job with the Federal Land Bank in Baltimore. The two lived in an upstairs apartment in a row house.

As an appraiser, he worked with farmers who held loans with the Land Bank when the Pennsylvania Tollway right-of-way was being purchased, among others.

In 1941,he took a job as assistant to the Tri-State (Maryland, Delaware and New Jersey) Packers Association in Easton, Maryland, with the prospect of becoming its Executive Secretary when the man who hired him retired. I think his name was Frank Shook. They lived in half a house until I was born in 1942.

My September, 1941, conception occurred before Pearl Harbor and for some reason that kept Dad from being drafted. Dad also worked for what the government considered an essential industry–food production. That may have contributed to his deferment later in World War II.

I found a Red Cross Volunteer arm patch, which I assume was Dad’s.

I know he told me that he did serve as a lookout along the shore to see if German submarines were within site.

I’m not sure where, but the coastal areas were worried that a submarine would land spies or saboteurs, I guess.

Our home county of Talbot has more miles of waterfront than any other in the country. (And, the British did bombard St. Michaels during the War of 1812. And, the Nazis patrolled the Eastern Seaboard looking for Allied ships.)

Tomorrow – More of Cal Skinner, Sr.’s biography.

= = = = =
Links to all the articles can be found below:

Biography of Calvin L Skinner – Part 1 – Second Son, School Years

Biography of Calvin L. Skinner – Part 2 – College, Marriage, First Jobs

Biography of Cal Skinner, Sr. – Part 3 – First House, Elected President of the Easton, Maryland, Town Council

Biography of Cal Skinner, Sr. – Part 4 – Storm Sewer Grates, Miles River Yacht Club, Slot Machines, Chesapeake Bay Bridge

Biography of Cal Skinner, Sr. – Part 5 – Switching Parties, Moving to Salt Lake City, Middletown and Crystal Lake

Biography of Cal L Skinner – Part 6 – The Early Crystal Lake Days, Dipping Feet Slowly into Political Arena

Biography of Cal Skinner, Sr. – Part 7 – Running for County Auditor, Precinct Committeeman, Calling the Meeting that Led to McHenry County College

Biography of Cal Skinner – Part 8 – The Star Reporter, Daughter Ellen Bored in High School, Prohibited from Attending MCC Classes

Biography of Cal L Skinner – Part 9 – Responsible Republicans’ Slate, County Board Reapportionment

Biography of Cal Skinner, Sr. – Part 10 – Unsuccessful County Clerk Try, County Airport Fight, Wife’s Death

Today’s “Message of the Day” is a rear window decal.

It is a representation of Durer’s Praying Hands etching.

I first saw them in my grandmother Addie Skinner’s home in Crumpton, Maryland.

She had what I remember as a glass representation.

I last saw them on her coffee table in a senior citizens housing complex in Sudlersville, MD, when I interviewed her.

She was 95 years old.

After her husband Roy died, I noticed that her return address appeared as “Addie Watling-Skinner.” It had never been hyphenated before.

When she died I convinced the family that her name should be hyphenated on her tomb stone.

So, when you see the hyphen in the little cemetery in Crumpton, Maryland, and wonder why, that’s the reason.