McHenry County Blog

Neighbors of a proposed shooting ranged on Route 120 east of Marian Central High School owned by a “Franks Trust” organized so well, that the petitioner for a change in the parcel’s zoning withdrew his petition.

That’s what you see below:

While my mother’s family owned land, my father’s did not.

Roy Skinner was a carpenter and handyman of many skills, if his tools (including a cove molding device) in the basement are any indication, but often a farmer.

One of the family’s tenant farms (in high school) was next to my mother’s.

The closest high school to the family farm was in Sudlersville, where both my mother and father attended high school.

When my father was undergoing lung cancer treatment in Washington, we drove over to the Eastern Shore.

As we went past one road at a bend in the highway between Centerville and Church Hill with a run down building that appeared to have been a store on the west side of the intersection, Dad told me he used to live down it.  Is is south of Clanahan Shop (I think) Road.  Dad said he knew Mr. Clanahan for whom it was named after.

I see from the map that it is called White Marsh Road.

He told of walking down the dirt road with his father.  I gathered he was over ten but not in high school yet.  That would have put it in the late 1920′s, since he was born in 1916.

“What’s that?” he asked, as he saw a crowd of men up ahead.

“Don’t look at them.  Just keep on walking,” his father said.

It was a lynching.

The road on which my father lived had both whites and blacks.

When I contacted Maryland state officials they said no lynchings had taken place in Maryland since 1900.  I suggested that a lynching in Queen Anne’s County in the late 1920′s would not have made the  Queen Anne’s County Record.

It’s not exactly something the powers-that-be would want recorded.

But my father had died, so I couldn’t produce the eye witness and the lynching trackers in Maryland apparently didn’t believe me.

More tomorrow.

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.

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.

“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.

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.

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.)

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

Father’s Day is tomorrow and it seems appropriate to jot down some thoughts about my Dad.

The story got out of hand, so I’ll cut it up and run some each day until I reach the end.

Calvin LeRoy Skinner was born in Wilmington, Delaware June 8, 1916, the second son of Addie Watling and Roy Skinner.

His mother was running a corner store. She already had son George when she became pregnant with Dad.

I was interviewing her in her 95th year and she suddenly asked,

“Are you in favor of abortion?”

“I don’t know, Grandmom,” I replied, not knowing where she was going.

“Well, you better not, because you wouldn’t be here if I had followed my girlfriends’ advice.”

Her girl friends suggested if she had a second child she would have to close the store.

The family also lived in Chester, Pennsylvania, and on various rental farms in Maryland, two I know of were in Queen Anne’s County.

Dad’s father was a handyman-builder and farmer. He built their home in Chester. At one point his mother worked in a fireworks factory in Chestertown, Maryland, that blew up. She led survivors to safety, crawling under a wire fence.

The family lived on rental farms, one of which was next to his future wife Eleanor Stevens near Barclay, Maryland.

Another was on a road where he and his father saw a black man lynched. They were walking home as the mob was stringing the poor man up. (I wrote Maryland officials interested in lynching, but none are listed in Queen Anne’s County after 1891. I figure this probably occurred in the 1920′s, but Maryland statistics show no lynchings in that decade.)

The last farm was near Route 50 east of Crumpton and Dad farmed it during World War II when his father became unable to do so.

As a high schooler, Dad excelled in agriculture, becoming President of the Maryland 4-H All-Stars. (He must have had a politically astute Ag teacher to win the convention held in Fredericksburg, Maryland.)

As a kid he broke his arm falling out of a tree. His father set it. The result was a slightly bent arm the rest of his life, left, I think.

After graduating from Sudlersville High School, the same year as his future wife Eleanor, in the summer before attending the University of Maryland, he may have received the first student loan.

The local banker asked him,

“Calvin, how are you going to pay for college?”

Dad told him he was going to work his way through.

“Here’s a check book. If you ever need money, write a check.”

Dad got his first car, a Model T with a rumble seat, I believe, when he walked by a man on a road who couldn’t get his vehicle restarted.

“You want it?” he asked.

My father answered in the affirmative.

“It’s yours,” the owner said and walked away.

Tomorrow, Cal Skinner, Sr.’s story continues with Part 2

= = = = =
Links to all the stories are 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