Henry Cline Almost Reached His Goal

     

Henry Cline - 1918

       William Henry Cline

 1859-1949

Photos from

1918 and 1947
He was my grandpa!

Henry Cline
1947

The photo above is how my father remembers his father.  The picture on the left is the last known photo of Henry Cline, taken in 1947.  He was eight-seven-years-old in the photograph on the left.  I only have a faint memory of my grandpa Cline.  I was five-years-old when he died, and he was in a nursing home the last six months of his life.  I do remember climbing a very steep hill to reach the nursing home where he lived at the time of his death.  My brothers remember him more.  I also remember family members use to ask him what time it was and he would pull his watch out and tell them.  It was an elegant gold pocket watch with a gold chain.  I also remember he had bandages on his face and arm when I saw him.  He had skin cancer, and then he had to have one arm taken off above his elbow due to cancer.  In the 1940s they did not have the medical procedures they do now.  They just removed the body part that was cancerous.  

Henry Cline was born in 1859 in the town of Moscow, Kentucky.  The mode of transportation then was a horse, horse and buggies, steamboats, or trains.  In his early years, he saw both Union and Confederate soldiers traversing through or by his family farm in Hickman County, Kentucky. His Tickell grandparents lived only five or six miles away in Fulton County, and his Cline grandpa lived on the adjoining farm to his family.  The town of Moscow was thriving in the 1860s until the turn of the century.  Moscow had a train depot, hotel, bank and more than one store that carried groceries, excellent dress materials and quality China, as well as other things that families needed.  Henry's father, William, took over his father's (Aaron) business in town when he died.  I counted over 60 families living in Moscow on the 1870 census records.  Today, there is less than a dozen families in Moscow. 

Henry was educated in the public schools in Moscow.  After graduation, he helped his father on the farm and dating a few young ladies in the community.  When his father died in 1885, Henry and his siblings moved across the Mississippi River to New Madrid, Missouri where his mother's (Tickell) family lived.  It was there that he met his second cousin, Lena Kline.  They fell in love, and in 1888, they married in the Methodist Episcopal Church, South in New Madrid.  That church still stands today.

Henry and Lena had three daughters and five sons.  My father, Curtis H. Cline, was one of their sons.  Henry and his family were a prominent family in New Madrid County, Missouri.  Henry had a good life where his generation saw travel change from horse and buggies to airplanes.  

One of my grandpa Cline's goals was to reach ninety-years-of-age.  He died on the 17th of August 1949, and he would have been ninety on the 29th of December, 1949.  He missed his goal by a little over four months.  Had he not set that goal, he could have died much sooner based on the cancerous issue he suffered.  The fact that Henry lived so long is a lesson on the importance of setting goals.  I wish he could have lived a healthy life well into his nineties so I could have gotten to know him well.  God's blessings Henry Cline, I know you are enjoying heaven cancer free.

Grandma Price-Austill was a loving Grandmother

Carrie Rettig-Price-Austill was my maternal grandmother. Grandma Rettig married Henry Price in 1914.  In April 1915, they had one daughter, my mother Marie, and were expecting a second child in the month of July 1916.  On June 5, 1916, a deadly tornado dipped down on the Price farm in New Madrid County, Missouri.  It killed Carrie Rettig Price's mother-in-law and sister-in-law instantly and severely injuring her husband, Henry Price.  My Aunt Beulah was born eighteen days later, and my grandfather died twenty days later on June 25, 1916.  My grandmother was a widow at age twenty-two with two young daughters to raise. She had a hard life with much work and little security.  Most impressive, she never complained and had a warm, caring, and positive attitude about life.

She briefly married Clyde Austill and, along with her daughters, raised his two sons.  She loved Mr. Austill but he drank too much, and she left him after a couple of years and was again without real means of support.  Upon her death, her two step-sons attended her funeral.  She took in cleanings and did what she could but was often forced to live with one relative or another during her daughters' formative years. About the time they were teenagers, she was employed by the International Shoe Company in Sikeston.  That allowed her to rent her a place, and she was much happier.

 She was a quiet lady who wore a hearing aid most of the time.  When she had her hearing aid in she was soft spoken.  Once Sunday after church, I went home with her for a few hours.  I played near her with childhood toys she kept in her closet for me.  All of a sudden, she said something to me so loudly it frightens me.  My parents said I got up and ran the three blocks home.  She did not have a telephone at the time, so she walked to my house behind me to learn what caused me to run off.  I told her she had never yelled at me before, and it scared me.  My mother laughed because she knew how Grandma talked without the hearing aid.   I think Grandma was embarrassed.  From that point on she never took her hearing aid out around me and I always looked to see if it was in her ear.  Back in the 1940 and 1950s they were worn outside the ear and were about the size of a nickel.

Grandma Price-Austill lived in small dwellings in the time I can remember visiting her.  One place was a small duplex with persimmon trees in her back yard.  She told me not to eat them unless they were dark orange.  One day I was in the back yard, and I just had to try one.  I had waited a long time for those persimmons to ripen.  I got a bucket to stand on, and I picked one that was mostly orange, but it had a bit of green on it too.  Oh my goodness!  That was the worst thing I ever tasted.  It puckered my mouth for hours.  Grandma did not scold me; she just told me I should listen to her the next time she gave me instructions about something. From that day forward I listened to her every word.

In the late-1950s, she moved to an apartment in downtown Sikeston, above the Collins Music Store.  I remember taking a set of very steep stairs to reach her apartment.  Once she opened the door to her two-room, one-bath apartment one was always impressed at how fastidious the two rooms were.  She was a second-generation German-American, and they believed that cleanness was next to Godliness.  You could not find a speck of dust on her floors.  The apartment had a tiny kitchen, with a divider between the small stove, refrigerator, and dining area.  The divider was where she kept her dishes.  The dining area was small, a standard table and chairs would not fit into the designated eating area provided, because space was only about four feet by five feet in size.  Instead of a standard table, she had a fold-down table, and two thin benches, one on each side of the table, where she ate her meals.  The table and benches worked like a Murphy bed.  Not once did I ever hear her complain about a lack of space.  She loved the little place she made her home.

On another of my visits, I remember Grandma taught me to like spinach.  When I was about five or six years old, I was spending another Sunday afternoon with her.  Grandma started cooking supper for us.  The vegetable was spinach.  After she had cooked it, she ate some of it and went on about how good it tasted.  She said there might not be enough for me.   After it had finished cooking, she put a big helping on her plate and a small serving on my plate.  That was not her normal way of feeding us.  I watched her eat it and heard her make noises of delight.  She had me wait until after everything else on my plate was eaten before eating my spinach.  When I finally tasted it, I thought it was the best vegetable in the world.  I still like it today.

She taught me many things in her unique style.  It is odd what we remember about the ones we loved after they are gone.  My paternal grandfather died when I was five, and Grandma Price-Austill was the only grandparent I had the privilege of knowing.  She was not well educated, but had good common sense; she had little in material wealth, but she was happy and a good Christian lady who I loved very much.