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Family Stories
A potpourri of stories about various family members or events
From Burlington to Mahnomen
On Aug 13, 1969, our family (except the oldest child and the youngest child) departed on a two-and-a-half-week trip to Canada, Vermont, Massachusetts, D.C., and back home. Day 9 into the trip, my dad had one more day of his week-long conference/meeting. On that day, my mom learned from the campground host at our Burlington, Vermont campground that she was supposed to call the Western Union. This being 1969, we predated common cell phone usage by at least 35 years (and another 40 years or so for me). Thus, as my mom knew that she had to call the telegraph company, this could only mean that someone has an important message to convey.
George Smith holds his first child, Virginia
She was asked to call her mother, Eva, who lived with her husband George in Mahnomen, MN (clicking on the town you will learn the meaning of the town in Ojibwe, a local Indian tribe and language). Upon calling, my mom discovered that her father, George Jacob Smith, had died the night before on 19 Aug 1969. He had been having some heart issues, but the prostate cancer that was found five years earlier had metastasized enough to end his life of 72 years at the local hospital.
George Smith
Possibly to accommodate my mother, the funeral was scheduled for Saturday. Friends of my parents, the Carufels, were also present in Burlington for this same meeting. Since the distance was over 1330 miles, Mom and Caye investigated flights. The best plan seemed to be to fly out of Albany, NY (150 miles away) on Friday early afternoon and then to fly back to Boston on Sunday morning. This worked well with dad’s schedule since he was done by Friday (though perhaps not until the afternoon) and we were going to go to Boston anyway, since the Carufels lived in that area.
George Smith and wife Eva Goodale
Mom and Caye took us kids to Fort Ticonderoga on Thursday to wrap up our week in the Burlington area. Friday morning, we got up early and left Burlington at 8. She got on her plane at 12:30 for her 1:00 flight and took a Mohawk flight to the Kennedy airport (JFK) in New York City. She then took a Northwest Airlines flight to Fargo (with stops at Detroit and Chicago). Art Ladwig, her sister Vivian’s husband, picked Mom up at Fargo and brought her to Mahnomen. This made for a very long day.
Family gathered after funeral
Saturday’s funeral was set for 1:00 in the afternoon. At 11, she went to the funeral home and conveyed her last goodbye to her father. There was a dinner at the church at 11:30. After lunch, as they were about to take some photos, Jesse (my grandfather) and Bruce arrived. Bruce was under Jesse’s care while we were gone on this trip. He was shy of being 7 at this time. Mom wrote in her trip diary that “Bruce was my shadow all p.m.”, which is quite understandable.
Don (mom’s only brother) and Fonda (his wife) took Mom back to Fargo to catch her 11:40 p.m. flight to Minneapolis. She then went to Chicago and had a five-hour layover there, and then arrived in Boston at 10:15 a.m. I am sure that she was totally exhausted, but she joined our family, with the Carufel and Hickling families, at a beach north of Boston, Crane Beach. I am not sure when she got caught up with her sleep, but I am guessing that we kids had no idea of the ordeal that she had just endured, both the traveling and the loss of a parent, and yet we continued to expect her to be “Mom”.
This event was part of the trip out east we took in 1969. See http://alhibbard.com/stories/familyStories_a/overview_of_1969_trip_east.html for other things that happened with more photos. This story and the one mentioned above are both based on my mother’s diary for this trip.
Published 2021-02-06. Revised 2025-06-30.
If you find any errors in the text, please let me know. Thanks. Contact me with errors or comments using hibbardac@gmail.com. [Back to the top] [About the author, Al]