Saturday, March 13, 1926

Grandma resumes writing in her diary tomorrow. In the meantime, one more post from the family history she wrote...

"The Bells had been favorably impressed by Gilbert's integrity from the start and in telling about him, Mr. Bell had said, "he may be crippled in the leg, but he is not in the head, which is more important." I liked him from the first, for, although he was quiet in a crowd, he was good company in a small group and really was very keen intellectually. Although he had been unhappy in his home life, with his older sisters always dictating to him, and criticizing everything that he did, he really longed for a home of his own. But he was not really ready financially as we later found out, and attraction overcame our better judgement, and we began to think of marriage. I did not have any trouble in keeping him interested in the church! We often met at the noon hour in a small lunch room that operated on Market Street, between Illinois and the Circle, where a parking garge is now located. I worked a few blocks west or south and he worked on south Pennnsylvania Street, so eating together came to be a pleasant habit. In those days one could get a satisfactory lunch for twelve or fifteen cents, which made our small salaries seem adequate. While we were both working, we saved all the money we could toward furnishing our home, and I bought and made hand decorated things for my "hope chest", too much in love to realize that what we had was not really enough and that we should save longer before we were married. Gilbert was twenty-six and I was approaching my twenty-third birthday, and we both felt that we were old enough to take the final step toward matrimoney. Except among the very rich who had church weddings, it was the custom to have weddings at home with invited friends and relatives present. All but one of my friends had home weddings, so we were married in front of the flower decked mantel at the end of the long living room of my father's home at 3916 College Avenue in the evening of October 20, 1915. Dr. Philputt performed the ceremony and my little nieces, Mildred and Onarga, were flower girls, and carried baskets ahead of us as we went down the stairs and across the room to the tune of the wedding march played on my little piano by my good friend from Kempton, Jessie Cunningham...

...What happened after that is perhaps more vivid in the minds of my children than in my own, for I was so busy caring for my family, and events crowded in so fast that I don't feel that I can trust my own memory."

Grandma wrote the above in 1970. My sister called me and asked if I was going to include information about how Grandma's parents didn't like anyone she dated prior to Gilbert, always saying they weren't good enough, but with Gilbert, Grandma put her foot down and would not listen to them. I don't know about that, but I do recall Grandam wrote someplace that for awhile she thought she was destined to become a farmer's wife, but that relationship didn't last.