Fred Miller

I don’t know the name of the girl to whom my Dad proposed marriage before he met my mother. I never heard it, and if either of my sisters did, they’ve forgotten. Most definitely it is not recorded in the family Bible.

Whatever became of this ex-fiancee, I wonder? Did she and Dad stay in touch? Not likely, I would think. Not on planet “Ol’ Food.”

My sister Col. Peggy remembers some details, none of which I knew, but then I was younger and a boy. Our mother, Ol’ Food, would have leaked some of the story to her daughters. The girl was a redhead, which explains my genetic predisposition for redheads. I married one; Dad almost did. Is not a single photo of this girl tucked away somewhere?

When some years ago my wife organized old photos of us and our children into scrapbooks, it didn’t seem quite right to include some of former boyfriends and girlfriends, but not right to throw their pictures away, either. They are a part of family memories; most good, some not so good. Honey’s solution was to make a special album of just the “Ex’s.” Pictures of the ex-whatevers of other relatives went in there, too.

Regarding Dad’s “Ex,” he must have met her through 4-H, because the girl found out when Dad showed up at a Jacksons Mill conference with his new wife. How embarrassing for her, as well as for the newlyweds! She had prepared “treats” to distribute to friends with the announcement of their engagement, a custom of the time, says Peg.

Mom and Dad met when she was two years out of high school, working at a drug store soda fountain in her hometown of Hamlin in downstate West Virginia. He was five years older, a college graduate (bachelor’s in agriculture from WVU) probably working as an extension agent for Lincoln County. He worked a variety of jobs in agriculture for government including managing prison work farms and monitoring the “government mule” Depression-era program for poor farmers. The family moved frequently around the state during the war and into the ’50s.

They married Jan. 4, 1941, after an apparently brief engagement.

What makes this story so astonishing to anyone who knew my Dad is that they would never think him the jilting type. But he was the kind of compliant man who a determined woman could get her hooks into, and Ol’ Food proved to have the stronger hooks. The situation he found himself in, having promised marriage to one girl then marrying another, must have stressed him out terribly. How to break the news to her? He must have been in a dither, because the way he chose was the worst imaginable.

Why, you may ask, am I asking these probing questions now, so many years later, when no one alive can give me the answers?

Curiosity, that’s all. There aren’t many secrets in our family. The few there were, were mostly disclosed when we kids became adults; that my parents as young marrieds drank, for example, as most in their circle did back then. My sisters and I grew up with no liquor in the house because one day crossing Mud River on a swinging bridge, my Dad had been drinking. Holding toddler Jeanne by the hand and baby Peggy in the other arm, he lost his balance and dropped Peggy off the bridge and into the mud. In his defense, swinging bridges are hard to walk across holding onto the ropes with two hands. I grew up thinking my parents were teetotalers.

Then there was the secret half-brother in mother’s family, born out of wedlock and given to people nearby to raise. Him I didn’t know about until fairly recently, though it happened more than a hundred years ago. I say that our family’s deep, dark family secrets are few, but then, they might be so bad that I wouldn’t know, would I?

I personally generated a catalog of embarrassing stories in my younger days. The grandsons know most of them. With the passage of years, those I can tell have become cautionary tales with some wry comedic value.

Still, regarding the jilted fiancee, I understand why it wasn’t a family story we learned at Daddy’s knee. Some uncomfortable memories are best ignored until forgotten.

It just occurred to me that in the “Ex’s” photo album I mentioned above there are no pictures of Mickey, the jerk Honey began dating after she threw me over in college. (Long story, my fault.) Because of him, to this day I hate Mickey Mantle, Micky Rooney and even Mickey Mouse. I won the girl, but there darned we ll had better not be any pictures of boyfriend Mickey anywhere in this house.

Dad, if you’re somehow following this, forget I ever brought it up.