childhood

Normal farm-kid, me. If a redhead ever can be normal. :)
At the end of the first grade I and my parents decided we coud give myself a birthday party; inviting schoolmates. A creek existed for us and a multivaried lawn. Far, far back from the public, gravel road.

The idea might have been that someone else would have a party the next summer and so on. But no one picked up the tradition. Not until our senior year did the class clown and person from one of the two rich families in gave a party. It must have been a halloween party, because I remember dunking for apples. Someone suggested spin the coke bottle but that was hushed up so quickly that I didn't even learn anything about the RULES of this game. What a waste :(

An aunt recently said I was a whiz kid when half-gown. But I was not making straight As, so I'm not so sure.

Oh I know!; PS.  Mother was an elementary teacher and she kind of held off on some things.  She did NOT want me to be an exceptional child or anything near.  I was the oldest of 3 and no suggestion was there than I'd learn to read before six and the first grade.  That's it. I was not making straight As because school and studies was de-emphasized. 

In 2d grade and then again 7th grade the family, five of us traveled to the South. Dad, a farmer, sometimes had health problems. And he hoped somehow to find a way to provide for us all, in a less strenuous occupation.
Bless him, hoping he looks down on me today :,) ---These forays into milder climes gave me a glimpse of --other ways--.  I observed a school in Florida teaching Florida history first and American history second. It was a beginning of a certain kind of cosmopolitanism of mine, these journeys.
;

;
more later

Family (this is geneology to say)

Bowens from the 1690s,
Benedicts from the 1620s.

The name Bowen relating L to former Gov Otis Bowen
This line (which is my father's side) coming to northern Indiana in1835, a few months before that area opened up.

Although the time of the Benedicts coming to Indiana I do not know, the Voreises came -- as the Bowens -- the 1830s. A large boulder with a plaque sits beside SR 110 leading into Culver with the names of the first six families. V. being one of them. Bigley of the Maxinkuckee Bigley Orchards is also on that plaque.
The story is that a small wagon train was passing through that area: In the morning the milk-giving cow was being rounded up; (small children in the caravan, you know). The individual out looking for the cow saw a lake. What was later to be named Lake Maxinkuckee. Aha!, the group decided to seek no further for a place to settle.

These were my grandFATHER'S people. Benedict being the family of my mother's mother.

My parents met at Manchester College. Dad's sister roomed down the hall from Mother. Although it was eight years later when they began to court. Walking across campus one day they caught sight of....

Somehow Mother had maintained ties there. A brother of my father's was by then attending there.

.