Part IV · THE YEAR THE FAMILY BROKE APART · Chapter 17

Finding Bill

Ottawa, Illinois · Hammond, Indiana · Centerville, Iowa · 1969–2005

In the record Al Krewson (1943–2006) · Bill Krewson of Hammond · Anna Marietta Krewson · Marvel Krewson · Della Krewson (d. 1968) · Galen Vane Krewson (1897–1957) · Michael V. Krewson

"When Bill got my letter from Ottawa, written around September 1969, he phoned me and invited me to his place … but only if I could tell him my dad's middle name … which I did. He said I was right, and only a relative would have known this. He asked if I knew where he was born. I said Cincinnati, Ohio. He asked me if it could have been Cincinnati, Iowa. I told him it was possible, but I never knew there was a Cincinnati in Iowa, and assumed it to be Ohio. So, he was reasonably sure I was for real and invited me to meet him" [1].

That is how the second half of this family found the first. Al was twenty-six, out of the Navy, and in Ottawa, Illinois, for reasons the letters do not give. Bill Krewson of Hammond, Indiana, was his father's first cousin — a son of one of Charles's brothers, and so a grandson of Lewis and Phoebe — and "knew my dad very well" [1]. The middle name was Vane. The town was Cincinnati, Appanoose County, Iowa, a coal-mining village of a few hundred people eight miles south of Centerville, which is where Galen was born and which no Los Angeles child had any reason to know existed. Bill did, and used it. A man who had not been heard from since 1935 had a son at the door.

The photograph

"When he first saw me, he thought at first I was 'Gale' (my dad) cuz I looked so much like him" [1]. Al told him what he had — the windmill, the tall grass, the stream, the man on the tractor, the heavy-set woman and the potato bugs — and Bill said the landscape "was exactly like the terrain where his cousin Marvel lived." Then, one evening, he did what the book has been doing for seventeen chapters, which is to put a document in front of a memory:

Della had died the year before, in 1968. The other two were alive, and Bill telephoned Anna and "told her he is sure I am Gale's son." Anna took him in for some days "so we could get to know each other," and while he was there she rang Marvel, put him on the phone, and went to another room [1].

The telephone call

What happened on that line is the one scene in the whole archive where a rift is caught in the act, and Al told it plainly:

Anna "was very saddened to hear of how Marvel treated me on the phone and wondered why." Al worked it out from something Bill had told him. At the reunion a few years earlier — the one where the three sisters were photographed — Bill had overheard Marvel telling Anna and Della "of a family in LA that their brother Gale produced in the early to mid 40s, and she had first hand knowledge of this. Bill asked Marvel what this was all about, but she suddenly shut up and said no more" [1]. She had kept four small children on her farm in 1946 and let them be taken away, and told no one; and now one of them, "the picture of my dad," was on the phone. "Aunt Marvel was afraid I'd recognize her once I saw her" [1]. Bill and Anna both told her, later, that "the real loss was hers more than mine … though mine too" [2]. The book's reading is the simplest one: what Marvel could not face in 1969 was not Galen's son but her own part in 1946, and the fear was of being known rather than of being blamed. She and Al never met. The woman with the potato bugs is a photograph and a voice on a telephone, and the book has no more of her than that.

What Bill knew

The rest of what Bill told him the book has already used, in chapter 12, to close Part III: that Galen was last heard from in Iowa in 1935; that Charles "was after my dad's blood, because he blamed my dad for the deaths of a couple of other sons" — "all circumstantial and never proven," in Bill's view — and that Galen "literally feared for his life and got as far away as possible from Iowa," never learning that his father died that same year [1]. Bill's other verdicts on his cousin were fair in both directions: "my dad got blamed for a lot of things that were simply not true, but … he also did some things that were regrettable"; never a heavy drinker that Bill saw, "though he has seen my dad have a nip here and there"; "definitely a lady's man … he had a couple of wives up to 1935 when he disappeared" [2]. Al set all of it down without choosing, which is the reason this book could be written from his letters at all.

"To make things short, I wound up moving to Hammond and he looked over me like a father would his son and helped me get started and establishing myself there. He found me to be an excellent worker" [1]. In 1970 Al went to Centerville and "met some more relatives" [3]. Bill put him in touch with Earl in Portland, and Portland is where the rest of his life was [2].

1987

Seventeen years later he went back, with a family of his own. "I saw Aunt Anna again in 1987 while returning to Portland from Florida. She was so happy to see me again and had us all stay overnight with her. She absolutely loved my wife and kids, at that time Cheryl, Laura, Khrissie and Paul. When leaving, she thanked me so much for stopping by so she could see my family, assuring me and my wife that I would take the best care of them in my power and not let what happened to us kids happen to them too … She was so happy to see that there was some tangible good coming out of my father's story … good responsible children of his own taking proper care of their own" [2]. Anna died, Al said in 2005, "a couple of years ago." That was the same year — 1987 — that Al, on some visit to California, sat a sixteen-year-old nephew at a piano and tried to teach him Chariots of Fire. The book has no way of knowing whether it was the same journey. It notes that the man who had found his family was, that year, showing it to the next generation at both ends.

The rifts

On the evening of 20 January 2005 Michael, thirty-three, in Bella Vista, Arkansas, wrote his uncle a question. It is quoted here because it is the question this book was written to answer, and because he asked for the book in the same paragraph:

Al answered twice that night. The first answer was a correction, and a careful one: not that the family lacked loyalty, but that "there is a history of very serious family rifts that have occurred, to where one side of Krewsons have nothing to do with the other side of Krewsons … but within each side is to be found a fierce loyalty. This is particularly true up to the generation previous to mine and your Dad's. One reason I couldn't get info from some Krewsons was because I was born on the wrong side of the fence as far as my lineage is concerned, but this rift has nothing to do with us personally" [4]. And then, an hour later, when Michael asked what "the wrong side of the fence" meant, the sentence that is this book's epigraph:

He was right about the 1600s, and he could not have known how right. He had never read Cruise; he thought the family had come "with the Pennsylvania Dutch" in the 1500s [3]. But the book has now gone back and looked, and the rifts are there in the documents, one to a generation: Garret Croesen and his minister over the trees in 1662; a father's will burned and a brother sued in Bucks County; the Staten Island cousins with a Loyalist brigade in their house and the Flying Camp lieutenant in Bucks County on opposite sides in 1776; Charles "after my dad's blood" in 1935; Marvel and the four children in 1946; Marvel and the telephone in 1969; and two brothers who wrote their nephew opposite accounts of the same Irish house within five years of each other. "No one was talking about what they were." That was the diagnosis. The treatment, Michael proposed in the same exchange, was a record that succeeding generations could add to — and Al's reply was to write it all down, in two long emails the next morning, the letters Part IV is made of.

He died a year and three days later. Michael built the record. This is it, and Part IV ends where the family's own genealogist would have wanted it to: with the finding, not the fence. "Let's keep each other posted of what we find out."

The ground it happened on

Period-general, as always. Hammond, Indiana, in 1969 was the western edge of the Calumet — steel mills, oil refineries and rail yards on the Lake Michigan shore, a city of a hundred thousand where a man who could work found work, and a good place for a cousin to look over a young man "like a father" [5]. Ottawa, Illinois, ninety miles south-west, was a river town at the meeting of the Fox and the Illinois, glass and silica sand, the site of the first Lincoln–Douglas debate. Centerville, Iowa, where Al went in 1970, was a courthouse-square county seat of six thousand whose coal had run out; Cincinnati, Iowa, the village Bill named, had been a mining camp and was by then a few hundred people on the Missouri line [5]. The Krewson family reunion of the mid-sixties, where three sisters were photographed and a fourth sibling was mentioned and then not, was the kind of thing an Iowa family held in a park shelter or a church basement on a Sunday in summer, with a long table and a photographer, and everyone who could be found — which is the point.

1. Al Krewson to Michael, 21 January 2005, 11:01 a.m. (al-krewson-early-childhood-1-2005-01-21.htm): the letter from Ottawa, Bill's test, "Cincinnati, Iowa," the photograph of Marvel, the three sisters' reunion picture, Aunt Anna, the telephone call, Bill's account of the reunion and of Charles. Quoted as written, typing slips silently corrected.
2. Al Krewson to Michael, 21 January 2005, 11:55 a.m. (al-krewson-early-childhood-2-2005-01-21.htm): Bill and Anna telling Marvel of "her big mistake"; the 1987 visit to Anna with Cheryl, Laura, Khrissie and Paul; Anna's death "a couple of years ago"; Bill's verdicts on Galen; Earl in Portland.
3. Al Krewson to Marcia Shaw, cc. Michael, 20 January 2005, 9:20 p.m. (info-on-krewson-fathers-names-and-iowa-2005-01-20.htm): "My particular line of the family hails from the Centerville, Iowa area. I had a chance to visit there in 1970"; his full name and birth date; the line Galen → "Franklyn Charles" → Lewis. The "Pennsylvania Dutch … mid to late 1500s" belief: his 26 June 2002 email. Cincinnati, Appanoose County, Iowa (laid out in the 1850s; a coal town; a few hundred people by 1970): the county's published histories.
4. The exchange of 20 January 2005 (more-rifts-in-the-family-2005-01-20.htm): Michael to Al, 8:51 p.m.; Al's two replies, 9:33 p.m. ("fierce loyalty … wrong side of the fence") and 11:40 p.m. ("the whole Krewson line all the way back to the 1600s"). The chapter's list of rifts refers to chapters 2, 8, 10, 12, 13 and 14 of this book and their sources.
5. Hammond and the Calumet region, Ottawa, Centerville and Cincinnati, Iowa, c. 1969–70: general and county histories; period-general, not a record of where Al lived or worked.