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In Search of Ed Haley 165

05 Thursday Sep 2013

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When I got back in Nashville, I arranged all of Ella’s postcards into chronological order in the hopes of discovering some new revelation. Most of the cards were dated between 1908-1918, the years immediately prior to her marriage to Ed. Individually they carried only short messages from family and friends, but together they formed an interesting story line detailing events from Ella’s “single years.”

Ella was at the Kentucky School for the Blind in Louisville throughout the first part of 1908. She returned home to Morehead during her summer break, where friends wrote her fondly from Louisville, Nashville, Richmond, and Paducah. There was one card from “Bridget” – probably the same one that Lawrence remembered his mother visiting in Mt. Healthy, Ohio.

“Suppose you think I have forgotten you but think of you every day,” the card read. “Company season has started in and we are having plenty of visitors. Wish you were one. Your cousin Lula is expecting to go West for her health. She was much grieved to hear of the death of Aunt Henrette. Answer soon with love.”

In June of 1909, Ella received a card from “Loula Lee” in Denison, Texas. This was no doubt the same Lula Lee who Lawrence Haley had remembered playing music on the streets of Ashland at the same time as his parents, likely the same person as “cousin Lula” referenced in other cards.

“Hello Ella how are you,” Loula wrote. “all wright I hope. Got out here all right and I like Very Well. It is hot as Summer out here.”

There was also a card from Nellie Motts in South Portsmouth, Ohio.

“I rec’d your card a few days ago and was very glad to hear from you. I am having a delightful vacation. How did you enjoy the Fourth?”

Then this from “Mabel” in Mississippi: “I am away down in the Sunny South. Awful warm weather. I will be glad to get back to Kentucky.”

Ella was back in Louisville that fall where her brother Allie Trumbo sent several cards to her.

“Luther is at home now,” one read. “Please write within 23 hours this time.”

Luther was Ella’s other brother and a future soldier in World War I.

“Hello Allie,” she responded. “It seems as though you keep the road hot sending cards. Now I have written within 23 hours. What more do you bid me to do? The girls are waiting on you.”

Allie wrote back: “how is everything. We had a little rain last week. Please write within 22 hrs. I just got your letter out of the office and will write to you soon.”

“Thank you for the pretty card,” someone wrote from Providence, Rhode Island. “Am glad you are having a pleasant year. Be sure and do good work.”

More from Allie: “I couldn’t make out all of your card but I enjoy it very much. I will send you some cards of our town which will show the bridge and george’s house and part of grandmaw’s.”

“how are you?” one from someone named Cora in Morehead read. “We have biscuits this morning for breakfast and I am going to have fried potatoes for dinner and when I got your card last night we had beef steak.”

“You have been sending me the ugliest cards you can find,” Allie writes. “Try and do better. The creek was Higher than it ever was before Tuesday night.”

In November 1909, there was a “Forget-Me-Not” card from S.H. Childers postmarked in Hellier, Kentucky.

“I do insist on you sending me one of those pictures,” Childers wrote. “Never mind what it looks like.”

There were more from Childers, often signed, “Your lonely friend,” with passages reading, “I am not quite well now. Haven’t don any thing for two weeks. They tell me I am love sick but I don’t think that’s it.”

Bridget sent a Christmas card, signing her last name as Welsh, while another friend, “Flossie,” wrote a few months later.

“You may think I have forgotten you but indeed I have not,” she wrote. “Hope you are having a good time playing in the snow.”

In May 1910, Allie wrote from Portsmouth, Ohio.

“I came from Ashland on this Boat. We got here all O.K. and have got a job. Go to work Tuesday. I like to stay here.”

For the next several weeks, Ella received mail at 115 Woodland Avenue in Lexington, Kentucky. By June of 1910, she was back in Morehead. A card was sent there to “Miss Bridget Welsh & Miss Ella Trumbo” from Miss Henderson in Little Rock, Arkansas.

In July, there was another card reading, “Know you and Bridget are enjoying each others company.”

Late in August 1910 there was a card from “Aunt Anna” to Ella and Bridget: “arrived here all right. Am well and having a fine time. hope you are both enjoying good health.”

On September 7, “Oma” wrote: “Received your pretty card. I guess you will sure hate to see Bridget leave.”

Later in September was a card sent “With Fond Love” and stamped with a fanciful signature from S.H. Childress at the Sunset Ranch in Rhine, Washington.

“I have at last made up my mind to vacate Ky. and have done so. Will write you all a bout my future home when I get my slate.”

It seemed clear that this “S.H. Childress” was the same “S.H. Childers” who’d written Ella the previous fall. He wrote again in December.

“I believe is your first Xmas at home and I trust it will be the happiest you have ever spent.”

In Search of Ed Haley 151

15 Thursday Aug 2013

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A few weeks later, I gave Lawrence another call. I wanted to update him on Bruce Nemerov’s work with Ed’s records. I’d heard some of the cleaned-up tracks and noticed that Ella’s mandolin was extremely loud at times. I asked Lawrence if it was because she was seated closest to the microphone.

“I’m pretty sure my brother did it all on one microphone,” he said. “But I guess it was placement of the microphone. She was just there to keep a good solid beat going. It wasn’t anybody trying to hog the music someway.”

I really bragged on Ed’s “Fifteen Days in Georgia” and “Over the Waves” — two of the “new” tunes from the Holbrook records. I played Ed’s recording of “Over the Waves” for Lawrence; it was an incredible, up-tempo version with Ella seconding him on the mandolin.

“Well you see, the record I’ve got of that tune she was playing the piano, so they had to be in a studio somewhere for that,” he said, after the recording ended.

“It’s amazing how fast he played back then,” I said.

Lawrence agreed, “Yeah, yeah, it sure was. That was a waltz, and you’d have to waltz the hall if you waltzed that one.”

Lawrence stressed that I had “a lifetime of stuff to study in there.”

I asked him if his father ever listened to the home recordings much and he said, “No, I think Mom put them up and left them up until Pop was dead and then she started dividing them out. You know, letting the kids come in and get pieces that they enjoyed. I had 45 or 50 records that I know of. One or two of them kind of got lost. I think I know who lost them for me. That’s the way things go, I guess. You can’t hold onto every little scrap of treasure all the time. It eventually goes. My mom used to have a whole library — I mean it took up quite a bit of space — ’cause these blind books, the letters had to be big enough to finger them, and they was pretty good size books. When I went into the service, they all left, and her mandolin left, and I guess her accordion went up to Aunt Minnie’s and got burnt up, and some of Pop’s stuff left. They just got rid of it, I guess, just stuff that was in the way for my brother Jack and his wife Patsy. Things like the mandolin and his fiddle I woulda kept.”

I got the impression that Lawrence was satisfied that he had told me all he could about his father, and that his father’s music would have to speak for itself. He was more in the mood to talk about his mother.

“I’m not sure, but I think they put her in school when she’s about four,” he said of Ella. “I think she come out of school when she was nineteen or 20 years old. They must’ve kept them segregated or something. You know, she was in with mostly girls. She had quite a few friends she made while she was at school. I guess they was times when she had bad times, too. Missed her family and missed her friends back at Morehead, Kentucky. She was pretty well-educated. She would read old Chaucer’s English. She’d come out with that on us every now and then when she wanted to really stress something to us. To let us know that she didn’t approve of what we was doing. I don’t know, she was just a wonderful woman to me. She’d sit down and read. You know we’d be laying in a bed in a room pitch black and she’d be a reading that story to us. It didn’t take long to put us to sleep like that. She read the whole Robin Hood stories and Jungle Boy. Stories like that she’d read to us. That was all we had for entertainment. It was a different life for the whole Haley bunch I guess from what most people would realize.”

“I know she had a bunch of friends,” Lawrence continued. “They was one — all I knew her name was was Bridget — and she come right out of school and went to a home-type thing that they had in Mt. Healthy, Ohio. Mt. Healthy is just more or less an outlying suburb of Cincinnati. When Mom would be down in Cincinnati visiting her sister or running her newsstand or something, she’d always go to Mt. Healthy to see Bridget. I think we’d ride a trolley bus or something out there. We’d spend the day out there with Bridget. It was a nice home — great big mansion-type home — plenty of grounds and things. And I’d get out in the grounds the biggest part of the time. I’d be out checking things out on the grounds — fishes in the ponds — and I’d check on Mom every now and then and find out when she wanted to leave or something. But we’d spend that day up there just about every time she went up there till I guess Bridget died.”

In Search of Ed Haley 148

11 Sunday Aug 2013

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Ella provided most of the family entertainment.

“Pop never tried to sing any songs to us,” Lawrence said. “Mom sang songs. She had one she called ‘The Coo Coo’s Nest’. A lot of religious songs, little nonsense songs and rhymes, like ‘The Watermelon’. She had a principal, I guess, or the headmaster of the school — Dr. Huntington, or something like that — he’d come into the class and he’d have a reading session with them. Read them a story and he would read all the parts in different voices. And my Mom kinda got to using inflections a lot more than any of us would. Like, she used to read us Robin Hood from her Braille magazine.”

I wondered if Ed ever entertained the kids with stories.

“Ah, maybe a ghost story or two,” Lawrence said. “He’s telling one time about somebody a riding a… I guess it was a story he heard when he was a kid, too. Somebody was coming down Trace Fork from somewhere riding a horse way up above where Aunt Liza and them lived. Said they began to hear this rattling kind of sound, this guy did. And they said he began to speed up his horse a little bit, and this rattling kept getting louder and louder and he’s a going faster and faster. Said all at once this thing jumped right up on the horse behind him and locked its arms up around him and just stayed with him forever it seemed like. And just all at once got off. Pop could tell stories like that, now. Those stories kinda filled our lonely days, too. That was the thing that they did back in them days, I guess, was tell stories, but Aunt Liza never told any stories like that, or Uncle Peter didn’t.”

I asked Lawrence if Ed “worked on” tunes at home and he said, “Well, yeah, he’d kinda play the general outline and then maybe start working on some of the real, I guess, it would be the depth of a piece of music that he wanted to put in there. Depth or body to it. He’d add to it. But mostly he might just hear a piece of music and maybe just hit every fifth or sixth note or something just to get an outline of how he wanted to play it.”

I don’t think Lawrence realized what an important and sophisticated piece of musical insight that was. What he meant by saying that Ed hit “every fifth or six note” was that he was coming down on the big accent notes that made up the “spine” of the tune. I later wondered if Lawrence’s statement was based on observations or genetic memory or both.

I asked him about Ed playing for dances, but he said those memories had left his mind years ago.

“I was walking from Clay over to Clay Junction there that one night and there was nothing but the moon — it was a full moon — but it was a hazy… It had a big ring around the moon. It was the first time I ever noticed that. Now I can’t remember where we came from, but I know that they had their instruments with them. I guess we’s a gonna go back up on Stinson up there to Aunt Minnie’s. I think this was after the time of Laury’s death, so I guess we’s heading back that way. And if we could get to Clay Junction there, we’s supposed to get a ride or something, I think. Like I say, I can’t remember what kind of function we’d come from, and what we did after that. My recollection of that was walking down this highway — a dark night, except for a hazy, ringed moon. Now that hazy ringed moon kept that in my mind all these years. The rest of it I don’t know. So there’s a lot of stuff that you forget and you never remember.”

In Search of Ed Haley 141

08 Monday Jul 2013

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Ella Trumbo — Ed Haley’s future wife — was born in February of 1888, roughly a year after the feud’s conclusion. She was born with “runny eyes” but went blind after a doctor prescribed “bad medicine.” When the drops were put into Ella’s eyes, the family ignored her crying because they thought she was acting out with what Pat Haley called “the Trumbo temper.” Thereafter, she fell on two separate occasions, losing an eye each time. Mona said her eyes actually “burst one at a time,” leaving her face with empty sockets. Ella told Mona that all she remembered seeing was “the light of day.” Supposedly, Jesse James once stopped at her father’s vegetable stand in Morehead and gave her money because she was a little blind girl.

Some time between 1893 and 1899, Laura Belle Trumbo died, leaving a great void in Ella’s life. The situation was complicated when her father remarried to a woman named Nannie around 1899. Nannie, or Nan, as she was called, was born in April of 1878 — making her barely older than William’s oldest child, Zora. Ella did not like her stepmother, Pat said, because she was really close to her father. She found comfort among her friends at the Kentucky School for the Blind, which she attended from the age of about four years until she was nineteen or twenty years old.

In 1900, the Trumbos were listed as renters in the 1900 Rowan County Census (Morehead Precinct): William was a thirty-eight-year-old farmer, Nannie was twenty-two, Zora was twenty-one, Texas Anna was fifteen, Ella was twelve, Allie was nine and Luther was several months old. Zora worked as a day laborer, while Texas Anna and Ella attended school. All could read and write except the youngest two children.

Thomas Trumbo — Ella’s grandfather — died in October of 1909 and was buried on Triplett Creek.

“Thomas Trumbo was buried on a point overlooking his property, a place he had chosen because it was where the morning light first struck,” according to one local history.

A year later, in 1910, William Trumbo was listed in the Rowan County census (Morehead Precinct #1). William was a fifty-eight-year-old farmer, Nannie was thirty-two years old, Ella was a twenty-one-year-old blind music teacher, Allie W. was an 18-year-old working at odd jobs, and Luther was sixteen years old. William’s mother, Celia, was listed in the home as seventy-two years old, with five of her seven children alive. Willie A. Campbell, a forty-six year old widow, was listed in the home as a ward. All could read and write. Celia died four years later on January 13 or 14, 1914 and was buried beside of her husband on Triplett Creek.

By 1920, William had left Morehead and settled at Clyffeside Park in Ashland, where he was listed in a city directory as an employee of the Vansant-Kitchen Company. “In the timber-boom era of the 1880s to the early 1900s, Ashland and the immediate vicinity had several saw mills, among them the famous Vansant-Kitchen Mill,” wrote one early history. “Located at Keyes Creek, this mill depended principally on the river for bringing the timber from the forests to Ashland. It made use in the early days also of the splash-dam system of floating logs down Keyes Creek, but as the timber in that area became harder to reach, the system no longer worked well and a narrow-gauge railway was built up the creek to haul the timber from the jobs far up the hollows.”

Following William’s death, Nan remarried to a Brewer.

In Search of Ed Haley 108

11 Saturday May 2013

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I asked Lawrence if he knew anything about his brother Clyde supposedly trying to play the fiddle.

“Well, he never said anything about it to me and if he ever played the violin I never saw him, John,” he said. “But he did sit around and play a little on the guitar. Then he got away from home and got in some kind of industrial accident working in a woodshop or something and a band saw got his fingers. Mona, she’d take off with Pop a lot of times up into West Virginia and they’d be gone a week or two. She went with him as much as any of the rest of us did. Most of the time whenever I’d go, there’d be my mother, too.”

I told Lawrence what Wilson Douglas had said about Ed being able to get around extremely well on his own.

“I can remember, just like going up Harts Creek,” he said. “Remember where you turn off to the Trace Fork they got a big new church and stuff? They wasn’t anything in there then. They wasn’t even a road. People made their own footpaths around close to the hillside. Most of it was just pathways. And that’s how Pop could go from one house to another, I guess. He’d know when he was on that path — how many steps or something it was from his place to anybody else’s he wanted to go to. It’d be like if somebody could count the streets in succession — if they’re numbered streets… Mom could get around Ashland here anywhere she wanted to by herself, but Pop wasn’t too good at that. He couldn’t keep track of how many blocks he’d walked or where he’d started from a lot of times. He just didn’t have the training, I guess, to learn how to handle hisself as a blind man. Mom went to that Louisville School for the Blind. She was there about twelve or thirteen years, I reckon, and they taught her piano music.”

Lawrence told me more about his memories of his father’s appearance.

“He walked fairly fast and upright as a fence post with his shoulders throwed back,” he said. “He was no slouch. He set in his chair upright. A lot went through his mind, I know that. He used to tell me, ‘Son, if a man can think it up and imagine it, then it’s possible.’ In later years, he was always having some problems with his arms and hands. I remember him shaking his hand real vigorously, like he was trying to get circulation going back in it. He’d walk through the house a lot. ‘Course he’d go up and down the street some. If he felt like he wanted a beer or something, he might get out and go and play down at Russ’s Place half a day and drink what beer he wanted to and then he’d come home. I’ve seen Pop get pretty high at times.”

Lawrence said, “Well, I’ve tried to think and tell you everything I know my dad did. If I’m helping you at all, I’m tickled to death. I didn’t know him that long. He was about 44 or 45 when I was born. I went into the service when I was about eighteen and I wasn’t out of the service maybe a year and a half and he was dead.”

In Search of Ed Haley 76

05 Tuesday Mar 2013

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That evening, back at Lawrence’s, I was full of questions about Mona. She had made a real impression. As I spoke about her, I could sense a little hostility from Pat, as if there were years of family trouble between them, barely hidden away.

“Mona was married to Wilson Mullins,” Pat said. “He was from Harts. Mona was fourteen, I guess, when she married and he was 23 years older than her. She had one boy by Wilson Mullins — Ralph Andrew, who was named after Ralph Andrew Haley. When I came over here in 1949, Mona was divorced from Wilson and she was married to a Kenny Smith. She had two boys by Kenny Smith. Freddie lives in Michigan and Kenny Jr. lives in Ohio. Kenny Sr. is dead. Had a heart attack in Cleveland.”

After a brief marriage to Raymond Willis, a railroad engineer in Ashland, Mona married James Hager.

Pat said, “We met him once. I think they lived in Ohio.”

Mona had a daughter by Mr. Hager named Mona Lisa.

Pat seemed to think the most of Lawrence’s brother, Jack.

“Jack was a very devoted husband and father and had a beautiful home,” she said. “He worked very hard. Larry and Jack were very, very close. Jack was five years older than Lawrence.”

Jack’s wife Patsy had done a lot of family research “but found nothing beyond Uncle Peter and Aunt Liza.”

I asked if Patsy had any pictures of Ed and Pat said, “No more than what we have, because when Rounder Records came to Larry and we was getting pictures for them we went up to Pat’s and Larry got records from them. Jack had four or five records left and their son Scott brought those to Washington and whatever pictures they had.”

Pat promised to ask Patsy if she had anything.

Later that night, Lawrence told me more about his mother. He said Ella was a very small person, only about five feet tall. As a young woman, she attended the Kentucky School for the Blind at Louisville and earned a piano teaching certificate at the Morehead Normal School (now Morehead University).

“Mom was very refined,” Pat said. “No matter where she went, you could always tell she was an educated lady. Mom had very good manners. She was very good at speaking. And when you saw her and Pop together, and listening to both of them, you could tell there was a vast difference in the way they were raised.”

“Mom would read Dickens to us,” Lawrence said. “Robin Hood, Great Expectations — all them classical stories that came out of England and places at that time.”

When young, Ella was proficient at playing the piano and organ. After marrying Ed, she learned to play the mandolin and banjo-mandolin so that she could play “his type of music.”

“She used to sing more of the old English-type music,” Lawrence said. “Little nonsense stuff. We’d ask for it a lot of times ’cause we didn’t have anything else but the radio. I remember her singing one that had to do with a sea captain and it went something like this:

There was a noble boatsman.

Noble he did well.

He had a lovin’ wife

But she loved the tailor well.

And then it went on to state that the sea captain had to take his boat and go on a trip and he left his house and kissed his wife and started out. And the local tailor came in. And it just so happened the captain had forgot his sea chest so he came back and when he knocked on the door the wife was trying to find a place for him to hide. Guess where he hid? In the sea chest. And what happened to the tailor, he got chucked into the sea sometime or another on that cruise.”