Dad’s mom, Mary Alice, was a tiny lady. The picture I have of her shows her to be very thin faced, much like my Aunt Ella. She just got to feeling bad one day and went to sleep and didn’t wake up. Maybe she was just plum tuckered out. She had thirteen kids. My dad was the second to youngest but the youngest to live past early childbirth. I have Grandma Wells’ black chest that seems to have all of her “kept” things. I can’t tell what some things are or what some notes mean, but they were things guarded for one reason or another. Because I have begun doing some of the research too late almost everyone has passed away that can help me find out more about Mary Alice Long. We don’t know about her family and how and when they or she came in to the area. It has been a dead end for us as we do the genealogical research.

My dad was the baby of the family but actually, in retrospect, he became an adult much quicker in age than any of his siblings. The others seemed to have each other and their mom around. My dad pretty much had to go it alone.

The older brother and sisters had moved on with their lives and had left the younger kids. With Grandma Mary Alice gone my grandfather James Washington Wells was old even then. Consequently, my dad and Uncle Conard basically raised themselves. My dad at times has almost proudly shown me a scar from a gunshot wound when a boyhood friend accidentally shot him with a 22 in his leg. Dad has limped or had a shorter leg all his life because of it.

When dad talks about his past it always seems to be a story about getting or working for food or being in a fight with somebody in the neighborhood. I can’t imagine being left alone like that. He just learned to do what had to be done to eat. He was shortchanged in life with many things, but, if you don’t know you are shortchanged you don’t worry too much about it. Harry, my dad, never had a middle name. I always figured his mom just ran out of names or perhaps an older sister named him. As I look at the names of all of the kids that dads ancestors had I see James and John and Joseph come up over and over again….but never a Harry. It might have been a name in vogue at the time.

Last year I met a lady, a cousin of his, who told me a story about my dad showing up at their family’s doorstep once every week or so. He would just come in and sit down at the same place at the table with them wearing a potato sack as clothes, no shoes and not saying much as he ate. After eating, dad would just leave and they wouldn’t see him for a week or so again. They used to make fun of him for wearing a dress. My dad says he didn’t wear a potato sack and never a dress. To be honest, I don’t know if I believe him. Pride could have caused him to forget.

As I hear dad talk about the area and the things that went on in his childhood I can see that he lived in a relatively small area, some 20 miles square but, when you walked it on foot, with dirt or muddy roads, it must have seemed it was the whole world and that it centered right in Park City and Rhoda (pronounced Rhody by the locals).