Jeannie Out of the Bottle - Barbara Eden [6]
Goodbye and may the Lord give you strength to endure whatever you may be called to go through.
Direct your letter “John A Bills, Ramsey-Fayette Co Illinois.”
Your Father John A Bills
Mrs. Bilista A Long
San Francisco
Cal
The Mary mentioned in the letter was my great-grandmother, Mary Dorothea Long, who came west in the covered wagon with her parents, Bilista and William Long, when she was only four years old. After her parents’ untimely deaths, she was raised by nuns in San Francisco.
My great-grandfather, Richard O’Leary, was born in County Cork, Ireland. When he was a child during the potato famine, his parents, hoping to save his life, put him on a ship bound for the New World. That ship turned out to be one of the “coffin boats,” so named because so many children who sailed on them died of starvation or disease during the harsh and unforgiving Atlantic crossing.
Richard O’Leary was one of the lucky ones; he survived. At fifteen years old, still unable to read and write, he took a job building the transcontinental railroad and ended up in Marysville, California, where he met a priest and confided to him that he wanted a wife.
The priest relayed that information to my great-grandmother, Mary, who thought about it for a bit, then informed the priest, “I’ll walk out with him.” So that’s what she did, for just one week, at the end of which she announced to the priest, “I’ll marry him,” and did.
She went on to teach my great-grandfather to read and write, and had nine children along the way as well, one of whom was my maternal grandmother, Frances Elvira O’Leary, who was born in Nevada and went to school there.
Meanwhile, back east in Pennsylvania, my maternal grandfather-to-be, Charles Benjamin Franklin (a distant relative of the great man himself), the son of an Englishwoman, was orphaned at nine after his parents were killed in a carriage accident.
On discovering that young Charles had been left alone in the world, his two maternal aunts sailed from England to America, determined to bring him back home to the old country with them. The aunts realized Charles was happy in his new home and allowed my grandfather to stay. However, later, he ran away from home, apprenticed himself to a ship’s carpenter, and sailed the seven seas.
By the time Charles arrived back in America, he had married, divorced, and along the way become an accomplished carpenter, adept at all branches of the trade, including cabinetry. Finally he turned up in Nevada, where he booked into a small boardinghouse. There, one morning, a beautiful young girl—Frances Elvira O’Leary—served him breakfast.
Although he was entranced by her charms, he nevertheless couldn’t help noticing that she kept rubbing her cheek. Without any preamble, he demanded to know why she hadn’t seen a dentist. She blushed scarlet and shook her head, whereupon he grabbed her arm and declared, “Whether you like it or not, I’m taking you to one.”
He did, and within months, my grandmother, Frances Elvira O’Leary, married Charles Benjamin Franklin in San Francisco. My mother, Alice, the youngest of four children, was born in El Paso. My grandfather became a house builder and would remain so for the rest of his days, building homes in Los Angeles, El Paso, and Tuscon, Arizona, which is where I came in.
During the first two or three years of my life, because money was quite scarce, we lived in Tucson and then El Paso with my grandparents. My earliest memory is of sleeping in one bed with my mother, in the morning watching her get dressed for work, and being overwhelmed by her youth and beauty.
In the early thirties, my mother attended business college, where she learned dictation