Straight Life - Art Pepper [12]
(Sarah Schechter Bartold)* My husband was born in Italy. I think he said he had four sisters, but maybe there were three. Two were living when I went there many years ago. I couldn't say a word. They brought a chair outside. They didn't invite me in. They were country people, very suspicious.
My husband went to study for the priesthood when he was a young man, but he didn't like the things he saw going on there. He came to this country, and he was a waiter. He also worked in the coal mines. When I met him he was an insurance man. We met back east. I worked daytimes, and then I went with him to all his prospects at night. But I actually never got, out of fifty-eight years with him, more than he told me. And what difference does it make?
I don't remember anything about Ida [Mildred Bartold, Art's mother]. She was seven or eight when she came to us. She was pretty, but she was a terrible little troublemaker right from the beginning. She was a liar, a little liar. But I really don't
* See Cast of Characters on page x, for identification of speakers.
remember why she was sent to live with us. Maybe they felt that she would do better in America. As far as I knew she was one of my husband's sisters' children. She was a little liar, and that's the whole story. A child who fibs can do an awful lot of damage, especially when you have little children of your own. She lied about all sorts of things, about the other children-"This one did that." And they were younger than she was, so I thought it best not to have her around. But why stir up the past and cause her son to have hard feelings about her? She was his mother. Was he her only child? Did he inherit anything when she died? She had nothing to leave? I remember her mostly as a terrible fibber.
(Thelma Winters Noble Pepper) Arthur Senior, "Daddy," was born in Galena, Kansas, and then I think they went to this Missouri mining town. Grandma's [Art's grandmother's] first husband worked in the lead mines. And it was a real sad thing there because her husband, I think his name was Sam Pepper, was a periodic drunkard. Every weekend when he got paid, he'd go to the saloon to cash his check, and then usually there was nothing left. So this one time, they were visiting Sam's sister's family, and this sister's husband and Sam, they both got drunk, and the sister called the police, who took 'em both to jail, and I think they must of give 'em a thirty-day sentence. And while he was in jail, the place where Grandma lived-they evicted her. She had four or five children at that time (one had just died), and there wasn't no place for her to go, so they sent her to the poor farm, she and the children. And she was expecting then. She was carrying her twins. They told her, "You know that you can't keep your children here. They'll have to be put up for adoption." She said no way was she going to let her children be put up for adoption, so she went back to where they had been living. She knew an old man that had a rundown, old chicken house. She asked him if she could move in there, and he told her that if she thought she could make that livable, she could have it, and she did. When Sam come out of jail he didn't look for her. He just stayed away. He just decided to beat it. So that ended that, and that was two months before her twins was born. This all gives you an idea of why Grandma was like she was.
The twins was only three weeks old when she went to work. She and her sister-in-law took in washing together. And the boys-the sister had a boy about Daddy's age-they'd deliver and pick up. I guess this was in 1895. Daddy would have been about nine years old.
When the twins was fifteen months old they got-at that time they called it membranous croup, but now we know that it was diphtheria. So one of 'em died, and they took him away to be buried, and then the second one got