Thunderstruck - Erik Larson [14]
Philo Crippen and his wife soon had a son, Myron, who in turn married a woman named Andresse Skinner and eventually took over the family’s dry goods empire, while also serving as tax assessor for the city’s first ward and an agent for a sewing machine company. In 1862 Myron and Andresse had their first child, Hawley Harvey, who arrived in the midst of national tumult. Every day the Coldwater newspapers reported the ebb and flow of shed blood, as the country’s breeders shipped off horses to support the Union effort, in all three thousand horses by the war’s end. The Coldwater Union Sentinel of Friday, April 29, 1864, when Hawley Harvey was two years old, cast gloom over the town. “The spring campaign seems to have a bad send off,” the newspaper reported: “—disaster, defeat or retreat has attended thus far every effort of our armies.” Branch County’s young men came back with foreshortened limbs and grotesque scars and told stories of heroic maneuvers and bounding cannonballs. In these times conversation at Philo’s dry goods store did not lack for exuberance and gore.
DESPITE THE WAR HAWLEY enjoyed a childhood of privilege. He grew up in a house at 66 North Monroe, one block north of Chicago Street, at the edge of an avenue columned with straight-trunked trees having canopies as dense and green as broccoli. In summer sunlight filtered to the ground and left a paisley of blue shadow that cooled the mind as well as the air.
Sundays were days of quiet. There was no Sunday newspaper. Townspeople crossed paths as they headed for their favored churches. In the heat of summer cicadas clicked off a rhythm of somnolence and piety. Hawley’s grandfather, Philo, was a man of austere mien, which was not unusual in Coldwater among the town’s older set. A photograph taken sometime after 1870 shows a gathering of about twenty of Coldwater’s earliest residents, including Philo himself. It is true that in this time people set their faces hard for photographs, partly from custom, partly because of deficits in photographic technology, but this crowd might not have smiled for the better part of a century. The women seem suspended in a state somewhere between melancholy and fury and are surrounded by old men in strange beards that look as if someone had dabbed glue at random points on their faces, then hurled buckets of white hair in their direction. The day on which this photograph was taken must have been breezy because the longest and strangest beard, stuck on the oldest living citizen, Allen Tibbits, is a white blur resembling a cataract. Grandfather Philo stands in the back row, tall and bald at his summit, with tufts of white hair along the sides of his head and the ridge of his jaw. He has prominent ears, which fate and blood passed downward to Hawley.
A man of strong opinion and Methodist belief, Grandfather Philo exerted on the Crippen clan a force like gravity, suppressing passion and whim whenever he entered the room. He hunted evil in every corner. Once he asked the Methodist council to “prevent the ringing of bells for auctions.” In those days members of the congregation paid the pastor for their seats, with the highest-priced pews in front selling for forty dollars a year. It was an impressive sum—over $400 today—but Philo paid it and made Hawley and other members of the family join him every Sunday. In matters involving the Lord, no expense was too great.
Worship did not end with the pastor’s amen. At home Grandfather Philo read the Bible aloud, with special emphasis on the gloomy fates that awaited