Mebbe So

"Mebbe so" was the way John Webb Kellogg said "maybe so", a reflection of his early years in Lancaster and Buffalo, New York.  Every once in a while I'll hear someone with that older upstate New York speech and be reminded of incidents in my childhood.

This picture of my father was taken in about 1919 when he was 20 and living in Detroit and Ann Arbor, Michigan.   He was working multiple jobs because his life was on a financial roller coaster.  Charles Henry Kellogg, his father, had died suddenly at about 59.  Like his father, another Charles Henry, he was an engineer who built bridges all over the East Coast.  Unfortunately, Charles, who had one of the first cars in Buffalo, left his second wife, Esther, a 16-room house, 2 servants and scarcely any money.  I don't know if anything went to the three much older offspring from Charles' first marriage.  They were all in their 30s and only one still lived in the Buffalo area.

By this time John's only full sister, Dorothy Helen, was 9, born in 1903.  At age 13 John's  life turned upside-down, dropping from a privileged status to being concerned about a roof over the head and food on the table.  His mother sold the house, fired the servants and moved from outlying Lancaster to much larger Buffalo.  There she rented and operated a boarding house, helped by one of her sisters from nearby Grand Island.  Esther Clara Webb Kellogg was a grand-daughter of Irish Potato Famine immigrants, a confidant, resillient young woman who grew up on a farm.  She was also the oldest of ten children, used to commanding the others.

Only in her 30s, Esther remarried in 1915, this time to an easy-going Bible salesman.  The family moved to Detroit where there were supposed to be jobs to be had.  According to John, in the early years the budget was tight for Esther and Guy Ashford Wood, her husband.  They had two children, Guy Jr. in 1917 and Sara Jane in 1919.

By the time John entered college, he relished working.  To put himself through the University of Michigan, he baked pies, became a sandwich man to fraternities, waited tables at a fraternity, worked at a "casino" (a resort cafeteria), bid on and won a contract for food concessions at sporting events.  In the first summer after he started school, he was able to work 100 hours a week at the Belle Isle Casino near Detroit and had a place to sleep there.   He saved a lot of money during college.  That was a lesson - save, don't spend - he drilled into his children.  You can find out more about him - and Ruth Meredith - in Pieces of a Life.