Two Thanksgivings - 1925 (diary) and 1957 (photo)

The 1957 photo, taken in the dining room at 1210 N. Euclid, Oak Park,  misses most of 2 people on the right - Jimmie (46) and Lottie Meredith (71), Ruth's brother and mother.  The others are:  (left side, going around table)  Diane Kellogg - 21 , Ken Kellogg - 26, John Kellogg - 58, Esther Wood - 79 (John's mother), Ruth Kellogg  - 51 (turned toward camera)

Thursday, Nov. 26, 1925 - Thanksgiving Day
    "Got up at 5:20.  Evangeline got here at 6:00.  We went for Mrs. Diehl shortly afterward and got at the Oak Park church at about 6:25. Out at 8:30.  
     All but I went to the Chicago this afternoon.  Papa had never seen the inside before.  Irene came out and helped me with my dress.  She had dinner with us at 5:00.  
     At 8:00 Willard rang the bell and came in.  He had come about the ticket, but asked me to go for a ride for 1/2 hour.  I did.  We had a fine ride in the country.  We sat in car in front for a long while.  Irene stayed all night."

The Kelloggs had lived in Oak Park for 16 years when the photo was taken.  Esther Wood lived in Ann Arbor where she and her husband, G.A. Wood, had operated a boarding house for male college students at the University of Michigan.  By 1957 she had retired.  Ken had married in 1956, but his wife, Beth, took the picture, so is not shown.

In Ruth's diary, she speaks of getting up early, which must have been for the Sunrise Service.  A friend, Evangeline, and Ruth picked up a neighbor, Mrs. Diehl and drove to First Baptist Church in Oak Park. Lottie may have prepared some of the dinner that morning or perhaps was reluctant to go to church be-
cause she was increasingly hard of hearing.  The "Chicago" is the Chicago Theatre downtown.

The ticket Willard mentioned was for the prom.  Ruth invited Willard, whom she seemed to have a crush on through the end of high school.  Willard and Ruth sat in the car one time too many.  In early December Ruth's parents, Lottie and Jim, both reproached Ruth for sitting in the car with him, telling her she could not do that for more than 30 minutes.  They may have been concerned about what the neighbors would think too.


   

John Speaks of Esther Clara Webb, His Mother

The quote below is from the beginning of my father's section in Pieces of a Life.  It's taken from the brief autobiography John Kellogg wrote in 1974 called 75 Years - Where Did They Go? 

The picture shows G.A. (Guy Ashford Wood) and his wife, Esther, in their home on Hamilton Ave., Detroit MI in 1922, both in their 40s.  This was after they'd moved from Buffalo NY as newlyweds and before they moved on to Walnut St. in Ann Arbor to buy and manage a rooming house for University of Michigan students. When this picture was taken, they had two young children, Junior (Guy) and Sara Jane.

I remember my grandmother saying that after trying both male and female students as roomers, she settled on only men because they were easier to deal with.  Like my father, she had strong, definite opinions - nothing wishy-washy about her!  Also like John, Esther was very interested in politics and current events.

Esther's first husband was Charles Kellogg, who had died in 1913.  She had been married at 18 and had two children with Charles as well - John Webb and Dorothy Helen.

"By luck I was born into a family which knew gracious living.   One of my earliest memories is my Mother, a young, attractive woman with a flat velvet ribbon around her hair to keep it in place.  One day I asked her why she wore that kind of decoration when none of the other ladies did.  The next day she appeared with her hair fluffed around a metal form called a 'rat.'  We have a 1907 picture of her dressed in that manner with her two children.

Actually she was much younger than the other women she knew.  As a farm girl, at an early age she learned to make her clothes.  Her next step was to do dressmaking in Buffalo NY.  At the age of 18 she married my Father, a widower about 44.  The farm was on Grand Island, which is in the Niagara River below Buffalo and above Niagara Falls."  

I recall a few early pictures of Grandmother Wood, but haven't seen them in years.  I'm sure that I saw the picture my father mentioned from 1907, but it may have been on a wall in Ann Arbor.  Sad that old pictures, letters, journals so often are lost in the dust of time.