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Over 50 years of research into the Stratton, Schneider, King, and allied families—from colonial Massachusetts to Indiana and beyond. Built by Bill & Karen Stratton.
Strattons of Massachusetts Bay
Running Through the Sands of Time
The Life of Lucille Dee King Hendrickson Stratton Hunter Rhinehart
from a son's perspective
by Wm F. Stratton, February 2026
"The days of our years are threescore years and ten; and if by reason of strength they be fourscore years, yet is their labour and sorrow." —The Bible, Psalms 90:10
Before my mother, Lucille Dee King, ever took a breath on July 29, 1902, my grandparents had already buried two children. Their first pregnancy produced twins—a boy and a girl—who were gone almost as soon as they arrived, laid in the ground as "Boy King" and "Girl King" because they hadn't lived long enough to be christened. When Lucille came along, she was the third child born and the first one they got to keep.
I doubt anyone ever sat her down and said, "You're replacing them," but children don't need words to feel expectations. She would have heard it in the way Bertha told the story of the twins, seen something cross Volney's face whenever the subject came up. Kids pick that stuff up without anyone saying a word. I think she knew, even as a little girl, that she couldn't afford to be any trouble. They'd already lost two. That kind of thing sits on a child whether anyone says it out loud or not.
By the time she was grown, people would say my mother was the oldest of eight children, which is true as far as it goes. But inside the family story she was really the third child and the first one who lived, the one they got to keep. Over the next thirteen years, seven siblings arrived, last but certainly not least was Isaac in 1915 when Lucille was thirteen, and the King farm in Thomcreek, Whitley County, turned into a crowded, noisy household where the oldest girl's work never ended.
Her days were filled with endless chores and caretaking: getting younger children dressed, helping with meals, hauling water, washing, mending, minding babies while Bertha juggled everything else. Being "the oldest" in a big farm family was already a full-time job. Being the oldest after the twins died made it something more—she couldn't just help, she had to get it right. I can hear her at the sink: "If I don't do it, who will?" She never stopped asking that question.
"Farm life is not for the faint of heart, but for those with a strong will and a commitment to duty." —Liberty Hyde Bailey, American horticulturist, 1895
The King farm ran like any early 20th-century Indiana homesteads: nobody was extra, and everybody's hands were needed. Men did the field work, heavy lifting, and livestock, while women and girls handled chickens, gardens, canning, baking, dairy, sewing—everything that turned raw farm products into survival. Lucille's world would have been framed by the barn, the house, the pump, the chicken yard, and the garden, with school squeezed in around that when she could go.
What made her situation different were those two tiny graves in the background of the family story. Bertha must have watched Lucille like a hawk—more protective, more anxious, perhaps more demanding. That anxiety trickled down as extra responsibility: "Watch your brothers," "Keep an eye on the baby," "Don't let anyone get hurt." I picture her at sixteen, standing in the yard after supper with her apron still on, watching the younger ones run around, knowing she'd be the one to get them inside and cleaned up. She wasn't their sister by then. She was their second mother whether she wanted the job or not.
That was her girlhood. Holding everyone else together.
"The voice of freedom has always resounded from without, and from within." —Eleanor Roosevelt, 1939
By sixteen, after years of functioning as chief nursemaid and housekeeper, my mother saw a way out—and she took it. On November 23, 1918, still a junior at Ligonier High School, she boarded a train with her teacher, twenty-four-year-old Fred George Hendrickson, and crossed into Michigan so they could marry in Pontiac. To make it legal, they both lied about their ages: she said she was eighteen, he shaved a couple of years off his, and the state of Michigan stamped their union as if it were just another ordinary wedding.
I don't know what they said to each other on that train. I know she was sixteen and he was twenty-four and they both lied to get married the next morning. It wasn't romance. It was escape. Her own house, away from that farm and those expectations. Whatever she was feeling, she never looked back.
"I am not afraid; I was born to do this." —Joan of Arc, 1431
The marriage lasted more than a decade on paper, but somewhere along the way the promise curdled. In 1930 they were living in Ligonier, at 404 Martin Street, with their daughter Winifred Ellen—Peg—and Lucille's younger sister Mary in the house, the census capturing a family that already had cracks running through it. The strangest detail in that census is Fred's age listed as eighty-one when he was only thirty-six, almost certainly not a mistake but a jab, a little act of rebellion in ink. It feels like something my mother might have done with a tight, private smile: "You want to control everything? Fine. Let's see how you like being ancient on paper."
Not long after that, she left. Whether she was pushed out, walked out, or some combination of both, the result was the same: Lucille went to Detroit, and Peg did not go with her. My half sister's life became a shuffle between Bertha and Volney, Fred's people, and various relatives, a rootless arrangement that would mark her for life. My mother, meanwhile, landed in the roaring, industrial city and found work as an accounting clerk at J.L. Hudson's—the towering 25-story department store that dominated downtown Detroit. She was handling bank deposits in the early years of the Great Depression, a farm girl turned working woman in a city that barely knew her name. For the first time, her competence had a paycheck attached to it.
It's easy to judge that choice from a distance—mother in Detroit, daughter left behind—but I try to see it through her eyes. After years of unpaid labor on the farm and then a marriage that had begun as an escape and turned sour, Hudson's must have looked like proof that she could stand on her own two feet. But while she was proving that in Detroit, Peg was being shuttled between relatives—never quite settled, never quite home. I can see both things at once from where I sit: the woman who found out she could make it on her own, and the little girl who paid for that discovery.
"It is not how much we have, but how much we enjoy, that makes happiness." —Charles Spurgeon, 1834-1892
She stayed in Detroit roughly a year and a half, maybe two years. Back in Indiana, Volney had not stopped fighting the marriage. From the day she eloped with Fred, he'd viewed the union as both illegal and improper—his underage daughter married to her teacher on the strength of falsified ages. On January 18, 1932, he finally succeeded in pushing a divorce through the courts.
She had already left Fred in every way that mattered, but the legal end of the marriage gave her something she hadn't had since she was sixteen: a clean slate. When she returned to Ligonier, she was about thirty years old with a daughter who barely knew her and a proven track record in a major city department store. She knew she could survive without a husband's income. That knowledge would shape everything that came next.
"Two souls with but a single thought, two hearts that beat as one." —John Keats, poet, 1819
Into that newly independent life walked Dr. Frederick Nelson "Doc" Stratton, the town dentist. On paper he was everything her father could approve of: a professional man, solid and respected, with a good practice and a good name in Ligonier. Beneath the surface he carried his own complex history—a WWI veteran of the 42nd "Rainbow" Division, a radio operator who had spent the years 1917 to 1919 in France, Belgium, Luxembourg, and Germany, and an early radio enthusiast who had been tinkering with wireless sets since his teens.
By the time Lucille met him, Doc had spent years building and miniaturizing radio equipment, turning what had been clumsy experimental rigs into something small enough to be useful in the field. After the war, he never lost that passion. He was the kind of man who could spend hours at a workbench surrounded by tubes, wires, and dials, chasing a clearer signal from half a world away. I think she was drawn to the steadiness of him—patient, methodical. That must have looked like safety after everything she'd been through.
They married on August 24, 1933. This time she was in her early thirties, not a scared sixteen-year-old. For the first time, it felt like a real partnership.
"In every conceivable manner, the family is link to our past, bridge to our future, and the context for our present." —Alex Haley, author, 1976
By mid‑1934, Lucille and Doc were settled in Ligonier, and their family began to grow. That year their daughter Marilu was born, and three years later, in 1937, their son—me, William Frederick—joined the household. With Peg from her first marriage, there were now three children in the mix, and for a time they lived something like the stable family life my mother had been after since she left that farm at sixteen.
They divided their time between a cabin at Lake Tippecanoe and the King family farm, where Volney and Bertha lived. My grandparents adored Doc. After the disaster of the Hendrickson marriage, here was a son‑in‑law they could proudly claim: a dentist, a veteran, a man from a family of respected standing. For Lucille, that approval must have felt like a long-delayed vindication.
"Illness is the doctor to whom we pay most heed; to kindness, to knowledge, we make promises only; pain we obey." —Marcel Proust, French author, 1871-1922
But nothing in her life ever stayed simple for long. Around 1936, Doc began showing symptoms that disturbed everyone: fatigue that wouldn't lift, trouble with everyday tasks, a body that seemed to be failing him too soon. At the Mayo Clinic, the diagnosis came back as Banti's Syndrome—a rare condition involving an enlarged spleen, anemia, and eventually liver disease, which the doctors believed was tied to his wartime exposure to toxic substances. Doc's job in the 42nd Division had not been standing in a trench with a rifle. He was a radio operator, and radio equipment was valuable enough to be buried—set up in dugouts and bunkered positions below ground level, with improvised antennas rigged up through the dirt to pull in a signal. That meant he spent his working hours in an enclosed space with no real ventilation. When gas came—mustard, phosgene, whatever the Germans were using that week—it didn't drift past him in the open air. It settled into the low ground and stayed. A man in a foxhole might catch a lungful and move. A man in a buried radio bunker breathed it until somebody told him to get out or until it was too late to matter. The concentrated, repeated exposure in those tight spaces was almost certainly what destroyed his spleen and liver twenty years later.
As the disease progressed, the practical impact on the family was enormous. Driving became first difficult, then unsafe, and his dental practice suffered as he struggled to work through exhaustion and pain. Increasingly, they stayed at the King farm so Bertha could help with the children while Lucille tried to hold the household together. Doc traveled to the VA Hospital in Indianapolis for treatment when he could, his military service now the basis for government responsibility for his care.
I picture my mother watching him button his shirt with slow, careful movements, remembering the vigorous man she'd married just a few years earlier. She would have known she was adding another burden to the stack she had been carrying since childhood. But she would have kept that to herself.
"In the midst of chaos, there is also opportunity." —Sun Tzu, ancient Chinese military strategist
Even as his body weakened, Doc clung to his radios. The hum of equipment and the crackle of distant voices were constants in the house—the soundtrack of his waking hours when he wasn't in the chair or in bed. He had earned his devotion to that equipment the hard way. In France, his radio rig had been buried in a dugout for protection, but the antenna had to come up through the dirt to work—a jury-rigged wire sticking up out of the ground that might as well have been a flag to any German spotter who understood what it meant. The equipment survived because it was hidden. The man operating it was a target because the antenna gave him away. Years before any of that, young Fred Stratton had worked summers as a ship's radio operator, tapping out messages from the wheelhouses of oil tankers running between Mexico and the Texas coast, and twice aboard a mail boat threading its way between Havana and New York City. He knew the Atlantic by its sounds—clear signals on calm nights, static when weather came in, the terse back-and-forth between ships that all meant the same thing: we're out here and we're paying attention.
But I think the radios were more than a passion by then. They were where he went. A man who knows he's dying has to put his mind somewhere, and Doc put his into the dial and the static and the distant voices that asked nothing of him except that he listen. With headphones on, he didn't have to be the husband who couldn't drive anymore, or the dentist whose hands weren't steady, or the father who couldn't wrestle with his kids. He could be what he'd always been best at—a radio man, pulling in signals, making sense of what he heard. I don't blame him for it. But the result was that Marilu and I spent more and more time at the King farm with Bertha, and I suspect my mother did too. The household was already splitting apart before Doc died—him at his desk with the headphones, us at the farm, and my mother going back and forth between the two, holding it together the way she always did.
By the late 1930s, as Hitler's Germany grew more aggressive, his powerful homebuilt rigs sometimes pulled in transmissions from Europe—military chatter, coded signals, voices speaking a kind of urgency that needed no translation. On quiet nights he would tune across the dial and find old acquaintances: radio men on tankers still running those same Gulf routes, operators on Atlantic freighters whose call signs he knew by heart. They would talk for hours, trading news, comparing what they were hearing on the ether. Some of what they passed along never made the newspapers.
I imagine him at his desk late at night, headphones on, a notepad nearby with half-legible penciled frequencies and ship names. Lucille passes the doorway with a dish towel in her hands. "What are they saying?" she asks. He lifts one side of the headset. "Nothing good," he says. "There's going to be another war."
"Character is what you are in the dark." —Dwight L. Moody, American evangelist, 1837-1899
Doc's mother, Otilie, never warmed to Lucille. Where the Kings embraced Doc as a son, Otilie viewed Lucille with suspicion and, eventually, open hostility. As Doc's health declined and the question of inheritance loomed larger, Otilie's concern shifted from her son's wellbeing to the fate of the Stratton family assets—property, holdings, whatever might be left when Doc died.
On May 2, 1940, divorce papers were filed in Noble County. On paper, it was Doc filing against Lucille, but the hand behind it was almost certainly Otilie's, with help from her other son, Frank. Given Doc's condition, it's entirely possible he had little idea what was being set in motion.
For the second time in her life, powerful parents were using the legal system to reshape her marriage over her head.
"Grief is the price we pay for love." —Queen Elizabeth II, 2021
Before the divorce could be finalized, Banti's Syndrome finished what the trenches had started. On October 16, 1940, Dr. Frederick Nelson Stratton died, leaving my mother a widow at thirty‑eight with two young children—Marilu, six, and me, three—plus Peg, now a teenager, with her own scars from the past decade. She lost the one man her parents had openly loved for her, the fragile stability they had built together, and, thanks to Otilie's legal maneuvers, most of whatever financial cushion the Stratton name might have given her.
I think of her standing at his funeral, Bertha on one side, Volney on the other, the children fidgeting in their Sunday clothes. Somewhere behind them, Otilie sat with her own grief and her own victory. Once again she was starting over. Kids to raise, no money, and one more thing taken from her.
"The heart has its reasons which reason knows nothing of." —Blaise Pascal, French mathematician and philosopher, 1623-1662
My mother was not one who sat in black for years after a loss. She moved back fully onto the King farm, and life, in its rough, insistent way, kept going. Peg had married Marshall Wallace by then and given birth to Sue Ellen, which meant Lucille was now a grandmother even as she was figuring out how to be a widowed mother of two young children.
She met Roman Lamont "Jake" Hunter in a bar, which tells you something right away. He was twenty‑six, twelve years younger than she was, a talented carpenter with a bad drinking habit and a charm that could fill in the gaps where reliability should have been.
On June 14, 1941, just eight months after Doc's death, they married in Whitley County. Marilu and I went with them to Ligonier, and for a brief moment on paper, it looked like she'd built another family unit: a husband, two children in the house, a new start.
"The heart has its reasons which reason knows nothing of." —Blaise Pascal, French mathematician and philosopher, 1623-1662
"A parents love is whole no matter how many times divided." —Robert Browning, poet, 1812-1889
Volney saw it differently. To him, Jake was not a fresh start but a walking red flag—a drunk, however gifted with wood and tools, and not someone he trusted with his grandson.
At some point early in that marriage, Volney made his move. He took me—three years old then—back to the farm to live with him and Bertha. On the surface, it might have looked like "helping out." Underneath, it was a familiar pattern: the older generation stepping in, deciding my mother's choices were too dangerous, and reclaiming a child for what they believed was a safer environment. The echo of Peg's childhood is hard to miss—once again, a child of Lucille's was being raised away from her because the adults around her did not trust the home she was in.
"A woman is the full circle. Within her is the power to create, nurture, transform, and heal." —Diane Mariechild, poet and author
Out of that bad marriage came one of the best things she ever did for herself. Needing to be out of the house and to have her own money, she went into business with two of her sisters, buying or leasing a converted railroad dining car and turning it into a diner. They set it up across from the Essex Wire plant on Cavin Street, feeding workers who made electrical wiring and came in hungry before and after shifts.
This was during the war years, when rationing made every pound of sugar, every pat of butter, every slice of meat something to be stretched and guarded. I can see her at the grill in that narrow car, apron on, hair pinned back, barking out orders with affection: "Eggs over easy! Bacon if we still have any. Coffee all around." The work was hot, demanding, and endless—but it was hers. Every hour in that diner was an hour she didn't have to navigate Jake's moods, and every dollar that went into the till was money she'd earned by the sweat of her own labor.
Later the diner was moved to a major intersection of Highways 6 and 33, replacing a converted gas station and becoming a local landmark. For people passing through, it was just a place to eat. For my mother, it was proof she could run something on her own.
"Strength does not come from winning. Your struggles develop your strengths." —Arnold Schwarzenegger
From 1941 to 1945, as the country fought Hitler and the Axis, my mother fought her own war at home. Life with Jake was rough from the beginning. His talent as a carpenter was real, but talent doesn't show up for work when the man is drunk, and alcohol had a firm hold on him. The cycle was always the same: a good stretch when he stayed mostly sober and the charm returned, followed by a slide back into bottles, sharp words, slammed doors.
Marilu was with her through most of this, growing up amidst the clatter of dishes and the smell of frying bacon, watching her mother juggle business, customers, and an unstable home life. I stayed with Volney and Bertha on the farm, probably safer there than in the chaos of Lucille and Jake's household, but also farther away from my mother's daily life.
Then the seams started coming apart everywhere at once. Volney's health had broken down to the point that Bertha could no longer care for him at home, and he was admitted to the VA Hospital in Marion, Indiana. With her husband gone and no longer able to run the farm alone, Bertha—and I, still a boy of about eight—moved in with Lucille and Jake in Ligonier.
It was a catastrophic arrangement. The household with just my mother and Jake had already been unstable; now you added a grandmother trying to hold some kind of order together and a young boy who would see things no child should see. Meanwhile, Marilu wasn't in that house at all. She'd been living for years with Aunt Mary and Uncle Sam Patton—Mary having married Indiana State Trooper Sam in 1937—alongside their boys, Sam Jr. and Ron, born in 1940 and 1942. Marilu found in the Patton household what my mother could never quite sustain: steady routines, two parents who weren't at war with each other, and a home that didn't explode without warning.
I look back and see two households—ours and the Pattons—moving in opposite directions. Theirs was becoming the safe harbor. Ours was slowly sinking.
"Courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the assessment that something else is more important than fear." —Franklin D. Roosevelt, 1933
For me and for my mother, 1945 to 1949 were the worst years. Jake's drinking shifted from harsh words and slammed doors to outright physical abuse. The more he drank, the more dangerous he became, and the smaller our house seemed. Bertha was there, watching her daughter get hit, trying to shield me when she could, knowing she couldn't actually stop the blows.
I remember the feel more than the individual incidents: the way the air changed when he started in, the way my mother's voice went flat and careful, the way my grandmother's hands shook as she tried to keep things normal around the edges.
In 1949, everything broke. There was a particularly violent episode—one of those nights that burns itself into a child's memory like a brand. Jake beat my mother while I was there, watching, powerless. Then, in a rage that felt almost methodical, he burned whatever he could get his hands on. Clothes, photographs, keepsakes. It was as if he wanted to erase proof that she'd ever been anything but his battered wife.
That was my breaking point. At twelve years old, I left to live with Peg and her family—Marshall, Sue Ellen, and Shirley Jean—in Arizona. I didn't have the words for it then, but I was fleeing a war zone for a place that, by comparison, felt like peace.
"There is a time for silence and a time for words. There is a time for endurance and a time for action." —Unknown
After that night and my departure, Lucille still had to survive long enough to get free on paper. Somehow, she did. On May 24, 1950, she finally divorced Jake Hunter. She was forty‑seven, and this marriage had taken more from her than any other—her safety, her possessions, her son's presence in the house, and a good portion of her faith that life could be made stable.
Unlike her first marriage, ended by a court at her father's insistence, and her second, ended by death and a hostile mother‑in‑law's legal games, this one ended because she reached her own limit. She'd buried one husband, left another, and survived a third's fists. She knew how to work. From then on, she leaned on that.
"The greatest glory in living lies not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall." —Nelson Mandela
After the divorce, my mother was on her own for the first time in a long time. No husband, no abusive partner in the next room, just herself and whatever she could build. In 1951, Bertha moved in with her full‑time; Volney had been in the VA hospital in Marion since the mid‑1940s, and when he died, Bertha became a widow with a dependable income from veterans' benefits and Social Security. The house was paid for, which meant that for once, the ground under my mother's feet wasn't shifting.
Then came Karen Ann. She was the baby daughter of Jake's sister Mary, born out of wedlock to a man named Gerald Renner at a time when such a situation drew more judgment than support. Mary couldn't keep her, and Lucille stepped in. The household became an unusual little unit: my mother, my grandmother, and a baby who wasn't related by blood but was loved and cared for as if she were. Bertha was still mobile and capable enough to help with childcare while my mother worked, and together they gave Karen something neither had been able to give consistently to their own children—stability.
I think my mother knew it, too. She may not have done right by all her kids in the past. She was going to do right by this one.
"Independence is happiness." —Susan B. Anthony, women rights advocate, 1820-1906
For nearly twenty years, Lucille supported that household with a string of jobs that were all hard on the feet and the back but honest and steady. She worked a lunch counter at Matthew's dime store in Ligonier, pouring coffee and serving sandwiches to people who knew at least some of her story and, no doubt, gossiped about the rest. She cooked in the school cafeteria at Ligonier Consolidated Schools, feeding children in the same system where she had once been a student and where her first husband had taught. She put in time as a laundromat attendant, wrestling with endless loads of other people's dirty clothes in the humid heat of washing machines and dryers.
These weren't careers in the modern sense. They were jobs, stitched together with Bertha's checks to make a life. In that little house, two aging women raised Karen Ann, determined that her childhood would not be defined by instability and sudden departures. It wasn't glamorous, but they were eating, the lights were on, and the girl had a bed that was always in the same place. That was more than my mother had been able to offer before.
"Love is not about finding someone to live with. It is about finding someone you cannot imagine living without." —Unknown
After three marriages—one to a man who exploited her youth, one cut short by illness and interference, and one to a violent drunk—you'd think my mother might give up on men entirely. She didn't. There was still a part of her that believed she could fix someone, that her loyalty and work ethic could redeem a broken man. That's where William Eugene "Bill" Rhinehart comes in.
Bill was a WWII Navy veteran who had served on the destroyer USS Conner (DD‑582) and the cruiser USS Cleveland (CL‑55). He was intelligent and kind, qualities that had not always been present in her earlier choices. He was also an alcoholic, which my mother read as "needs me" rather than "danger ahead." The difference, as it turned out, was in who he was when he drank. Unlike Jake, Bill's alcoholism did not turn him cruel. Whatever damage it did to his body, it didn't twist his basic temperament.
On October 4, 1969, in Brimfield, Noble County, Lucille married Bill. She was sixty‑seven years old, and this was her fourth and final marriage. This decision was made by a woman who knew exactly how hard life could be and still chose companionship over solitude.
"The simple things are also the most extraordinary things, and only the wise can see them." —Paulo Coelho, author
Against the odds, those years with Bill were some of the happiest of her life. Bill loved Bertha, loved Lucille, loved Karen Ann, and showed it in small, consistent ways that mattered more than grand gestures. He brought his own veteran's disability income into the household, and combined with Bertha's benefits and my mother's work, they found themselves not merely surviving but actually living.
For the first time, Lucille had the financial and emotional breathing room to travel. She came to see me in Arizona, re‑knitting the bond that Jake's violence and my departure had frayed. When I joined the Navy, following in the wake of both Doc and now Bill, she visited me at every duty station she could reach—letters in between, carefully saved in a box that she kept for the rest of her life. Only the farthest posts, like Hawaii and Guam, remained lines on a map instead of stamps in her memory.
Bill's presence gave my mother something she'd rarely had: a safe home. Bertha, by then in her eighties, could slow down in a house that wasn't ruled by fear. Karen Ann grew into adulthood surrounded by steady affection.
"Deep grief is sometimes almost like a specific location, a coordinate on a map of time." —Patti Smith, artist and author
On August 26, 1976, Bill died of cirrhosis and complications from his alcoholism. Lucille was seventy‑four and widowed for the second time. The very thing that had made her feel needed—his drinking—had finally killed him, but this time the loss brought genuine grief, not the bitter relief that sometimes follows the end of a bad marriage.
#### Note on Sources
Not everything I know about my mother came from census records and court documents. Some of the best of it came from people who loved her. Terry Vanette, who married Karen Ann Hunter — the girl my mother and Grandma King raised as their own — told me a story about that time that I could not improve on if I tried. The humor and the heart are entirely his. He is a better witness to parts of my mother's life than I am.
"Love is not about finding someone to live with. It is about finding someone you cannot imagine living without." —Unknown
#### The Social Security Call
As told by Terry Vanette
Shortly after Bill Rhinehart passed away, Aunt Lou came over and the two of them settled in with a bottle of wine. At some point they decided that Lucille needed to call the Social Security office and ask about Bill's survivor benefits. Lucille got the lady on the phone and started working through the questions — Bill's name, dates, service record — and they got that part done just fine.
Then the lady asked, "Were you married before?"
"Yes," Lucille said. "Jake Hunter."
"The simple things are also the most extraordinary things, and only the wise can see them." —Paulo Coelho, author
"And when did you marry him?"
Lucille turned from the phone. "Lou, when did I marry Jake?"
Lou thought about it. "Hell, I don't know."
So they guessed at a date and gave it to the lady.
"And what happened to him?"
"Deep grief is sometimes almost like a specific location, a coordinate on a map of time." —Patti Smith, artist and author
"We divorced," Lucille said. "And then he died."
"When did he die?"
Lucille: "Lou, when did Jake die?"
Lou: "Hell, I don't know."
Another date was invented and submitted.
By now, the rest of us in the room were starting to lose our composure.
The lady pressed on. "Was there anyone before Mr. Hunter?"
"Yes, Doc Stratton." A date was offered. Lou immediately said, "That's not right," and gave a different one. They debated it briefly on Lucille's end of the phone while the Social Security lady waited patiently, and then agreed on something that was probably in the right neighborhood.
"And what happened to Mr. Stratton?"
"He passed away." They sorted out approximately when.
At this point we were all laughing so hard we were about to wet our pants.
"Was there anyone before Mr. Stratton?"
"Yes," said Lucille, without missing a beat. "Mr. Hendrickson. We divorced. He died. Here are some dates." Lou either confirmed them or didn't, it barely mattered anymore.
A pause from the government end of the line.
"Is that all?"
"That's all."
Another pause — you could almost hear the lady steadying herself.
"Ma'am, we would like to ask you a favor. When you marry again, please call us right away so we can keep the records current."
Lucille considered this for a moment and replied, perfectly dry: "After burying four husbands, number five is going to be damn hard to find."
The house came down.
She stayed in Ligonier for the next twenty years. Bertha was still with her for part of this time, and Karen Ann, now grown, remained part of her orbit. When I retired from the Navy in 1980 and settled in Port Orchard, Washington, my mother began visiting, often bringing her sister Lou along.
"Home is not a place, it is the people you love." —Edward Cullen, Twilight series
When Bill died, my mother was determined to stay in her own house in Indiana. She had outlived most of the women born when she was, and independence was by then as ingrained in her as breathing. But age and gravity don't negotiate. The falls started, and then they started coming more often. My cousin Sam Patton, still nearby, grew weary of driving her fourteen miles to the emergency room in Goshen after each new spill. Eventually he told me what I already feared: she was no longer safe living alone.
That's when I knew I had to bring her west. Moving her to Washington meant uprooting a woman whose life had been anchored for decades in Indiana—the King farm, Ligonier streets, Sparta Cemetery where her parents and so many relatives lay. Port Orchard, on Sinclair Inlet in Kitsap County, felt worlds away from Noble County, but in temperament it suited her: quiet, modest, with working people and water always in view.
She came because her boy was here. That was enough for her. In our house she settled into small, steady routines—coffee at the kitchen table, watching the rain streak down the window. She'd gone from horse-drawn wagons to the computer age, all inside one lifetime.
On March 13, 2000, my mother died in Port Orchard at the age of ninety‑seven. On March 21, we took her back east, to Sparta Cemetery at Kimmell in Noble County, where her father, her mother, and many of the King clan were already buried. We buried her next to Volney and Bertha and all the rest of the Kings. She'd spent her whole life leaving Indiana. In the end, that's where she came back to.
Lucille Dee King (1902–2000) was the eldest daughter of Volney William King and Bertha Lena McConnell King of the Brush College Farm near Ligonier, Noble County, Indiana. She married four times: Ira Hendrickson, Frederick Stratton (the author’s father, a dentist and World War I veteran who died of Banti’s Syndrome in 1940), William “Bill” Hunter, and Alfred Rhinehart. She is buried at Sparta Cemetery, Kimmell, Noble County, Indiana.
—Wm. F. Stratton, April 2026
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