The Babbs Switch School Fire

As told by Hall Cavel Jr, Charlie's eldest son - 13 February, 2009


While living in Carmi (Illinois) in the early 1940s, Dad came home from work one day to find the house next door was on fire. He asked some people standing on the street watching if the family had gotten out and they said they didn't know. Dad ran into the burning house, found the woman and carried her out, then went back in and got the child and brought it out. Boiling tar dripped from the burning roof onto him and blistered his back. He had a row of blisters as big as quarters all down his back from his neck to his hipbones.

It wasn't the first time he'd saved lives in a fire. After Hall told me about Dad's involvement in the Babb's Switch School fire I looked up the official reports on the web, the story of Dad's involvement is afterwards.

"On December 24, 1924, a crowd of nearly 200 had gathered to watch grade school children perform an annual Christmas songfest at the Babb Switch School in Hobart, Oklahoma when fire erupted. A candle placed on the top of a Christmas tree, located on the school's stage, fell into the tree branches causing the tree to burst into flames. Parents saw the fire and rushed the stage to rescue the children. The children unaware of why everyone was rushing at them began to retreat. This caused the tree to topple.

The play had been taking place in the rear of a one-room schoolhouse, the farthest distance from the one door. The fire forced the children to the rear of the stage - trapped with no avenue of escape. Parents grabbed children and ran through the flames towards the door but since it opened inward and the crush of terrified people were pushing forward the door was jammed shut. No one could escape through the windows because they were covered with wire mesh, probably to keep baseballs from breaking the glass.

Some men arrived and began pulling bodies and survivors through the exit door. The door had become jammed due to the onslaught of humanity. Within minutes the building was incinerated along with the loss of thirty-six lives. Most being small children."

Christmas Fire in Oklahoma School House Claims Lives of 33 With Five Missing.
(By The Associated Press)

HOBART, Okla., Dec. 25th; With the identification of the last victim established the rechecked death list in the Christmas Eve fire at the Babb Switch rural school, stood at 33 tonight. Twenty injured persons are still confined in two hospitals. One is expected to die and two others are in a critical condition. Funeral services for 16 of the dead will be held tomorrow.

Memorial for Fire Victims

GRIEF STRICKEN LINE SEARCHES MORGUE.

(By The Associated Press) HOBART, Okla., Dec. 25th;

With thirty-two bodies, most of them burned beyond recognition lying in a temporary morgue in two store buildings and five others listed as missing as a result of a Christmas eve fire at the district school house at Babb's Switch, seven miles from here. Hobart citizens tonight were continuing their efforts to identify the dead.

At a mass meeting today called by Mayor F. E. Gillespie, committees were named to look after every detail of the sad task and the work was going forward systematically.

It has been decided to bury all the unidentified in a large grave in the Hobart cemetery and late today a crew of men broke the snow that blanketed the burial ground to throw up a long trench of earth. Early tonight only ten of the dead had been identified, despite the fact that the morgue was early thrown open to the public. A steady procession of grief stricken relatives filed all day long between the shrouded forms, but so terribly had they been burned that it was impossible in most cases to mark the features of loved ones.

Halls' story of Charlie Cavel's involvement in the event:

On Christmas Eve night, 1924, Dad was working as a fireman in the grain elevator at Hobart (OK). He and the fire crew, including Orville Grider, were called to the Babbs Switch School, which was on fire. They tried to open the school's only door but the door opened inward and people had packed up against it in an effort to escape. When they couldn't open the door they chopped through it with their fire axes, and were able to start pulling people out, but many people died, and as a result legislation was passed requiring that the doors on all public buildings in Oklahoma open outward.

As an aside, Hall Cavel Jr. married Deloris June Grider, daughter of Orville Grider, who worked as a carpenter at the grain elevator in Hobart and went out with the fire crew to the Babb's Switch School Fire. Charlie and Orville worked together for a few months in 1924, and 27 years later when Hall Jr. told Charlie he was marrying a girl whose surname was Grider, Charlie remembered working with Orville well enough to describe him perfectly; i.e. short, skinny and blind in one eye.

The Mystery in the Field

Cavel House Built by Grandad Fred in 1911

This is a story I heard numerous times as my Dad, Charley Hall, and his brothers sat around and talked after meals. It must have happened when Dad was about 11 or 12, as the family was living in the house on Highway 7 near Velma then, and that's where the story took place.  

The boys had been told by their Dad to clear and plow a previously unbroken field. They had cleared the brush from the field and were plowing (with a mule). They were picking out rocks and throwing them in a pile at the edge of the field as they turned them up. After several passes across the field one of them remarked that the rocks they'd been picking up seemed to lay in a regular pattern, a series of circles. This piqued their interest, and they began to pay more close attention to the position of the stones. 

Soon it was clear that the rocks were not only laid in circles, but that the circles got closer together as they neared the middle of the field. By the time they got to the middle their boyish imaginations were on fire. The final ring of stones lay in a small circle a couple of feet across. They were sure they had found the spot where the famous Jesse James' gang had hid their loot. (Apparently everyone in Oklahoma and Texas had a theory about where this stashed treasure lay - my Granddad Clark used to go hunting for it every summer.) 

The boys dug the rocks from the middle of the circle and found a large flat stone. They pried it up, to find a stone-lined vault, a fold of calico fabric and another rock beneath. At this point they ran to get their dad, sure they'd found treasure and were bursting to uncover it. But when he arrived he scolded them, saying they had disturbed a child's grave. He made them replace the stone on top and cover the hole back in. He then sent them to clear a different field and told them to leave that one alone.

One thing the Cavel boys did not do was disobey their father. They dared not investigate their find further. But in the night they went out and set up markers in the adjoining woods, took sightings and made notes, so that in the future they could come back to the spot. 

Before the farm was sold, which must have been after my Granddad Cavel passed away in 1941, the brothers went back to the site. They hunted up the markers in the woods and paced off the steps. With great expectation they dug where they'd found the vault some 25 years before, but there was no sign of it. There was nothing but dirt. They rechecked their markers and notes, and paced it out again, which brought them to the same spot. 

They were as mystified as men as they had been as boys, but for a different reason. Now they couldn't understand what had happened to the rings and the stones. They speculated endlessly; had their father moved the markers, had they paced it out wrongly somehow, had he dug the whole affair up and moved it? Whatever happened, the secret went to the grave with someone. 

After I discovered Kizziah Crouch's family origins I began to read about the culture of the Tuscarora people. They were described as light-hearted people, who easily bore every misfortune except one, the death of a loved one. They considered the departed still part of the family, and when they moved they carried generations of ancestor's bones with them.

The Tuscarora burial was in a cypress-lined vault in the earth. The body was laid on a bed of boughs, covered with boughs and roofed over with bark. It was left until the bones had been entirely cleaned by "the little creatures of the earth", then the bones were taken up and placed in a clay jar. They were kept in the home, or buried nearby, to be taken up when the family moved on. I found record of one Tuscarora family, long since melded into the "White" community, having moved through four successive states, still in possession of a great-grandfather's bones 75 years after his death. 

Which makes me wonder. Kizziah Crouch and Enoch Jones Smith had a little girl named Mahalia who died between the ages of five and ten years. Could the "grave" the Cavel boys discovered have been the temporary resting place for her little jar of bones? And if so what happened to them? Perhaps they were dug up when Kizziah Crouch Smith Carter died in 1921 and placed in her coffin with her? 

I am puzzled by Kizziah Crouch Smith Carter's position in the Velma Cemetery. She is buried in an aisle, not in the row of graves. She lies in the aisle between the plots of her children William Wesley Smith and Eliza Ann Smith Seely, both of whom died years after she did. I thought for years she might have been buried first on the farm, and moved to the Velma cemetery later, maybe when Granddad and Grandma left the farm in Velma years before they sold it. They moved to Hastings in 1935, and both WW Smith and Eliza Seely had died and were buried in the Velma Cemetery by then. But I now have a copy of Kizziah's death certificate which states she was buried in the Velma Cemetery the day after her death.

I may be letting my imagination get the better of me, but it's one explanation for where the "child's grave" went, but I can think of no good reason why Granny K herself is buried in such an unusual spot. She is the only person in the entire huge cemetery who is buried in an aisle. 

In the last few years the descendants of Randolph Carter have placed a stone on her unmarked grave, for which I am very grateful. I feel a deep connection to her for some reason, in part maybe because I look a good deal like her but even before I'd ever seen a picture about her I felt a connection to her. I asked Dad what she was like once. It was one of the few times in my life I ever saw him tear up, but his eyes filled with tears which he brushed away before saying, "She was wonderful." 

Come Lord Jesus!

Uncle Arthur aged 15

I heard this story many times in the 1940s, 50s, and 60s, recounted my Dad Charlie Hall Cavel, and uncles Arthur and Dick Cavel.  It must have taken place when Charlie was 14 or 15 years old, so 1917 or 1918.

Charlie, Arthur and Dick were driving a herd of cattle from Velma (OK) to the rail head at Chickasha (OK). One evening they had corralled the cows and camped for the night. After a while they heard singing and shouting and, being naturally curious, they went to see what was going on.

Well, from some distance they could see a group of 30-40 people having a religious meeting under a brush arbour, lit by torches on poles stuck in the ground a few feet from each corner of the arbour. So the boys climbed a big tree just beyond the reach of the torch light and watched as the preacher worked his congregation into a fervor of religious enthusiasm. The worshippers became more and more energized under the influence of "The Spirit". 

Soon they were running up and down the aisles, jumping the plank benches, throwing their arms in the air, imploring in loud voices, "Come Lord Jesus! Come Lord Jesus!"

Accustomed to the sedate dignity of the Baptist service, this hullabaloo struck the boys as comical, and they saw the opportunity to have some fun.  They began to shake the limbs and branches of the tree. Arthur, who was about 20 years old at the time, lowered his voice as deep as he could and shouted down from the tree, "I'm a comin'! I'm a comin'!" 

On hearing this announcement the worshippers began to scream and scattered into the night, including the preacher.  Not a one waited to welcome the coming of the Lord.

If their father (who was a Baptist pastor) had ever learned of this stunt he'd have soundly whipped them all. I'm betting they didn't tell it openly until after Granddad's death in 1941, but while I was growing up they repeated the story again and again as evidence of what scoundrels they had been as teenagers. 

My Bunch

The Clark Side

My Mom, Mattie Clark, age 40

My Mom's father, Henry Clark

Mom's brother Ossie (O-See)

Mom's sister Fanny Clark

Mom's brother Henry Calvin Clark Jr

Mom's sister Eva Clark

Mom's Uncle Levin 

Mom's Cousin Marvin Clark

                                                                       

The Smiths and Cavels

G-grands, Wm John Cavel & Susan Ann Shave 1907

My Dad Charlie Hall Cavel, about 40

My grandparents- Josie Smith and Fred Cavel

My Dad about 65

Josie's mother my G-granny Casiah Crouch Smith abt 1900

Casiah Crouch Smith Carter 1920

And the DNA says, "Spanish Roots"

In 1979 we attended the annual Cavel Reunion at Brownwood, Texas, near where my great-grandparents Wm John and Susan Ann (Shave) Cavel settled in the late 1800s. I struck up an immediate friendship with Myrtle Sorrells Russell, one of my Dad's cousins. Myrtle was an absolute storehouse of Cavel knowledge. She and I just "clicked", like we'd known each other forever.

We'd been out to the old Cavel house, and to the Rocky Creek Baptist Church they attended and its cemetery, where they are buried. The country around Brownwood was described as my Dad by saying, "God put it there to hold the world together."

Myrtle caught a ride home with us. She and I sat in the back seat of my brother's Buick and talked up a storm all day. The Cavel's life in Texas was so hard. I wondered out loud why they'd left their families and the green hills of England for such a desolate place.


Myrtle told me that her Grandpa William was a preacher, and he and Grandma Susan had gotten involved in a religion that was forbidden by the king. They were forced to worship in secret, so they would meet late at night, in each others' homes. They would sneak down alleys and back lanes in the dark to get to the meeting place. They had to knock on the door and whisper a password, which was "Cavel".


One member of the congregation was a silversmith. His wife noticed him slipping from bed, dressing and going out after he thought she was asleep. She suspected he had a girlfriend, and she reported her suspicions to her priest. The priest had him followed and saw him go into the Cavel's house. The priest reported it to the king and the whole group was arrested and thrown into prison.


Somehow William John and Susan managed to escape with baby Fred (my Grandfather) but they had to leave so fast that they had to leave the older child, Rose, behind.
When we got to Myrtle's home she showed us some "forbidden" pamphlets the Cavels had brought with them from England, but as I looked them over they seemed pretty innocent to me. They were small folded paper evangelistic tracts from the British Bible Society, "What Must I Do to be Saved?", "For God So Loved the World", and a couple of others.


I took Myrtle's story at face value at the time, but with only a little research I discovered that there was complete religious freedom in Britain by the 1800s. I located Parish records proved that Wm John and Susan had attended their local Anglican parish church, been married there, had their children baptized there, and had two little ones buried in an Anglican churchyard. Then I obtained a copy of my granddad Fred Cavel's birth certificate, which listed his father's occupation as "shepard", not preacher.


I eventually decided Myrtle's story, which was told her by her mother, was a sort of family legend with little basis in fact. It was a great deal different than the story I'd heard all my life, that they bought tickets for America after losing two children to a scarlet fever epidemic months before my grandad was born. They'd been forced to burn everything they owned, leaving them with nothing.


At the same time Texas Agents were traveling through British villages, spinning tales of the fabulous wealth to be had on the American frontier. When they said the streets were "paved with gold" they may have meant it figuratively, but the naive English country kids took it literally and bought four tickets for Galveston, Texas.


Their five-year-old daughter Rose, had survived the scarlet fever but was still too ill to travel when the date came to sail, so with heavy hearts they left her in the care of Susan's parents, promising to come back for her after they'd made their fortune in America. In a year at most.


Of course the tale ended badly. Great-Grandad William sustained a serious injury shortly after landing in Texas, one that crippled him for life. The frontier was desolate and the threat of attack by raiding parties of Comanches ever present. Rose grew up in England and they never saw each other again.


I went back to school at the age of 38. Like all students I had papers to write and research to do. One day in the University of Calgary (Canada) library stacks I ran across a biography of Edith Cavell. It is every Cavel family's tradition that they are somehow related to Edith Cavell, the famous WWI nurse heroine who was executed by the Germans in 1915 for rescuing wounded allied soldiers in Belgium, secretly nursing them back to health and sneaking them across enemy lines to safety.


An 1898 "book of English Surnames" which found its way into my hands as part of a stage prop listed all the spelling and pronouncing variants of Cavel/ Cavell/Cavil/Cavill in Britain and stated that the family of Edith Cavel was the only one in Britain which pronounced the name to rhyme with "gavel", as we do, so I sat down to look at this biography and made a few notes. Edith's sister, Lillian Cavel Wainwright, told the interviewer that the family did not originate in Cornwall, as had been reported in an earlier biography. She claimed that their Cavell family was originally Spanish and the name was Cavella or something very close to it.


I was taking Spanish at the time. Once I was home, knowing that many a Spaniard draws their surname from their village of origin, I got out our big red "Atlas of the World" and opened it to the map of Spain. I went to the index. There was no Cavella, but there was a village called Cazalla, which in Castillian is pronounced very much the same. I found the coordinates on the map, laid my finger on them and called Tony to come see.


I can hardly describe what happened to me next. It was as if the wind had been knocked out of me. I was no longer sitting on the floor in front of our fireplace, I was standing in a crowd looking at a scene of incredible horror. There before me were a series of pyres, but my eyes were drawn to one. A haggard man was tied to the stake. He lifted his head and stared into my eyes, and in that moment I knew him entirely. It was if the unwavering gaze of his dark eyes transferred his life's story to me.


Do we have racial memory burned into our DNA? I don't know how to explain it. Tony shook me, asking, "Are you okay?"


I sat there for a few minutes to collect my wits and then called the University Library and asked for them to tell me what they had on file for an Augustin de Cazalla, who was burned by the Spanish Inquisition on the 20th of May 1559.

The librarian came back in a few moments and told me that he was listed in the Lutheran Book of Martyrs. He was a Catholic priest, the Personal Chaplain and Confessor of King Charles V, and in disputing with heretics in Germany he had become converted to Lutheranism and as a result had been burned as a heretic by the Spanish Inquisition.

The next day I went back to the library. The first book I found described, in almost exactly the same words as Myrtle's, how Augustin and his brothers (three priests in one family!) all converted to the forbidden religion of Lutheranism, and established a secret Lutheran congregation in Valladolid Spain in the early 1550's. They met in each other's homes late at night, using "Cazalla" as a password at the door. The congregation had grown to over 60 when the wife of a member named Garcia, who was a silversmith, told her priest she thought that he was going out at night to meet a woman. The priest had Garcia followed and within days the Inquisition moved in and arrested almost the entire congregation, including 16 members of the de Cazalla family.


Several of them, including Augustin, were burned at the stake as heretics on May 20, 1559 outside the city walls of Valladolid. One of the sisters, a recent widow and mother of 13 children, was imprisoned for life. Her children, ranging in age from six months to 17 years, were turned into the streets. Citizens were told that anyone who gave them so much as a crust of bread or a cup of water would be treated as a heretic. Of 10 adult children in the family six were burned at the stake or imprisoned for life. One who lived in a different province was pardoned by the Pope a year later, but three slipped through the net, to turn up in England a year later.

Prior to 1564 it was difficult for refugees from the Continent to settle anywhere but in London, so most refugees who entered England before 1564 went to London. St. Mary's Axe Church was given in 1562 to the Spanish Protestant refugees for divine worship. (Wheatley's London Past and Present, vol. II, p. 493) Photo is of the restored windows at what remains of St. Mary's Axe Church London.

The Spanish group was headed up by Casiodoro de Reina, a former monk who had also converted. He had been a close friend of Augustin de Cazalla's in Spain and had urged him to flee in 1555. Augustin refused, saying the Inquisition wouldn't dare arrest him due to his family's close associations with the crown. (The de Cazalla's father, Pedro, was Royal Treasurer under Charles V, and their mother, Leonora de Vivero, was of noble blood. King Ferdinand and Queen Isabel of Spain were married in the de Vivero home and spent part of their honeymoon in the de Vivero Castle at Fuensaldana.)


But the Inquisition followed them to London. In 1567 de Reina had to flee to Germany. The Spanish refugee church in London disintegrated. Many members felt it wise to 'blend' into the population as best they could. Some joined other refugee communities in London. Some left London for other parts of the country. Unfortunately all we have are contemporary accounts of that time, the Spanish refugee church's records were destroyed when St. Mary's Axe received a direct hit from a German bomb in 1942.


At least some of the Cazallas moved and joined the Walloon Church in Bocking, Essex. Those who went to Essex must be Edith Cavell's line if her sister's claim of Spanish ancestry is accurate.


The 'Bocking' Refugee congregational records contain Cavell records which appear to be "foreign" from 1668 onwards. The parish priest made an entry saying he'd done the best he could to turn this family's unpronounceable foreign surname into a similar English one. He said 'Cavell' was the closest he could come!)


Some Cavells went to Somerset, which is where we pick up our lineage with the birth of Caleb Cavel 130 years later in 1689 in Kingston, St. Mary, North Somerset. So it's an easy task ahead of us. We only have to track Caleb Cavel's ancestry back to a Spanish Protestant immigrant - 100 years or so of almost non-existent records.


The story of the de Cazalla family is little known today but very well documented in Spanish literature of the time. They were prominent and wealthy, and of Sephardic Jewish origins. The arrest of the family was as much a political as a religious act. It was all about consolidation of power by the Head of the Inquisition, who had been trying to entrap various family members for years.

Plaza de la Cazalla in Valladolid Spain

On the day Augustin and his brother Francisco were burned the bones of their mother were exhumed and she was burned in effigy. Their house was ransacked of its treasures, then it was torn down and the ground was strewn with salt. A pillar was set up to warn others not to become Heretics lest this fate befall them too. The ground where the house stood remains empty to this day. The street is named Dr. Cazalla Street, and the place where their house stood is "Plaza de la Cazalla".


And to think that this story has been handed down, generation after generation of Cavels, for over 400 years. Like many stories of this type, it was attributed to a more recent ancestor, but the story itself was true, and intact. And in the 21st century autosomal DNA can confirm that of our European ancestry 31% of it is from Spain and Portugal.


Thanks, Myrtle. You saved a family treasure.

Henry and Molly's "Exciting" Life

My grandmother Mary Ellen (Molly) Hayman was said to have been beautiful, but she was a very strict mother because she was always guilty about the "shame" of being a divorced woman. Her first husband disappeared on a cattle drive leaving her at 17 having already borne four children, with no way to support them. Since the court wouldn't declare him dead for seven years she was advised to divorce him for desertion, which she did. Granddad was her second husband.

Including those four (none of whom survived to adulthood) Molly had *17* children in all, FOUR sets of twins! My Granddad Henry Calvin Clark was her husband. Granddad's parents (Levin Larkin Clark and Martha Jeanette Kast) didn't want Henry to marry Molly, and when Henry married her his father never spoke to him again. So Granddad Clark apparently set a lot of stock in his Indian relatives at Anadarko.

Henry Clark had Indian blood on both sides. Though I have never been able to find out her name, Henry's first wife was apparently Lenape (Delaware) from the reservation near Anadarko. They had three children, twin girls and a boy. When Henry's first wife died her parents took the kids. When he married Molly they wouldn't let him have the children back, which is perfectly consistent with matriarchal cultures. The children always belong to their mother's family, never to their father's.

I don't have a clue who this Native man is, but he looks very much like my Grandad. I suspect from the visible breastplate he is from a Plains Nation, I'll need to do some reasearch, but I wanted to add it to show how easily an "Indian" became "European". In Henry Clark's case it was explained by saying his mother was French and that the language they spoke when together was French.

Molly was terrified of Granddad's relatives, who would ride up the road into the farmyard ki-yi-ying wearing their feather war bonnets, all painted up, and with their horses painted. Molly wouldn't let them come in the house, so they'd camp in the yard, visit and smoke the pipe together.

I have heard this "visiting" story about my grandparents Henry Calvin Clark and Mary Ellen (Molly) Hayman Clark many times, not only from my mother but from a cousin's elderly uncle (Ed Clark Lane) whose mother was Henry's sister Sarah. Sarah Clark Lane and her husband lived just down the road from Henry and Molly, and the Indian relatives called on all of them.

I'm not sure when the visits started but by 1910 or so, when they'd been forced to move several times after the visiting Indian relatives scared the neighbours half to death (many Indians were still on the warpath) Molly said, "Instead of them coming to see us, we'll go see them." The following incident took place when my mother was nine years old, and was burned into her memory. She told it again and again as I grew up.

Granddad would pile Molly and the kids into a covered wagon and drive several days to visit his kinfolks at the reservation at Anadarko, but in 1913 there was a localized Creek Indian uprising. The Creek were murdering white settlers in an effort to regain control of their lands. On the way Granddad and Molly met a war party on the road. Granddad saw the war party far ahead, and knew they would all be killed if they saw Molly and the children. He told Molly and the kids lie flat in the wagon bed, and he threw quilts and burlap sacks over them. He told them not to move or make a sound no matter what, or how long it took.

As the war party approached he stopped the mules, got down and walked to meet the men in the war party, addressing them in their own language. He spoke several different Indian languages, and luckily Musgokee Creek was one of them. He asked their business and said they must be hungry and asked if he could cook them a meal and offer them tobacco. This sounded good to them. They built a fire and he hauled out coffee and cornmeal, beans and bacon and made a meal while they smoked and talked in the shade of nearby trees.

After three or four hours they took their leave and let Granddad go on his way without searching the wagon. By then Molly and the kids were drenched with sweat from lying under the quilts, their muscles were screaming from holding still, all the younger ones had wet themselves and worse. And there was no food left for the rest of the journey, nor any money to buy more.

It is probably no surprise that after that trip Molly wouldn't go and wouldn't let Grandad take the kids. After that he had to go visit the Indian kinfolks alone.

Charlie's Fight to Save His Sons

Eighty-three years ago today my tiny mother gave birth to twin sons. It was not an easy birth. It was cold for June. There had been a wild series of storms. The bridge spanning the nearby river had been washed away, and the other road was impassable to anything other than a horse. There was no easy way, in the back of a horse-drawn wagon, to get a labouring woman to the hospital through pouring rain and wild wind.

For 36 long hours she laboured without result. She was only seven months pregnant, so the baby was not yet at term, and prospects were grim. While my Dad's brother Arthur rode a horse the long way round to town to fetch the doctor Dad and Mom's sister Fannie did what little they could do to ease the contractions which threatened to tear her apart.

Finally the doctor arrived and after an exam said the baby was transverse, and had to be turned. A horrific process even in a modern hospital he warned Dad to prepare for the worst. But the little one was turned, and shortly after was born breech. A tiny boy, barely the length of my father's hand.

"There's another one!" Mother gasped, "There's still another!"

"No, it's just the placenta," he assured her, in time to see another little head emerge.

Identical twin sons, tiny little things, but active and squalling.

"Might as well just wrap them up and leave them be," the doctor said, "easier not to fight. They'll be dead before nightfall."

Dad drew himself up to his full 6' 2" height and said, "Not my sons, not while I have breath in my body and can fight for them."

Within minutes he and Aunt Fanny had assembled a bed made of a wooden apple box. They laid a double layer of ironed muslin over a layer of cotton quilt batting. By manipulating the layers of cotton the wet/soiled batting beneath could be changed without handling or disturbing the babies, who were laid naked inside. The sides were lined with damp towels, and draped over the top, in an unending succession day and night, hot steaming towels were laid to warm the interior of the box. As one towel cooled it was replaced with another.

The towels were immersed in a pot of boiling water, then pulled out and wrung as dry as possible, before being unrolled and laid over the impromptu incubator. A thermometer borrowed from a neighbour let them monitor the temperature and keep it at a constant 98.6 F.

Mother expressed milk into a sterile teaspoon and on the second day the twins began receiving two drops of milk every half hour fed to them with a sterilized eyedropper. As they figured out how to swallow this amount was increased until they were strong enough at two weeks to be swaddled and brought out to nurse.

By the time the weather warmed enough to no longer need the incubator Dad and the neighbour who had been helping him had burned all the skin off their hands and arms to their elbows wringing the boiling water from those towels.

Both those boys, my older brothers, went on to live long and productive lives, and bring up families of their own. They had a rough start, but they came from strong and stubborn stock.

I miss them today, I miss them all.