Ohio or Bust: All About My Missouri Freemason Family

In October of 1941, my grandmother, Virginia, married Clint in Springfield, Missouri. She was four months pregnant and not quite out of high school. By December, America would join the war, and her husband would ship out to fight. In March, my mother would be born, just one month shy of my grandmother’s 18th birthday.

My mother would grow up believing Clint was her father. They were heavy drinkers, the kind who have vodka in their morning coffee. They would eventually move out to California, and my grandmother would die in the 1970s, way too young, while Clint would go on to marry wife #2.

No one in my family knew Clint was not my mother’s real father until the 1980s, when his second wife called my mother in a drunken stupor and blurted it out.