Molly Reed Shay was known as "most beautiful" in St. Patrick’s Church, Iowa City, Iowa,
So says a description printed in tiny letters on
a genealogy chart put together by one of my relatives and now in my hands in
Cheyenne, Wyoming, in this pandemic year of 2020.
Not sure if St. Patrick’s conducted a beauty pageant
but highly unlikely in Iowa’s Mississippi River Valley in the latter part of
the 19th century. It might
have been an observation by a fellow parishioner, possibly a young man with an
eye for beauty. It may have been a line spoken at Molly’s funeral in September
1905. Molly died in childbirth on Sept. 18 of that year. Her husband, Michael
Francis Shay, might have said it as part of his eulogy if he could have managed
to say anything after such a devastating loss.
Molly was not yet 40 and had already birthed five
children, two girls and three boys, the eldest being my paternal grandfather,
Raymond Arthur Shay. The sixth, Richard, was born the same day his mother died.
Raymond later told his grandchildren, me included, that the doctor charged with
delivering Richard was drunk. It was a terrible memory for Raymond, who would
have been 11 at the time, old enough to be helping out on the Shay farm in what
is now Iowa City suburb.
As I wrote this, I thought about what it was like to
be 11. My mom gave birth to twins when I was a bit older at 12. I also was the
eldest of what would eventually be nine kids. We lived in a drafty old
two-story house in Wichita, Kansas. Imagine it was 1905 and we lived on a farm
in Wichita’s outskirts and my mom went into labor at home and a drunken doctor
came for the delivery and he botched it so that my mother died. Motherless at
12. It would have left a mark that I would feel all of my life.
I can’t say what it did to my grandfather. We called him Big Danny. I hung that nickname on him as a mouthy
toddler. Baby Danny was my new brother in 1952 and Grandpa seemed like Big
Danny to me. My reasoning is unclear. I was just a little kid with a big imagination.
Molly’s storied beauty passed down to her
granddaughters. Muriel, whom I met as a kid growing up in Denver, was
homecoming queen at her high school – it says so on the genealogical chart.
Muriel’s brother Bobby “took his own life when his mother died in 1934.” Their
mother Gertrude (Gertie) died at 33. Molly’s great-granddaughter, Christy, was
“homecoming queen at Cherry Creek High” which once was the Denver area’s largest
high school and adjacent to its swankiest neighborhood, Cherry Hills. I reported
on football and soccer games at its stadium when I covered high school sports
for The Denver Post.
Speaking of me, I am mentioned on the chart. Muriel’s
other daughter, Jill Scott, was “born 12-19-50, 1 day later than Mike T. Shay.
Movie pictures were taken of them when they were babies.” I never saw the film.
My mother said that I was a beautiful baby and photogenic but that was my
mother speaking.
One more family connection with the line of people
spawned by Michael Francis and Molly Shay. Her daughter Marie married Glenn
Schafbuch and their son Mickey, born in 1934, went into the Marines after
college and later managed television stations in Denver and Portland, Ore. When
I decided to move back to Denver in 1978, my father said goodbye and good luck and then suggested that I look up his cousin Mickey and
see if he had any leads on jobs in local media. Mickey said he could refer me
to KOA noting that they probably had jobs for researchers and reporters. I said
no, that newspapers were my trade. He gave me a funny look that said
“newspapers are dying, kid – TV is where the action is.” He did send me to talk
to an old school chum, the managing editor at the Post, who liked the cut of my jib and brought me on as a
high school sports reporter at the paper.
Later, when I was married and had a child, I gave up
the newspaper game for the corporate life at Gates Rubber Company where I made
the world a better place by telling imaginative tales about automotive and
industrial rubber products. My boss’s boss’s boss, Chuck Sonnen, served in the
Marines with Mickey. Not sure if he gave me, a Navy ROTC dropout and peacenik, any
preferential treatment, but he didn’t fire me. I quit after an illustrious
five-year career to pursue the creative writing game. I figured that was where
the action was, for me, at least.
I'm not strong on foresight.
Hindsight is my
beat.
