Where do I start a blog post about my maternal grandfather, Harry Adrian Wherry? There is so much to tell, and so little space to tell it.
Grandpa was the only one of my grandparents that I actually got to know. Born May 3, 1888, he died at age 91 about two weeks after my 17th birthday.
I remember thinking he was so tall; according to his WWII draft registration, I wasn’t wrong. He is described as 5’10.5” weighing 183 pounds, with brown hair, brown eyes, and a dark complexion. I was hoping to see how tall he was at a younger age, but the WWI registration card only describes him as “tall.”
Anyway, he was in his late 70s and long-since retired by the time we moved to Convoy in 1966. His passion as a retiree was as a ham (amateur) radio operator, and, when I would visit, he was often talking to someone in some exotic-sounding place on his short-wave radio, which was in a little room off the kitchen of the house he shared with Aunt Jenny and Uncle Myron Webb. It was a one-story ranch-style house, which was small except for the huge family room that they added on after they all retired and moved from The Station.
Hanging on the wall was a clear-plastic display that had slots to hold the call-sign cards he had collected from ham-radio operators he had communicated with through the years. They were from all over the world. I believe I was drawn to the idea of being a radio news announcer because of his hobby. (I did work for a couple of years at WERT Radio 1220AM as the news person.)
Occasionally he would let me say hi to someone, but you couldn’t be on there for long if you weren’t licensed. I remember the funny sounds that the voices made over the airwaves––nothing like the quality of FM radio––and he had to adjust knobs that labelled “squelch” and such to make the voices sound more normal.
Grandpa was the eldest of six children born to William Pendleton Wherry and Permilla May, my mother’s namesake. Siblings were Lola Cleo (1890-1985), who married John Helm; Alpha Verne (1893-1970); Asa Jennings (1896-1908); Mary Helen (1899-1961); Allen Dayton (1902-1997); and Richard Harold (1908-1949). The family lived on a farm outside in Union Township, Adams County, Indiana, not far from Decatur. Grandpa’s great-grandparents migrated there from Ohio. True story: Their names were Adam and Eve. Adam Wherry and Eve Umbaugh both were born in Washington County, Pennsylvania, before their families began westward migration, first to Harrison County, Ohio, and then to Decatur, Adams County, Indiana, where they are buried.
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Grandpa, who was prone to emotion when talking about his childhood, would get particularly teary-eyed talking about his brother, Asa. Asa was 11 when he died after getting caught between the discs of a harrow and dragged around a field. That had to be gruesome, According to an article in the Fort Wayne Journal-Gazette (October 1908), “The body of the unfortunate boy was mangled in a sickening manner and when help reached him life was found to be extinct. The lad was a particularly bright little fellow, and the tragedy has excited more than ordinary sympathy.”
In the 1910 census, taken in April, Grandpa was still a bachelor living in Monroeville, Indiana, boarding house while working as a telegrapher for the “steam railroad,” which would be the major Pennsylvania RR line. Monroeville is just over the state line from Convoy in Tully Township, Ohio, where my grandmother, Ola Ethel Reed, was born and raised. They were married on Christmas Day that same year.
Monroeville was connected to Convoy, Van Wert, Delphos, and Lima along the Pennsylvania Rail Road line, next to which, in the late 1880s to about the 1930s, was the interurban electric-powered (traction) trolly line. I believe Grandpa told me he worked on the interurban, as a conductor or motorman for a time. Too bad America chucked that amazing mass-transit system for the automobile.
By the 1920 census, they were living on South Jackson Street in Lima, Ohio (Ward 3, to be exact), amongst several other of his telegrapher and railroad worker colleagues. By that time, my Uncle Harry Adrian Wherry Jr. (a WWII aviation hero) was one year old.
I’m not sure when Grandpa stopped working for the railroad, but it probably had to do with an accident he was involved with while working in the caboose of a PRR train. I don’t know exactly when or where it occurred, but when the accident happened, it derailed the train and he was thrown from the caboose and suffered a badly broken leg. He walked with a cane the whole time I knew him.
I’d guess it was between 1920 and 1930, because the 1930 census shows that he and Grandma were now living in the house on South Shannon Street in Van Wert, where my mom was born and raised. By that time, Aunt Jenny was 15, Uncle Harry was 12, and my Aunt Max was 9. Mom was 4. In the 1940 census, she was the only one of her siblings still living at home, age 14.
The census shows that he had left the railroad and was now working as a clerk at the Van Wert Post Office. He worked for the postal service for years; he had transferred to the job of rural mail carrier for a few years, but by the time they moved to Convoy, he had retired, according to an an article in the Van Wert Times-Bulletin from January 1845. The blurb on the “Society” page told that their neighbors had thrown them a surprise farewell party a few weeks before they moved from Shannon Street. In 1950, they were living at The Station with Aunt Jenny and Uncle Myron, and my cousins, Larry, 8, and my cousin Becky, who was an infant.
Grandpa died a couple weeks after my 17th birthday on August 31, 1979. Grandma had died on August 24, 1963. It never seemed like it was a random thing. Ironically, Uncle Harry and Aunt Kay had just arrived back at their home in Phoenix, Arizona, only to be called back because he died soon after they left.
But, in that time, you had to be over 18 to visit anyone in the hospital. Grandpa was admitted a couple of weeks before he died, which means that during that time, I was never allowed to see him, tell him I loved him, or at the most, say good-bye. That, too, was ironic, because I had worked for a couple years before then as a volunteer Candy Striper at that same hospital.
It’s something that has stayed with me all this time. But, I have to say, that at one crucial time in my life, not long after he passed, my Grandpa visited me in a dream. It was VERY real. Most people would scoff at it and say that there was nothing to it. But, I felt his presence. He literally hugged me and told me that he was proud of me. Think what you will, but I’ll take it.
And now, I’m the one getting teary-eyed.
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