Here are my notes for Harry, from his entry in my family tree- Rick Waggener:
Harry David Waggener was the youngest of six children born to his parents, Jesse David and Anna Eliza (Kenner) Waggener. Harry was born in the town of Bonne Terre in St. Francois County, Missouri on March 14, 1900. I believe they were living in that area at the time because his father was working there in nearby lead mines. I know that the family moved in a year or two to Elwood, Indiana, where Harry's father worked for the Pittsburg Glass Company. Within another year or two the family moved to what was known as Kenner's Hill, just north of the town of Festus, Missouri. The family of Harry's mother Annie, William Bryant and Mary Malinda (Swink), were a very prominent family in the area and had been living in a house at the top of the hill, for over 25 years. According to the story reported below by Harry, the Kenners gave Jesse and Annie an acre of land near to their home, and Jesse and Annie borrowed $3,000 and built a house on the property. The family lived there, and Harry spent the rest of his childhood there.
According to the story below, in August of 1917, the 17 year old Harry went to Detroit, Michigan to visit some of his family members who had moved there. Harry's older brother Dick had moved there in 1912 or 1913, seeking work as an electrician. Detroit was in the middle of a major industrial boom, and good jobs were apparently easy to be had. A few years later his sisters, Dorothy and Min, had also moved there and found jobs working for Western Electric, which was affiliated with the Michigan Telephone company, which came to be the Michigan Bell Telephone Company. They reportedly introduce Harry to a Frank Phelps, a Michigan Telephone company employee, and he offered Harry a job. Two days later Harry was working for this company as a splicer's helper. Harry worked the rest of his career for this company. By 1919 he was working on a regular splicing crew, and by 1925 he was a foreman. In 1941 he became the district supervising foreman of cable repair for Michigan Bell. In 1943 he became the splicing foreman of Detroit's east district, and later of the Woodward division.
For about the first ten years that Harry was in the Detroit area, he lived with a number of his siblings and his parents. By 1920 they had all moved there. Initially they were in Detroit, but in 1920, Harry and his siblings purchased a house at 201 Farrand Park in Highland Park, and Harry lived there with his parents and all of his siblings except Dick and his family, who were nearby. Harry married Reva L. Beers on July 7, 1921. Reva died tragically about a year later, on July 3, 1922.
On March 12, 1927, Harry married Elsie Catherine Gregg in Detroit, Michigan. Elsie had begun working for Western Electric in 1922 when she was 18 years old, and there she met Harry's sister Min. Shortly thereafter she attended the wedding of Min and Pete Dillman, and there she met Harry. I think that they might have lived briefly in the Highland Park house after their marriage, but not long afterward they had their own home at 14820 Westwood St, Detroit. There were four children born to Harry and Elsie: Russell (1928), Barbara (1934), Cheryl (1944) and Judy (1946). Judy died at the age of three, but the other three children survived their parents.
With the onset of the Great Depression in the early 1930's, times were tough for everyone. Harry kept his job as a cable splicer for the phone company, but at some point had to take every 6th week off without pay. They also apparently had to sell their house in Detroit in 1934, and moved to a rented house in Oak Park on Kenwood Street. However, at about the same time they bought a farm north of the metropolitan Detroit area, about five miles south of Almont, Michigan on M53. Harry was a lover of horses and they could keep a horse there as well as provide a place for Elsie's parents and sister, Martin, Elvira and June Gregg, to live. It was also a general farm with horses, cows, sheep, pigs, and chickens; as well as hay, wheat, and oats fields, and an apple orchard and a garden. In 1930 Harry and Elsie purchased a home in Royal Oak, Michigan, at 2325 N. Connecticut Ave., and moved there.
In 1946 they bought a 40 acre property with a house, a three car garage, a barn and 30 acres of apple trees in Clarkston, Michigan. They sold the home is Royal Oak and moved there. They built a house for Elsie's parents on the property and sold the farm near Almont. Harry had horses there also and became the president of the Dixie Saddle Club, which did square dancing on horse back. After Elsie's father died they sold the house and her mother lived with them for the rest of her life.
In 1960, Harry retired from the phone company after working there for 43 years. A short while later they sold the home in Clarkston and moved to West Palm Beach, Florida and bought an unfinished house there, which Harry subsequently finished. The house was next to a canal and there was a pasture where Harry also kept some horses. For the most part Elsie and Harry lived the rest of their lives in Florida, although they lived for a short while in Alabama. For a while he had a business repairing washing machines. As a grand-nephew, I have nothing but fond memories of both Uncle Harry and Aunt Elsie. They were always kind and friendly. Harry passed away at the age of 90 on October 21, 1990, and Elsie followed at the age of 92 on September 18, 1996. They are both buried in the Lakeview Cemetery in Clarkston, Oakland County, Michigan.- RW
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From the 1900 Federal Census of St. Francois County, Missouri, Perry Township, (not a city), taken June 4, 1900, District #95, page 4A; ancestry.com, St. Francois #95, image 7 of 56. Harry is listed in the household of his parents:
Household #67, family #70, no address listed;
----- Harry D; son, male, born- Mar. 1900, age- 2/12, born- Missouri, parents born- Missouri
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From the 1910 Federal Census of the City of Festus, Joachim Township, Jefferson County, Missouri, district 33, sheet 26a, page 136, taken May 12, 1910, household 552; from genealogy.com. Harry is listed in the household of his parents:
------ Harry D.; son, male, age- 10, born- Missouri, parents born- Missouri, in school, rw's
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From Ancestry.com. World War I Selective Service System Draft Registration Cards, 1917-18 [database online] Provo, UT: Ancestry.com, 2002. National Archives and Records Administration. World War I Selective Service System Draft Registration Cards, 1917-1918. M1509, 4,277 rolls. Washington, D.C.: National Archives and Records Administration.:
No. A960
Name: Harry David Waggener
Address: 985 John R. St., Detroit, Mich.
Age; 18
Date of birth: March 14, 1900
Race: white
Citizenship: natural born
Occupation: cable helper
Employer: Michigan State Telephone Co.
Location of employment: 34 John R St., Detroit, Mich.
Nearest relative: Mrs. Anna E. Waggener- mother
Address: 985 John R St., Detroit, Mich
Height: medium
Build: medium
Color of eyes: dark
Color of hair: dark
Date of registration: September 17, 1918
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From the 1920 Federal Census of Detroit City, District 14 (part of), 4th Ward (part of), Wayne County, Michigan, district 147, sheet 8A, taken January 19-20, 1920, household 164, address- 208 Bethune Ave. West; from ancestry.com, image 15 of 17. Harry is listed in the household of his parents:
------ Harry D.; son, male, age- 19, single, born- Missouri, parents born- Missouri, occupation- Cable Officer/ Telephone Co.
(I believe that Harry spent the rest of his career working for the Michigan Bell Telephone Company. -Rick Waggener)
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From the Polk's City Directory for Detroit, Wayne County, Michigan, 1920-21, page 2241:
Waggener, Harry D.; splicer, boards 201 Farrand Ave., Highland Park
(Also listed as living there are Dorothy, George, Minnie, Jesse, and Lucetta.-RW)
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From the Polk's City Directory for Detroit, Wayne County, Michigan, 1921-22, page 1973:
Waggener, Harry D., boards 201 Farrand Pk., Highland Park
(Also listed as living there are Minnie, George, Dorothy, Jesse, and Lucetta.-RW)
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From Michigan, Marriage Records, 1867-1952. Michigan Department of Community Health, Division for Vital Records and Health Statistics:
Bride's Name: Reva L Beers
Bride's Gender: Female
Bride's Race: White
Bride's Age: 17
Bride's Birth Place: Michigan
Bride's Residence: Detroit, Mich.
Bride's Occupation: none
Bride's Father's name: Warren C.
Bride's Mother's name: Lucy M. Blake
Bride previously married: no
Marriage Date: 7 Jul 1921
Marriage Place: Detroit, Wayne Co., Michigan
Groom: Harry D Waggener
Groom's Gender: Male
Groom's Race: White
Groom's Age: 21
Groom's Birth Place: Missouri
Groom's occupation: cable splicer
Groom's Residence Place: Detroit, Michigan
Groom's Father: Jesse
Groom's Mother: Anna Kenner
Groom previously married: no
By whom married: Peter F. Staci, Clergyman
Witnesses: Mrs. Peter F. Staci, Detroit; Mrs. W. C. Beers, Cleveland, Ohio
Record Number: 215684
Film Description: 1921 Wayne
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Harry and Elsie's Marriage License was posted on-line by Ancestry.com:
License County: Oakland County, Michigan
No. 473; 63 1985
Groom: Harry D. Waggener
Age: 27 years
Color: white
Residence: Highland Park, Mich.
Birthplace: Monetere, Mo. (actually Bonne Terre, Mo.)
Occupation: Cable Foreman
Father's name: J. D. Waggener
Mother's maiden name: Annie E. Kenner
Previously married no times (not true)
Bride: Miss Elsie C. Gregg
Age: 23 years
Color: white
Residence: Royal Oak, Mich.
Birthplace: Lancaster, Penn.
Occupation: typist
Father's name: Martin Gregg
Mother's maiden name: Elvira Luts
Previously married no times
License date: June 9, 1927
Marriage: June 12, 1927
Location: Detroit, Wayne Co., Mich.
Witnesses: Robert Bueschen of Detroit, and Mildred G. Dairs of Detroit
Person performing service: Harold H. Davis, Minister
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From the 1930 Federal Census of Detroit City, Ward 22, Precinct 17, Wayne County, Michigan, district 82-864, sheet 28a, taken April 11 1930, household 3, 14820 Westwood Street; from ancestry.com, image 54 of 205:
Waggener, Harry R.; head of household, owns home/ value- $3,600, radio in home, home is not a farm, male, age- 30, married, 27 years old at 1st marriage, in school, r/w's, born- Missouri, parents born- Missouri, occupation- Foreman/ Telephone Cable Co., wage worker, currently employed, not a veteran
------ Elsie C.; wife/ head, female, age- 26, married, 23 years old at 1st marriage, r/w's, born- Pennsylvania, parents born- Pennsylvania, occupation- house wife
------ Russell S.; son, male, age- 2, born- Michigan, father born- Missouri, mother born- Pennsylvania
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From Polk's Directory of Royal Oak and Ferndale, Oakland County, Michigan, 1938; page 838:
Waggener, Harry D (Elsie C) foreman Michigan Bell Telephone Company (Detroit) household 10750 Kenwood Ave., Oak Park
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From the 1940 Federal Census of Royal Oak, Oakland County, Michigan, district 63-145, sheet 27a, taken April 27, 1940, address- 2325 N. Connecticut Ave.:
Waggener, Harry; owns home/ $4000, head of household, male, age- 40, married, highest school grade completed- 2nd year high school, born- Missouri, residence in 1935- Oak Park, Oakland Co., Michigan, worked the last week of March/ 40 hours, occupation- foreman/ Bell Telephone, private worker, worked 52 weeks in 1939, earned $?3135
------- Elsie; wife, female, age- 26, married, highest school grade completed- 4th year high school, born- Pennsylvania, residence in 1935- Oak Park, Mi., not employed, engaged in housework
------ Barbara; daughter, female, age- 6, in school, highest grade completed- 1st, born- Michigan, residence in 1935- Oak Park, Mi.
------ Russell; son, male, age- 12, in school, highest grade completed- 7th, born- Michigan, residence in 1935- Oak Park, Mi.
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From The National Archives in St. Louis, Missouri; St. Louis, Missouri; WWII Draft Registration Cards for Michigan, 10/16/1940-03/31/1947; Record Group: Records of the Selective Service System, 147; Box: 1255:
Name: Harry David Waggener
Gender: Male
Race: White
Age: 41
Relationship to Draftee: Self (Head)
Birth Date: 14 Mar 1900
Birth Place: Bonnettere, Missouri, USA
Residence Place: 2325 N. Connecticut, Royal Oak, Oakland, Michigan, USA
Registration Date: 16 Feb 1942
Registration Place: Royal Oak, Oakland, Michigan, USA
Employer: Michigan Bell Telephone Company
Employer's address: 1365 Cass Ave., Detroit, Wayne Co., Mich.
Weight: 151
Complexion: Light brown
Eye Color: Brown
Hair Color: Brown
Height: 5 9
Next of Kin: Mrs. W. J. Dillman; 201 Farrand Park, Highland Park, Mich.
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Russell Waggener sent me the following newspaper story about his father Harry. I believe it was from the Daily Tribune newspaper in about 1952:
Harry D. Waggener came to Michigan on a visit in 1917 and really enjoyed his stay. He liked it so much, in fact, that today he is celebrating his 35th anniversary as a Michigan Bell Telephone employee.
Waggener, an ex- Royal Oaker and now a resident of Clarkston, Mich. is district splicing foreman for the Royal Oak and Pontiac areas. He lived in Oak Park from 1934 to 1939, and in Royal Oak from 1939 to 1945.
Waggener was born in a small Missouri hamlet near St. Louis, March 14, 1900. On August 12 1917, he took a train ride to Detroit for a "short visit." But it didn't turnout that way. Through a mutual friend, he was introduced to Frank Phelps, a Michigan Bell employee. Phelps induced Waggener to go to work for Bell.
Firsts-
The Missouri youngster started as a spicer's helper, Aug. 14, 1917. While on that job, Waggener worked on the first motorized cable trouble rig in Detroit. The rig was a brand new Model-T Ford with a pickup body.
In those days, it was not unusual for cable failures to hinder service for weeks at a time. Waggener came to the conclusion that a job on the regular splicing crew was for him, and so in 1919 he joined the outfit. By 1925 he was a foreman.
Waggener worked on the cables that carried the first toll circuits out of Detroit and also on the cut-over that placed the first dial telephones in the Detroit area.
Underwater Job-
In 1941, 24 years after he started with the company, Waggener became district supervising foreman of cable repair for Michigan Bell. It was while working in this capacity he received perhaps his toughest assignment.
On Thanksgiving day, 1941, a Detroit river freighter was cruising along with its anchor dragging. The anchor caught on two underwater marine cables which linked Detroit and Windsor and snapped them both. Waggener was immediately given the task of supervising the repair job. The operation required a diver, several scows and tugboats and a great many telephone crews. But the broken cables were finally put in ship-shape.
Scouter-
In 1943 Waggener was promoted to splicing foreman of Detroit's east district. Today he is foreman of the Woodward division.
Waggener, who has just recently celebrated his 25th wedding anniversary, lives with is wife and two daughters on a 40 acre plot of land near Clarkston. A married son is a Bell plant engineer in the Wyandotte district.
During his residence in Royal Oak, Waggener was active in community affairs. He was a scoutmaster of troop RO-149 and for two years was president of the Oak Park PTA. He was a member of the Lions club and victory garden chairman of Royal Oak during the war.
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From Ancestry.com. U.S. Public Records Index, 1950-1993, Volume 1 [database on-line]. Provo, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations, Inc., 2010:
Name: Harry D Waggener
Residence Date: 1987
Address: 2 Westwood Ave Apt 102
Residence: Tequesta, FL
Postal Code: 33469-2566
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From the Palm Beach Post (West Palm Beach, Florida), Wednesday, October 24, 1990, Page 38:
Harry D. Waggener
Age 90 of Tequesta passed away Sunday, October 21st, 1990.
He is survived by his wife Elsie; son, Russell Waggener; daughters Barbara Gusie and Cheryl Conklin; six grandchildren; three great grandchildren.
Funeral services will be held at 1 p.m. on Saturday, October 27th at the Grace Immanuel Bible Church, 17475 Johathan Dr., Jupiter. The family suggests contributions be made to the Palm Beach County Special Olympics, 2700 6th Ave. S., Lake Worth, FL 22461. Northwood Funeral Home, WPB in charge of arrangements.
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From the Social Security Death Index at ancestry.com:
HARRY D WAGGENER
SSN 363-07-3256
Born 14 Mar 1900
Died 21 Oct 1990
Issued: MI (Before 1951)
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From Ancestry.com. Florida Death Index, 1990-1991. [database online] Provo, UT:Ancestry.com, 2001. Original data: State of Florida. Florida Death Index,1877-1998. Florida: Florida Health Department, Office of Vital Records,1998.:
Name: Harry David Waggener
Certificate: 109277
Place: Palm Beach
Race: W
Death Date: 21 Oct 1990
Birth Date: 14 Mar 1900
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Interview with Harry and Elsie Waggener, August 1979
This is a transcript of a tape that Phil and Elaine Waggener recorded at the home of Harry and Elsie Waggener in Culman, Alabama, in August 1979 to capture their recollections about the Waggener family. The sound quality of the tape was poor, so some words could not be understood. Incidental conversation unrelated to family history has been omitted, and some remarks have been edited slightly for clarity.
Harry: Now we're talking about the Waggener family. It starts out with a Kenner and Swink. Kenner was my mother's maiden name. They lived on a hill called Kenner’s Hill. They were very respected in the community, and they were one of the first settlers in that area.
Phil: Near Festus?
Harry: Just above Festus. In fact, when my mother and father and all of us kids moved there, Grandpa Kenner gave us an acre of land. My dad borrowed three thousand dollars from the Citizens Bank there and he built a house. It was up on a hill overlooking the Mississippi River. It was just down a little ways from the Kenners’ house. They were on top of the hill and we were down the hill just a little ways. This was the only house in that area. All that area was subdivided into lots later on. The Kenner family were pioneers in that area. When I was a boy I used to go up there and milk cows and they would give us a can of milk. I would carry the milk home. Before we got our house built we lived with them. Aunt Kate was there. She had been divorced from her husband named Charlie. She had a daughter named Mary, and Mary and I played a lot together. We were the only two kids around there. We practically lived between the two places, the Kenners and our home.
Phil: My dad had left by that time?
Harry: Your dad, Vest Waggener, had moved there with us. He worked at the Pittsburgh Plate Glass factory. He was a toolmaker. The reason the factory was there because it was on the Mississippi River and in the foothills of the Ozarks, which was full of silica sand, and that's what they made glass out of. There was enough silica sand there, they said, to last anyone's life. Dick worked there too. He was an electrician. I imagine that's where he learned his trade. They called your dad “piss ant.” I don't know how he got that name, but that's what they called him. After we lived there a while, Vest went to Alton, Illinois, and worked there for Eden Washing Machine Company. He would come home on weekends. There was a train running from St. Louis to Festus. One of they things he did was he bought a pool table. We had it in the living room and everybody learned to play pool. That was one of the big things-we all went to the Christian Church, or the Methodist Church or Baptist Church, and every once in a while they would have a-they had no regular minister but they would bring ministers in from out of town. There was a family that used to come there and hold revivals called the Park family. He was a preacher and she played the organ and the daughter sang. In the summertime we had nothing to do there but to take a walk. We would take that pool table out on the front lawn and play pool some evenings. This preacher preached several sermons about that, about how the Waggeners were going to hell.
There were a lot of other preachers who came there. One of them went around with Lucetta for a while. One Saturday night the church caught fire (early 1908- RW) and burned down. My mother, the Kenners, and some other people around there who were pioneers in that church built a new church. My mother was very instrumental. They built it out of cement blocks. It was the first block building in that area. That church is still standing there. She was very proud of that. They had a furnace in there that seldom worked. We went to church then. We went to Sunday school and stayed for church and went back at night. Of course my dad never went to church. I understand, though, that when he came to Michigan-you remember Edgar DeWitt Jones, don't you?
Phil: Yes, I do. I met him.
Harry: Your dad and I went to meet him at the train when he first came to Michigan. He came from Bloomington, Illinois, and he took over that Christian Church there down on Third Street in Detroit. He used to visit us. My mother was the main pillar in that church too. When she died, they buried her from that church, which was unusual, because they thought so much of her. I understand that the church made a memorial for her somewhere there. Anyway, Edgar DeWitt Jones baptized my dad. I didn't see it. When he died, Edgar DeWitt Jones preached his funeral. We had the funeral from our home in Farrand Park. That was because my mother was sick and couldn't go to the funeral home or anything. I think your dad (inaudible). When Jones preached a sermon he wrote it all out and memorized it. I think that when I visited your dad in Arizona he showed me a copy of the sermon he preached at the funeral. One of the things he said was that my dad was the only one who ever called him DeWitt.
We kind of got away from Festus, didn't we? I never did learn to play pool good, but Min got real good, and Cet got good. A lot of other people came there and played a game called Model(?) pool. Cet was a school teacher there. She taught in the MacNutt School-a one-room school out in the country that had all the grades, the first to the-I don't know. That was the first school that I went to. Later Dorothy went to Cape Giradeau(sp?) to learn to be a school teacher, and she taught for one year. She never did like teaching school. She had a belt that she used to control the kids.
When we were living with the Kenners they had an old Negro. His name was Avis. He had been a slave, and his last name was Swink. He could play the violin. He would have nightmares...(inaudible). Also living at the Kenners were Uncle Gee (George- RW)and Uncle Tom(?). Neither one of them was married. They ran the farm. That farm didn't produce enough to make a living and they rented a farm out on the Mississippi River, on that good Mississippi bottom land and they raised good wheat there. They could get a hundred bushel of wheat to the acre.
Elaine: I want to back up and ask about the man who had the nightmares. You said he was a slave and his name was Swink. Was he a black man?
Harry: He was a black man-a colored guy. He lived with my grandparents. They were taking care of him. I think they gave him three or four dollars a week and he lived with them. He would go down into nigger town in Festus on weekends to visit relatives and friends there. Once in a while we would go hunting and kill a possum. White people didn't eat possum, but colored people did. He would give me a dime for a possum. He would take it down there and they would cook it.
What I started to tell you about was this farm they rented on the river. They had dairy cows. They finally gave up that farm and had an auction sale, but they couldn't sell the cows-nobody wanted them-so they moved the cows up to the Kenner farm. I used to stay up there, and we would get up at 3 in the morning to milk 12 cows before breakfast.
Phil: What else did they grow? Corn?
Harry: Yes, they grew corn, and hay for the cattle. The wheat they would load on boxcars. At that time, you know, they didn't have combines. We had a wheat binder, pulled by four horses, and one of my jobs was to run it. I would sit on one horse. They would cut the wheat down, and this thing would put it out into bundles. They would shock it up, and then they would bring in a thresher run by a steam engine. That was always a big time on the farm. The women would have a lot of chicken and they would cook the meals, and the neighbors would come to help them thresh the wheat.
My mother's twin sister, Em. She lived in DeSoto and of course they would visit back and forth. One day I was going off to school and I had to go by Kenners’ house and down the road. My granddad was going along there in a buggy on his way to DeSota and he said “boy, I think I'll take you with me.” And so instead of going to school that day I got into that buggy and went to DeSota. It took a couple of hours.
Em married a man named Gamel. They had a big farm. They raised lots of chickens and when we went there we always had a lot to eat. But they never had beefsteak. I remember that they always had shredded wheat. I loved that shredded wheat when they had whipped cream on it. It was a real treat.
When Cet first started teaching my uncle Horace gave her a horse to ride-it was quite a ways. He wouldn’t give her the horse until she rode side-saddle. Uncle Horace was a banker. I don't know if he owned the bank, but he had controlling stock in it. I went to see him once-I don't know if you [Elsie] went with me or not [Elsie said she was there]. Anyway, we took a ride down to the creek where we played as kids. We were late for dinner but they never waited. He said “If you can’t get to dinner on time, we eat.” That’s the way he was.
Uncle Stoke-I don't know how this happened-he seemed to have a lot of money. My dad never had anything. Uncle Stoke started that Waggener Store. He married a woman named England. The story is-I don’t know how true it is-that she had a son by Uncle Stoke before they were married. That's where Charlie England came in. He was Uncle Stoke’s son and he lived with them. Then there was another son they had, Sid England. Charlie England was the brain. Sid worked in the store. When we first went there it was quite a store; they sold groceries and everything including furniture.
Elsie: What else can you tell about your father?
Harry: I don’t know the whole story, but somehow he went out to the Black Hills and discovered gold. He and another fellow-I guess there were three of them-had a mine and it was doing pretty good. This other guy was trying to cheat him out (inaudible). Dad had a rifle and took a bead on him but couldn't kill him. So they lost the mine.
Your dad [George] told me this story. You know that Mississippi bottom land-it flooded one year and ruined the corn crop. But dad got a bunch of hogs and put them out there to root out that corn and fatten up. He made as much money on that as he would have with the corn.
He [Jesse] wanted to go into the (inaudible) (I think it was the saloon business.-RW) business. My mother told him she would rather he would go into the army than to go into the (inaudible) business-so that’s what he did. He was in the Spanish-American War. He got a pension from that for a long time. I don't think he got it for being in a battle; I think he got a sun stroke.
Elsie: He got it during a parade, and they sent him home. He was never even out of the United States.
Harry: You know, they lived in Florida a long time-in Lake Worth.
Elsie: Seven years.
Harry: That’s where he started getting sick. They couldn't live there any more, and the family got together and decided to bring him up [to Detroit]. They sent me down there to bring him back. We got a compartment on a train. Every once in a while on the way he would say “Where are we?” I'd say “We're coming into Texas” and he’d say “That's a big place.” I don't know how many times he would say that. Elsie: That's where he was mustered out of the army. He was kind of on the decline and his kidneys were going bad....
Elsie: Hardening of the arteries.
Harry: ...and he wasn't all there. There was a mirror in this compartment, and he looked at it and said “Who is that guy?” One night he got up to go to the bathroom, I guess, and he went outside and was roaming up and down the train, and the porter came to get me and I had to go get him and bring him back. He went to Farrand Park, and that's where he died shortly after that.
You know my mother was taking care of him and she contracted TB. She went to doctors, but they never suspected she had tuberculosis [until] they couldn’t do anything about it.
Elsie: You either recovered or you died. She was 75.
Harry: She was in a sanitarium about a year. All the family took turns going there to sit with her in the afternoons.
Elaine: Tell about the slave who took care of the children.
Harry: You know my mother had a twin sister. It was a custom when a child was born to assign a slave girl to take care of it. My grandparents didn’t have a slave girl of suitable age, so they assigned a boy named Jeff to take care of [the twins]. Annie had a bald spot on her head...
Elsie: She got burned there when she fell in the fireplace. Jeff probably wasn’t watching her.
Harry: During the Civil War, some soldiers had a habit of burning houses and taking clothes or whatever was around. The story goes that when some soldiers came up to the Kenner house my dad went out to meet them and said “You’re not going to take my clothes and you're not going to burn this house down.” They were impressed and went on their way.
You remember the silica sand I told you about? It was all around the Kenner home too. A guy by the name of (inaudible) was mining it. He built a cable system with buckets to take the sand down the hill and dump it into carts. It had a steam engine. I used to work for him-I was just a kid. He had a team of mules that I used to drive for a dollar and a half a day. I tried to fire the boiler on the steam engine too.
Phil: Why did the Kenners leave the farm?
Harry: They never did leave the farm. They died there. Then it was sold. But shortly after it was sold, the house burned down. Part of it was a log house, and it had a big porch all around it. In fact it was two houses.
When they set the table at that house they would set the whole table. They never knew who was coming to eat there, or how long they would stay. People would drive up there in a horse and buggy and they might stay a week. There were two old women who came and stayed for over a month. We didn't really know them. Finally we... [end of side 1 of tape].
Phil: When did your dad leave the farm?
Harry: I don’t know. That was before my time. The first I knew he was working at the Pittsburgh Plate Glass factory in Elwood, Indiana. Then we moved from Elwood to Festus and built that house. After that he never had a regular job that I know of. He did odd jobs.
Phil: Cet helped pay for the house. Did my dad help too?
Harry: I imagine he did, but I don’t know how much. He would come there, and I told you that he got that operation for me.
Phil: Elsie, you were telling me earlier that when Harry was little my dad noticed that he [Harry] was having trouble breathing and had him go to a doctor.
Harry: I went on a train all by myself.
Elaine: How old were you?
Harry: I must have been seven or eight.
Phil: How did you get in the telephone business?
Harry: Through my sisters. Dick came to Michigan first-on a freight train. He got a job as an electrician, working on the Keokuk dam. Then Min came up and got a job with Western Electric. Then Dorothy came up and she got a job with Western Electric too. She met a man by the name of (inaudible). You see Western Electric and the telephone company were pretty well connected. He was in the construction department of the telephone company and they were looking for people-this was in 1917, and I was 17 years old. This guy got me a job.
Elsie: Western Electric is where Min met Pete and she married him. And Dorothy had a job there, and the day I went to work for Western, Min and Pete were getting married. There was a notice on the bulletin board saying that everyone was invited to the wedding. And that's where I met Harry. I was 18.
Phil: Did you grow up there?
Elsie: I was born in Pennsylvania...(inaudible)... [my parents] were going north to find work. He worked for Anderson Electric. I was only two years old when we left there.
Harry: Finally the whole family got to Detroit, and we couldn’t rent a place that was big enough for us. So we went to Highland Park and five of us bought the house at 201 Farrand Park. All of us but Dick lived there together for several years, including some other friends from Festus who had come up there to live. One was a friend of George’s who had worked with him in Crystal City. That was unusual for all of us to live together. Then my mother and father came, and Uncle Tom also came and lived with us for a while. There was only one bathroom in that house.
Elsie: There was a toilet in the basement.
Harry: Once when I came home at night and didn't have a key, I climbed on the porch and opened a window and walked over Dorothy and Minnie who were in bed.
Phil: I think my dad was living there when they got married.
Harry: Yes he was.
Elsie: In fact they lived there for a while.
Harry: Your mother came there and visited a lot. We all lived there when we got married. We'd probably still be living there if we hadn’t got married. [Laughter] Then Min and Pete finally ended up with the whole thing.
Elsie: What did you do, sell that house when you (inaudible)?
Harry: We gave it to them, I guess.
Elsie: No, I mean when Min and Pete were living in Royal Oak.
Harry: (inaudible).
Elaine: How did the Garr family fit in?
Harry: It was on the Waggener side.
Elsie: The Garr family originated in Bavaria, which is now part of Germany but then it had a king....
Harry: The only part of the Waggener family I know about are the people I told you about-Uncle Jim, Uncle Stoke, and Uncle Horace-and there was a Will Waggener... (inaudible).
Phil: Was your dad a farmer for a while?
Harry: Evidently, before my time. But we always had a big garden.
Elsie: What you told me was that it was always the women who put in the garden.
Harry: One thing my dad did, he would go and wait on sick people. Even when they had smallpox and things like that and were quarantined, he would go there and take care of them.
Elaine: That seemed to be a tradition then, didn’t it?
Harry: Yes, and when someone died people would sit up with [the body] all night. I sat up all night with my grandmother. We went to the graveyard in a horse and buggy. That was 1916.
Phil: I have memories of my grandfather. What kind of guy was Jesse D.?
Harry: He was a reprobate. He treated my mother a lot worse (inaudible). She was active in her church. This church class she went to had quilting parties. They would go to different houses and make quilts. She would have those women [in her house], and he would go in there and tell them that she didn’t feed him and wouldn’t do this and that-to all those strange women. But I never heard her say one word against him.
Elsie: We went there one day and he was sitting on the front porch, and we asked him where Annie was. He said “I don't know, she just goes and doesn’t tell me where she's going.” Well, she was up at the church quilting and she did tell him. Harry said “Why don't you divorce her?” and he said “I'm thinking about it.” And he could hardly go across the street without her.
Harry: When we were coming back from that train ride [from Florida], he had weak kidneys. When we got off the train and went in the waiting room he did not want her to go in the ladies’ room. He wanted her to go in the men’s room with him. He would raise hell, too.
Phil: I remember my dad talking about the food the family would put on the table at the farm. He said the women would cook all day for Sunday dinner and that there would be every kind of meat and three or four different kinds of pie and potatoes...
Elsie: Yes.
Harry: And they would have what was called clabber cheese-cottage cheese. They would make it themselves. They would put it in a dish and put cream on it.
Phil: When I visited you in Florida, you were repairing washing machines.
Harry: Yeah, it became a regular business. That's one reason I moved. They kept me too busy.
Elsie: There were lots of widows down there, and nobody could do anything.
[end of tape]
==============
Harry is buried with his wife Elsie and youngest daughter Judy Ann in the Lakeview Cemetery, Clarkston, Oakland County, Michigan. Plot: Block 15, Lot 44, Grave 5. His headstone reads:
Harry D.
Waggener
1900- 1990
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Harry David Waggener was the youngest of six children born to his parents, Jesse David and Anna Eliza (Kenner) Waggener. Harry was born in the town of Bonne Terre in St. Francois County, Missouri on March 14, 1900. I believe they were living in that area at the time because his father was working there in nearby lead mines. I know that the family moved in a year or two to Elwood, Indiana, where Harry's father worked for the Pittsburg Glass Company. Within another year or two the family moved to what was known as Kenner's Hill, just north of the town of Festus, Missouri. The family of Harry's mother Annie, William Bryant and Mary Malinda (Swink), were a very prominent family in the area and had been living in a house at the top of the hill, for over 25 years. According to the story reported below by Harry, the Kenners gave Jesse and Annie an acre of land near to their home, and Jesse and Annie borrowed $3,000 and built a house on the property. The family lived there, and Harry spent the rest of his childhood there.
According to the story below, in August of 1917, the 17 year old Harry went to Detroit, Michigan to visit some of his family members who had moved there. Harry's older brother Dick had moved there in 1912 or 1913, seeking work as an electrician. Detroit was in the middle of a major industrial boom, and good jobs were apparently easy to be had. A few years later his sisters, Dorothy and Min, had also moved there and found jobs working for Western Electric, which was affiliated with the Michigan Telephone company, which came to be the Michigan Bell Telephone Company. They reportedly introduce Harry to a Frank Phelps, a Michigan Telephone company employee, and he offered Harry a job. Two days later Harry was working for this company as a splicer's helper. Harry worked the rest of his career for this company. By 1919 he was working on a regular splicing crew, and by 1925 he was a foreman. In 1941 he became the district supervising foreman of cable repair for Michigan Bell. In 1943 he became the splicing foreman of Detroit's east district, and later of the Woodward division.
For about the first ten years that Harry was in the Detroit area, he lived with a number of his siblings and his parents. By 1920 they had all moved there. Initially they were in Detroit, but in 1920, Harry and his siblings purchased a house at 201 Farrand Park in Highland Park, and Harry lived there with his parents and all of his siblings except Dick and his family, who were nearby. Harry married Reva L. Beers on July 7, 1921. Reva died tragically about a year later, on July 3, 1922.
On March 12, 1927, Harry married Elsie Catherine Gregg in Detroit, Michigan. Elsie had begun working for Western Electric in 1922 when she was 18 years old, and there she met Harry's sister Min. Shortly thereafter she attended the wedding of Min and Pete Dillman, and there she met Harry. I think that they might have lived briefly in the Highland Park house after their marriage, but not long afterward they had their own home at 14820 Westwood St, Detroit. There were four children born to Harry and Elsie: Russell (1928), Barbara (1934), Cheryl (1944) and Judy (1946). Judy died at the age of three, but the other three children survived their parents.
With the onset of the Great Depression in the early 1930's, times were tough for everyone. Harry kept his job as a cable splicer for the phone company, but at some point had to take every 6th week off without pay. They also apparently had to sell their house in Detroit in 1934, and moved to a rented house in Oak Park on Kenwood Street. However, at about the same time they bought a farm north of the metropolitan Detroit area, about five miles south of Almont, Michigan on M53. Harry was a lover of horses and they could keep a horse there as well as provide a place for Elsie's parents and sister, Martin, Elvira and June Gregg, to live. It was also a general farm with horses, cows, sheep, pigs, and chickens; as well as hay, wheat, and oats fields, and an apple orchard and a garden. In 1930 Harry and Elsie purchased a home in Royal Oak, Michigan, at 2325 N. Connecticut Ave., and moved there.
In 1946 they bought a 40 acre property with a house, a three car garage, a barn and 30 acres of apple trees in Clarkston, Michigan. They sold the home is Royal Oak and moved there. They built a house for Elsie's parents on the property and sold the farm near Almont. Harry had horses there also and became the president of the Dixie Saddle Club, which did square dancing on horse back. After Elsie's father died they sold the house and her mother lived with them for the rest of her life.
In 1960, Harry retired from the phone company after working there for 43 years. A short while later they sold the home in Clarkston and moved to West Palm Beach, Florida and bought an unfinished house there, which Harry subsequently finished. The house was next to a canal and there was a pasture where Harry also kept some horses. For the most part Elsie and Harry lived the rest of their lives in Florida, although they lived for a short while in Alabama. For a while he had a business repairing washing machines. As a grand-nephew, I have nothing but fond memories of both Uncle Harry and Aunt Elsie. They were always kind and friendly. Harry passed away at the age of 90 on October 21, 1990, and Elsie followed at the age of 92 on September 18, 1996. They are both buried in the Lakeview Cemetery in Clarkston, Oakland County, Michigan.- RW
==============
From the 1900 Federal Census of St. Francois County, Missouri, Perry Township, (not a city), taken June 4, 1900, District #95, page 4A; ancestry.com, St. Francois #95, image 7 of 56. Harry is listed in the household of his parents:
Household #67, family #70, no address listed;
----- Harry D; son, male, born- Mar. 1900, age- 2/12, born- Missouri, parents born- Missouri
==================
From the 1910 Federal Census of the City of Festus, Joachim Township, Jefferson County, Missouri, district 33, sheet 26a, page 136, taken May 12, 1910, household 552; from genealogy.com. Harry is listed in the household of his parents:
------ Harry D.; son, male, age- 10, born- Missouri, parents born- Missouri, in school, rw's
==================
From Ancestry.com. World War I Selective Service System Draft Registration Cards, 1917-18 [database online] Provo, UT: Ancestry.com, 2002. National Archives and Records Administration. World War I Selective Service System Draft Registration Cards, 1917-1918. M1509, 4,277 rolls. Washington, D.C.: National Archives and Records Administration.:
No. A960
Name: Harry David Waggener
Address: 985 John R. St., Detroit, Mich.
Age; 18
Date of birth: March 14, 1900
Race: white
Citizenship: natural born
Occupation: cable helper
Employer: Michigan State Telephone Co.
Location of employment: 34 John R St., Detroit, Mich.
Nearest relative: Mrs. Anna E. Waggener- mother
Address: 985 John R St., Detroit, Mich
Height: medium
Build: medium
Color of eyes: dark
Color of hair: dark
Date of registration: September 17, 1918
==================
From the 1920 Federal Census of Detroit City, District 14 (part of), 4th Ward (part of), Wayne County, Michigan, district 147, sheet 8A, taken January 19-20, 1920, household 164, address- 208 Bethune Ave. West; from ancestry.com, image 15 of 17. Harry is listed in the household of his parents:
------ Harry D.; son, male, age- 19, single, born- Missouri, parents born- Missouri, occupation- Cable Officer/ Telephone Co.
(I believe that Harry spent the rest of his career working for the Michigan Bell Telephone Company. -Rick Waggener)
==================
From the Polk's City Directory for Detroit, Wayne County, Michigan, 1920-21, page 2241:
Waggener, Harry D.; splicer, boards 201 Farrand Ave., Highland Park
(Also listed as living there are Dorothy, George, Minnie, Jesse, and Lucetta.-RW)
==================
From the Polk's City Directory for Detroit, Wayne County, Michigan, 1921-22, page 1973:
Waggener, Harry D., boards 201 Farrand Pk., Highland Park
(Also listed as living there are Minnie, George, Dorothy, Jesse, and Lucetta.-RW)
==================
From Michigan, Marriage Records, 1867-1952. Michigan Department of Community Health, Division for Vital Records and Health Statistics:
Bride's Name: Reva L Beers
Bride's Gender: Female
Bride's Race: White
Bride's Age: 17
Bride's Birth Place: Michigan
Bride's Residence: Detroit, Mich.
Bride's Occupation: none
Bride's Father's name: Warren C.
Bride's Mother's name: Lucy M. Blake
Bride previously married: no
Marriage Date: 7 Jul 1921
Marriage Place: Detroit, Wayne Co., Michigan
Groom: Harry D Waggener
Groom's Gender: Male
Groom's Race: White
Groom's Age: 21
Groom's Birth Place: Missouri
Groom's occupation: cable splicer
Groom's Residence Place: Detroit, Michigan
Groom's Father: Jesse
Groom's Mother: Anna Kenner
Groom previously married: no
By whom married: Peter F. Staci, Clergyman
Witnesses: Mrs. Peter F. Staci, Detroit; Mrs. W. C. Beers, Cleveland, Ohio
Record Number: 215684
Film Description: 1921 Wayne
==================
Harry and Elsie's Marriage License was posted on-line by Ancestry.com:
License County: Oakland County, Michigan
No. 473; 63 1985
Groom: Harry D. Waggener
Age: 27 years
Color: white
Residence: Highland Park, Mich.
Birthplace: Monetere, Mo. (actually Bonne Terre, Mo.)
Occupation: Cable Foreman
Father's name: J. D. Waggener
Mother's maiden name: Annie E. Kenner
Previously married no times (not true)
Bride: Miss Elsie C. Gregg
Age: 23 years
Color: white
Residence: Royal Oak, Mich.
Birthplace: Lancaster, Penn.
Occupation: typist
Father's name: Martin Gregg
Mother's maiden name: Elvira Luts
Previously married no times
License date: June 9, 1927
Marriage: June 12, 1927
Location: Detroit, Wayne Co., Mich.
Witnesses: Robert Bueschen of Detroit, and Mildred G. Dairs of Detroit
Person performing service: Harold H. Davis, Minister
================
From the 1930 Federal Census of Detroit City, Ward 22, Precinct 17, Wayne County, Michigan, district 82-864, sheet 28a, taken April 11 1930, household 3, 14820 Westwood Street; from ancestry.com, image 54 of 205:
Waggener, Harry R.; head of household, owns home/ value- $3,600, radio in home, home is not a farm, male, age- 30, married, 27 years old at 1st marriage, in school, r/w's, born- Missouri, parents born- Missouri, occupation- Foreman/ Telephone Cable Co., wage worker, currently employed, not a veteran
------ Elsie C.; wife/ head, female, age- 26, married, 23 years old at 1st marriage, r/w's, born- Pennsylvania, parents born- Pennsylvania, occupation- house wife
------ Russell S.; son, male, age- 2, born- Michigan, father born- Missouri, mother born- Pennsylvania
==================
From Polk's Directory of Royal Oak and Ferndale, Oakland County, Michigan, 1938; page 838:
Waggener, Harry D (Elsie C) foreman Michigan Bell Telephone Company (Detroit) household 10750 Kenwood Ave., Oak Park
=================
From the 1940 Federal Census of Royal Oak, Oakland County, Michigan, district 63-145, sheet 27a, taken April 27, 1940, address- 2325 N. Connecticut Ave.:
Waggener, Harry; owns home/ $4000, head of household, male, age- 40, married, highest school grade completed- 2nd year high school, born- Missouri, residence in 1935- Oak Park, Oakland Co., Michigan, worked the last week of March/ 40 hours, occupation- foreman/ Bell Telephone, private worker, worked 52 weeks in 1939, earned $?3135
------- Elsie; wife, female, age- 26, married, highest school grade completed- 4th year high school, born- Pennsylvania, residence in 1935- Oak Park, Mi., not employed, engaged in housework
------ Barbara; daughter, female, age- 6, in school, highest grade completed- 1st, born- Michigan, residence in 1935- Oak Park, Mi.
------ Russell; son, male, age- 12, in school, highest grade completed- 7th, born- Michigan, residence in 1935- Oak Park, Mi.
===============
From The National Archives in St. Louis, Missouri; St. Louis, Missouri; WWII Draft Registration Cards for Michigan, 10/16/1940-03/31/1947; Record Group: Records of the Selective Service System, 147; Box: 1255:
Name: Harry David Waggener
Gender: Male
Race: White
Age: 41
Relationship to Draftee: Self (Head)
Birth Date: 14 Mar 1900
Birth Place: Bonnettere, Missouri, USA
Residence Place: 2325 N. Connecticut, Royal Oak, Oakland, Michigan, USA
Registration Date: 16 Feb 1942
Registration Place: Royal Oak, Oakland, Michigan, USA
Employer: Michigan Bell Telephone Company
Employer's address: 1365 Cass Ave., Detroit, Wayne Co., Mich.
Weight: 151
Complexion: Light brown
Eye Color: Brown
Hair Color: Brown
Height: 5 9
Next of Kin: Mrs. W. J. Dillman; 201 Farrand Park, Highland Park, Mich.
==============
Russell Waggener sent me the following newspaper story about his father Harry. I believe it was from the Daily Tribune newspaper in about 1952:
Harry D. Waggener came to Michigan on a visit in 1917 and really enjoyed his stay. He liked it so much, in fact, that today he is celebrating his 35th anniversary as a Michigan Bell Telephone employee.
Waggener, an ex- Royal Oaker and now a resident of Clarkston, Mich. is district splicing foreman for the Royal Oak and Pontiac areas. He lived in Oak Park from 1934 to 1939, and in Royal Oak from 1939 to 1945.
Waggener was born in a small Missouri hamlet near St. Louis, March 14, 1900. On August 12 1917, he took a train ride to Detroit for a "short visit." But it didn't turnout that way. Through a mutual friend, he was introduced to Frank Phelps, a Michigan Bell employee. Phelps induced Waggener to go to work for Bell.
Firsts-
The Missouri youngster started as a spicer's helper, Aug. 14, 1917. While on that job, Waggener worked on the first motorized cable trouble rig in Detroit. The rig was a brand new Model-T Ford with a pickup body.
In those days, it was not unusual for cable failures to hinder service for weeks at a time. Waggener came to the conclusion that a job on the regular splicing crew was for him, and so in 1919 he joined the outfit. By 1925 he was a foreman.
Waggener worked on the cables that carried the first toll circuits out of Detroit and also on the cut-over that placed the first dial telephones in the Detroit area.
Underwater Job-
In 1941, 24 years after he started with the company, Waggener became district supervising foreman of cable repair for Michigan Bell. It was while working in this capacity he received perhaps his toughest assignment.
On Thanksgiving day, 1941, a Detroit river freighter was cruising along with its anchor dragging. The anchor caught on two underwater marine cables which linked Detroit and Windsor and snapped them both. Waggener was immediately given the task of supervising the repair job. The operation required a diver, several scows and tugboats and a great many telephone crews. But the broken cables were finally put in ship-shape.
Scouter-
In 1943 Waggener was promoted to splicing foreman of Detroit's east district. Today he is foreman of the Woodward division.
Waggener, who has just recently celebrated his 25th wedding anniversary, lives with is wife and two daughters on a 40 acre plot of land near Clarkston. A married son is a Bell plant engineer in the Wyandotte district.
During his residence in Royal Oak, Waggener was active in community affairs. He was a scoutmaster of troop RO-149 and for two years was president of the Oak Park PTA. He was a member of the Lions club and victory garden chairman of Royal Oak during the war.
===============
From Ancestry.com. U.S. Public Records Index, 1950-1993, Volume 1 [database on-line]. Provo, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations, Inc., 2010:
Name: Harry D Waggener
Residence Date: 1987
Address: 2 Westwood Ave Apt 102
Residence: Tequesta, FL
Postal Code: 33469-2566
===============
From the Palm Beach Post (West Palm Beach, Florida), Wednesday, October 24, 1990, Page 38:
Harry D. Waggener
Age 90 of Tequesta passed away Sunday, October 21st, 1990.
He is survived by his wife Elsie; son, Russell Waggener; daughters Barbara Gusie and Cheryl Conklin; six grandchildren; three great grandchildren.
Funeral services will be held at 1 p.m. on Saturday, October 27th at the Grace Immanuel Bible Church, 17475 Johathan Dr., Jupiter. The family suggests contributions be made to the Palm Beach County Special Olympics, 2700 6th Ave. S., Lake Worth, FL 22461. Northwood Funeral Home, WPB in charge of arrangements.
===============
From the Social Security Death Index at ancestry.com:
HARRY D WAGGENER
SSN 363-07-3256
Born 14 Mar 1900
Died 21 Oct 1990
Issued: MI (Before 1951)
================
From Ancestry.com. Florida Death Index, 1990-1991. [database online] Provo, UT:Ancestry.com, 2001. Original data: State of Florida. Florida Death Index,1877-1998. Florida: Florida Health Department, Office of Vital Records,1998.:
Name: Harry David Waggener
Certificate: 109277
Place: Palm Beach
Race: W
Death Date: 21 Oct 1990
Birth Date: 14 Mar 1900
=============
Interview with Harry and Elsie Waggener, August 1979
This is a transcript of a tape that Phil and Elaine Waggener recorded at the home of Harry and Elsie Waggener in Culman, Alabama, in August 1979 to capture their recollections about the Waggener family. The sound quality of the tape was poor, so some words could not be understood. Incidental conversation unrelated to family history has been omitted, and some remarks have been edited slightly for clarity.
Harry: Now we're talking about the Waggener family. It starts out with a Kenner and Swink. Kenner was my mother's maiden name. They lived on a hill called Kenner’s Hill. They were very respected in the community, and they were one of the first settlers in that area.
Phil: Near Festus?
Harry: Just above Festus. In fact, when my mother and father and all of us kids moved there, Grandpa Kenner gave us an acre of land. My dad borrowed three thousand dollars from the Citizens Bank there and he built a house. It was up on a hill overlooking the Mississippi River. It was just down a little ways from the Kenners’ house. They were on top of the hill and we were down the hill just a little ways. This was the only house in that area. All that area was subdivided into lots later on. The Kenner family were pioneers in that area. When I was a boy I used to go up there and milk cows and they would give us a can of milk. I would carry the milk home. Before we got our house built we lived with them. Aunt Kate was there. She had been divorced from her husband named Charlie. She had a daughter named Mary, and Mary and I played a lot together. We were the only two kids around there. We practically lived between the two places, the Kenners and our home.
Phil: My dad had left by that time?
Harry: Your dad, Vest Waggener, had moved there with us. He worked at the Pittsburgh Plate Glass factory. He was a toolmaker. The reason the factory was there because it was on the Mississippi River and in the foothills of the Ozarks, which was full of silica sand, and that's what they made glass out of. There was enough silica sand there, they said, to last anyone's life. Dick worked there too. He was an electrician. I imagine that's where he learned his trade. They called your dad “piss ant.” I don't know how he got that name, but that's what they called him. After we lived there a while, Vest went to Alton, Illinois, and worked there for Eden Washing Machine Company. He would come home on weekends. There was a train running from St. Louis to Festus. One of they things he did was he bought a pool table. We had it in the living room and everybody learned to play pool. That was one of the big things-we all went to the Christian Church, or the Methodist Church or Baptist Church, and every once in a while they would have a-they had no regular minister but they would bring ministers in from out of town. There was a family that used to come there and hold revivals called the Park family. He was a preacher and she played the organ and the daughter sang. In the summertime we had nothing to do there but to take a walk. We would take that pool table out on the front lawn and play pool some evenings. This preacher preached several sermons about that, about how the Waggeners were going to hell.
There were a lot of other preachers who came there. One of them went around with Lucetta for a while. One Saturday night the church caught fire (early 1908- RW) and burned down. My mother, the Kenners, and some other people around there who were pioneers in that church built a new church. My mother was very instrumental. They built it out of cement blocks. It was the first block building in that area. That church is still standing there. She was very proud of that. They had a furnace in there that seldom worked. We went to church then. We went to Sunday school and stayed for church and went back at night. Of course my dad never went to church. I understand, though, that when he came to Michigan-you remember Edgar DeWitt Jones, don't you?
Phil: Yes, I do. I met him.
Harry: Your dad and I went to meet him at the train when he first came to Michigan. He came from Bloomington, Illinois, and he took over that Christian Church there down on Third Street in Detroit. He used to visit us. My mother was the main pillar in that church too. When she died, they buried her from that church, which was unusual, because they thought so much of her. I understand that the church made a memorial for her somewhere there. Anyway, Edgar DeWitt Jones baptized my dad. I didn't see it. When he died, Edgar DeWitt Jones preached his funeral. We had the funeral from our home in Farrand Park. That was because my mother was sick and couldn't go to the funeral home or anything. I think your dad (inaudible). When Jones preached a sermon he wrote it all out and memorized it. I think that when I visited your dad in Arizona he showed me a copy of the sermon he preached at the funeral. One of the things he said was that my dad was the only one who ever called him DeWitt.
We kind of got away from Festus, didn't we? I never did learn to play pool good, but Min got real good, and Cet got good. A lot of other people came there and played a game called Model(?) pool. Cet was a school teacher there. She taught in the MacNutt School-a one-room school out in the country that had all the grades, the first to the-I don't know. That was the first school that I went to. Later Dorothy went to Cape Giradeau(sp?) to learn to be a school teacher, and she taught for one year. She never did like teaching school. She had a belt that she used to control the kids.
When we were living with the Kenners they had an old Negro. His name was Avis. He had been a slave, and his last name was Swink. He could play the violin. He would have nightmares...(inaudible). Also living at the Kenners were Uncle Gee (George- RW)and Uncle Tom(?). Neither one of them was married. They ran the farm. That farm didn't produce enough to make a living and they rented a farm out on the Mississippi River, on that good Mississippi bottom land and they raised good wheat there. They could get a hundred bushel of wheat to the acre.
Elaine: I want to back up and ask about the man who had the nightmares. You said he was a slave and his name was Swink. Was he a black man?
Harry: He was a black man-a colored guy. He lived with my grandparents. They were taking care of him. I think they gave him three or four dollars a week and he lived with them. He would go down into nigger town in Festus on weekends to visit relatives and friends there. Once in a while we would go hunting and kill a possum. White people didn't eat possum, but colored people did. He would give me a dime for a possum. He would take it down there and they would cook it.
What I started to tell you about was this farm they rented on the river. They had dairy cows. They finally gave up that farm and had an auction sale, but they couldn't sell the cows-nobody wanted them-so they moved the cows up to the Kenner farm. I used to stay up there, and we would get up at 3 in the morning to milk 12 cows before breakfast.
Phil: What else did they grow? Corn?
Harry: Yes, they grew corn, and hay for the cattle. The wheat they would load on boxcars. At that time, you know, they didn't have combines. We had a wheat binder, pulled by four horses, and one of my jobs was to run it. I would sit on one horse. They would cut the wheat down, and this thing would put it out into bundles. They would shock it up, and then they would bring in a thresher run by a steam engine. That was always a big time on the farm. The women would have a lot of chicken and they would cook the meals, and the neighbors would come to help them thresh the wheat.
My mother's twin sister, Em. She lived in DeSoto and of course they would visit back and forth. One day I was going off to school and I had to go by Kenners’ house and down the road. My granddad was going along there in a buggy on his way to DeSota and he said “boy, I think I'll take you with me.” And so instead of going to school that day I got into that buggy and went to DeSota. It took a couple of hours.
Em married a man named Gamel. They had a big farm. They raised lots of chickens and when we went there we always had a lot to eat. But they never had beefsteak. I remember that they always had shredded wheat. I loved that shredded wheat when they had whipped cream on it. It was a real treat.
When Cet first started teaching my uncle Horace gave her a horse to ride-it was quite a ways. He wouldn’t give her the horse until she rode side-saddle. Uncle Horace was a banker. I don't know if he owned the bank, but he had controlling stock in it. I went to see him once-I don't know if you [Elsie] went with me or not [Elsie said she was there]. Anyway, we took a ride down to the creek where we played as kids. We were late for dinner but they never waited. He said “If you can’t get to dinner on time, we eat.” That’s the way he was.
Uncle Stoke-I don't know how this happened-he seemed to have a lot of money. My dad never had anything. Uncle Stoke started that Waggener Store. He married a woman named England. The story is-I don’t know how true it is-that she had a son by Uncle Stoke before they were married. That's where Charlie England came in. He was Uncle Stoke’s son and he lived with them. Then there was another son they had, Sid England. Charlie England was the brain. Sid worked in the store. When we first went there it was quite a store; they sold groceries and everything including furniture.
Elsie: What else can you tell about your father?
Harry: I don’t know the whole story, but somehow he went out to the Black Hills and discovered gold. He and another fellow-I guess there were three of them-had a mine and it was doing pretty good. This other guy was trying to cheat him out (inaudible). Dad had a rifle and took a bead on him but couldn't kill him. So they lost the mine.
Your dad [George] told me this story. You know that Mississippi bottom land-it flooded one year and ruined the corn crop. But dad got a bunch of hogs and put them out there to root out that corn and fatten up. He made as much money on that as he would have with the corn.
He [Jesse] wanted to go into the (inaudible) (I think it was the saloon business.-RW) business. My mother told him she would rather he would go into the army than to go into the (inaudible) business-so that’s what he did. He was in the Spanish-American War. He got a pension from that for a long time. I don't think he got it for being in a battle; I think he got a sun stroke.
Elsie: He got it during a parade, and they sent him home. He was never even out of the United States.
Harry: You know, they lived in Florida a long time-in Lake Worth.
Elsie: Seven years.
Harry: That’s where he started getting sick. They couldn't live there any more, and the family got together and decided to bring him up [to Detroit]. They sent me down there to bring him back. We got a compartment on a train. Every once in a while on the way he would say “Where are we?” I'd say “We're coming into Texas” and he’d say “That's a big place.” I don't know how many times he would say that. Elsie: That's where he was mustered out of the army. He was kind of on the decline and his kidneys were going bad....
Elsie: Hardening of the arteries.
Harry: ...and he wasn't all there. There was a mirror in this compartment, and he looked at it and said “Who is that guy?” One night he got up to go to the bathroom, I guess, and he went outside and was roaming up and down the train, and the porter came to get me and I had to go get him and bring him back. He went to Farrand Park, and that's where he died shortly after that.
You know my mother was taking care of him and she contracted TB. She went to doctors, but they never suspected she had tuberculosis [until] they couldn’t do anything about it.
Elsie: You either recovered or you died. She was 75.
Harry: She was in a sanitarium about a year. All the family took turns going there to sit with her in the afternoons.
Elaine: Tell about the slave who took care of the children.
Harry: You know my mother had a twin sister. It was a custom when a child was born to assign a slave girl to take care of it. My grandparents didn’t have a slave girl of suitable age, so they assigned a boy named Jeff to take care of [the twins]. Annie had a bald spot on her head...
Elsie: She got burned there when she fell in the fireplace. Jeff probably wasn’t watching her.
Harry: During the Civil War, some soldiers had a habit of burning houses and taking clothes or whatever was around. The story goes that when some soldiers came up to the Kenner house my dad went out to meet them and said “You’re not going to take my clothes and you're not going to burn this house down.” They were impressed and went on their way.
You remember the silica sand I told you about? It was all around the Kenner home too. A guy by the name of (inaudible) was mining it. He built a cable system with buckets to take the sand down the hill and dump it into carts. It had a steam engine. I used to work for him-I was just a kid. He had a team of mules that I used to drive for a dollar and a half a day. I tried to fire the boiler on the steam engine too.
Phil: Why did the Kenners leave the farm?
Harry: They never did leave the farm. They died there. Then it was sold. But shortly after it was sold, the house burned down. Part of it was a log house, and it had a big porch all around it. In fact it was two houses.
When they set the table at that house they would set the whole table. They never knew who was coming to eat there, or how long they would stay. People would drive up there in a horse and buggy and they might stay a week. There were two old women who came and stayed for over a month. We didn't really know them. Finally we... [end of side 1 of tape].
Phil: When did your dad leave the farm?
Harry: I don’t know. That was before my time. The first I knew he was working at the Pittsburgh Plate Glass factory in Elwood, Indiana. Then we moved from Elwood to Festus and built that house. After that he never had a regular job that I know of. He did odd jobs.
Phil: Cet helped pay for the house. Did my dad help too?
Harry: I imagine he did, but I don’t know how much. He would come there, and I told you that he got that operation for me.
Phil: Elsie, you were telling me earlier that when Harry was little my dad noticed that he [Harry] was having trouble breathing and had him go to a doctor.
Harry: I went on a train all by myself.
Elaine: How old were you?
Harry: I must have been seven or eight.
Phil: How did you get in the telephone business?
Harry: Through my sisters. Dick came to Michigan first-on a freight train. He got a job as an electrician, working on the Keokuk dam. Then Min came up and got a job with Western Electric. Then Dorothy came up and she got a job with Western Electric too. She met a man by the name of (inaudible). You see Western Electric and the telephone company were pretty well connected. He was in the construction department of the telephone company and they were looking for people-this was in 1917, and I was 17 years old. This guy got me a job.
Elsie: Western Electric is where Min met Pete and she married him. And Dorothy had a job there, and the day I went to work for Western, Min and Pete were getting married. There was a notice on the bulletin board saying that everyone was invited to the wedding. And that's where I met Harry. I was 18.
Phil: Did you grow up there?
Elsie: I was born in Pennsylvania...(inaudible)... [my parents] were going north to find work. He worked for Anderson Electric. I was only two years old when we left there.
Harry: Finally the whole family got to Detroit, and we couldn’t rent a place that was big enough for us. So we went to Highland Park and five of us bought the house at 201 Farrand Park. All of us but Dick lived there together for several years, including some other friends from Festus who had come up there to live. One was a friend of George’s who had worked with him in Crystal City. That was unusual for all of us to live together. Then my mother and father came, and Uncle Tom also came and lived with us for a while. There was only one bathroom in that house.
Elsie: There was a toilet in the basement.
Harry: Once when I came home at night and didn't have a key, I climbed on the porch and opened a window and walked over Dorothy and Minnie who were in bed.
Phil: I think my dad was living there when they got married.
Harry: Yes he was.
Elsie: In fact they lived there for a while.
Harry: Your mother came there and visited a lot. We all lived there when we got married. We'd probably still be living there if we hadn’t got married. [Laughter] Then Min and Pete finally ended up with the whole thing.
Elsie: What did you do, sell that house when you (inaudible)?
Harry: We gave it to them, I guess.
Elsie: No, I mean when Min and Pete were living in Royal Oak.
Harry: (inaudible).
Elaine: How did the Garr family fit in?
Harry: It was on the Waggener side.
Elsie: The Garr family originated in Bavaria, which is now part of Germany but then it had a king....
Harry: The only part of the Waggener family I know about are the people I told you about-Uncle Jim, Uncle Stoke, and Uncle Horace-and there was a Will Waggener... (inaudible).
Phil: Was your dad a farmer for a while?
Harry: Evidently, before my time. But we always had a big garden.
Elsie: What you told me was that it was always the women who put in the garden.
Harry: One thing my dad did, he would go and wait on sick people. Even when they had smallpox and things like that and were quarantined, he would go there and take care of them.
Elaine: That seemed to be a tradition then, didn’t it?
Harry: Yes, and when someone died people would sit up with [the body] all night. I sat up all night with my grandmother. We went to the graveyard in a horse and buggy. That was 1916.
Phil: I have memories of my grandfather. What kind of guy was Jesse D.?
Harry: He was a reprobate. He treated my mother a lot worse (inaudible). She was active in her church. This church class she went to had quilting parties. They would go to different houses and make quilts. She would have those women [in her house], and he would go in there and tell them that she didn’t feed him and wouldn’t do this and that-to all those strange women. But I never heard her say one word against him.
Elsie: We went there one day and he was sitting on the front porch, and we asked him where Annie was. He said “I don't know, she just goes and doesn’t tell me where she's going.” Well, she was up at the church quilting and she did tell him. Harry said “Why don't you divorce her?” and he said “I'm thinking about it.” And he could hardly go across the street without her.
Harry: When we were coming back from that train ride [from Florida], he had weak kidneys. When we got off the train and went in the waiting room he did not want her to go in the ladies’ room. He wanted her to go in the men’s room with him. He would raise hell, too.
Phil: I remember my dad talking about the food the family would put on the table at the farm. He said the women would cook all day for Sunday dinner and that there would be every kind of meat and three or four different kinds of pie and potatoes...
Elsie: Yes.
Harry: And they would have what was called clabber cheese-cottage cheese. They would make it themselves. They would put it in a dish and put cream on it.
Phil: When I visited you in Florida, you were repairing washing machines.
Harry: Yeah, it became a regular business. That's one reason I moved. They kept me too busy.
Elsie: There were lots of widows down there, and nobody could do anything.
[end of tape]
==============
Harry is buried with his wife Elsie and youngest daughter Judy Ann in the Lakeview Cemetery, Clarkston, Oakland County, Michigan. Plot: Block 15, Lot 44, Grave 5. His headstone reads:
Harry D.
Waggener
1900- 1990
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Here are my notes for Harry, from his entry in my family tree- Rick Waggener:
Harry David Waggener was the youngest of six children born to his parents, Jesse David and Anna Eliza (Kenner) Waggener. Harry was born in the town of Bonne Terre in St. Francois County, Missouri on March 14, 1900. I believe they were living in that area at the time because his father was working there in nearby lead mines. I know that the family moved in a year or two to Elwood, Indiana, where Harry's father worked for the Pittsburg Glass Company. Within another year or two the family moved to what was known as Kenner's Hill, just north of the town of Festus, Missouri. The family of Harry's mother Annie, William Bryant and Mary Malinda (Swink), were a very prominent family in the area and had been living in a house at the top of the hill, for over 25 years. According to the story reported below by Harry, the Kenners gave Jesse and Annie an acre of land near to their home, and Jesse and Annie borrowed $3,000 and built a house on the property. The family lived there, and Harry spent the rest of his childhood there.
According to the story below, in August of 1917, the 17 year old Harry went to Detroit, Michigan to visit some of his family members who had moved there. Harry's older brother Dick had moved there in 1912 or 1913, seeking work as an electrician. Detroit was in the middle of a major industrial boom, and good jobs were apparently easy to be had. A few years later his sisters, Dorothy and Min, had also moved there and found jobs working for Western Electric, which was affiliated with the Michigan Telephone company, which came to be the Michigan Bell Telephone Company. They reportedly introduce Harry to a Frank Phelps, a Michigan Telephone company employee, and he offered Harry a job. Two days later Harry was working for this company as a splicer's helper. Harry worked the rest of his career for this company. By 1919 he was working on a regular splicing crew, and by 1925 he was a foreman. In 1941 he became the district supervising foreman of cable repair for Michigan Bell. In 1943 he became the splicing foreman of Detroit's east district, and later of the Woodward division.
For about the first ten years that Harry was in the Detroit area, he lived with a number of his siblings and his parents. By 1920 they had all moved there. Initially they were in Detroit, but in 1920, Harry and his siblings purchased a house at 201 Farrand Park in Highland Park, and Harry lived there with his parents and all of his siblings except Dick and his family, who were nearby. Harry married Reva L. Beers on July 7, 1921. Reva died tragically about a year later, on July 3, 1922.
On March 12, 1927, Harry married Elsie Catherine Gregg in Detroit, Michigan. Elsie had begun working for Western Electric in 1922 when she was 18 years old, and there she met Harry's sister Min. Shortly thereafter she attended the wedding of Min and Pete Dillman, and there she met Harry. I think that they might have lived briefly in the Highland Park house after their marriage, but not long afterward they had their own home at 14820 Westwood St, Detroit. There were four children born to Harry and Elsie: Russell (1928), Barbara (1934), Cheryl (1944) and Judy (1946). Judy died at the age of three, but the other three children survived their parents.
With the onset of the Great Depression in the early 1930's, times were tough for everyone. Harry kept his job as a cable splicer for the phone company, but at some point had to take every 6th week off without pay. They also apparently had to sell their house in Detroit in 1934, and moved to a rented house in Oak Park on Kenwood Street. However, at about the same time they bought a farm north of the metropolitan Detroit area, about five miles south of Almont, Michigan on M53. Harry was a lover of horses and they could keep a horse there as well as provide a place for Elsie's parents and sister, Martin, Elvira and June Gregg, to live. It was also a general farm with horses, cows, sheep, pigs, and chickens; as well as hay, wheat, and oats fields, and an apple orchard and a garden. In 1930 Harry and Elsie purchased a home in Royal Oak, Michigan, at 2325 N. Connecticut Ave., and moved there.
In 1946 they bought a 40 acre property with a house, a three car garage, a barn and 30 acres of apple trees in Clarkston, Michigan. They sold the home is Royal Oak and moved there. They built a house for Elsie's parents on the property and sold the farm near Almont. Harry had horses there also and became the president of the Dixie Saddle Club, which did square dancing on horse back. After Elsie's father died they sold the house and her mother lived with them for the rest of her life.
In 1960, Harry retired from the phone company after working there for 43 years. A short while later they sold the home in Clarkston and moved to West Palm Beach, Florida and bought an unfinished house there, which Harry subsequently finished. The house was next to a canal and there was a pasture where Harry also kept some horses. For the most part Elsie and Harry lived the rest of their lives in Florida, although they lived for a short while in Alabama. For a while he had a business repairing washing machines. As a grand-nephew, I have nothing but fond memories of both Uncle Harry and Aunt Elsie. They were always kind and friendly. Harry passed away at the age of 90 on October 21, 1990, and Elsie followed at the age of 92 on September 18, 1996. They are both buried in the Lakeview Cemetery in Clarkston, Oakland County, Michigan.- RW
==============
From the 1900 Federal Census of St. Francois County, Missouri, Perry Township, (not a city), taken June 4, 1900, District #95, page 4A; ancestry.com, St. Francois #95, image 7 of 56. Harry is listed in the household of his parents:
Household #67, family #70, no address listed;
----- Harry D; son, male, born- Mar. 1900, age- 2/12, born- Missouri, parents born- Missouri
==================
From the 1910 Federal Census of the City of Festus, Joachim Township, Jefferson County, Missouri, district 33, sheet 26a, page 136, taken May 12, 1910, household 552; from genealogy.com. Harry is listed in the household of his parents:
------ Harry D.; son, male, age- 10, born- Missouri, parents born- Missouri, in school, rw's
==================
From Ancestry.com. World War I Selective Service System Draft Registration Cards, 1917-18 [database online] Provo, UT: Ancestry.com, 2002. National Archives and Records Administration. World War I Selective Service System Draft Registration Cards, 1917-1918. M1509, 4,277 rolls. Washington, D.C.: National Archives and Records Administration.:
No. A960
Name: Harry David Waggener
Address: 985 John R. St., Detroit, Mich.
Age; 18
Date of birth: March 14, 1900
Race: white
Citizenship: natural born
Occupation: cable helper
Employer: Michigan State Telephone Co.
Location of employment: 34 John R St., Detroit, Mich.
Nearest relative: Mrs. Anna E. Waggener- mother
Address: 985 John R St., Detroit, Mich
Height: medium
Build: medium
Color of eyes: dark
Color of hair: dark
Date of registration: September 17, 1918
==================
From the 1920 Federal Census of Detroit City, District 14 (part of), 4th Ward (part of), Wayne County, Michigan, district 147, sheet 8A, taken January 19-20, 1920, household 164, address- 208 Bethune Ave. West; from ancestry.com, image 15 of 17. Harry is listed in the household of his parents:
------ Harry D.; son, male, age- 19, single, born- Missouri, parents born- Missouri, occupation- Cable Officer/ Telephone Co.
(I believe that Harry spent the rest of his career working for the Michigan Bell Telephone Company. -Rick Waggener)
==================
From the Polk's City Directory for Detroit, Wayne County, Michigan, 1920-21, page 2241:
Waggener, Harry D.; splicer, boards 201 Farrand Ave., Highland Park
(Also listed as living there are Dorothy, George, Minnie, Jesse, and Lucetta.-RW)
==================
From the Polk's City Directory for Detroit, Wayne County, Michigan, 1921-22, page 1973:
Waggener, Harry D., boards 201 Farrand Pk., Highland Park
(Also listed as living there are Minnie, George, Dorothy, Jesse, and Lucetta.-RW)
==================
From Michigan, Marriage Records, 1867-1952. Michigan Department of Community Health, Division for Vital Records and Health Statistics:
Bride's Name: Reva L Beers
Bride's Gender: Female
Bride's Race: White
Bride's Age: 17
Bride's Birth Place: Michigan
Bride's Residence: Detroit, Mich.
Bride's Occupation: none
Bride's Father's name: Warren C.
Bride's Mother's name: Lucy M. Blake
Bride previously married: no
Marriage Date: 7 Jul 1921
Marriage Place: Detroit, Wayne Co., Michigan
Groom: Harry D Waggener
Groom's Gender: Male
Groom's Race: White
Groom's Age: 21
Groom's Birth Place: Missouri
Groom's occupation: cable splicer
Groom's Residence Place: Detroit, Michigan
Groom's Father: Jesse
Groom's Mother: Anna Kenner
Groom previously married: no
By whom married: Peter F. Staci, Clergyman
Witnesses: Mrs. Peter F. Staci, Detroit; Mrs. W. C. Beers, Cleveland, Ohio
Record Number: 215684
Film Description: 1921 Wayne
==================
Harry and Elsie's Marriage License was posted on-line by Ancestry.com:
License County: Oakland County, Michigan
No. 473; 63 1985
Groom: Harry D. Waggener
Age: 27 years
Color: white
Residence: Highland Park, Mich.
Birthplace: Monetere, Mo. (actually Bonne Terre, Mo.)
Occupation: Cable Foreman
Father's name: J. D. Waggener
Mother's maiden name: Annie E. Kenner
Previously married no times (not true)
Bride: Miss Elsie C. Gregg
Age: 23 years
Color: white
Residence: Royal Oak, Mich.
Birthplace: Lancaster, Penn.
Occupation: typist
Father's name: Martin Gregg
Mother's maiden name: Elvira Luts
Previously married no times
License date: June 9, 1927
Marriage: June 12, 1927
Location: Detroit, Wayne Co., Mich.
Witnesses: Robert Bueschen of Detroit, and Mildred G. Dairs of Detroit
Person performing service: Harold H. Davis, Minister
================
From the 1930 Federal Census of Detroit City, Ward 22, Precinct 17, Wayne County, Michigan, district 82-864, sheet 28a, taken April 11 1930, household 3, 14820 Westwood Street; from ancestry.com, image 54 of 205:
Waggener, Harry R.; head of household, owns home/ value- $3,600, radio in home, home is not a farm, male, age- 30, married, 27 years old at 1st marriage, in school, r/w's, born- Missouri, parents born- Missouri, occupation- Foreman/ Telephone Cable Co., wage worker, currently employed, not a veteran
------ Elsie C.; wife/ head, female, age- 26, married, 23 years old at 1st marriage, r/w's, born- Pennsylvania, parents born- Pennsylvania, occupation- house wife
------ Russell S.; son, male, age- 2, born- Michigan, father born- Missouri, mother born- Pennsylvania
==================
From Polk's Directory of Royal Oak and Ferndale, Oakland County, Michigan, 1938; page 838:
Waggener, Harry D (Elsie C) foreman Michigan Bell Telephone Company (Detroit) household 10750 Kenwood Ave., Oak Park
=================
From the 1940 Federal Census of Royal Oak, Oakland County, Michigan, district 63-145, sheet 27a, taken April 27, 1940, address- 2325 N. Connecticut Ave.:
Waggener, Harry; owns home/ $4000, head of household, male, age- 40, married, highest school grade completed- 2nd year high school, born- Missouri, residence in 1935- Oak Park, Oakland Co., Michigan, worked the last week of March/ 40 hours, occupation- foreman/ Bell Telephone, private worker, worked 52 weeks in 1939, earned $?3135
------- Elsie; wife, female, age- 26, married, highest school grade completed- 4th year high school, born- Pennsylvania, residence in 1935- Oak Park, Mi., not employed, engaged in housework
------ Barbara; daughter, female, age- 6, in school, highest grade completed- 1st, born- Michigan, residence in 1935- Oak Park, Mi.
------ Russell; son, male, age- 12, in school, highest grade completed- 7th, born- Michigan, residence in 1935- Oak Park, Mi.
===============
From The National Archives in St. Louis, Missouri; St. Louis, Missouri; WWII Draft Registration Cards for Michigan, 10/16/1940-03/31/1947; Record Group: Records of the Selective Service System, 147; Box: 1255:
Name: Harry David Waggener
Gender: Male
Race: White
Age: 41
Relationship to Draftee: Self (Head)
Birth Date: 14 Mar 1900
Birth Place: Bonnettere, Missouri, USA
Residence Place: 2325 N. Connecticut, Royal Oak, Oakland, Michigan, USA
Registration Date: 16 Feb 1942
Registration Place: Royal Oak, Oakland, Michigan, USA
Employer: Michigan Bell Telephone Company
Employer's address: 1365 Cass Ave., Detroit, Wayne Co., Mich.
Weight: 151
Complexion: Light brown
Eye Color: Brown
Hair Color: Brown
Height: 5 9
Next of Kin: Mrs. W. J. Dillman; 201 Farrand Park, Highland Park, Mich.
==============
Russell Waggener sent me the following newspaper story about his father Harry. I believe it was from the Daily Tribune newspaper in about 1952:
Harry D. Waggener came to Michigan on a visit in 1917 and really enjoyed his stay. He liked it so much, in fact, that today he is celebrating his 35th anniversary as a Michigan Bell Telephone employee.
Waggener, an ex- Royal Oaker and now a resident of Clarkston, Mich. is district splicing foreman for the Royal Oak and Pontiac areas. He lived in Oak Park from 1934 to 1939, and in Royal Oak from 1939 to 1945.
Waggener was born in a small Missouri hamlet near St. Louis, March 14, 1900. On August 12 1917, he took a train ride to Detroit for a "short visit." But it didn't turnout that way. Through a mutual friend, he was introduced to Frank Phelps, a Michigan Bell employee. Phelps induced Waggener to go to work for Bell.
Firsts-
The Missouri youngster started as a spicer's helper, Aug. 14, 1917. While on that job, Waggener worked on the first motorized cable trouble rig in Detroit. The rig was a brand new Model-T Ford with a pickup body.
In those days, it was not unusual for cable failures to hinder service for weeks at a time. Waggener came to the conclusion that a job on the regular splicing crew was for him, and so in 1919 he joined the outfit. By 1925 he was a foreman.
Waggener worked on the cables that carried the first toll circuits out of Detroit and also on the cut-over that placed the first dial telephones in the Detroit area.
Underwater Job-
In 1941, 24 years after he started with the company, Waggener became district supervising foreman of cable repair for Michigan Bell. It was while working in this capacity he received perhaps his toughest assignment.
On Thanksgiving day, 1941, a Detroit river freighter was cruising along with its anchor dragging. The anchor caught on two underwater marine cables which linked Detroit and Windsor and snapped them both. Waggener was immediately given the task of supervising the repair job. The operation required a diver, several scows and tugboats and a great many telephone crews. But the broken cables were finally put in ship-shape.
Scouter-
In 1943 Waggener was promoted to splicing foreman of Detroit's east district. Today he is foreman of the Woodward division.
Waggener, who has just recently celebrated his 25th wedding anniversary, lives with is wife and two daughters on a 40 acre plot of land near Clarkston. A married son is a Bell plant engineer in the Wyandotte district.
During his residence in Royal Oak, Waggener was active in community affairs. He was a scoutmaster of troop RO-149 and for two years was president of the Oak Park PTA. He was a member of the Lions club and victory garden chairman of Royal Oak during the war.
===============
From Ancestry.com. U.S. Public Records Index, 1950-1993, Volume 1 [database on-line]. Provo, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations, Inc., 2010:
Name: Harry D Waggener
Residence Date: 1987
Address: 2 Westwood Ave Apt 102
Residence: Tequesta, FL
Postal Code: 33469-2566
===============
From the Palm Beach Post (West Palm Beach, Florida), Wednesday, October 24, 1990, Page 38:
Harry D. Waggener
Age 90 of Tequesta passed away Sunday, October 21st, 1990.
He is survived by his wife Elsie; son, Russell Waggener; daughters Barbara Gusie and Cheryl Conklin; six grandchildren; three great grandchildren.
Funeral services will be held at 1 p.m. on Saturday, October 27th at the Grace Immanuel Bible Church, 17475 Johathan Dr., Jupiter. The family suggests contributions be made to the Palm Beach County Special Olympics, 2700 6th Ave. S., Lake Worth, FL 22461. Northwood Funeral Home, WPB in charge of arrangements.
===============
From the Social Security Death Index at ancestry.com:
HARRY D WAGGENER
SSN 363-07-3256
Born 14 Mar 1900
Died 21 Oct 1990
Issued: MI (Before 1951)
================
From Ancestry.com. Florida Death Index, 1990-1991. [database online] Provo, UT:Ancestry.com, 2001. Original data: State of Florida. Florida Death Index,1877-1998. Florida: Florida Health Department, Office of Vital Records,1998.:
Name: Harry David Waggener
Certificate: 109277
Place: Palm Beach
Race: W
Death Date: 21 Oct 1990
Birth Date: 14 Mar 1900
=============
Interview with Harry and Elsie Waggener, August 1979
This is a transcript of a tape that Phil and Elaine Waggener recorded at the home of Harry and Elsie Waggener in Culman, Alabama, in August 1979 to capture their recollections about the Waggener family. The sound quality of the tape was poor, so some words could not be understood. Incidental conversation unrelated to family history has been omitted, and some remarks have been edited slightly for clarity.
Harry: Now we're talking about the Waggener family. It starts out with a Kenner and Swink. Kenner was my mother's maiden name. They lived on a hill called Kenner’s Hill. They were very respected in the community, and they were one of the first settlers in that area.
Phil: Near Festus?
Harry: Just above Festus. In fact, when my mother and father and all of us kids moved there, Grandpa Kenner gave us an acre of land. My dad borrowed three thousand dollars from the Citizens Bank there and he built a house. It was up on a hill overlooking the Mississippi River. It was just down a little ways from the Kenners’ house. They were on top of the hill and we were down the hill just a little ways. This was the only house in that area. All that area was subdivided into lots later on. The Kenner family were pioneers in that area. When I was a boy I used to go up there and milk cows and they would give us a can of milk. I would carry the milk home. Before we got our house built we lived with them. Aunt Kate was there. She had been divorced from her husband named Charlie. She had a daughter named Mary, and Mary and I played a lot together. We were the only two kids around there. We practically lived between the two places, the Kenners and our home.
Phil: My dad had left by that time?
Harry: Your dad, Vest Waggener, had moved there with us. He worked at the Pittsburgh Plate Glass factory. He was a toolmaker. The reason the factory was there because it was on the Mississippi River and in the foothills of the Ozarks, which was full of silica sand, and that's what they made glass out of. There was enough silica sand there, they said, to last anyone's life. Dick worked there too. He was an electrician. I imagine that's where he learned his trade. They called your dad “piss ant.” I don't know how he got that name, but that's what they called him. After we lived there a while, Vest went to Alton, Illinois, and worked there for Eden Washing Machine Company. He would come home on weekends. There was a train running from St. Louis to Festus. One of they things he did was he bought a pool table. We had it in the living room and everybody learned to play pool. That was one of the big things-we all went to the Christian Church, or the Methodist Church or Baptist Church, and every once in a while they would have a-they had no regular minister but they would bring ministers in from out of town. There was a family that used to come there and hold revivals called the Park family. He was a preacher and she played the organ and the daughter sang. In the summertime we had nothing to do there but to take a walk. We would take that pool table out on the front lawn and play pool some evenings. This preacher preached several sermons about that, about how the Waggeners were going to hell.
There were a lot of other preachers who came there. One of them went around with Lucetta for a while. One Saturday night the church caught fire (early 1908- RW) and burned down. My mother, the Kenners, and some other people around there who were pioneers in that church built a new church. My mother was very instrumental. They built it out of cement blocks. It was the first block building in that area. That church is still standing there. She was very proud of that. They had a furnace in there that seldom worked. We went to church then. We went to Sunday school and stayed for church and went back at night. Of course my dad never went to church. I understand, though, that when he came to Michigan-you remember Edgar DeWitt Jones, don't you?
Phil: Yes, I do. I met him.
Harry: Your dad and I went to meet him at the train when he first came to Michigan. He came from Bloomington, Illinois, and he took over that Christian Church there down on Third Street in Detroit. He used to visit us. My mother was the main pillar in that church too. When she died, they buried her from that church, which was unusual, because they thought so much of her. I understand that the church made a memorial for her somewhere there. Anyway, Edgar DeWitt Jones baptized my dad. I didn't see it. When he died, Edgar DeWitt Jones preached his funeral. We had the funeral from our home in Farrand Park. That was because my mother was sick and couldn't go to the funeral home or anything. I think your dad (inaudible). When Jones preached a sermon he wrote it all out and memorized it. I think that when I visited your dad in Arizona he showed me a copy of the sermon he preached at the funeral. One of the things he said was that my dad was the only one who ever called him DeWitt.
We kind of got away from Festus, didn't we? I never did learn to play pool good, but Min got real good, and Cet got good. A lot of other people came there and played a game called Model(?) pool. Cet was a school teacher there. She taught in the MacNutt School-a one-room school out in the country that had all the grades, the first to the-I don't know. That was the first school that I went to. Later Dorothy went to Cape Giradeau(sp?) to learn to be a school teacher, and she taught for one year. She never did like teaching school. She had a belt that she used to control the kids.
When we were living with the Kenners they had an old Negro. His name was Avis. He had been a slave, and his last name was Swink. He could play the violin. He would have nightmares...(inaudible). Also living at the Kenners were Uncle Gee (George- RW)and Uncle Tom(?). Neither one of them was married. They ran the farm. That farm didn't produce enough to make a living and they rented a farm out on the Mississippi River, on that good Mississippi bottom land and they raised good wheat there. They could get a hundred bushel of wheat to the acre.
Elaine: I want to back up and ask about the man who had the nightmares. You said he was a slave and his name was Swink. Was he a black man?
Harry: He was a black man-a colored guy. He lived with my grandparents. They were taking care of him. I think they gave him three or four dollars a week and he lived with them. He would go down into nigger town in Festus on weekends to visit relatives and friends there. Once in a while we would go hunting and kill a possum. White people didn't eat possum, but colored people did. He would give me a dime for a possum. He would take it down there and they would cook it.
What I started to tell you about was this farm they rented on the river. They had dairy cows. They finally gave up that farm and had an auction sale, but they couldn't sell the cows-nobody wanted them-so they moved the cows up to the Kenner farm. I used to stay up there, and we would get up at 3 in the morning to milk 12 cows before breakfast.
Phil: What else did they grow? Corn?
Harry: Yes, they grew corn, and hay for the cattle. The wheat they would load on boxcars. At that time, you know, they didn't have combines. We had a wheat binder, pulled by four horses, and one of my jobs was to run it. I would sit on one horse. They would cut the wheat down, and this thing would put it out into bundles. They would shock it up, and then they would bring in a thresher run by a steam engine. That was always a big time on the farm. The women would have a lot of chicken and they would cook the meals, and the neighbors would come to help them thresh the wheat.
My mother's twin sister, Em. She lived in DeSoto and of course they would visit back and forth. One day I was going off to school and I had to go by Kenners’ house and down the road. My granddad was going along there in a buggy on his way to DeSota and he said “boy, I think I'll take you with me.” And so instead of going to school that day I got into that buggy and went to DeSota. It took a couple of hours.
Em married a man named Gamel. They had a big farm. They raised lots of chickens and when we went there we always had a lot to eat. But they never had beefsteak. I remember that they always had shredded wheat. I loved that shredded wheat when they had whipped cream on it. It was a real treat.
When Cet first started teaching my uncle Horace gave her a horse to ride-it was quite a ways. He wouldn’t give her the horse until she rode side-saddle. Uncle Horace was a banker. I don't know if he owned the bank, but he had controlling stock in it. I went to see him once-I don't know if you [Elsie] went with me or not [Elsie said she was there]. Anyway, we took a ride down to the creek where we played as kids. We were late for dinner but they never waited. He said “If you can’t get to dinner on time, we eat.” That’s the way he was.
Uncle Stoke-I don't know how this happened-he seemed to have a lot of money. My dad never had anything. Uncle Stoke started that Waggener Store. He married a woman named England. The story is-I don’t know how true it is-that she had a son by Uncle Stoke before they were married. That's where Charlie England came in. He was Uncle Stoke’s son and he lived with them. Then there was another son they had, Sid England. Charlie England was the brain. Sid worked in the store. When we first went there it was quite a store; they sold groceries and everything including furniture.
Elsie: What else can you tell about your father?
Harry: I don’t know the whole story, but somehow he went out to the Black Hills and discovered gold. He and another fellow-I guess there were three of them-had a mine and it was doing pretty good. This other guy was trying to cheat him out (inaudible). Dad had a rifle and took a bead on him but couldn't kill him. So they lost the mine.
Your dad [George] told me this story. You know that Mississippi bottom land-it flooded one year and ruined the corn crop. But dad got a bunch of hogs and put them out there to root out that corn and fatten up. He made as much money on that as he would have with the corn.
He [Jesse] wanted to go into the (inaudible) (I think it was the saloon business.-RW) business. My mother told him she would rather he would go into the army than to go into the (inaudible) business-so that’s what he did. He was in the Spanish-American War. He got a pension from that for a long time. I don't think he got it for being in a battle; I think he got a sun stroke.
Elsie: He got it during a parade, and they sent him home. He was never even out of the United States.
Harry: You know, they lived in Florida a long time-in Lake Worth.
Elsie: Seven years.
Harry: That’s where he started getting sick. They couldn't live there any more, and the family got together and decided to bring him up [to Detroit]. They sent me down there to bring him back. We got a compartment on a train. Every once in a while on the way he would say “Where are we?” I'd say “We're coming into Texas” and he’d say “That's a big place.” I don't know how many times he would say that. Elsie: That's where he was mustered out of the army. He was kind of on the decline and his kidneys were going bad....
Elsie: Hardening of the arteries.
Harry: ...and he wasn't all there. There was a mirror in this compartment, and he looked at it and said “Who is that guy?” One night he got up to go to the bathroom, I guess, and he went outside and was roaming up and down the train, and the porter came to get me and I had to go get him and bring him back. He went to Farrand Park, and that's where he died shortly after that.
You know my mother was taking care of him and she contracted TB. She went to doctors, but they never suspected she had tuberculosis [until] they couldn’t do anything about it.
Elsie: You either recovered or you died. She was 75.
Harry: She was in a sanitarium about a year. All the family took turns going there to sit with her in the afternoons.
Elaine: Tell about the slave who took care of the children.
Harry: You know my mother had a twin sister. It was a custom when a child was born to assign a slave girl to take care of it. My grandparents didn’t have a slave girl of suitable age, so they assigned a boy named Jeff to take care of [the twins]. Annie had a bald spot on her head...
Elsie: She got burned there when she fell in the fireplace. Jeff probably wasn’t watching her.
Harry: During the Civil War, some soldiers had a habit of burning houses and taking clothes or whatever was around. The story goes that when some soldiers came up to the Kenner house my dad went out to meet them and said “You’re not going to take my clothes and you're not going to burn this house down.” They were impressed and went on their way.
You remember the silica sand I told you about? It was all around the Kenner home too. A guy by the name of (inaudible) was mining it. He built a cable system with buckets to take the sand down the hill and dump it into carts. It had a steam engine. I used to work for him-I was just a kid. He had a team of mules that I used to drive for a dollar and a half a day. I tried to fire the boiler on the steam engine too.
Phil: Why did the Kenners leave the farm?
Harry: They never did leave the farm. They died there. Then it was sold. But shortly after it was sold, the house burned down. Part of it was a log house, and it had a big porch all around it. In fact it was two houses.
When they set the table at that house they would set the whole table. They never knew who was coming to eat there, or how long they would stay. People would drive up there in a horse and buggy and they might stay a week. There were two old women who came and stayed for over a month. We didn't really know them. Finally we... [end of side 1 of tape].
Phil: When did your dad leave the farm?
Harry: I don’t know. That was before my time. The first I knew he was working at the Pittsburgh Plate Glass factory in Elwood, Indiana. Then we moved from Elwood to Festus and built that house. After that he never had a regular job that I know of. He did odd jobs.
Phil: Cet helped pay for the house. Did my dad help too?
Harry: I imagine he did, but I don’t know how much. He would come there, and I told you that he got that operation for me.
Phil: Elsie, you were telling me earlier that when Harry was little my dad noticed that he [Harry] was having trouble breathing and had him go to a doctor.
Harry: I went on a train all by myself.
Elaine: How old were you?
Harry: I must have been seven or eight.
Phil: How did you get in the telephone business?
Harry: Through my sisters. Dick came to Michigan first-on a freight train. He got a job as an electrician, working on the Keokuk dam. Then Min came up and got a job with Western Electric. Then Dorothy came up and she got a job with Western Electric too. She met a man by the name of (inaudible). You see Western Electric and the telephone company were pretty well connected. He was in the construction department of the telephone company and they were looking for people-this was in 1917, and I was 17 years old. This guy got me a job.
Elsie: Western Electric is where Min met Pete and she married him. And Dorothy had a job there, and the day I went to work for Western, Min and Pete were getting married. There was a notice on the bulletin board saying that everyone was invited to the wedding. And that's where I met Harry. I was 18.
Phil: Did you grow up there?
Elsie: I was born in Pennsylvania...(inaudible)... [my parents] were going north to find work. He worked for Anderson Electric. I was only two years old when we left there.
Harry: Finally the whole family got to Detroit, and we couldn’t rent a place that was big enough for us. So we went to Highland Park and five of us bought the house at 201 Farrand Park. All of us but Dick lived there together for several years, including some other friends from Festus who had come up there to live. One was a friend of George’s who had worked with him in Crystal City. That was unusual for all of us to live together. Then my mother and father came, and Uncle Tom also came and lived with us for a while. There was only one bathroom in that house.
Elsie: There was a toilet in the basement.
Harry: Once when I came home at night and didn't have a key, I climbed on the porch and opened a window and walked over Dorothy and Minnie who were in bed.
Phil: I think my dad was living there when they got married.
Harry: Yes he was.
Elsie: In fact they lived there for a while.
Harry: Your mother came there and visited a lot. We all lived there when we got married. We'd probably still be living there if we hadn’t got married. [Laughter] Then Min and Pete finally ended up with the whole thing.
Elsie: What did you do, sell that house when you (inaudible)?
Harry: We gave it to them, I guess.
Elsie: No, I mean when Min and Pete were living in Royal Oak.
Harry: (inaudible).
Elaine: How did the Garr family fit in?
Harry: It was on the Waggener side.
Elsie: The Garr family originated in Bavaria, which is now part of Germany but then it had a king....
Harry: The only part of the Waggener family I know about are the people I told you about-Uncle Jim, Uncle Stoke, and Uncle Horace-and there was a Will Waggener... (inaudible).
Phil: Was your dad a farmer for a while?
Harry: Evidently, before my time. But we always had a big garden.
Elsie: What you told me was that it was always the women who put in the garden.
Harry: One thing my dad did, he would go and wait on sick people. Even when they had smallpox and things like that and were quarantined, he would go there and take care of them.
Elaine: That seemed to be a tradition then, didn’t it?
Harry: Yes, and when someone died people would sit up with [the body] all night. I sat up all night with my grandmother. We went to the graveyard in a horse and buggy. That was 1916.
Phil: I have memories of my grandfather. What kind of guy was Jesse D.?
Harry: He was a reprobate. He treated my mother a lot worse (inaudible). She was active in her church. This church class she went to had quilting parties. They would go to different houses and make quilts. She would have those women [in her house], and he would go in there and tell them that she didn’t feed him and wouldn’t do this and that-to all those strange women. But I never heard her say one word against him.
Elsie: We went there one day and he was sitting on the front porch, and we asked him where Annie was. He said “I don't know, she just goes and doesn’t tell me where she's going.” Well, she was up at the church quilting and she did tell him. Harry said “Why don't you divorce her?” and he said “I'm thinking about it.” And he could hardly go across the street without her.
Harry: When we were coming back from that train ride [from Florida], he had weak kidneys. When we got off the train and went in the waiting room he did not want her to go in the ladies’ room. He wanted her to go in the men’s room with him. He would raise hell, too.
Phil: I remember my dad talking about the food the family would put on the table at the farm. He said the women would cook all day for Sunday dinner and that there would be every kind of meat and three or four different kinds of pie and potatoes...
Elsie: Yes.
Harry: And they would have what was called clabber cheese-cottage cheese. They would make it themselves. They would put it in a dish and put cream on it.
Phil: When I visited you in Florida, you were repairing washing machines.
Harry: Yeah, it became a regular business. That's one reason I moved. They kept me too busy.
Elsie: There were lots of widows down there, and nobody could do anything.
[end of tape]
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Harry is buried with his wife Elsie and youngest daughter Judy Ann in the Lakeview Cemetery, Clarkston, Oakland County, Michigan. Plot: Block 15, Lot 44, Grave 5. His headstone reads:
Harry D.
Waggener
1900- 1990
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Harry David Waggener was the youngest of six children born to his parents, Jesse David and Anna Eliza (Kenner) Waggener. Harry was born in the town of Bonne Terre in St. Francois County, Missouri on March 14, 1900. I believe they were living in that area at the time because his father was working there in nearby lead mines. I know that the family moved in a year or two to Elwood, Indiana, where Harry's father worked for the Pittsburg Glass Company. Within another year or two the family moved to what was known as Kenner's Hill, just north of the town of Festus, Missouri. The family of Harry's mother Annie, William Bryant and Mary Malinda (Swink), were a very prominent family in the area and had been living in a house at the top of the hill, for over 25 years. According to the story reported below by Harry, the Kenners gave Jesse and Annie an acre of land near to their home, and Jesse and Annie borrowed $3,000 and built a house on the property. The family lived there, and Harry spent the rest of his childhood there.
According to the story below, in August of 1917, the 17 year old Harry went to Detroit, Michigan to visit some of his family members who had moved there. Harry's older brother Dick had moved there in 1912 or 1913, seeking work as an electrician. Detroit was in the middle of a major industrial boom, and good jobs were apparently easy to be had. A few years later his sisters, Dorothy and Min, had also moved there and found jobs working for Western Electric, which was affiliated with the Michigan Telephone company, which came to be the Michigan Bell Telephone Company. They reportedly introduce Harry to a Frank Phelps, a Michigan Telephone company employee, and he offered Harry a job. Two days later Harry was working for this company as a splicer's helper. Harry worked the rest of his career for this company. By 1919 he was working on a regular splicing crew, and by 1925 he was a foreman. In 1941 he became the district supervising foreman of cable repair for Michigan Bell. In 1943 he became the splicing foreman of Detroit's east district, and later of the Woodward division.
For about the first ten years that Harry was in the Detroit area, he lived with a number of his siblings and his parents. By 1920 they had all moved there. Initially they were in Detroit, but in 1920, Harry and his siblings purchased a house at 201 Farrand Park in Highland Park, and Harry lived there with his parents and all of his siblings except Dick and his family, who were nearby. Harry married Reva L. Beers on July 7, 1921. Reva died tragically about a year later, on July 3, 1922.
On March 12, 1927, Harry married Elsie Catherine Gregg in Detroit, Michigan. Elsie had begun working for Western Electric in 1922 when she was 18 years old, and there she met Harry's sister Min. Shortly thereafter she attended the wedding of Min and Pete Dillman, and there she met Harry. I think that they might have lived briefly in the Highland Park house after their marriage, but not long afterward they had their own home at 14820 Westwood St, Detroit. There were four children born to Harry and Elsie: Russell (1928), Barbara (1934), Cheryl (1944) and Judy (1946). Judy died at the age of three, but the other three children survived their parents.
With the onset of the Great Depression in the early 1930's, times were tough for everyone. Harry kept his job as a cable splicer for the phone company, but at some point had to take every 6th week off without pay. They also apparently had to sell their house in Detroit in 1934, and moved to a rented house in Oak Park on Kenwood Street. However, at about the same time they bought a farm north of the metropolitan Detroit area, about five miles south of Almont, Michigan on M53. Harry was a lover of horses and they could keep a horse there as well as provide a place for Elsie's parents and sister, Martin, Elvira and June Gregg, to live. It was also a general farm with horses, cows, sheep, pigs, and chickens; as well as hay, wheat, and oats fields, and an apple orchard and a garden. In 1930 Harry and Elsie purchased a home in Royal Oak, Michigan, at 2325 N. Connecticut Ave., and moved there.
In 1946 they bought a 40 acre property with a house, a three car garage, a barn and 30 acres of apple trees in Clarkston, Michigan. They sold the home is Royal Oak and moved there. They built a house for Elsie's parents on the property and sold the farm near Almont. Harry had horses there also and became the president of the Dixie Saddle Club, which did square dancing on horse back. After Elsie's father died they sold the house and her mother lived with them for the rest of her life.
In 1960, Harry retired from the phone company after working there for 43 years. A short while later they sold the home in Clarkston and moved to West Palm Beach, Florida and bought an unfinished house there, which Harry subsequently finished. The house was next to a canal and there was a pasture where Harry also kept some horses. For the most part Elsie and Harry lived the rest of their lives in Florida, although they lived for a short while in Alabama. For a while he had a business repairing washing machines. As a grand-nephew, I have nothing but fond memories of both Uncle Harry and Aunt Elsie. They were always kind and friendly. Harry passed away at the age of 90 on October 21, 1990, and Elsie followed at the age of 92 on September 18, 1996. They are both buried in the Lakeview Cemetery in Clarkston, Oakland County, Michigan.- RW
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From the 1900 Federal Census of St. Francois County, Missouri, Perry Township, (not a city), taken June 4, 1900, District #95, page 4A; ancestry.com, St. Francois #95, image 7 of 56. Harry is listed in the household of his parents:
Household #67, family #70, no address listed;
----- Harry D; son, male, born- Mar. 1900, age- 2/12, born- Missouri, parents born- Missouri
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From the 1910 Federal Census of the City of Festus, Joachim Township, Jefferson County, Missouri, district 33, sheet 26a, page 136, taken May 12, 1910, household 552; from genealogy.com. Harry is listed in the household of his parents:
------ Harry D.; son, male, age- 10, born- Missouri, parents born- Missouri, in school, rw's
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From Ancestry.com. World War I Selective Service System Draft Registration Cards, 1917-18 [database online] Provo, UT: Ancestry.com, 2002. National Archives and Records Administration. World War I Selective Service System Draft Registration Cards, 1917-1918. M1509, 4,277 rolls. Washington, D.C.: National Archives and Records Administration.:
No. A960
Name: Harry David Waggener
Address: 985 John R. St., Detroit, Mich.
Age; 18
Date of birth: March 14, 1900
Race: white
Citizenship: natural born
Occupation: cable helper
Employer: Michigan State Telephone Co.
Location of employment: 34 John R St., Detroit, Mich.
Nearest relative: Mrs. Anna E. Waggener- mother
Address: 985 John R St., Detroit, Mich
Height: medium
Build: medium
Color of eyes: dark
Color of hair: dark
Date of registration: September 17, 1918
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From the 1920 Federal Census of Detroit City, District 14 (part of), 4th Ward (part of), Wayne County, Michigan, district 147, sheet 8A, taken January 19-20, 1920, household 164, address- 208 Bethune Ave. West; from ancestry.com, image 15 of 17. Harry is listed in the household of his parents:
------ Harry D.; son, male, age- 19, single, born- Missouri, parents born- Missouri, occupation- Cable Officer/ Telephone Co.
(I believe that Harry spent the rest of his career working for the Michigan Bell Telephone Company. -Rick Waggener)
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From the Polk's City Directory for Detroit, Wayne County, Michigan, 1920-21, page 2241:
Waggener, Harry D.; splicer, boards 201 Farrand Ave., Highland Park
(Also listed as living there are Dorothy, George, Minnie, Jesse, and Lucetta.-RW)
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From the Polk's City Directory for Detroit, Wayne County, Michigan, 1921-22, page 1973:
Waggener, Harry D., boards 201 Farrand Pk., Highland Park
(Also listed as living there are Minnie, George, Dorothy, Jesse, and Lucetta.-RW)
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From Michigan, Marriage Records, 1867-1952. Michigan Department of Community Health, Division for Vital Records and Health Statistics:
Bride's Name: Reva L Beers
Bride's Gender: Female
Bride's Race: White
Bride's Age: 17
Bride's Birth Place: Michigan
Bride's Residence: Detroit, Mich.
Bride's Occupation: none
Bride's Father's name: Warren C.
Bride's Mother's name: Lucy M. Blake
Bride previously married: no
Marriage Date: 7 Jul 1921
Marriage Place: Detroit, Wayne Co., Michigan
Groom: Harry D Waggener
Groom's Gender: Male
Groom's Race: White
Groom's Age: 21
Groom's Birth Place: Missouri
Groom's occupation: cable splicer
Groom's Residence Place: Detroit, Michigan
Groom's Father: Jesse
Groom's Mother: Anna Kenner
Groom previously married: no
By whom married: Peter F. Staci, Clergyman
Witnesses: Mrs. Peter F. Staci, Detroit; Mrs. W. C. Beers, Cleveland, Ohio
Record Number: 215684
Film Description: 1921 Wayne
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Harry and Elsie's Marriage License was posted on-line by Ancestry.com:
License County: Oakland County, Michigan
No. 473; 63 1985
Groom: Harry D. Waggener
Age: 27 years
Color: white
Residence: Highland Park, Mich.
Birthplace: Monetere, Mo. (actually Bonne Terre, Mo.)
Occupation: Cable Foreman
Father's name: J. D. Waggener
Mother's maiden name: Annie E. Kenner
Previously married no times (not true)
Bride: Miss Elsie C. Gregg
Age: 23 years
Color: white
Residence: Royal Oak, Mich.
Birthplace: Lancaster, Penn.
Occupation: typist
Father's name: Martin Gregg
Mother's maiden name: Elvira Luts
Previously married no times
License date: June 9, 1927
Marriage: June 12, 1927
Location: Detroit, Wayne Co., Mich.
Witnesses: Robert Bueschen of Detroit, and Mildred G. Dairs of Detroit
Person performing service: Harold H. Davis, Minister
================
From the 1930 Federal Census of Detroit City, Ward 22, Precinct 17, Wayne County, Michigan, district 82-864, sheet 28a, taken April 11 1930, household 3, 14820 Westwood Street; from ancestry.com, image 54 of 205:
Waggener, Harry R.; head of household, owns home/ value- $3,600, radio in home, home is not a farm, male, age- 30, married, 27 years old at 1st marriage, in school, r/w's, born- Missouri, parents born- Missouri, occupation- Foreman/ Telephone Cable Co., wage worker, currently employed, not a veteran
------ Elsie C.; wife/ head, female, age- 26, married, 23 years old at 1st marriage, r/w's, born- Pennsylvania, parents born- Pennsylvania, occupation- house wife
------ Russell S.; son, male, age- 2, born- Michigan, father born- Missouri, mother born- Pennsylvania
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From Polk's Directory of Royal Oak and Ferndale, Oakland County, Michigan, 1938; page 838:
Waggener, Harry D (Elsie C) foreman Michigan Bell Telephone Company (Detroit) household 10750 Kenwood Ave., Oak Park
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From the 1940 Federal Census of Royal Oak, Oakland County, Michigan, district 63-145, sheet 27a, taken April 27, 1940, address- 2325 N. Connecticut Ave.:
Waggener, Harry; owns home/ $4000, head of household, male, age- 40, married, highest school grade completed- 2nd year high school, born- Missouri, residence in 1935- Oak Park, Oakland Co., Michigan, worked the last week of March/ 40 hours, occupation- foreman/ Bell Telephone, private worker, worked 52 weeks in 1939, earned $?3135
------- Elsie; wife, female, age- 26, married, highest school grade completed- 4th year high school, born- Pennsylvania, residence in 1935- Oak Park, Mi., not employed, engaged in housework
------ Barbara; daughter, female, age- 6, in school, highest grade completed- 1st, born- Michigan, residence in 1935- Oak Park, Mi.
------ Russell; son, male, age- 12, in school, highest grade completed- 7th, born- Michigan, residence in 1935- Oak Park, Mi.
===============
From The National Archives in St. Louis, Missouri; St. Louis, Missouri; WWII Draft Registration Cards for Michigan, 10/16/1940-03/31/1947; Record Group: Records of the Selective Service System, 147; Box: 1255:
Name: Harry David Waggener
Gender: Male
Race: White
Age: 41
Relationship to Draftee: Self (Head)
Birth Date: 14 Mar 1900
Birth Place: Bonnettere, Missouri, USA
Residence Place: 2325 N. Connecticut, Royal Oak, Oakland, Michigan, USA
Registration Date: 16 Feb 1942
Registration Place: Royal Oak, Oakland, Michigan, USA
Employer: Michigan Bell Telephone Company
Employer's address: 1365 Cass Ave., Detroit, Wayne Co., Mich.
Weight: 151
Complexion: Light brown
Eye Color: Brown
Hair Color: Brown
Height: 5 9
Next of Kin: Mrs. W. J. Dillman; 201 Farrand Park, Highland Park, Mich.
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Russell Waggener sent me the following newspaper story about his father Harry. I believe it was from the Daily Tribune newspaper in about 1952:
Harry D. Waggener came to Michigan on a visit in 1917 and really enjoyed his stay. He liked it so much, in fact, that today he is celebrating his 35th anniversary as a Michigan Bell Telephone employee.
Waggener, an ex- Royal Oaker and now a resident of Clarkston, Mich. is district splicing foreman for the Royal Oak and Pontiac areas. He lived in Oak Park from 1934 to 1939, and in Royal Oak from 1939 to 1945.
Waggener was born in a small Missouri hamlet near St. Louis, March 14, 1900. On August 12 1917, he took a train ride to Detroit for a "short visit." But it didn't turnout that way. Through a mutual friend, he was introduced to Frank Phelps, a Michigan Bell employee. Phelps induced Waggener to go to work for Bell.
Firsts-
The Missouri youngster started as a spicer's helper, Aug. 14, 1917. While on that job, Waggener worked on the first motorized cable trouble rig in Detroit. The rig was a brand new Model-T Ford with a pickup body.
In those days, it was not unusual for cable failures to hinder service for weeks at a time. Waggener came to the conclusion that a job on the regular splicing crew was for him, and so in 1919 he joined the outfit. By 1925 he was a foreman.
Waggener worked on the cables that carried the first toll circuits out of Detroit and also on the cut-over that placed the first dial telephones in the Detroit area.
Underwater Job-
In 1941, 24 years after he started with the company, Waggener became district supervising foreman of cable repair for Michigan Bell. It was while working in this capacity he received perhaps his toughest assignment.
On Thanksgiving day, 1941, a Detroit river freighter was cruising along with its anchor dragging. The anchor caught on two underwater marine cables which linked Detroit and Windsor and snapped them both. Waggener was immediately given the task of supervising the repair job. The operation required a diver, several scows and tugboats and a great many telephone crews. But the broken cables were finally put in ship-shape.
Scouter-
In 1943 Waggener was promoted to splicing foreman of Detroit's east district. Today he is foreman of the Woodward division.
Waggener, who has just recently celebrated his 25th wedding anniversary, lives with is wife and two daughters on a 40 acre plot of land near Clarkston. A married son is a Bell plant engineer in the Wyandotte district.
During his residence in Royal Oak, Waggener was active in community affairs. He was a scoutmaster of troop RO-149 and for two years was president of the Oak Park PTA. He was a member of the Lions club and victory garden chairman of Royal Oak during the war.
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From Ancestry.com. U.S. Public Records Index, 1950-1993, Volume 1 [database on-line]. Provo, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations, Inc., 2010:
Name: Harry D Waggener
Residence Date: 1987
Address: 2 Westwood Ave Apt 102
Residence: Tequesta, FL
Postal Code: 33469-2566
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From the Palm Beach Post (West Palm Beach, Florida), Wednesday, October 24, 1990, Page 38:
Harry D. Waggener
Age 90 of Tequesta passed away Sunday, October 21st, 1990.
He is survived by his wife Elsie; son, Russell Waggener; daughters Barbara Gusie and Cheryl Conklin; six grandchildren; three great grandchildren.
Funeral services will be held at 1 p.m. on Saturday, October 27th at the Grace Immanuel Bible Church, 17475 Johathan Dr., Jupiter. The family suggests contributions be made to the Palm Beach County Special Olympics, 2700 6th Ave. S., Lake Worth, FL 22461. Northwood Funeral Home, WPB in charge of arrangements.
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From the Social Security Death Index at ancestry.com:
HARRY D WAGGENER
SSN 363-07-3256
Born 14 Mar 1900
Died 21 Oct 1990
Issued: MI (Before 1951)
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From Ancestry.com. Florida Death Index, 1990-1991. [database online] Provo, UT:Ancestry.com, 2001. Original data: State of Florida. Florida Death Index,1877-1998. Florida: Florida Health Department, Office of Vital Records,1998.:
Name: Harry David Waggener
Certificate: 109277
Place: Palm Beach
Race: W
Death Date: 21 Oct 1990
Birth Date: 14 Mar 1900
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Interview with Harry and Elsie Waggener, August 1979
This is a transcript of a tape that Phil and Elaine Waggener recorded at the home of Harry and Elsie Waggener in Culman, Alabama, in August 1979 to capture their recollections about the Waggener family. The sound quality of the tape was poor, so some words could not be understood. Incidental conversation unrelated to family history has been omitted, and some remarks have been edited slightly for clarity.
Harry: Now we're talking about the Waggener family. It starts out with a Kenner and Swink. Kenner was my mother's maiden name. They lived on a hill called Kenner’s Hill. They were very respected in the community, and they were one of the first settlers in that area.
Phil: Near Festus?
Harry: Just above Festus. In fact, when my mother and father and all of us kids moved there, Grandpa Kenner gave us an acre of land. My dad borrowed three thousand dollars from the Citizens Bank there and he built a house. It was up on a hill overlooking the Mississippi River. It was just down a little ways from the Kenners’ house. They were on top of the hill and we were down the hill just a little ways. This was the only house in that area. All that area was subdivided into lots later on. The Kenner family were pioneers in that area. When I was a boy I used to go up there and milk cows and they would give us a can of milk. I would carry the milk home. Before we got our house built we lived with them. Aunt Kate was there. She had been divorced from her husband named Charlie. She had a daughter named Mary, and Mary and I played a lot together. We were the only two kids around there. We practically lived between the two places, the Kenners and our home.
Phil: My dad had left by that time?
Harry: Your dad, Vest Waggener, had moved there with us. He worked at the Pittsburgh Plate Glass factory. He was a toolmaker. The reason the factory was there because it was on the Mississippi River and in the foothills of the Ozarks, which was full of silica sand, and that's what they made glass out of. There was enough silica sand there, they said, to last anyone's life. Dick worked there too. He was an electrician. I imagine that's where he learned his trade. They called your dad “piss ant.” I don't know how he got that name, but that's what they called him. After we lived there a while, Vest went to Alton, Illinois, and worked there for Eden Washing Machine Company. He would come home on weekends. There was a train running from St. Louis to Festus. One of they things he did was he bought a pool table. We had it in the living room and everybody learned to play pool. That was one of the big things-we all went to the Christian Church, or the Methodist Church or Baptist Church, and every once in a while they would have a-they had no regular minister but they would bring ministers in from out of town. There was a family that used to come there and hold revivals called the Park family. He was a preacher and she played the organ and the daughter sang. In the summertime we had nothing to do there but to take a walk. We would take that pool table out on the front lawn and play pool some evenings. This preacher preached several sermons about that, about how the Waggeners were going to hell.
There were a lot of other preachers who came there. One of them went around with Lucetta for a while. One Saturday night the church caught fire (early 1908- RW) and burned down. My mother, the Kenners, and some other people around there who were pioneers in that church built a new church. My mother was very instrumental. They built it out of cement blocks. It was the first block building in that area. That church is still standing there. She was very proud of that. They had a furnace in there that seldom worked. We went to church then. We went to Sunday school and stayed for church and went back at night. Of course my dad never went to church. I understand, though, that when he came to Michigan-you remember Edgar DeWitt Jones, don't you?
Phil: Yes, I do. I met him.
Harry: Your dad and I went to meet him at the train when he first came to Michigan. He came from Bloomington, Illinois, and he took over that Christian Church there down on Third Street in Detroit. He used to visit us. My mother was the main pillar in that church too. When she died, they buried her from that church, which was unusual, because they thought so much of her. I understand that the church made a memorial for her somewhere there. Anyway, Edgar DeWitt Jones baptized my dad. I didn't see it. When he died, Edgar DeWitt Jones preached his funeral. We had the funeral from our home in Farrand Park. That was because my mother was sick and couldn't go to the funeral home or anything. I think your dad (inaudible). When Jones preached a sermon he wrote it all out and memorized it. I think that when I visited your dad in Arizona he showed me a copy of the sermon he preached at the funeral. One of the things he said was that my dad was the only one who ever called him DeWitt.
We kind of got away from Festus, didn't we? I never did learn to play pool good, but Min got real good, and Cet got good. A lot of other people came there and played a game called Model(?) pool. Cet was a school teacher there. She taught in the MacNutt School-a one-room school out in the country that had all the grades, the first to the-I don't know. That was the first school that I went to. Later Dorothy went to Cape Giradeau(sp?) to learn to be a school teacher, and she taught for one year. She never did like teaching school. She had a belt that she used to control the kids.
When we were living with the Kenners they had an old Negro. His name was Avis. He had been a slave, and his last name was Swink. He could play the violin. He would have nightmares...(inaudible). Also living at the Kenners were Uncle Gee (George- RW)and Uncle Tom(?). Neither one of them was married. They ran the farm. That farm didn't produce enough to make a living and they rented a farm out on the Mississippi River, on that good Mississippi bottom land and they raised good wheat there. They could get a hundred bushel of wheat to the acre.
Elaine: I want to back up and ask about the man who had the nightmares. You said he was a slave and his name was Swink. Was he a black man?
Harry: He was a black man-a colored guy. He lived with my grandparents. They were taking care of him. I think they gave him three or four dollars a week and he lived with them. He would go down into nigger town in Festus on weekends to visit relatives and friends there. Once in a while we would go hunting and kill a possum. White people didn't eat possum, but colored people did. He would give me a dime for a possum. He would take it down there and they would cook it.
What I started to tell you about was this farm they rented on the river. They had dairy cows. They finally gave up that farm and had an auction sale, but they couldn't sell the cows-nobody wanted them-so they moved the cows up to the Kenner farm. I used to stay up there, and we would get up at 3 in the morning to milk 12 cows before breakfast.
Phil: What else did they grow? Corn?
Harry: Yes, they grew corn, and hay for the cattle. The wheat they would load on boxcars. At that time, you know, they didn't have combines. We had a wheat binder, pulled by four horses, and one of my jobs was to run it. I would sit on one horse. They would cut the wheat down, and this thing would put it out into bundles. They would shock it up, and then they would bring in a thresher run by a steam engine. That was always a big time on the farm. The women would have a lot of chicken and they would cook the meals, and the neighbors would come to help them thresh the wheat.
My mother's twin sister, Em. She lived in DeSoto and of course they would visit back and forth. One day I was going off to school and I had to go by Kenners’ house and down the road. My granddad was going along there in a buggy on his way to DeSota and he said “boy, I think I'll take you with me.” And so instead of going to school that day I got into that buggy and went to DeSota. It took a couple of hours.
Em married a man named Gamel. They had a big farm. They raised lots of chickens and when we went there we always had a lot to eat. But they never had beefsteak. I remember that they always had shredded wheat. I loved that shredded wheat when they had whipped cream on it. It was a real treat.
When Cet first started teaching my uncle Horace gave her a horse to ride-it was quite a ways. He wouldn’t give her the horse until she rode side-saddle. Uncle Horace was a banker. I don't know if he owned the bank, but he had controlling stock in it. I went to see him once-I don't know if you [Elsie] went with me or not [Elsie said she was there]. Anyway, we took a ride down to the creek where we played as kids. We were late for dinner but they never waited. He said “If you can’t get to dinner on time, we eat.” That’s the way he was.
Uncle Stoke-I don't know how this happened-he seemed to have a lot of money. My dad never had anything. Uncle Stoke started that Waggener Store. He married a woman named England. The story is-I don’t know how true it is-that she had a son by Uncle Stoke before they were married. That's where Charlie England came in. He was Uncle Stoke’s son and he lived with them. Then there was another son they had, Sid England. Charlie England was the brain. Sid worked in the store. When we first went there it was quite a store; they sold groceries and everything including furniture.
Elsie: What else can you tell about your father?
Harry: I don’t know the whole story, but somehow he went out to the Black Hills and discovered gold. He and another fellow-I guess there were three of them-had a mine and it was doing pretty good. This other guy was trying to cheat him out (inaudible). Dad had a rifle and took a bead on him but couldn't kill him. So they lost the mine.
Your dad [George] told me this story. You know that Mississippi bottom land-it flooded one year and ruined the corn crop. But dad got a bunch of hogs and put them out there to root out that corn and fatten up. He made as much money on that as he would have with the corn.
He [Jesse] wanted to go into the (inaudible) (I think it was the saloon business.-RW) business. My mother told him she would rather he would go into the army than to go into the (inaudible) business-so that’s what he did. He was in the Spanish-American War. He got a pension from that for a long time. I don't think he got it for being in a battle; I think he got a sun stroke.
Elsie: He got it during a parade, and they sent him home. He was never even out of the United States.
Harry: You know, they lived in Florida a long time-in Lake Worth.
Elsie: Seven years.
Harry: That’s where he started getting sick. They couldn't live there any more, and the family got together and decided to bring him up [to Detroit]. They sent me down there to bring him back. We got a compartment on a train. Every once in a while on the way he would say “Where are we?” I'd say “We're coming into Texas” and he’d say “That's a big place.” I don't know how many times he would say that. Elsie: That's where he was mustered out of the army. He was kind of on the decline and his kidneys were going bad....
Elsie: Hardening of the arteries.
Harry: ...and he wasn't all there. There was a mirror in this compartment, and he looked at it and said “Who is that guy?” One night he got up to go to the bathroom, I guess, and he went outside and was roaming up and down the train, and the porter came to get me and I had to go get him and bring him back. He went to Farrand Park, and that's where he died shortly after that.
You know my mother was taking care of him and she contracted TB. She went to doctors, but they never suspected she had tuberculosis [until] they couldn’t do anything about it.
Elsie: You either recovered or you died. She was 75.
Harry: She was in a sanitarium about a year. All the family took turns going there to sit with her in the afternoons.
Elaine: Tell about the slave who took care of the children.
Harry: You know my mother had a twin sister. It was a custom when a child was born to assign a slave girl to take care of it. My grandparents didn’t have a slave girl of suitable age, so they assigned a boy named Jeff to take care of [the twins]. Annie had a bald spot on her head...
Elsie: She got burned there when she fell in the fireplace. Jeff probably wasn’t watching her.
Harry: During the Civil War, some soldiers had a habit of burning houses and taking clothes or whatever was around. The story goes that when some soldiers came up to the Kenner house my dad went out to meet them and said “You’re not going to take my clothes and you're not going to burn this house down.” They were impressed and went on their way.
You remember the silica sand I told you about? It was all around the Kenner home too. A guy by the name of (inaudible) was mining it. He built a cable system with buckets to take the sand down the hill and dump it into carts. It had a steam engine. I used to work for him-I was just a kid. He had a team of mules that I used to drive for a dollar and a half a day. I tried to fire the boiler on the steam engine too.
Phil: Why did the Kenners leave the farm?
Harry: They never did leave the farm. They died there. Then it was sold. But shortly after it was sold, the house burned down. Part of it was a log house, and it had a big porch all around it. In fact it was two houses.
When they set the table at that house they would set the whole table. They never knew who was coming to eat there, or how long they would stay. People would drive up there in a horse and buggy and they might stay a week. There were two old women who came and stayed for over a month. We didn't really know them. Finally we... [end of side 1 of tape].
Phil: When did your dad leave the farm?
Harry: I don’t know. That was before my time. The first I knew he was working at the Pittsburgh Plate Glass factory in Elwood, Indiana. Then we moved from Elwood to Festus and built that house. After that he never had a regular job that I know of. He did odd jobs.
Phil: Cet helped pay for the house. Did my dad help too?
Harry: I imagine he did, but I don’t know how much. He would come there, and I told you that he got that operation for me.
Phil: Elsie, you were telling me earlier that when Harry was little my dad noticed that he [Harry] was having trouble breathing and had him go to a doctor.
Harry: I went on a train all by myself.
Elaine: How old were you?
Harry: I must have been seven or eight.
Phil: How did you get in the telephone business?
Harry: Through my sisters. Dick came to Michigan first-on a freight train. He got a job as an electrician, working on the Keokuk dam. Then Min came up and got a job with Western Electric. Then Dorothy came up and she got a job with Western Electric too. She met a man by the name of (inaudible). You see Western Electric and the telephone company were pretty well connected. He was in the construction department of the telephone company and they were looking for people-this was in 1917, and I was 17 years old. This guy got me a job.
Elsie: Western Electric is where Min met Pete and she married him. And Dorothy had a job there, and the day I went to work for Western, Min and Pete were getting married. There was a notice on the bulletin board saying that everyone was invited to the wedding. And that's where I met Harry. I was 18.
Phil: Did you grow up there?
Elsie: I was born in Pennsylvania...(inaudible)... [my parents] were going north to find work. He worked for Anderson Electric. I was only two years old when we left there.
Harry: Finally the whole family got to Detroit, and we couldn’t rent a place that was big enough for us. So we went to Highland Park and five of us bought the house at 201 Farrand Park. All of us but Dick lived there together for several years, including some other friends from Festus who had come up there to live. One was a friend of George’s who had worked with him in Crystal City. That was unusual for all of us to live together. Then my mother and father came, and Uncle Tom also came and lived with us for a while. There was only one bathroom in that house.
Elsie: There was a toilet in the basement.
Harry: Once when I came home at night and didn't have a key, I climbed on the porch and opened a window and walked over Dorothy and Minnie who were in bed.
Phil: I think my dad was living there when they got married.
Harry: Yes he was.
Elsie: In fact they lived there for a while.
Harry: Your mother came there and visited a lot. We all lived there when we got married. We'd probably still be living there if we hadn’t got married. [Laughter] Then Min and Pete finally ended up with the whole thing.
Elsie: What did you do, sell that house when you (inaudible)?
Harry: We gave it to them, I guess.
Elsie: No, I mean when Min and Pete were living in Royal Oak.
Harry: (inaudible).
Elaine: How did the Garr family fit in?
Harry: It was on the Waggener side.
Elsie: The Garr family originated in Bavaria, which is now part of Germany but then it had a king....
Harry: The only part of the Waggener family I know about are the people I told you about-Uncle Jim, Uncle Stoke, and Uncle Horace-and there was a Will Waggener... (inaudible).
Phil: Was your dad a farmer for a while?
Harry: Evidently, before my time. But we always had a big garden.
Elsie: What you told me was that it was always the women who put in the garden.
Harry: One thing my dad did, he would go and wait on sick people. Even when they had smallpox and things like that and were quarantined, he would go there and take care of them.
Elaine: That seemed to be a tradition then, didn’t it?
Harry: Yes, and when someone died people would sit up with [the body] all night. I sat up all night with my grandmother. We went to the graveyard in a horse and buggy. That was 1916.
Phil: I have memories of my grandfather. What kind of guy was Jesse D.?
Harry: He was a reprobate. He treated my mother a lot worse (inaudible). She was active in her church. This church class she went to had quilting parties. They would go to different houses and make quilts. She would have those women [in her house], and he would go in there and tell them that she didn’t feed him and wouldn’t do this and that-to all those strange women. But I never heard her say one word against him.
Elsie: We went there one day and he was sitting on the front porch, and we asked him where Annie was. He said “I don't know, she just goes and doesn’t tell me where she's going.” Well, she was up at the church quilting and she did tell him. Harry said “Why don't you divorce her?” and he said “I'm thinking about it.” And he could hardly go across the street without her.
Harry: When we were coming back from that train ride [from Florida], he had weak kidneys. When we got off the train and went in the waiting room he did not want her to go in the ladies’ room. He wanted her to go in the men’s room with him. He would raise hell, too.
Phil: I remember my dad talking about the food the family would put on the table at the farm. He said the women would cook all day for Sunday dinner and that there would be every kind of meat and three or four different kinds of pie and potatoes...
Elsie: Yes.
Harry: And they would have what was called clabber cheese-cottage cheese. They would make it themselves. They would put it in a dish and put cream on it.
Phil: When I visited you in Florida, you were repairing washing machines.
Harry: Yeah, it became a regular business. That's one reason I moved. They kept me too busy.
Elsie: There were lots of widows down there, and nobody could do anything.
[end of tape]
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Harry is buried with his wife Elsie and youngest daughter Judy Ann in the Lakeview Cemetery, Clarkston, Oakland County, Michigan. Plot: Block 15, Lot 44, Grave 5. His headstone reads:
Harry D.
Waggener
1900- 1990
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