CHAPTER 12

Paid in Eggs

Mary Stark and Della Stark Flinn, about 1924

The autumn after Grandpa Charles died, I finally started school. On the first day, Mom led me up the steps of an American icon: a classic red schoolhouse, complete with a bell at the top.

The Cottrell schoolhouse had been built in 1869, and at one time the school had taught grades one through eight. My brothers attended the school on their return from California, when one room was for kindergarten, the other for first grade.

I entered kindergarten in 1972, one of the last years the Cottrell School was open. A kind woman who genuinely loved children, Mrs. Cross told me that she could remember meeting my father on his first day of school in the mid-1930s. He had been one of her students her first year on the job. “Now it’s my last year,” she told me sweetly. “And I’m teaching his youngest daughter in the very same room. Isn’t that nice?”

Meeting more kids my age at school confirmed something that I had long suspected. Most children had two sets of grandparents. I knew only about one set. With the loss of Grandpa Charles, I became obsessed with finding out what happened to my “lost” grandparents. At first, Dad just said, “Oh, they’re in heaven. My mother died the year before you were born.”

Then I started to quiz Dad. What were they like? Did his father play the harmonica and grow beans like Grandpa Charles? What was Grandma Flinn’s name? Did she grow up on a farm like Mom? I flooded him incessantly with little kid questions, the kind that can drive a person crazy.

One Friday, he left work early and picked me up from the schoolhouse. “We’re going to go on a little adventure,” Dad said. Instead of walking back to our car, he took my hand. We went a little ways down the side of the road to a deserted two-room shack. We’d passed it loads of times driving back and forth to school.

The weathered structure wasn’t big, perhaps twenty feet by fourteen feet. Anyone driving by would assume it was some kind of abandoned plow shed related to the overgrown field it anchored. The once white paint was deeply cracked. Several of the windows were broken. Dad lifted me up so that I could peer inside. The whole place looked dusty and forlorn. A couple of broken chairs sat discarded in a corner. A rusting pipe hung from the ceiling, the exhaust for a stove long removed from the premises. The roof—so damaged it had a shredded appearance—filtered in a patchwork of light on the sagging wood floor.

“I lived here when I was a little boy your age,” he said quietly. I looked at him, surprised. “Your grandmother was named Della Stark Flinn. She was a wonderful woman. When I was your age, I honestly thought she was an angel from heaven.”

“What about Grandpa Flinn?” I asked.

Dad’s tone sobered. “Your grandfather was named James Flinn.”

“Are they both in heaven?”

He hesitated before he spoke. “Yes,” was all he said. Then he grabbed my hand. “We better get you home.”

It was years before I knew the truth.

It turns out my grandfather wasn’t in heaven. He was in Indiana.

My grandfather James was born in Alliance, Ohio. His dad was something of a scalawag who abandoned the family when James was a young boy. By his teens, James was a handsome, smooth-talking charmer, a natural-born showman and salesman. He ended up getting a job with a circus and traveled the Midwest entertaining crowds doing roller-skating stunts in the preshow parades and under the big top.

When the circus came to Flint in 1923, seventeen-year-old Della sat in the crowd, mesmerized. James saw her in the audience, and after his performance he asked her out. She fell hard for him. When they married a few months later, she was already pregnant.

Her father, Milton Stark, neither liked nor trusted James, and it wasn’t just because he’d gotten his daughter in trouble. He was convinced James was some kind of con artist. There was just something about him.

James quit the circus. From then on, his erratic employment included random sales jobs, the oddest of which was a scheme he devised selling fresh fish door to door. He fell for a couple of get-rich-quick scams. Eventually, he took a job as a traveling salesman, which meant that he was away much of the time. Even with his absences, James and Della managed to have six children in rapid succession: Joyce, Clyde, Bob, Hazel, Doug, and my father, Milton.

As the years passed, Della’s relationship with James turned increasingly unstable. When James was away for work, he rarely wrote. He’d turn up unexpectedly but with little cash. She’d quiz him about the income he should have had from his job. Smooth-talking James always had an explanation. By the time Dad was born in 1930, Della found herself alone most of the time, unsure if he’d ever return. When Della had their next child in 1932, James went missing again and wouldn’t resurface for nearly three years.

It turned out that Della’s father had been right about James.

James’s last name wasn’t Flinn.

It was Flint.

Before my grandparents met, James had gotten a girl in trouble in Ohio. At seventeen, he reportedly married her. Within a year, he’d left and joined the circus. He just told everyone his name was Flinn, even though he didn’t have a lick of Irish in him. He married my grandmother without the hassle of a divorce, making him a bigamist.

Around the time my father was born, James started a relationship in eastern Michigan using yet a different name. He’s thought to have married that woman and had another separate family. In the mid-1930s, he possibly married a fourth woman using yet another alias. It’s impossible to know how many children he fathered. James took advantage of a world and a time in which a simple lie could change your entire identity.

“Back in those days, you could move to the next town, change your name, and you’d be missing,” says Delynn Flinn, my sister- in-law and a certified genealogist.

No one had a social security number. Local police didn’t fingerprint. Driver’s licenses didn’t exist in most states, and if they did, they didn’t include a photo. Charismatic James Flint traveled the Midwest, wooing women and creating a complex web of deception.

Meanwhile, James left my grandmother to raise their eight children, including my father, alone during the Great Depression.

Della’s life was tough from the beginning.

She was born to a striking young woman named Myrtle. With high cheekbones and pale eyes, she looked like a modern-day fashion model. Myrtle’s parents arranged a lucrative marriage for her with a much older, wealthy businessman.

Predictably, she fell in love with someone else.

Milton Stark didn’t have much. But he worshipped Myrtle. He took her for long carriage rides and wrote her tender love letters that she read again and again. Myrtle pleaded with her parents to let her marry him. Their response was to lock her in the house. Her father figured she would get over it.

On a moonlit winter’s night just days before her arranged wedding, Milton and his father, Thaddeus, silently drew up in a horse-drawn sleigh. Myrtle threw a suitcase out her second-floor window into the snow. She hiked up her long skirt and climbed down a flower trellis. Milton bundled her in thick furs in the back of the sleigh and the trio slipped away. She had just turned fifteen.

The pair had four children; my grandmother Della was the oldest. In 1911, Myrtle caught whooping cough from her youngest child, then just a few weeks old. The infant recovered but her illness lingered, then worsened. Myrtle Stark died at just twenty-two years old.

Milton was devastated by the sudden loss of his beloved young wife. He struggled to raise the four children alone until he married his housekeeper. On the surface, she seemed a kind, even timid woman. In private, his second wife savagely beat my grandmother and her siblings.

When Milton finally clued in to the abuse, the youngest child was sent off to live with relatives. The others left home to work as young as fourteen.

Despite the horrific situation, they remained close to their father, especially Della.

From the beginning of her disastrous marriage to James, Della sought work cleaning houses, taking in laundry, and cooking for middle-class families. She’d do whatever it took to bring in a bit of money. They lived in a series of rental houses in Flint until she found the small ramshackle building in the countryside near the schoolhouse in Davison.

The place had no running water, a tiny outdoor privy, and only a small pot-bellied stove for heat. The little house was divided into two rooms with a crawl space above meant for storage. The girls slept on the floor in one room and Della and James (in the rare times he was around) slept in the main room. The boys slept in the attic, even though the owner had instructed that no one sleep there since the floor wasn’t reinforced. They had no mattresses, just wool blankets and a couple of pillows the kids shared. But it was cheap and, more important, walking distance to the Cottrell School.

While they lived at the little house, James returned in early 1935 with promises to reform, a stint of good behavior that lasted two months. It was long enough for Della to get pregnant with their final child, my aunt Mary Jo. By the time Della’s pregnancy started to show, James was long gone, this time for good.

Although Della worked as hard as she could, the family slipped into abject poverty. Her oldest daughter left to marry at age fourteen. Clyde and Bob worked after school helping out on farms nearby. Hazel stepped up to take responsibility for the care of the younger siblings, even though she was still a child herself.

All the kids went out to “pick coal.” This routine chore involved walking along the railroad tracks searching for chunks that had fallen from the trains’ coal cars. It was a dirty job, one that quickly covered their small hands with black soot. It could also be dangerous on lonesome stretches of track without a signal. Picking coal was something you did only if you were among the poorest of the poor. They’d tease one another and make a game of it, seeing who could gather coal the fastest.

While Dad had difficulty recalling what his father looked like, he clearly remembered years of going to bed hungry. He assumed this was normal.

Hunger was a real issue in many places during the Great Depression, but it hit Michigan especially hard. In the early 1930s, the unemployment rate in the state hit 34 percent. With so much competition for work, employers slashed pay rates, so even those fortunate to find and retain jobs earned little. Banks defaulted. At the area’s largest, the Union Industrial in Flint, the 1929 stock market crash revealed bankers had embezzled $3.5 million from depositors that they’d bet on Wall Street—and lost all of it. When a bank went under in the era before federal deposit insurance, everyone simply lost their savings. Often that alone was enough to leave a family destitute. Local residents couldn’t afford to pay their taxes, so Flint went into massive debt. In the fall of 1932, Buick shut down completely and it wasn’t clear if it would ever reopen. It took years for the New Deal programs under Franklin Delano Roosevelt to take hold after he was elected in 1932. Meanwhile, the lucky lived paycheck to paycheck. The less fortunate lived meal to meal.

Della’s primary focus was feeding her children the meager foodstuffs she could assemble. Their renter status meant they could rarely plant a garden of any significance. They subsisted on onions, dried beans, and potatoes, all foods she could buy cheap in bulk. Sometimes she got “paid in eggs,” when farmers gave her eggs in place of wages. Fortunately, Della was a nimble, thrifty cook. She could make soup out of anything. Nettle soup is chic in culinary circles today, but back then, she made it because onions were cheap and nettles were free in the woods. She’d learned to make it while working as a cook for a Swedish employer who had a field of nettles on her property.

One of Dad’s favorite dishes was Farmer’s Eggs, a humble combination of onion and leftover potatoes that stretched to feed the eight kids with just four or five eggs. In the hardest times, they simply ate stale bread or single slices of stale bread folded over a little bit of sugar. They rarely had money for milk, and generally ate vegetables only in summer when Della could get them cheap or the kids could earn the food by picking in the fields.

In the autumn, Hazel taught Dad to climb so they could shimmy up the branches of apple and pear trees. They’d camp out under the clandestine cover of leaves and position themselves under clusters of fruit and eat a few. They’d jump down and run fast, in case a farmer saw them. But then they would be back to bread, onions, and beans. “My mother did her best, but we never had enough to eat,” Dad said.

Most of the kids had various nutrition-related illnesses. A couple developed mild cases of scurvy, a result of not getting enough vitamin C. Dad developed rickets, a painful bone condition resulting from a lack of calcium and vitamin D, and had to be hospitalized for weeks.

Dad remembered his mother crying the Christmas he turned five when a neighbor gave them a chicken. Another generously donated a bucket of homemade corn syrup. That year, 1935, had been an especially tough one. Della was seven months pregnant with her last child but didn’t want her kids to miss out on the holiday. She scrounged up enough work to earn a bit of money. On Christmas Eve day, she put cardboard in the bottom of her shoes—she didn’t own any boots—and walked four miles through unpaved snowy roads to Main Street in Davison. There, she bought each child a candy cane, a naval orange, and a small gift. She packed them up, bought a five-pound bag of flour, and walked the four miles back in the snow.

On Christmas Day, the kids had picked enough coal to keep the drafty house toasty warm. Della made the kids pancakes on her cast-iron griddle atop the small stove and the kids lavished them with homemade syrup.

After breakfast, the kids helped her clean until the place was spotless. When every dish was done, the floor swept, and ashes tidied near the stove, they all sat down expectantly. She presented each child with their candy, fruit, and gifts.

“The gifts are from Santa,” Della explained. “He gave them to me yesterday because we don’t have a fireplace. Now, you all believe in Santa, right?” All the kids nodded eagerly.

Dad’s gift was a sticker gun. When you pulled the trigger, it shot out a small arrow with a suction cup. The arrow would stick on anything you shot it at. He loved it. It was his favorite gift ever, in part because later he knew how much she’d sacrificed to give it to him.

For Christmas dinner, she crafted noodles from the flour she had bought and eggs she had been paid by a neighbor. She expertly rolled the dough out on the dining room table in a uniform, paper-thin sheet and then hand-cut the noodles by candlelight with a hunting blade that had belonged to her father. Afterward, she put them on top of newspaper spread with flour to dry. She pan-roasted the chicken in a cast-iron Dutch oven atop the stove and served the noodles with a simple gravy made from the drippings.

As they sat to say grace, Della reminded her children to be especially grateful because many families were so much worse off than they were.

In late 1936, Della’s sister, Mary, landed a job working as a cook in the home of Charles Stewart Mott, then the president of General Motors. The Motts were fabulously wealthy. They lived in the Applewood Estate, a sprawling mansion on more than thirty acres. The Motts and their servants were good to Mary Stark.

When they learned about her sister, Della, and the poverty in which she lived with her children, the head cook insisted Mary take a bag of groceries with her on her regular visits. For Christmas in 1937, one of Mott’s children gave Mary an Erector toy kit to take to the Flinn children. They had never owned such an expensive toy. They treated it with reverence.

Della and her children moved from the small house the following year, when the owner came by to talk to her about rumors that the boys slept in the prohibited attic. While he was visiting, one of the boys put a foot straight through the ceiling.

Sadly—and hastily—they left their beloved, shabby little house next to the only school my dad had ever attended.

Della moved back to Flint to be close to her friend Nell Wineman. Nell had recently been diagnosed with cancer. Della did everything she could for her friend. She took Nell to doctors, cared for her children, did the laundry, and fed her soup when she was weak.

After her death, Della stepped in to help out Roy, her widowed husband. She became distraught as Roy hired a series of housekeepers, each one more neglectful and abusive to her friend’s four children than the last. Unexpectedly, one day Roy asked Della to marry him. Although she wasn’t in love with Roy, she loved Nell’s children and couldn’t stand the thought of them possibly suffering at the hands of an uncaring stepmother, as she had. She told Roy she’d think about it.

Although Roy had completed only sixth grade, he owned his own house and had a good job as a press operator with Chevrolet. He earned enough to care for their combined brood of twelve children, ten of whom still lived at home.

Della’s sons made a united plea to their mother not to marry Roy. All of them were working by late 1939. Even my nine-year-old dad contributed his earnings from a paper route to the family pot. Della had landed a position as a cook for a hospital kitchen so she had a steady income herself. But Della still had two small children to consider. Five-year-old Mary Jo was starting school. Myrtle had just turned eight. Roy’s children ranged from nine to fourteen.

In 1940, Della sued James for divorce on the grounds of extreme cruelty and abandonment. A judge awarded her lifetime alimony of one dollar per week and ten dollars weekly toward child support, none of which he ever paid.

Della married Roy as soon as the paperwork was settled. While the youngest children had fond memories of her second husband, the boys did not. “Roy was tough on my brothers,” Aunt Mary Jo admits. “While he was a good stepfather to me and Myrtle, for some reason he was a real bully to them.”

As each got old enough, the boys left for the military to get away from their stepfather. Clyde was first, leaving in 1942 to join the marines to fight in Europe. The next year, Bob signed on as a marine and ended up in the Pacific theater.

Dad briefly lived with one of Della’s sisters when he was in his teens. Two days after he turned seventeen, he joined the marines. They promptly shipped him to China to fight in what developed into the Korean War. Compared with the hardships he’d had as a kid, going to war didn’t seem like a big deal, at least not at first.

While he was away, Della and Roy moved to Traverse City. She went to work at the upscale Park Place Hotel as a maid. Within a few years, she became the hotel’s executive housekeeper, a job that typically required a college degree.

Back from Korea, Dad got past any issues he had with his stepfather so he could remain close to his mother for the rest of her life. He never forgot how hard she struggled to raise them all.

He also never forgot how cruel his father was to her.

In 1940, not long after their divorce, James, the grandfather I never knew, applied for a social security number using his real last name, Flint. Finally, his whereabouts could be tracked. In 1945, he married for the last time, to a woman named Beatrice, and they moved to Indiana, where they raised a family of four. Those children say that he was a good father to them even if he wasn’t openly affectionate.

But time weighed on James. Shortly before his death in 1988, James told a daughter about his other marriages and the many children he’d abandoned over the years. He asked her to help him reach out to them.

When he contacted the Flinn family, the gesture was too little too late. Three of James’s children were already dead. Those who remained wanted nothing to do with him.