Calling all Schmeckpeppers! (03.22.22)

My aunt Jane, of beloved memory, was small, neat, and never passed up a piece of free furniture. Oh, she would say, the Depression was hard. Someone who laughed freely, lived contentedly, and was, for a period of time, the belle of a considerable ball. Before the second world war, Jane taught in a one-room schoolhouse outside Chicago. When the war broke out, she took a course to teach radio code (likely Morse code) to new Army recruits and was sent to Sioux Falls, South Dakota, the only time in her life she lived away from her parents. And there, a proud part of the enormous war effort, she presided over class after class of boys, who left Sioux Falls to ship overseas. Many of them, no doubt, never came home, which made tiny smiling Jane one of their last memories of home. They wrote to her; I have searched the family home for years for a box of letters she saved.

She was elderly by the time I got smart enough to ask her about these times, and only a few names survived. Most mnemonically memorable, was a suitor named…really… Bill Schmeckpepper. He was apparently among the most serious of the small battalion of boys who wanted Jane to leave her home and make one with them. And, after she was gone, amid the accumulation of a lifetime, this jewelry case, in its original box, with a Christmas tag marked to Jane from Bill. Rhinestones! From Phyllis Originals! Christmas 1946 or 1947, a wooing present if I’ve ever seen one, presented with a deckle-edged snapshot of dapper Bill, jauntily posed with a city bus, double-breasted jacket open, loose trousers, two-toned shoes.

Calling all Schmeckpeppers! If Bill was yours, I’d like to return the photo, if not the rhinestones. Those I’ll wear to a fancy party some 75 years after blushing Jane opened her gift, with their ahead-of-their time daringly-pierced earrings, from amorous Bill Schmeckpepper. And then declined to be wed.