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Cast of characters:  my father, Lloyd.

His grandmother, Lucinda, my great grandmother.

Her mother, Amy; great-grandmother to Lloyd, and my great great grandmother.

As November 9th comes around, my thoughts turn to Mary Kelly, who, in 1888, became---some believe---the fifth and final victim of Jack the Rippers' "canonical" murders.  I have studied the Ripper since 1974, narrowing my focus to Mary Kelly since 1976.  Shout out to the late Tom Cullen, whose monograph, When London Walked In Terror, is, in my mind, the most poetic treatment of the murder spree.  Although some of Cullen's conclusions have been overturned, his understanding of the situation is flawless, and excellently expressed.  It pains me to remember, as I always do at this time, that my undergraduate faculty advisor in the department of History, from which I earned my BA, declared to me that the lives of five murdered whores were not worth serious scholarly inquiry.  And when, at a private luncheon arranged by the department in September 2001, at which I was asked to present my indepedent theory of what really happened at 13 Miller's Court, on the night Mary Kelly entered History (a theory which, I might humbly boast, has not yet been disproven), he conceded to me only that, in his opinion, it was "iron clad."

One cannot study the victims of the Ripper without picking up some ideas about their business and its trends.  From the mid nineteenth century to its end, and probably beyond, the most successful prostitutes had small stature.  Mary Kelly was no more than five feet tall.  (Oddly enough, one of the physical attractions retained troughout her life by another famous female with a similar sounding name, Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein, was her similar stature of no more than five feet tall.)  Although of small stature, Mary Kelly, when drunk, was able to command significant physical strength:  at the time of her encounter with the Ripper, she was "up" on charges for having beaten up a sailor (who had touched her inappropriately in public) at her favorite pub, The Ten Bells (still doing business in Whitechapel; alas, I shall never be able to get there), who was unable to return to duty until he recovered in hospital.  But I digress.

They tell me that one of our most closely held family secrets (in fact, so repugnant to my father than I learned, in 2017, that he actually fibbed to me in order to avoid questions) that my great great grandmother, Amy, ran away from her parents' Indiana farm, found herself in New York, and, lacking job skills, but possessing tremendous physical beauty and her own small stature, she began to work in a high-end brothel, not as a street-walker but as an in-house call girl.  A client by the name of Michael Adams impregnated her and, given the choice of aborting or leaving the business, she chose to leave the business, and New York city, and raised her child as the spouse of the heir to a complex of grist and lumber mills, built by the man who became her father-in-law.  Her daughter, Lucinda, married my great grandfather, and, with him, farmed a fairly large spread, and blessed her mother, Amy, with thirteen grandchildren (my grandfather's sibs, and Lloyd's aunts and uncles).  I have seen a very rare photograph of Lucinda in old age (stolen from me by a cousin who persuaded my mother to turn over to him a treasure trove of photographs that I was to have received upon my mother's passing), and I imagine her to have resembled that other Lucinda, the old lady in Masters' Spoon River Anthology that represents the Poet's grandmother (on whose farm he spent many happy days, as I did on my own grandparents' rural property).  When I read Masters' poem, "Lucina Matlock," I always imagine that photographic image of my great grandmother.

My father said he could just barely remember Amy (who was great-grandmother to him) who lived on his grandparents' (my great grandparents') farm where, he spent some weeks each summer from a very small age.  His name for her was "Little Grandma," in acknowledgement of her petite stature, which he said was remarkable.  He said that her passing, during his sixth year, prevented him from getting to know her substantially, such that he could tell me nothing, really, about her---except her very small stature.

I should like to point out, here, that my father was a land/road surveyor for the greater part of his working career.  During my first summer job, with surveyors he had trained and supervised (he had, thankfully, been promoted to the position of Traffic Research Technician by the time I became a summer hire; and in his new capacity, one of his responsibilities was to advise our area's Congressman, who sat on the House comittee that oversaw the Interstate Highway Administration), I was told by them that my father possessed exquisitely consummate skill with the transit, and that he turned an angle once, and once, only; no mistakes, no double-check, no second guess.  (He could also sight a straight line without a transit or a chain, which made mowing grass for him a harrowing experience.) While I worked there during summers in high school and college, my survey crew very often simply confirmed earlier surveys that my father had done, using his observations as foundational to our documentation of changes to lines, properties, etc.  One of the most major surface roads that encircle our municipal area, a road that almost qualifies as a highway (three lanes in both directions, rapid speeds, etc) was designed as the linking together of several different roads in many of our local vicinities---which were reconstructed according to my father's long, long work surveying each of the many roads that became that beltway.  To this day, I feel safer in a vehicle on that road than on any other.  My father had a very good head for numbers; one must have a skill with numbers in order to use a transit and turn an angle.

Now let me move back to my great great grandmother, whose grave I found, after some research, in 2017.  It is located in a cemetery less than two hours from my home, and in September of the year mentioned, I "called in sick" to work (FMLA is great for that when you've already used too many occurences) and went to pay my respects.

My great great grandmother, the adolescent prostitute who became grandmother to thirteen children through the single child born to her from her professional activity, who had been my father's beloved Little Grandma departed this life in 1940; which was the year my father turned . . . sixteen years old.

Starward