I -- ANNA
Aunt
Anna (we called her “Ant Ann”) was 4th of the five children of August and Bertha Carlson. My mother Bernice was the youngest.Her three older brothers all were St Olaf graduates and went on to doctorate level education. Clarence, the oldest was a math professor; Earl, the next, was a Lutheran minister; and Harold was a college professor in psychology. They called my mother “Babe”. That moniker continued into adulthood with my cousin’s calling her “Aunt Babe”.
II – Uncle Frank
Frank Spillman Jr. was born and raised in late 19th
century northwestern Missouri. He had served in France during the great war
(World War I), then worked in highway construction most of his adult life. As I
remember, he was a large, gruff man, tall with light brown hair, ruggedly
handsome with broad shoulders. When I saw one of those square-jawed newspaper
cartoon characters I would say “Look, It’s Uncle Frank.” We didn’t know much
about Uncle Frank’s childhood, but the one story I remember was about Frank’s
father, Frank Spillman Sr.
The Card Game was
in the back-room of a bar somewhere near St. Joseph Missouri. Little Frank Jr.
was there with his dad. The conversation
was loud, raucous and vulgar and the half-dozen or so men had been drinking
heavily. An African American man at that card game was serving drinks and
fetching food and other items for tips. The black man, seeing the boy looking
alone and frightened, brought him a bottle of soda pop and talked to him while
putting his hand on Frank Jr.’s shoulder. Maybe Frank Sr. was losing badly, or
maybe he was just in a drunken bad mood when he took exception to this black
man touching his son. He grabbed a pistol from his jacket pocket and shouting
“Get your black nigger hands off my boy.” shot the unsuspecting man in the
chest. The injured man stumbled out the back door and fell dead in the alley.
Little Frank screamed; he didn’t know what had happened. Suddenly there was a
loud noise, his ears were ringing, the room that had been thick with tobacco
smoke was now filed with a funny smell. People that had been boisterous were
now yelling and running back and forth. His mom and dad had yelled like that
before and it always scared him. Finally, his mother came to get him.
The Investigation a week or so later, listened to the
half-dozen white men witnesses, then determined that the shooting was a
justified defense of Frank Sr.’s son.
III -- Anna and Frank
Aunt Anna probably met Frank while he was on the
construction crew that built the section of US highway 77 completed from Sioux
City to Milbank. I remember Aunt Ann talking about Odebolt, Iowa where they
lived while Frank worked on a highway project, possibly US highway 20. They
moved back to Beresford in the late `30s or early 40s when the construction
work was finished. Frank did repairs, odd jobs and work on cement jobs.
Frank was older than Aunt Ann. I don’t know exactly how much
older, but Ann was born around 1912 and Frank was a World War I veteran, so he
was something like 15 or 20 years older. They had
three children: Wesley, Paul
and Berthe Ann, and nicknamed them Sonny, Buddy, and Sister. The dog was named
Buster. During the time I can remember they shared a converted duplex house
with my grandparents in Beresford.
Uncle Frank and my dad were drinking buddies. My cousins
often said my Dad was Frank’s best friend. One of my most pleasant memories was
of waking up at Grandma’s. While half asleep I would hear the voices of my mom
and Aunt Ann talking; in time it would sink in that I was at Grandma’s and I
would get to spend at least part of the day with my cousins in Beresford.
Eventually Dad would show up to get us. I don’t remember any angry words or any
mention of the fact that Dad had drunk enough to forget that his family was
there waiting for him at Grandma’s.
A car accident was probably the first sign that something
was not right with Uncle Frank. During the war (World War II) Uncle Frank and
Aunt Ann had sold their Model A Ford; gas rationing and lack of repair parts
made it too hard to keep a car. After a few years without a car, they had
recently acquired a used Chevrolet. Frank and the three children were coming
for a Sunday visit at our farm about 15 miles southeast of Beresford. Aunt Ann
had a church commitment and could not come. Seven or eight years old at the
time, I was looking forward to a day with my cousins. About a mile and a half
from our place, at an intersection of two county roads, he stopped at the Stop
sign. Although he had a clear view in both directions, he drove on colliding
with a car driven by our neighbor Melvin Tuntland. No one was hurt badly, but
both cars were damaged. When I went with my dad to help, we saw Frank’s car in
the ditch, the 3 kids crying and Frank, mad as hell, pacing up and down the
gravel road, yelling and shaking his fist. Dad got him calmed down and drove
them back to Beresford in our old Dodge.
Frank’s car was repairable, but he did not have insurance;
it had to be sold to pay for the damage to Melvin Tuntland’s car. In the
following months Aunt Ann received complaints from merchants saying Frank would
take things and not pay for them or he would stand by the cash register and
take change when it was lain on the counter for someone else. If they
protested, he would get angry and threatening. No one called for him to do odd
jobs. Then in May he took a bus to Sioux Falls and was arrested for
shoplifting. He had been talking about getting a car and was in Sioux Falls to
do just that, but first he needed some accessories. His erratic and belligerent behavior in jail led to a medical exam
and a blood test. His positive Kahn test indicated syphilis[1].
His symptoms indicated late stage syphilis. In the early stages the infections
could be treated with antibiotics, but it was too late for Frank as the damage
was done. He probably contracted it in Paris at the end of the first world war;
his Army records indicated he had been treated in France for syphilis.
Unfortunately, this was about a decade before more effective treatments were widely
available. Aunt Ann and each of the children had to be tested; they were
negative.
Frank was committed to the State Hospital[2],
where he died about a year later.
I went with my mom and sisters to the Wass Funeral home in Beresford to see
him. It was my first time in a funeral home and the first time I had seen a
dead person. I remember the odor in the funeral home, I don’t know if it was
the embalming fluid or a deodorant to mask embalming fluid odor. He was laid
out on a couch like bench, maybe because they didn’t have the casket yet. He
was dressed in a suit and tie. His shoes were splayed a little. It was a hot
summer day and in those days before there was air conditioning, all the windows
were open. There was black fly netting over him that the Mr. Wass pulled back,
so we could view the body. Everyone said he looked so natural; I didn’t think
he looked natural at all.
A couple days later there was a funeral with the flag draped
casket at the front of Emmanuel Lutheran Church. Frank was not a church-going
man. The last time he had been in a church was probably when his daughter
Berthe Ann was baptized. The minister told a story about how just a few weeks
ago Frank had confessed his sins, took communion from his wallet-sized
communion kit and told him that just now he truly believed. This was a little
hard for me to swallow and I was 8 or 9 at the time, I don’t know if Aunt Anna
believed it or not. I thought the best part was at the cemetery a couple miles
south of Beresford. After the preacher finished the “Ashes to ashes, dust to
dust.” rituals, an honor guard of three men from the VFW fired a salute, then took
the flag that was covering the casket, folded it in a triangle and presented it
to Aunt Anna. Then everyone went back to the church for lunch.
Driving home after the funeral, I remember my mother was bothered about things people had said to Aunt Ann. Thinking it would be comforting, some friends remarked that least it was a disease (syphilis) and not insanity that caused his aberrant behavior. Topics like venereal disease were not discussed in polite conversations, nor was the word “sex” heard; a pregnancy was described as “in a family way”. In that time, in that place, good people didn’t get “social diseases”. But it was far worse to be mentally ill.
[1] Syphilis:
Classified as a ‘venereal’ disease (now called ‘sexually transmitted disease’,
STD) is most commonly acquired through sexual intercourse but can be passed to
a fetus in utero. The initial (‘primary’) infection a skin sore called a
chancre, is the most infectious stage. A few weeks to several months later the
secondary stage appears as a skin rash. After the secondary stage subsides, the
disease usually goes dormant for months, years or decades then often emerging
as tertiary (late stage) syphilis.
[2] "Yankton
State Hospital", originally named the "Dakota Hospital for the
Insane", now called "The South Dakota Human Services Center".
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