A Defiance, OH, story

I grew up in Defiance, OH, a town of around 16,000 in the NW corner of Ohio midway between Fort Wayne, IN, and Toledo, OH.  We moved there when I was 4.  My father had finished his pediatric residency at Denver General Hospital and he wanted to practice medicine at the Defiance Clinic, which  his grandfather and uncle, and several other doctors had founded in Defiance a number of years prior to 1956.

Defiance was a sleepy backwater but occasionally there was an event that caused great excitement in the town.  Like when the Cisco Kid visited.

But the event that I remembered recently was when Judith Richards married Bob Hope's son.  This happened in the mid '60's.  Judith Richards' father had been the minister at the Methodist church in Defiance, but differences with the congregation led him to leave the church several years prior.  I understand from my friend, Julie, whose grandparents had been members of the church, that he managed a dry cleaners in Defiance after his departure.

Judith Richards graduated from Harvard Law School in 1964 after attending Wellesley College.  I don't know where she met Bob Hope's son, but the occasion of their wedding was a very big deal in my small town.  I'm sure that the wedding was a vindication for Reverend Richards in some small measure, although it was held in St. Mary's Catholic Church because the Hopes were Catholic.  In those days there was no question that if you married a Catholic, it had to be "in the Church."

A number of movie stars and celebrities like Liza Minnelli, Toots Shore, and Phyllis Diller, came to their wedding, causing great excitement in Defiance.  One of them,  Katherine Crosby, the wife of Bing Crosby, stopped at Daoust Drugs on Clinton Street and purchased some tamapax.  She didn't have enough cash, so she wrote a check  for $1.00 to the drugstore.  This was in the era before credit cards.  Daoust Drugs proudly displayed that check for a number of years.  I don't think they ever cashed it.  My initial reaction to this, was that movie stars writing checks was a great money making device, since small businesses probably were more impressed with the autograph than obtaining the money from the check.

Judith Richards Hope wrote about her Harvard Law School experiences in a book titled Pinstripes and Pearls.  She became quite successful and was something of a power in the Republican party.   Ronald Reagan nominated her for a seat on the DC Court of Appeals.  Unfortunately, she was not confirmed by the Senate and the seat was vacant until George HW Bush became president.  He then nominated Clarence Thomas for that seat.  I have some regrets on that score.

Armistice Day

This is my paternal great grandfather, John Ulrich Fauster, MD. [I went back to some family records and have to correct the next few statements] His family emigrated from Schaffhausen, Switzerland, in 1854 (they tatted lace to make the money that they used to buy steerage over to America) Gramps (as he was known to me when I was a little girl) seems to have been born in the US and thus could serve in the US Army at the time of World War One. He was the doctor in Defiance, Ohio, a small town in northwestern Ohio, where I grew up. I wonder if, given his profession, and the fact that he was perhaps one of a very few doctors in the area, he was allowed to leave. He also had 5 children at the time, although at least one was over the age of majority.




This is my maternal grandfather, Claude Frederick Holst, MD. His family had emigrated from northern Germany to the US in the late 1800's as well. They dropped the "von" that had been the prefix to their surname to better fit in in the New World. He also served in World War One, and I know from stories that my grandmother told me, that he was sent by the military to someplace other than Little Falls, MN, where he was working with his brother, Burton, as the town's doctors. My maternal grandparents had only been acquainted a short while before he was sent off. My grandmother had come, after graduating as the valedictorian of her nursing school class at Marquette University, to Little Falls to start a nursing school at St. Gabriel's hospital there. My grandfather was quite a bit older than my grandmother (who had actually lied about her age to get the job), but something clicked (apparently a Sr. Teresa played matchmaker) and they married in June of 1920, postponing their wedding to assist in the aftermath of a tornado that hit somewhere near Little Falls. Or so I was told by my grandmother.




This is my paternal grandfather, Seth Cullen. He's the tall guy on the left with the friend that looks like George Costanza. His grandfather and namesake had emigrated from Nottinghamshire, England in the 1850's and was an itinerant Methodist minister. Seth was from Paulding, OH, and served in World War One, shipping out right after marrying my grandmother, April 12, 1918. He rode ambulances in France, on the outside at night, so he could direct the drivers, as they could not turn their lights on because they would be shot at by the "Jerrys." I read about this in the letters that he sent home to his parents. I found the letters in 1981 when I was back in Paulding for the funeral of his sister, my great aunt, Bernice Cullen Sullivan. I gave the letters to my grandmother and she threw them away. I will always kick myself for doing that. She had her reasons for discarding them, ones I discovered later after she died, when I inherited a five year diary she kept in the early 50s. They deserve a thread of their own someday. Let us just say for now that she and Seth ran off to Michigan and eloped, something incredibly uncharacteristic for the very straight laced grandmother I knew growing up. When Seth returned from France, he brought silk aprons for his mother and sister and a beaded evening bag for his wife. The apron he brought home for his mother is such a work of embroidery art that I had it framed and it is hanging in my house.



And this is my father, John William Cullen. He was drafted and served as a medic in the Army during World War Two. He was never sent abroad because his eyesight was too poor. Instead, he was stationed in South Carolina where he met a young woman he became briefly engaged to, but it broke up for reasons he never mentioned. Although he did say that her house had a separate entrance in the back for their black servants, which he found off-putting. After the war was over, he finished college at Miami University, went to medical school at Case Western, and met my mother while both were working at Yellowstone Park in the summer of 1950, and voila!

These are the veterans in my family. I remember them today and thank them for their service to our country.