In 1912 my Father, Troy Wallace Scott, an Indiana farm boy, met my Mother, Irma Irene Seaman, in Des Moines, Iowa. She was teaching in a one room school. Dad was there working for AT&T as a telegraph operator. They fell in love and in 1914 got married and moved to Chicago, Illinois.

In 1916 their first child, my sister Evelyn, was born. I came along two years later and was named Gladys after one of my mother's friends. Our little family lived through World War I and the terrible influenza epidemic of 1918 without any problems. But Dad was not happy living in a big city. When I was eight months old he got a job offer from the AT&T telegraph branch in Indianapolis, Indiana, So he and Mother packed us all up and we moved to a little town near Indianapolis called Broad Ripple. Dad was made wire chief for the telegraph lines, a job he held for thirty years.

Mother and Dad bought a small house on the north edge of Broad Ripple. The address was 6519 Ferguson Street. It became the Scott family home for twenty-five years. It had no indoor plumbing or central heating so the first years were very hard. Mother had to do the family washing in a big tin tub with a scrub board and a big cake of lye soap. In the winter she hung the clothes on racks around the pot-bellied stove. On wash days the whole house smelled like steamy long johns and wool stockings. In addition to the washing, cleaning, and cooking, mother also sewed clothes for us using an old treadle sewing machine. Another big tin tub was used for the family baths. All the water had to be hauled in the house in buckets from the back yard.

The End - part one