Hoey At Home....No Other Picture Exists
Harry H Shaw...Nov. 28 1907-Jan 20 1993
True Story
Of A Long Friendship
That never Ended.
By Molly Ann....A Tribute To A Wonderful Man That Blessed My Life In So Many Ways
Thank You Hoey....For Just Being :)
Harold
AKA Hoey
Its not easy to start to tell about Hoey. I guess I could tell about when he would help me with my homework and when it came back corrected, every answer was wrong. Its enough to say that when I was hungry, he fed me. Ham And Bean Day Was My Favorite, I Can Still Recall Walking Home From School On very bitter cold winter days, and smelling the wood smoke from Hoeys old heat and his cook stove, Forever a memory in my heart and mind, If one has never tasted ham and beans made on top of a wood burning stove, well then I must say one hasn't lived :). Nothing in the world can compare !
We were best friends. Not like Delma and me, who were best friends at school. Delma and I shared secrets and talked about the boys at school, hairdos, makeup, and the wonderful life we would have after we grew up and moved from Morrill. And the other important things in a young girl's
world.
Hoey was different. "You're. very different", I would tease him.
I remember walking home atop the crust on the snow. Hoey's house was the last place before our farm, just outside of town, across the road from the cemetery. The snow was deep enough to cover all three strands of barbed wire and only the fence posts marked the boundaries. A brief shot of warm weather gave way to the bitter cold, leaving a crust on top of the snow hard enough to walk across.
I stopped at Hoey's house to warm up and visit as I often did. Hoey's house was unreal. Even to the standards of a community like ours where almost everyone was economically stressed, Hoey's place was a wreck. When the elevator in town closed, the retail stores followed close behind. We still had a grocery store in town then, but its gone now.
Its not right to say that Hoey's place was a slum. It was more like a train wreck or Hoey would cross the five acres between his house and ours to
steal one of my grandmother's pies, then return the pie tin and compliment my grandmother on her cooking. He would buy cigarettes, a couple of bottles of cola, and Mars bars, and hide them at his house. He would share them with me, but never my brother David. David didn't give Hoey the respect he deserved. So Hoey always said, "Don't tell Davey!"Delma and I would stop there on our way home from school. We'd smoke and talk and drink pop. Hoey would say, "Don't you tell anyone because this is contributing to juvenile delinquency". I think he did it to keep
us out of trouble.Hoey cooked on a wood stove that had fallen through the floor. The house had no basement and the stove then rested on the earth under the house about a foot below the floor. He never repaired the hole in the floor, or anything else for that matter. The stove sat in the hole in the floor, and he just threw wood into it and made a fire. I don't know if he didn't
know how to regulate the rate of burn or if he was always cold,
but he never closed the ashbin door to slow the fire down. Of
course the stove was nowhere near airtight so closing the chimney
draft for a slow smoldering fire was out of the question. The
stove would leak smoke from dozens of holes with any interference
with the chimney draft. So it blazed. It roared. And that was
his heat plant and his cook stove.
It seemed to match the rest of his "bachelor pad". No-one
ever went to the second floor of Hoey's house. It wasn't safe. I
was up there once and when I walked across the floor, it swayed
and felt pretty unstable ... like the entire house could collapse
at any moment. The house originally had a front and back porch
as well as a porch like addition which served as a barber shop when
Hoey worked. His father had been a barber and Hoey worked with
him in the shop after World War II. The front porch was still recognizable as a porch, but the rear porch and the barber shop roofs had collapsed years before.
Of course Hoey didn't repair them. After all, he was a barber, not a carpenter.
When I was six my grandmother had Hoey cut my hair. I took one look,in the mirror and kicked him in the shin. I never doubted what caused him to stop barbering. Undoubtedly, it was a lack of return cliental. The two barber chairs were partially visible under the ruins of the side porch. They stayed there for years. He used to go with me on dates. All my friends liked him. I remember when he went with a boy and me to the county fair at Humboldt. He rode the Ferris wheel and everything we did.He had insisted on taking his dog Ladie and on the way home the hood of the car blew open and cracked the windshield. The hood bent backwards and caved in the roof of the car a few inches. No one was hurt but Ladie lost it. Her eyes bulged and she put everything she had into Hoey's lap.
One hot summer day he said, Molly do you want to go swimming?" Of course that sounded fine but the nearest pool was at Sun Springs or Sycamore, a good fifteen miles either way. "Come on", he said, "Don't tell Davy".
We crossed the road just south of the cemetery and cut across the ballfield. Beyond was a pasture with cows. He led me to the abandoned farmstead and behind the house was a horse tank full of water. It was a nice big tank, ten feet across and two foot deep, but the bottom was green with cow slobber slime. The day was hot, the water was cool and I was young. I went for it.Hoey's swimsuit was something from the 1920's. A top and a bottom, all one piece, and it looked like it was made of wool, black with red stripes. My mother worked at the eggplant in Hiawatha then and she nearly had a fit when she found out. "Do you know what you could get from that dirty water", she said. But occasionally, when it was hot and the flatlands of Kansas were overbearing with boredom, we did it again.
One day he had a piece of wood and a magnifying glass. He was sitting on the step in the sun. "You have to wait quite a spell for it to get going", he explained. "Then you have to go like hell". He carved words and designs into all sorts of wooden things. He put his name on the stock of a .22 rifle which was stamped plainly on the barrel "property of US Army.
One day his house burned to the ground. All he salvaged was his family bible and a picture of himself as a baby. He had no place to go so my mother let him move in with us. He took the bible to the social security office to apply for social security as the inscription his mother made in it when he was born was the closest thing he had to a birth certificate.Whenever introduced to someone, Hoey would tell them his whole life story, a rather condensed version of it.
"Hello. My name is Harold H. Shaw. I was born in Moline, Illinois in 1907.
I Barbered for thirty years, uh, thirty, minutes," with a pause here to allow for a polite laugh if offered.
"My mom said they found me along the Mississippi river. She said to my dad, 'Can we keep itl,because it has blue eyes."
"He took one look at me. He said its not even cute, its too
green to burn. Throw it back."
I grew up and married, but never really lost track of Hoey. He was always turning up in town or at my house. Once he sneezed and his top plate blew out and cracked on the kitchen floor. He put it back together with super-glue, but it never really took. A couple days later he was showing my young son Kelly how to pick the lock on my deep freeze with a penknife. The cinnamon rolls were frozen solid, but he ate them anyway. That's how his plate broke the second time.
Whenever you saw Hoey, he was involved in some project of little or no relevance to your own life. Trying out a new glue on his teeth, burning a design into the mailbox post with a magnifying glass, rolling still more twine onto the ball he always had in his overall pocket; these things were his occupation. He never really kept a regular job. He helped farmers during threshing but was paid less than the other hands. He worked as hard as the other men, but he was an easy target with his easy going ways. Rather than argue with the farmer, he simply quit.
Years later, after I had moved to the big city, my mother said he had fallen and broken a hip. Upon discharge from the hospital, he was placed in residence at the Maple View Nursing Home at Hiawatha. When we went to visit my mother we stopped to see him.
He carefully hid the candy in the piano seat in the recreation room so the nurses wouldn't take it from him. An elderly lady, another resident, approached him and asked if he or I had seen her automobile. Of course she didn't have an automobile, but she insisted she had one, and it was missing. Hoey didn't argue, he asked her if she had kept up the payments.
"If you don't make those payments on time, they'll come and get those cars", he said. "That's what happened to my last car."
Actually the last car Hoey had was a model A Ford ... before they went out of style.I was absolutely stunned when I got the call. I never gave a moments thought to the idea that Hoey would ever pass away. The Sabetha funeral director said Hoey had listed me as next of kin.
It was true that he had no living relatives. He needed some information. What was his full name, where was he born, age.
A wave of grief washed over me. Of all the people in the world, Hoey had trusted me to handle his funeral. From countless tellings, I knew all of the statistical information. "Yes. Moline, Illinois. 1907. Well, he was a barber. Yes. Barbered for thirty years ....
I knew a few details that Hoey left out of his mini-biography as well. "A veteran? Yes. He fought Rommel in North Africa during the war. Ended up there as part of a medical unit." Hoey spoon fed twenty men a day at the field hospital in the desert. He told me about a young soldier who was bandaged so extensively that only his mouth and eyes were visible. Of course he would never consider himself a hero. He was just Hoey. Just a
soldier who probably was the only real human contact for the breathing mummy of a broken young soldier; encouraging him with every bite, passing along the scuttlebutt.
We left Omaha and arrive in Sabetha just before the ice storm made the roads impossible. The next morning I was glad we had decided to go down the night before as we were the only ones at the funeral.
He was laid next to his mom and dad in the cemetery across the road from home. The service was simple. The weather was bitter cold. It would have been a "bean day".
A week later my brother called. Of course, if it hadn't been for Hoey listing me as next of kin, I'd have missed the funeral."Did you know old Hoey died?" he asked.
"Yes I did. I didn't see you at the funeral", I said.
"You went to the funeral and didn't stop to see me?" he asked.
"That's right. It was a last request...."
"What's that mean?"
"Well, you know Hoey. He said, 'Don't tell Davy'."
Don't want to leave this out....as it has a great meaning to me now, that failed me when I was 12 years old. Hoey and I one day planted peony bushes on his mother and fathers grave site in Morrill Kansas....As a child I grew up on my grandparents farm next to the cemetery where Hoeys parents are buried....Also My Grandparents are there now. Hoey and I planted those bushes when i was 12...he said to me when you come here to see me when I am gone....you will remember this ....Guess what I Went to Morrill cemetery to visit my grandma & Grandpa's Places and There On Hoeys Place was those bushes he and I had Planted over 36 years ago....In full bloom. I did not cry....I Remembered his words and I smiled and said I Miss You.
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