52 Ancestors: #24, Father's Day Special: Roger Marchant Kirk

Roger M. Kirk, March 1942

Having profiled my mother, Kathleen Murphy, for Mother's Day, it's only reasonable that I should do the same for my father on Father's Day.¹

Roger Marchant Kirk was born on the 11th of May, 1919, at the family home in Lewiston, Maine.² He was the last child of Chester Frank Kirk and Mary Milliken Hodsdon, two years younger than his sister Geneva, and the apple of his mother's eye. I can't quite imagine what it would have been like to grow up with a father old enough to be your grandfather and a half-brother old enough to be your father (Chester was 62 and Kenneth was 30 when Roger was born).

Roger's first "wheels," date unknown

I can't say I know a whole lot about my father's childhood, though I get a few glimpses from his baby book and grade school report cards. He said his first word ("Sister") at 8 months; was taken on his first train trip at the age of 13 months, to Rumford and Roxbury, Maine;³ and memorized the Lord's Prayer at the age of 3.

He had most of the typical childhood diseases of the day, surviving diphtheria at the tender age of 8 months, followed by measles, whooping cough, and German measles, all between the ages of 7 and 8 years. He managed to avoid chicken pox until his sophomore year of high school, and somehow escaped mumps entirely.⁴ But the most intriguing "medical" notation in his baby book is this: "Accidentally shot in the leg on July 8, 1934." I wish I knew the story behind that!

He attended the Lewiston public schools – a total of four different grade and grammar schools, skipping the third grade entirely (despite a sketchy attendance record: he missed a total of 73 days during first grade, and 48 days during second grade) and ending with his eighth grade year at the Jordan Platoon School.⁵ According to his report cards, his penmanship was atrocious.

Six-year-old Roger Kirk (right), with his half-brother Kenneth (left) and father Chester, 1925,
at the house where Chester was born in Warren, Maine

Roger graduated from Lewiston High School in 1936. His class yearbook characterized him as "a scientist by nature and a whiz at Physics," noting his only extracurricular activity as "Outing Club" and naming him "most bashful boy." And although he was listed as being in the "Technical" curriculum rather than "College," his sketch says, "He plans to attend college next year, but hasn't made up his mind which one it will be."

But as it turned out, Roger never attended college; cars were his first love. Already a budding mechanic, in 1937 he was employed at a local gas station (presaging his own future as a gas station proprieter), and in 1939 at Woodworth's Machine Shop in Lewiston. By 1940, he was working as a mechanic at Wade & Dunton Motors, a local Ford dealer, and in October he registered for the draft.

Roger's first motorized vehicle, ca 1938

Roger with Kathleen, the day he left for active duty

Not quite two years later, war was declared, and like so many other young men, Roger enlisted in the Army. On Aug 24 he reported to the Recruit Reception Center at Fort Devens, Massachusetts, and two weeks later was assigned to the Military Police at Fort Adams in Rhode Island.

I was taken quite by surprise when I discovered, among my mother's personal papers, a true treasure: a box containing more than 70 letters that Roger wrote to her while he was in the Army. I never suspected that my father was the type to write letters, but there they were: handwritten (often by flashlight at a guard post), lengthy, frequent, heartfelt, funny, and sometimes even a bit mushy.⁶

From those letters I gleaned a detailed picture of his Army life. His schedule during training included "Revellie" at 5:45, "Chow" at 6:30, 12:00, and 5:30, rifle practice, and five-mile hikes. He stood guard duty (over prisoners, ammunition dumps, and the company payroll), broke up fights in the town, and transported prisoners to and from points as widespread as Canada to the north and Camp Shelby in Mississippi to the south (the farthest he had ever been from home). He played ping-pong, went rollerskating, and went to lots of movies.

Roger in uniform, 27 Mar 1943

His love of cars continued unabated, as he bought vehicles, rented them out to other soldiers, and sold them at a profit. Once he brought a Packard back from Lewiston, sold it only days later for $200, then bought a 1937 Lincoln Zephyr in Providence for $150 and promptly tore it apart to overhaul the engine. Before it was even repaired, he sold it to the mechanic who was helping him work on it.

And always, he ended his letters by telling Kathleen how much he loved her and missed her. He headed home to see his love every chance he got on short passes, and while home on a three-day Christmas pass, he got her an engagement ring. Unable to get a furlough from either Fort Adams or Fort Getty in Jamestown, Rhode Island (where was transferred in June 1943), he finally settled for a three-day pass. On July 22, having just got back to Jamestown from Lewiston, he wrote his first letter addressed to "Mrs. Kathleen Kirk," which, he allowed, looked "pretty snappy" on the envelope. They had been married just two days before in a civil ceremony that was, Roger wrote, "the happiest moment of my life."

Almost immediately, he was transferred to a military police detachment stationed at the Buckminster Hotel, in Boston's Kenmore Square.⁷ He was now so much closer to home that he could visit practically every weekend. Around March 1944, he was transferred to Fort Banks in Winthrop, Massachusetts, where he was finally assigned as a mechanic. Kathleen moved to furnished rooms in Winthrop, but no sooner had she taken the civil service exam and gotten a job in the Ordnance Department at Fort Banks, than Roger was transferred again, back to Fort Devens, 40 miles away. Still, that was the closest together they had been since he enlisted, and he could come "home" to her at least every weekend, and usually more often; he even worked part-time at a garage in Winthrop on his days off.

Roger's '37 Packard – probably the one he sold at the base for $200 before spending the proceeds on a '37 Lincoln Zephyr

Roger, not quite used to holding his firstborn

There were no more letters until September 1945, when Roger was admitted to the hospital at Fort Devens, with fever, bronchial problems, and stomach trouble. There he remained for over two months while his symptoms ebbed and returned, the doctors ran numerous tests and X-rays, and they considered a medical discharge for him. Kathleen drove to Fort Devens almost every evening, bringing him ice cream and candy, and as his symptoms subsided, eventually he was able to go home with her on weekends while remaining a patient. They never did figure out exactly what was wrong with him, and in the end he did not get a medical discharge.

He did, however, get his final discharge papers on 26 February 1946, about six months after V-J Day, and they finally went home to Lewiston, where Roger went back to work at Wade & Dunton's. They got an apartment in Auburn, and Kathleen was soon pregnant with their first child, a son born in April of 1947. In September 1948, they purchased a home in the nearby town of Mechanic Falls, where they spent the rest of their lives.

Roger Kirk at the wheel of his circa 1939 Crosley convertible coupe, fall 1950, with his son, age 3-1/2

Roger continued to work for car dealers as an auto mechanic for several years, but he wanted to be his own boss, and around 1957 he opened his own Sunoco gas station and garage at the corner of Main and Marston Streets in Norway. Those were the days of 25-cent-a-gallon gas, "filling stations" that stayed open on Sundays and late every evening, and long before anyone dreamed of self-service gas pumps.⁸

Gas at 25.9 cents a gallon, Kirk's Sunoco Station, Norway, Maine, May 1957

He hired a succession of assistants for the repair work and the gas pumping, but they tended to be unreliable, and more often than not he was the one "on duty" on Sunday and at least every other evening. In addition to the repair business and the gas sales, he bought and sold used cars and pickups on the side, and like so many Mainers, mounted a snowplow on his pickup each fall and plowed driveways as a sideline during the long, snowy Maine winters.

Roger taking a break at the garage, December 1973

Because of the long hours he put in at the garage, I didn't see much of my father during those years. He'd come home for supper, read the newspaper, and either go back to the station for the evening or doze off on the living room couch while watching TV. He'd rouse about 9 PM and go down to the local coffee shop⁹ to shoot the bull with the other guys. He built a plywood desk/workbench for my older brother and one for me, and a little playhouse with large windows in the back yard that we called "the clubhouse".

Aside from that he didn't engage in much activity with us older kids; my memories are mainly of the odor of gasoline and grease on his work uniforms, and the occasional trip to the town dump I got to go on with my Daddy.¹⁰ In later years, after he closed Kirk's Sunoco and opened a new garage/gas station/tire dealership in 1968 with a partner, he had a little more free time. He bought a pair of dirt bikes for himself and his youngest son so they could go riding together, and before long he moved up to a full-size motorcycle.

Roger Kirk on his motorcycle, Memorial Day Weekend, 1975

Beyond that he didn't have any hobbies that I know of, and only one recreational activity I can recall during my childhood: he was an avid fan of the weekly summer stock car races at Oxford Plains Speedway. Sadly, he would not live long enough to see his dirt-biker son take up first drag racing, and then stock car racing, at that same speedway. How he would have loved to watch his son race!

Early in 1979, Daddy started feeling fatigued and generally unwell – enough so that Mama got him to a doctor (no small feat in itself). The diagnosis was lung cancer.¹¹ He was unable to continue working, and as he was Paris Tire Company's only mechanic, the business was closed. Chemotherapy followed, but did little good.

Late in August, he went to the hospital with chest pains: he was having a heart attack. He rested in the hospital for just a week before the doctors sent him home. A few days later, Mama drove him to a local ice cream stand for one of his favorite treats. On returning home, he said, "I think maybe I tried to do too much," and lay down on the car seat to rest. He never got up. Mama knew he was already gone, but called the rescue squad – thank goodness, their youngest son, a member of the squad, was at his after-school job and not on call – and they took him to the hospital, where he was officially pronounced dead from another heart attack.

That was a Friday. The following Monday, all of his children came home for the funeral. He was buried in Gracelawn Memorial Park in Auburn, where his wife would join him a little more than thirteen years later.

Gracelawn Memorial Park, Auburn, Maine

What I wouldn't give for one last trip to the town dump with Daddy...


(Note: This post is in response to Amy Johnson Crow's "52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks" challenge at No Story Too Small.)

---

SOURCES

1. And for this holiday I finished it on time!
2. As I did for my mother's profile, I'm going to dispense with formal source citations. My information comes from personal knowledge; family photos, memorabilia, and lore; and the letters from Roger that Kathleen so carefully preserved.
3. No doubt to visit his Hodsdon relatives.
4. I well remember him avoiding me like the plague for a least a week after I was exposed to mumps as a 10-year-old (fortunately, I didn't come down with them).
5. His future wife would have been in the fifth grade at Jordan Platoon School at the time.
6. I only wish that he had saved her letters as she did his.
7. Part of the hotel was turned over to the military police for holding Italian prisoners of war.
8. While he usually kept his own gas tank topped off at his own garage, on rare occasions he would stop to get gas at someone else's gas station. I remember being mortally embarrassed when he would get out of the car and blithely start to pump his own gas, as the astonished proprietor came racing out to stop this mad customer from his unprecedented (and possibly illegal) act of self-service.
9. Although I never was in this coffee shop myself, I am confident that it had nothing in common with a Starbucks beyond the bare fact that it served coffee.
10. This was in the days of open-burning dumps, before "sanitary landfills" were even a glimmer on the horizon. Getting to ride with Daddy in his truck when he took the trash to the dump was quite the highlight of a child's weekend.
11. His oncologist automatically assumed that he must be a heavy smoker, but in reality his smoking was limited to only a cigarette or two on his nightly coffee shop visits; my mother didn't want cigarette smoke in the house, and he knew better than to smoke around the gas pumps. (In fact, I never knew he smoked at all – I was astounded when my mother mentioned it after his death.) We suspected that the roots of his cancer lay in the years he spent relining brakes and blowing loose asbestos out of the linings with compressed air, not to mention the constant heavy exposure to gasoline fumes for over forty years.

52 Ancestors: #19, Mother's Day Special: Kathleen Marie (Murphy) Kirk

Kathleen Murphy, ca 1942

What better time to profile my most recent ancestor – my mother – than Mother's Day?¹

Kathleen Marie Murphy was born in December 1921, in Berlin, New Hampshire, to William George Murphy and Glenna Marie Rabideau, and was baptized five weeks later at St. Kieran's Roman Catholic Church in Berlin.² She had no recollection of Berlin, because by May 1923 her parents had moved to Lewiston, Maine, where her sister Theresa was born.

Aside from a brief family sojourn in Texas circa 1926, Kathleen grew up in Lewiston, attending the oddly-named Jordan Platoon School,³ where at age 13 she was the highest-ranking student in her graduating class. She had an artistic bent, apparent in a series of pencil sketches she made as a teenager – mostly of assorted movie stars, but also one of her father and another that I believe is a self-portrait. She graduated in 1939 from Lewiston High School with a commercial track diploma and went to work, first as a clerk for the "NYA" (probably the National Youth Administration), then as a bookkeeper at the Bates Street Cigar & Confectionary Co.

Theresa (left) and Kathleen Murphy, Edinburgh, Texas, ca 1926

     

Kathleen's sketch of her father, Bill Murphy

     

Self-portrait by Kathleen Murphy

Meanwhile, a young man named Roger Kirk was also growing up in Lewiston. He also attended Jordan Grammar School (in 1931-32) and graduated from Lewiston High School, in 1936, three years before Kathleen. I don't know just when their paths first crossed⁴ – the earliest photos I have of them together are dated 1941 – but cross they did, and while their engagement was not officially announced until February 16, 1943, I feel certain that they must have had an "understanding" before Roger enlisted in the Army in August 1942.

     

First known photo of Roger Kirk
and Kathleen Murphy together, 1941

     

Locket found in my mother's jewelry box.
The vignettes were cut from a photo dated 21 Sep 1942.

In July of 1943, Roger managed to get a pass to come home just long enough for them to get married on July 20. No time for a honeymoon: he immediately headed back to his base and found a furnished room so his new bride could join him. While her husband served Uncle Sam as a military policeman and later a mechanic – thankfully, he was never sent overseas – Kathleen got a job in the Ordnance Department at Fort Banks. Roger was discharged in February 1946, and the happy couple could finally go home to Lewiston and, in May, enjoy a well-overdue honeymoon on the Maine coast. Then Roger went back to his pre-Army job as an auto mechanic; they rented an apartment in Auburn; and the following April, Kathleen had her first child, a son.

Kathleen (Murphy) and Roger Kirk on their wedding day, 20 July 1943, Lewiston, Maine

Soon they were thinking about adding to their family, and a year and a half of raising their first son in an apartment no doubt was influential in their decision to buy a house with a VA loan. In September 1948, they found their home, on a quiet dead-end street in the nearby town of Mechanic Falls.

The Kirk family home, Mechanic Falls, Maine, September 1948

There, Kathleen and Roger would live out their lives and raise their family:

1. [Living] Kirk, b. 1947
2. Kathleen "Kathy" Kirk, b. 1951⁵
3. Marshall Kenneth Kirk, 1957-2005⁶
4. [Living] Kirk (twin), b. 1962
5. William Kirk (twin), b. and d. 1962

Kathleen Kirk holding the future Down East
Genealogist, then six months old (Aug 1951)

My mother was a member of that once-common and now-rare breed: a stay-at-home mother and housewife. But although she never took on paid employment while I was growing up, she put her bookkeeping expertise to good use when Daddy opened his own Sunoco gas station and garage in 1957. While he pumped gas, repaired cars, and dealt with employees, she did all the bookkeeping, bill-paying, and banking for the business for the next ten years. When he closed Kirk's Sunoco and opened a new garage/gas station/tire dealership in 1968 with a partner, she continued as the unpaid bookkeeper for the new business, until it closed in 1979 shortly before my father's death.

Kathleen Kirk, ca 1986

When she wasn't wrangling us kids or keeping the books, Mama found time to sew most of her clothes and mine, volunteer in the Ground Observer Corps, do paint-by-number sets, ride with Daddy when he took up motorcycle-riding in the late 1970s (when they were both in their mid-50s), adopt a cat, and most of all, read voraciously. She always had a pile of at least a dozen books from the three libraries where she held cards, was a member of a couple of book-of-the-month clubs, bought paperback mysteries by the handful, subscribed to maybe two dozen magazines, and had both the morning and evening Lewiston newspapers delivered. In her later years, she worked occasionally at the local library, substituting for absent staff members. And she passed on to me her life-long love of reading.

One by one her children grew up, went to college, married, and scattered to Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New York. When my father died in 1979, my youngest brother was still in high school, and he remained at home for a number of years before marrying and buying a house only a few blocks away. He came by every day or two to see his mother and do little chores around the house that she wasn't up to doing.

On a snowy March 6th in 1993, he dropped by after work with his pickup truck to plow the driveway, and on the back porch found that the newspaper had not been brought in. Our mother had had a stroke and passed away in the wee hours of the morning. Five days later, her children gathered and laid their mother to rest, next to their father, in Gracelawn Memorial Park in Auburn.

How I miss you, Mama.

Gracelawn Memorial Park, Auburn, Maine

(Note: This post is in response to Amy Johnson Crow's "52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks" challenge at No Story Too Small.)

---

SOURCES

1. OK, it's a day late. As usual, it took much longer than expected to pull together. Not to mention that when it was nearly complete, I tried to "undo" something and Blogger summarily erased the entire post, which I had to recreate from a draft. My mother would understand.
2. For once, I'm going to dispense with formal source citations. Suffice it to say that my information comes from personal knowledge; family photos, memorabilia, and lore; and in a few cases, city directories for Lewiston and Auburn, Maine, found on Ancestry.com.
3. I have no idea why the Jordan Grammar School was commonly known as Jordan Platoon School, but that's how it was referred to in newspaper articles, for example.
4. It's entirely possible that they met through another connection that had nothing to do with growing up in Lewiston and attending the same schools. Roger had a half-uncle, Walter Rand, who lived in Milan, New Hampshire, from about 1906 until his death in 1946, and was the proprietor of Rand's Cabins, a "tourist camp" in Milan, from about the 1920s through 1946. Kathleen's mother, Glenna Rabideau, had grown up in Milan, and her parents were living in Dummer (only a stone's throw away from Milan) in the early 1930s (they moved to Norway, Maine in 1934). Glenna's parents, Peter and Eva (Woodward) Rabideau (b. 1870 and 1871), were close contemporaries of Walter and Ellen (Adley) Rand (b. 1875 and 1873), so it would be surprising if the families hadn't known each other (Milan is a very small town). And I can easily envision the Murphys visiting the Rabideaus at the same time the Kirks happened to be visiting the Rands.
5. AKA The Down East Genealogist. Also still living, last time I checked.
6. Marshall was the real genealogist in the family; he worked nearly ten years as a research librarian for the New England Historic Genealogical Society in Boston, and authored a number of articles for genealogical journals. I am deeply in his debt for his painstaking research on our family tree, which he bequeathed to me.