Reminiscences

I started to call this a "Memoir" but decided that such a title was too formal and implied some literary competence. Hence a retreat to "Reminiscences."

For those who may read the pages that follow, you have only to blame Mary and Barbara Boster who have, on several occasions, hectored me about making a record of my experiences for the benefit of members of my family, current and future. Flattering as this suggestion has been for me, I have resisted until now, concerned that I would not be able to resist dragging in every inconsequential detail of my life if I felt it cast me in a favorable light and that the net effect would turn out just the opposite of my intention, revealing me to be self-absorbed or, worse, foolish and shallow.

But nothing ventured, nothing gained. So here are some reminiscences about a supremely satisfying life, one blessed with good fortune and so many improbable strokes of luck that, agnostic though I am, I have wondered sometimes if someone up there might be looking out for me. For a prime example, consider how, after my discharge from the Navy at the end of World War II, I almost witlessly made my way back into the Navy for training in the Russian language and eventual entry into the Foreign Service, a career for which I had no training and almost no serious qualifications. An English major at Mount Union College, after all, was scarcely equivalent to a program in international relations at the Sorbonne or Georgetown.

This point, that I might not have been ideally prepared for the big time in foreign relations, was driven home to me in the very early days of my service in the State Department when the Washington columnist and leading pundit, Joseph Alsop, took me to a much-too-long and ultimately humbling lunch at the Metropolitan Club, probing me -- as I was the Department's new desk officer for the Soviet Union, he seemed to see me as a logical source -- for enlightenment on the past and future of the world communist movement. I hoped I was a reasonably competent desk officer, but I knew I was out of my depth in these waters, and I sensed that he soon understood this as well. This did not discourage him, however, from beginning to call me regularly in the evident expectation that, in the national interest broadly construed, I would share with him the Department's innermost thoughts about Soviet matters and provide him with copies of our confidential analyses of Soviet-related developments. A hobnobber with presidents and secretaries of departments, he was evidently accustomed to such open-handed treatment. I came to dread his calls, but I must have proved a disappointing source as the calls eventually stopped. But I am getting off track here and ahead of my story.

The Early Years

I weighed in at 8 pounds 6 ounces in my grandmother's bedroom in the small village of Rio Grande, Ohio on September 14, 1920, the only child of Ernest Gordon Boster and Nelle Emily Davis Boster. Rio Grande was then a community of some 200 souls in the rolling hills of Gallia County in southeastern Ohio, about 10 miles from the Ohio River and West Virginia to the east and perhaps 30 from Kentucky to the south. This was pure farm country, and Rio Grande's most distinguishing feature was the very small college that had been founded there to offer a liberal arts education to the sons and daughters of the local farmers, a majority of whom were the descendants of Welsh immigrants who had settled in Rio Grande (which they all mispronounced)  in the 1800's. The town was thus full of people with Welsh names like Robert Roberts, Tommy Thomas, Richard Richards, Willie Williams, and David Davis.

One such Davis was my grandfather, Daniel Levi Davis. He was nearly pure Welsh; his grandfather, David Davies, and his grandmother, Elizabeth Jones, had lived and died in Wales, and their son, David R. Davies, was born in Wales but had emmigrated to America where my grandfather was born, also in Gallia County. David R. Davies' wife was Emma Jane Smith who was born in Gallia County but was of half German and half Irish stock, thus slightly diluting the Welsh strain. It was my grandfather's deathbed wish (sadly, not honored) that his children change the family name back to the original Davies.

The Boster pedigree is in fact a grand mixture of four strains: Welsh, English (my grandmother on my mother's side came from a line of Tanners and Woods who may be presumed to have been of English stock), German (two of the grandparents of Emma Jane Smith were German, and the first Boster to come to America, Phillip Boster in 1740, came from Alsace, Germany), and Irish (two of the grandparents of my grandfather Davis' mother were Irish). I suspect that there was probably a little French in the mixture as well. Although the genealogist (Mary's next-door neighbor in Hudson and close friend, Janis Heidenreich Miller) showed Phillip Boster arriving from Alsace, Germany, but in the 1700's, when Phillip left Alsace, it was part of France and has always been populated by people of both German and French ethnic origin. Her research also showed that people were surprisingly careless about the spelling of their names in those days and that the Boster name appeared in various versions -- Boiser, Boyster (some of my relatives have come down in the Boyster line), Bosser, Bosester, and Boster. I suspect that the French word for woods, bois, was the original root of the name and that the forms Bosser and Boster were adopted in an effort to make the name more "American."

For most of his life my grandfather Davis had worked a fairly large farm about 10 miles south of Rio Grande but moved, with his wife Rozelma (or ZelIa, as she came to be called, I suppose because her sisters were named Ella and Della), to Rio Grande when he grew too old to farm. There he established one of the village's two general stores; his was situated at the edge of town, next door to the white frame house where they lived and where I was born.

They were called "general stores" because of the wide range of products they sold. On one side of my grandfather's store was a bank of counters behind which were displayed the food wares--canned vegetables, bread, cheese, bologna and ham, tobacco products. Cigarette tobacco came in little cloth sacks with drawstrings, and the smoker had to roll his own cigarettes. He sold Mail Pouch chewing tobacco, which he himself chewed, much to the eternal exasperation of my grandmother. Pipe tobacco -- he carried the brand Prince Albert -- came in cans, which led to the first joke I ever heard: "Do you have Prince Albert in the can?" "Yes." "Well let him out! Ha! Ha! Ha!"

At the end of this bank of counters were two coolers, one for dispensing ice cream in the flavors vanilla, chocolate, strawberry, and maple nut, and one which held Coca Cola, Ginger Ale, Orange Crush, and a chocolate-flavored soda which I think was called Mavis--all for a nickel apiece. He carried eggs from time to time -- the price seemed to vary between 7 and 8 cents a dozen -- but never any fresh fruit or vegetables; his customers were farmers who grew their own produce. Beneath these counters were barrels of flour, rice, and sugar which were sold in bulk, scooped into brown paper bags in the weight requested.

Behind the counters on the opposite aisle were "dry goods" -- fabrics for women to make their own dresses, shoes, and other such products. He did a fair business in dress goods, but I never saw anybody buy shoes there.

At the end of this main sales area was a pot-bellied stove, surrounded by two or three chairs, and during the winter this always drew in a few people from the cold. Beyond this area was a warehouse and a loading platform from which my grandfather dispensed hundred-pound sacks of bran and corn -- feed for cattle.

Business seemed fairly good in the mid to late 1920s, especially on Saturday evenings when the farm families, their work week over, streamed into Rio Grande to replenish their supplies. But competition from the new chain stores -- the Krogers, A&Ps, and Piggly Wigglys -- in Gallipolis, the county seat and only real city in Gallia County, plus the hard times of the Depression from 1929 to 1933, was about to drive him out of business at a time when his own health was failing. It was sad to see how many people owed him substantial sums for bills they had run up and simply were unable to pay. When I was 12, I think it was, he reached the point where he could no longer tend the store, and I was left in charge of it for the summer. Trade was so bad by then that the work was not overly taxing, a good thing because I don't think I could have coped with the normal amount of business. For my three months labor, I was paid $20. Not much, but probably about all my grandparents could afford at that time. The Depression had wrecked many lives, and I suspect that my grandparents, after a life of hard work and some modest success, were on the brink of bankruptcy. There was no evidence that they left any estate to speak of; certainly my mother did not come into any substantial money at that time, and my father had to declare bankruptcy in 1938 (in his case, it had nothing to do with the Depression but rather with his weakness for speculation in the Midwest commodities market, a fool's game.)

Curiously, this pattern of running a general store after a life of farming was also followed by my grandfather on my father's side, William Henry Harrison Boster. His store was in another part of Gallia County, but I have only the haziest memory of it. There was another pattern common to both families: with only one exception (my mother's sister Wilma McCarthy with her husband Elmer had the largest farm in Gallia county) all the next generation of children left farming for other pursuits, mostly for professional careers. My father was a school superintendent and sometime mathematics teacher, my mother taught English and Latin in high school, my uncle Harold was a small-town doctor, and my uncle Orville was a school superintendent. (The last of my mother's brothers died at age 11 after being kicked by a horse on my grandfather's farm.)