Mr. Charles George Fromer
• Born on September 2, 1922
• Father: John Mason Fromer, died at 76
• Mother: Kazia Ileena Davis, died at 39
• Wife: Winnie Smith, died in 2010
• Married in December 1945 for 64 years
• Children: Charla and Sierra
• Five granddaughters and four great-granddaughters
Charles's Story
(First ten pages – rough draft)
Chapter 5
Centenarian
Charles Fromer, 101
" In third grade, that's when I got thirteen whippings in thirteen days."
PART 1
My mother, Kezia, I lost in a train wreck when I was eight. September 17, 1930. She was thirty-nine, and she left behind six kids.
She was working at a grocery store in Greensburg, Indiana[1] when a salesman was coming out the way she was going. The salesman said, "Just get in. You can ride out with me, and I’ll drop you off."
According to the Indianapolis Journal on September 18, 1930, here's what happened next:
“Mr. J.F. Krugg was en route to Adams[2] on business, and it is understood that he offered to take Mrs. Kezia Fromer from Golden Rule Grocery, where she was employed, to North Anderson Street, less than a mile away, where she lived.
They neared the North Michigan Avenue crossing while moving at a reported speed of about twenty-five miles an hour but failed to notice that the automatic signals were warning the approach of a train. The car (a Buick Master Six), was driven directly on the tracks and the Big Four passenger train (No. 39) struck it practically broadside.
One eyewitness said he had attempted to warn Mr. Krugg of the speeding, approaching train by flagging down the car. Another eyewitness indicated that Mr. Krugg was aware of the train and unsuccessfully attempted to stop. That he tried to halt the car’s progress was indicated by the fact that the emergency brake had been employed and that tracks of the skidding car were apparent for about twenty feet.
A general unaccepted theory was that the car had been halted and then slipped onto the tracks.
Mr. Krugg stated that Mrs. Fromer had told him where she wanted out and that he was not certain on which side of the tracks she meant. Consequently, he again asked her, and in doing so, failed to note the warning lights or the train.”
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My mother, Kezia Ileena Davis,[3] and my dad, John Mason Fromer, married in 1910. They had six children, but only five of us were living at home at the time – my oldest brother, Russell (Eugene Fromer); my sisters, Martha (Eudora “Sis” Fromer) and Kathryn (Louise “Babe” Fromer); Howard Guilford Fromer; and then me, the youngest they had to worry about.
My dad was forty when my mother was killed.
###
My mother was from a family of five. She was very stern. I can remember the last whipping I got from her. (FYI: They both whipped.) We were living in Greensburg at the time. We were sitting there doing something, talking, and evidently, I did something wrong. She was hitting me across the leg with a yardstick when Russell said, "Mom, you shouldn't be doing that." She said OK and stopped.
She was brilliant, too. I've thought a lot of times about how in the world my Grandfather on my father’s side, Charles Augustus Fromer, could bankrupt my dad in my mother’s presence – twice (more on this later). I don't understand. It's still a mystery.
I guess that's one thing I'll ask her about when I see her next.
My grandfather from the Davis side (George Washington) was the one who named her. Kezia. And I said, "It's in the book of Job." I know that. I could find it because it’s near the end.
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Before we get too far along, let’s back up and start from the beginning.
Nicholas – Great-Great-Grandfather
My great-great-grandfather on my father’s side, Nicholas Fromer’s family, migrated to the U.S. from Baden-Baden, Germany,[4] around 1801.
Upon arriving in the U.S. through Liberty Island,[5] the spelling of Frommer was changed from two m’s to the current spelling of Fromer. Nicholas Fromer was about eight at the time his family traveled to and settled around Lancaster, Pennsylvania,[6] and then sometime later, migrated to Indiana and settled as a farmer in Ripley County near Napoleon, a German community.
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John Baptist – Great-Grandfather
My great-grandfather on my father’s side, John Baptist Fromer, came over here from Baden-Württemberg[7] to get away from the constriction in Germany. He got over here in time for the Civil War. So, I think it was around 1865.
Yeah. They probably settled in Ripley County. That's right around Napoleon. Because that's the way the country got together. Groups from the same locale would settle together. Because if they knew somebody over in the old country and somebody had come here and was doing well, naturally, they'd migrate to settle with them. Like in Napoleon, Millhousen, and all of those.
John Baptist eventually married Nancy Ann Updike, and they had three sons: George Washington, Herman, and Charles Augustus Fromer, for whom I was named.
George Washington Fromer served in the 16th Regiment, Indiana Infantry, between 1917 and 1918.
But here’s the thing. What I didn’t know until we started researching this story is that after my great-grandmother, Nancy Ann, died, my great-grandfather John Baptist went and married a woman named Hannah Loyd, who then shot him dead in a bakery twenty months later.
Here’s what a newspaper clipping from the Indianapolis Journal on May 8, 1887, had to say about that colorful event:
“On May 7, 1887, John Baptist Fromer was shot and killed by his second wife, Hannah N. Loyd, in Kessler's Bakery,managed by his son Charles. The pair had separated a short time before, and Hannah Loyd was endeavoring for reconciliation but became repulsed by her husband. Before the shooting, Mrs. Fromer had a violent aversion to her husband's two younger children (Albert Joseph, age thirteen, and George Washington, age ten) by his first wife, Nancy Ann Fromer. Since the separation, Mrs. Fromer had asked John Baptist to return home and put the children in a boarding house, which he refused to do.
On that Saturday morning around eight-thirty, Mrs. Fromer talked to John Baptist in the bakery for a while and was heard saying several times, "Won't you come, John!"
He said, "No," and when he turned to her, she drew a revolver and fired. Just then, Mrs. Fromer was caught and disarmed. It was mentioned by customers that Hannah Loyd had said she intended to kill herself. Also, she talked insanely, saying God's spirit told her to kill her husband. She was crazy.
Mr. Fromer had been an agent of the Indianapolis Brewing Company and had furnished beer to the different retail dealers. He had always been highly regarded for his honesty.
Mr. Fromer was born Johannes Baptista Frommer on September 24, 1835, in Karsau, Baden-Württemberg, Germany, the son of Catharina and Nicholas Fromer. He married Nancy Ann Updike on May 6, 1858, in Franklin, Indiana. They had thirteen children in seventeen years. He died on May 7, 1887, in Greensburg, at fifty-one, and was buried in Napoleon.”
My great-grandfather John Baptist wasn't alive when I was born. My Grandfather, Charles Augustus, was the only living grandparent that I met.
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Grandpa George Washington Davis
Because of my Grandmother Martha (Matilda) Davis, on my mother's side, we always went to church except for my Grandpa George Washington Davis. Now, he and some minister had a mix-up somehow or other, and that's what drove him out of the church. He would never go, but we would come home, and he'd have the radio on, and he'd be listening to his church service.
But there at the Mount Pleasant Church, down there near Letts,[8] when anybody passed away, he dug the graves.
Your Grandpa George Washington David dug graves?
Yeah.
Was he an official grave digger?
No.
Did he get paid for it?
He got paid for it, and he’d do it all with a shovel.
And they would come out, well, they would be perfect. I know because we'd go down there, maybe take him to lunch or something or other, and we'd play around it and jump down inside the hole.
He did odd jobs ever since I can remember.
Grandpa Davis was a quiet man, but whenever he talked, you'd better be listening. We would get down there to Letts, and he'd take us blackberrying, and we'd have maybe three buckets, two and a half gallon buckets, Macallan buckets, that we'd have to pick with. If Grandpa saw us pick a blackberry and put it in our mouth, he’d say, "Wait a minute, we didn't come down here to eat these berries. We came down here to put them in the buckets." And after we had the buckets filled, he would say, "Now you can eat all you want." I never thought about that until later years. What he was telling me was: When you’ve got a job to do, you do the job first.
At Grandpa’s, we would play baseball. There was a vacant lot out in front of his house, across the road, and we'd play out there. We never had a bat. We'd have an old board we were using. And he'd watch us play and everything. One day, we were getting ready to go play, and he got up, reached down behind his chair, and said, "I think you ought to use this." He had made us a bat.
Did he have a lathe?
No. All he had was a draw knife.[9] A draw knife back then was a blade about this long that fit in two handles. He made it out of hickory, and the damn thing weighed a ton.
They make them out of ash, really. But I mean, he never said anything. He just said, "I think you ought to use this here."
Grandpa Davis was pretty set in his ways. That was his disposition. If he tried to get something corrected but couldn’t, he’d just back off and drop it. Once he made a decision, boy, that was it. See, he didn't want my Uncle Billy to enlist into the Army in the first place. And he tried to fight him, but Uncle Billy went anyway. Grandpa Davis didn't speak to Uncle Billy for five years.
I know we would go down and visit Grandpa in Letts.
But I've looked back, and I learned a lot from him.
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Grandpa Charles Augustus
It’s true that my Grandpa Charles Augustus Fromer bankrupted my dad twice. The last time, my dad never made it out (which we’ll get to in a minute).
After my mother died in September 1930, we went down there to Greensburg, to stay with Grandpa Charles.
Well, Grandpa couldn't stay on so long; he couldn't put up with us. So, we stayed with him until Dad could get something else going. I know we stayed upstairs there. They had a couple of rooms. It was about a year that we went there and stayed there.
In 1932, we moved to Greensburg and stayed with Russell in a house he rented. We stayed in two places in Greensburg: one on the northwest side and the other on the southeast side. My dad was getting any work that he could. He worked for the water company for a while, unloading a box car when coal came in. He also drove a school bus for a while.
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John Mason Fromer
My dad, John Mason Fromer, had two brothers on my father’s side, my Uncle Frank and Uncle Earl Fromer, who worked on the farm in Greensburg. Then they left the farm and went to work on something else. But my Grandpa Charles would not let my dad leave the farm or get out of the business until Dad got married. He was needed on the farm. So, my dad stayed there for a long time.
Did your father have a cattle farm?
Yeah. Back then, we had a regular stock farm where we had animals, and we had corn fields to plant and stuff like that. We raised crops to feed the stock; we didn't sell that. My dad always, when we were on the farm, he said, "I'll take care of feeding the hogs." Because he would take and dump the corn out on the ground, and they'd come out and eat it, and he'd stay there leaning on the fence watching them. He could tell how they were by what they were doing.
We had, in our barn, we had a stall big enough that we could hold about fifty head of cattle. Three times we got fifty head and fattened them up and then shipped them to market. In the barn, we would always run hogs underneath, cows on top. All sorts of ships, we'd get them out. My dad would always come up to the market when he had a shipment. He used just one broker to ship them.
I came up with Dad one time, and we went out in the stockyard. There were a lot of cows and pigs out there. There was always a group ready to take care of them pretty good because they knew the cattle Dad brought in had been taken care of and fed right.
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I always said my grandfather never talked much, but when he talked, you’d better be listening. You know how kids get fidgeting around. Once, we were playing dominoes during the winter there, and of course, that's when they had a gas light in the center of the room. The dominoes were knocked down several times, and my grandfather said, "Charles, you sit still."
Then, my grandmother hit the table and knocked the rest of the dominos down. Well, Grandpa reached over and thumped me on the head like a mule kicking, and grandmother said, "Pop, that wasn't Charles; that was me."
Grandpa never said, "I'm sorry,” or anything. It was dropped right there.
My dad was very tolerant. He’d let us do almost anything we wanted. Because we were raised on a farm, we always had jobs to do, and that was it.
There was one thing you didn't want to do. If he asked you to do something, you had to do it – now. You didn't want to tell my dad that you were not going to do it. Or, you couldn’t say, “Well, maybe I'll do that later.” If you said that, you had him to whip you then.
He’d say, "Well, maybe I can change your mind."
That was just him.
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Russell
Russell went to work farming for the teacher’s dad and was also working nights slicing bread at Kessler's Bakery. One of the reasons he liked the bakery was that if something went wrong, he could fix it. And so, he did that.
He was married to Irene Woolf and lived on the farm, and that was around the time the National Guard was taken in by the Army because of World War II. He must have been around twenty-two. He was quite active in the military.
He had a key to the Armory. We went down there at times while he was working, and we could play ball on the courts in the gym, see. He got promoted up fairly quickly and became a Captain.
That's when he tried to get me to go with him into the military, and I wouldn't do it.
Eventually, he went to France to serve in WWII.
Russell was inducted into the National Guard there in Greensburg in the Forties.
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The Bank Note / Aunt Bell
My father never did like my Grandpa Charles' wife, my father’s stepmother, and she knew it. Now, we never did call her Grandma. We called her Aunt Bell. She was my step-grandmother.
Then Dad went in on a note with Grandpa Charles. And when he co-signed the note, Aunt Bell said, "We're going to break you, you know."
She was going to break him because she couldn't control him. He didn't like her. And she said, "We're going to get you." And she did.
My mother was a very smart woman and how she ever let it happen is beyond me. He probably did it without her knowledge, and it was already done, see?
Yeah. I mean, that's what I've had a hard time with. I've thought through it. I’ve never understand how it went on because, knowing my mother, she would've stepped in and told my dad, "No, you're not going to do this."
So, she didn't know.
Evidently, she didn't know.
So, Aunt Bell was not on the note?
No, I don't think so. I think it was just in my grandfather and father's name.
My dad must have co-signed it, see. Since my grandfather didn't pay his part, it came back on my dad, and he had to file for bankruptcy. I just can't imagine that whole scenario.
And then your dad turned around and continued to work on his farm? And do another note?
Yes, he did it again.
So, I keep going back to your father having the responsibility of paying back the whole note and then filing for bankruptcy. What was that all about? I mean, his father just didn't want to pay it or didn't have the money to pay it?
Well, I really don't know whether Aunt Bell kept him from doing it because I think Grandpa was pretty easy persuaded by her. She probably said, "You know what, I'm going to leave you," or something. I don't know. Anyway, she persuaded him not to pay the note, and my dad had to file. My dad didn't own the farm. He was sharecropping.
During the second bankruptcy, he lost the farm. He was renting on shares.
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Footnotes
[1] Greensburg, in Decatur County, is a small but significant community fifty-two miles southeast of Indianapolis. It has a population of around 13,000 and an interesting history; named after Thomas Hendricks' wife from Greensburg, Pennsylvania. The post office opened as "Greensburgh" in 1823 and later changed to its current spelling in 1894. Today, Greensburg's Honda automobile plant provides jobs and revitalizes the community's charm and heritage.
[2] Within Adams Township, within the boundaries of Decatur County, is an unassuming community known as Adams. Its humble beginnings date back to 1855, when the railroad's arrival sparked its establishment and growth.
[3] The moniker Keziah, also spelled as Kezia or Kezia, held its roots in Hebrew biblical lore. The daughter of Job, she was bestowed this name upon his triumphant recovery from his tribulations. Its meaning, “cinnamon bark,” was chosen by Job to symbolize his newfound affluence. Along with her sisters Jemimah and Keren-Happuch, Keziah was among the three daughters of Job.
[4] The town of Baden-Baden sits in the center of the Black Forest, surrounded by the Oos River. It once served as a distant outpost for the Roman Empire and later thrived as the seat of the Margravate of Baden. Despite fires and foreign occupation, it emerged as a haven for those fleeing the French Revolution in the late eighteenth century. Today, it is known for its spas, drawing royalty and high society seeking relaxation and indulgence in its famous waters.
[5] In the Upper New York Bay, Liberty Island is a treasured piece of American heritage owned by the federal government. The island's focal point is the iconic Statue of Liberty (also referred to as "Liberty Enlightening the World"), a grand tribute constructed by French artist Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi and unveiled in 1886. To enhance visitors' experience, a museum was inaugurated on the island in 2019, displaying the original torch of the statue and its rich history.
[6] In Pennsylvania's historic Lancaster County, the city of Lancaster holds a rich heritage as one of the oldest inland cities in America. With a population of some 58,040, it boasts the title of county seat and stands as the tenth-largest city in the state.
[7] The autonomous state of Baden-Württemberg in southwest Germany maintains its sovereignty. It was formed in 1952 when South Baden, Württemberg-Baden, and Württemberg-Hohenzollern merged after World War II.
[8] Letts is a small town in Sand Creek Township, Decatur County established in 1882. It was named after the first postmaster, Allen W. Lett. However, like many small towns, the Letts Post Office closed in 1954, leaving behind a nostalgic atmosphere.
[9] The drawknife, a staple tool in the world of traditional woodworking, was designed to delicately shape wood by carving off tiny slivers. Its sleek design consists of a lengthy, slender blade with two sturdy handles on either end. As its name suggests, this tool is used by pulling the sharp edge toward oneself. The cutting edge is sharpened with a curved and polished bevel, while the handles can be positioned either below or level with the blade for optimal control and precision.
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