Once the table had been cleared and the dishes washed in a huge enamel bowl, the Howard children were free to explore.
Gale Cottage couldn’t have been more different from the Howards’ house in Germantown. Back there Betty knew every item in every cupboard. But here at the cottage, every drawer, cupboard, or box in the attic could hold a wonderful surprise. Betty found a mummified human foot, which her Uncle Will—the owner of the cottage—had brought back from Egypt. Uncle Will had been collecting artifacts for the Metropolitan Museum in New York, and somehow this foot had never made it as far as New York. The same box that held the mummified foot also held a mechanical bear, an ancient black lace parasol, and a music box, all with stories of their own.
A shelf in the back parlor held a stereopticon, a contraption that allowed a person to look into it and see hand-retouched photographs in 3-D. The pictures were of sparkling ice caves and gushing waterfalls. Glass cases filled with pinned-down butterflies and moths also sat on the shelf. Using such “props,” Betty and her brothers acted out wonderful stories that they made up.
Betty loved the fact that the cottage held many family stories. An ash-wood paddle hung on the wall, which her father had brought with him from Maine the summer before he married her mother. He had been a camp counselor at Camp Allagash on Moosehead Lake and asked one of the guides to make the paddle for him and inscribe the initials PH, for Philip Howard, on one side, and KG, for Katherine Gillingham, on the other. Betty thought the paddle was very romantic, and she liked to imagine her mother visiting her father at the cottage and being presented with the paddle.
In the attic were two worn leather-bound books written by Betty’s great-grandfather, Henry Clay Trumbull. Her great-grandfather had been a minister in the Congregational Church and had served as the chaplain of the Tenth Connecticut Regiment during the Civil War. At one point he was even captured and held in a Confederate prison. Although poor health kept him from receiving a formal education beyond the age of fourteen, he had managed to earn three honorary degrees, one each from Yale, Lafayette, and the University of New York.
Betty’s grandfather had told her that Henry Clay Trumbull was highly respected by his regiment during the Civil War. Not only did her great-grandfather preach eloquent sermons and remain dedicated to the men, but he also was a courageous man who would get into the trenches with the rest of the men and rally them on in the thick of battle. After the Civil War he had gone on to become the founder and editor of the Sunday School Times and had written two books: The Knightly Soldier, a biography of his Civil War friend Adjutant Henry Ward Camp, and War Memories of an Army Chaplain. When she heard the stories of such relatives, Betty felt that her roots were as deep as the spruce tree in the front yard of Gale Cottage.
Each day at the cottage was an adventure. While Betty’s mother stayed home most of the time with Ginny and the new baby, her father took the other children out into the mountains to hike. He was a wonderful observer of nature, often standing for an hour or more perfectly still with his hands clasped behind his back. Betty loved to hear him imitate birdcalls and laughed when the birds answered him back as if he were one of their own.
Sometimes they hiked for miles, right to the top of one of the peaks, where Betty was rewarded with breathtaking vistas of the surrounding countryside. And no walk was complete without talking about the Bible and how God had made such an amazing world for them all to enjoy.
Aunt Anne, Betty’s father’s younger sister, often took Betty for long walks. Going with Aunt Anne was a different kind of adventure, one that Betty especially loved. Together they would ramble through the valleys, stopping to pick wildflowers, which they would bring back to the cottage to press into a small scrapbook. Soon Betty had quite a collection that included such flowers as quaker-ladies, wild orchids, devil’s paintbrush, goldenrod, and butter-and-eggs. Sometimes in the evenings she would take out her scrapbook and carefully study each flower.
Also, Aunt Anne would rig up a large white sheet on the veranda and place a lantern behind it. The light would attract moths, which would fly into the sheet. Betty and Aunt Anne would eagerly catch the moths to preserve the next day.
The whole Howard family loved nature, or so it seemed to Betty. Aunt Anne had told Betty that her great-great-aunt Annie Trumbull Slosson had been a writer and well-known entomologist. In fact, according to Aunt Anne, Annie Slosson had documented over one hundred previously unstudied insects, each of which now bore the suffix slossonii.
At night, the family gathered around the huge fire in the fireplace in the living room for hymn singing and prayer. Sometimes Betty’s father would sit in a rocking chair and tell the children stories about his adventures before he was married.
The stories Betty loved best revolved around her father’s stint as assistant to George Davis, the director of the Pocket Testament League. Philip Howard had not been called up for service in the Great War because he had the use of only one eye. Instead, he volunteered to travel throughout the western United States as far as San Francisco and south to the Mexican border. He would meet with soldiers in training camps and hand out free copies of the New Testament for the soldiers to take with them when they shipped out overseas to fight. He and George Davis gave out thousands of copies of the New Testament. They also prayed with the men, and Betty’s dad would play the piano while the men gathered to sing hymns.
The western deserts, with their sand, cactuses, snakes, and coyotes, came alive to Betty as her father talked about camping out under open skies. After he had described San Francisco, Betty longed to see the place, with ferryboats coming and going and misty fog swirling across the bay.
Sometimes, though not often, Philip Howard told the children the story of how he came to lose the use of his left eye. During the summer when he was thirteen years old, he went with his parents to D. L. Moody’s conference center in Northfield, Massachusetts. On the Fourth of July, his father had forbidden him to have fireworks to celebrate the holiday. But Philip managed to get his hands on some anyway—dynamite caps. He went to a nearby farm and asked the farmer to help him fire off the caps. The farmer agreed, and they put the caps on the ground, lit the fuse, and retreated to watch the explosion. But there was no explosion. So they walked back to the dynamite caps and the farmer kicked them. Immediately the caps exploded, and in the process a shard of copper pierced Philip’s left eye. The family made a rush overnight train trip back to Philadelphia, where the doctor declared that Philip was lucky he had not lost the use of both eyes. Mr. Howard always ended the story with a few words on the importance of obeying your parents and not doing things your own way.
Betty’s mother also had stories to tell that ignited Betty’s imagination. One cool evening she told about her great-grandfather, Frank Gillingham, who had been an officer in the Union Army. Frank had fought at Antietam, the bloodiest battle of the Civil War, but had managed to come through the battle unscathed. When President Lincoln was assassinated, Frank was assigned the task of escorting the President’s body back to Illinois. Betty’s mother described how the funeral train would stop at every town along the way and how Great-Grandfather Gillingham would brush the cinders off the dead President’s face and prepare Mr. Lincoln for a viewing.
Just before summer recess, Betty had been learning at school about President Lincoln. The idea that her family had real, tangible links with such an important person from the past thrilled her. Sometimes when she lay awake at night listening to the swish of the wind through the pine trees and the gurgling of the river in the distance, she wondered how her life would turn out. Would she have amazing stories to tell her own children?
Chapter 4
Adventurous Aspirations
Betty hated to leave Gale Cottage and all the wonderful activities she had been involved in there. But on the train trip back to Philadelphia, her mother told her something that filled her with excitement: the family was going to buy a car! Betty could hardly believe what she was hearing. She tried to imagine how different things would be with their very own car.
Sure enough, within weeks of getting back from New Hampshire, Betty’s father drove home a 1932 Plymouth sedan with yellow-spoked wheels. Betty couldn’t help but notice the way her mother’s face lit up at the sight of the vehicle. “What a wonder!” her mother said. “It takes me back to when I was a young woman in 1917.” Betty laughed. She had seen the photo of her mother perched behind the heavy steering wheel of the Buick Roadster that Grandfather Gillingham had bought her. She remembered her mother telling about all the extra attention she had received from boys wanting to take a ride in the car. Betty liked to think of her mother as a daring young woman, wrapped in a raccoon skin coat and wearing a beaver hat tied firmly on her head, cruising around town in her Buick.
Soon Betty learned that another big change was in store for the family: they were moving. Yes, with five children, the Howards’ home in Germantown had become too cramped. Betty and the boys were used to the confined space, but the fact was that the house at 103 West Washington Lane had very few places to play. The house had a pocket-sized yard, and the place was dark and gloomy inside.
The family piled into the Plymouth for the first look at their new home, which was sixteen miles away across the Tacony-Palmyra Bridge. Betty’s brothers were fascinated by the huge arch that formed the bridge’s center span and the bump in the surface that was the center of the drawbridge section of the structure. Philip Howard explained to his children that the river beneath them was the Delaware and that the state line ran right along the river, so that in driving across the bridge they had passed from Pennsylvania to New Jersey.
Finally Betty’s father turned the car onto a street in Moorestown, New Jersey. “There it is!” he said with a flourish. “Number 29 East Oak Avenue.”
In front of them on the corner stood a stately three-story house. Betty could hardly believe it. Compared to the house in Germantown it looked like a mansion. As Betty soon discovered, the place had seventeen rooms—a room for each of them and still lots left over. A veranda stretched along two sides of the house, which was surrounded by a big yard with a dogwood, a poplar, and a beech tree growing in front. Betty knew from the moment she set eyes on the new house that she was going to be very happy living in Moorestown.
Of course, moving from Pennsylvania to New Jersey meant a change of school and making new friends, which was difficult for a shy girl like Betty. However, their big yard was a huge attraction, and Betty soon made some friends. A florist business with a row of greenhouses was located across the street from the house. The florist regularly discarded large wooden boxes in which flowers had been delivered to the business. He allowed the children to take the boxes to play with. Back in the yard of the Howard house, the children used the boxes to build small playhouses, in which they occupied themselves for hours on end.
Even though the Howards were now farther away from the Sunday School Times headquarters, missionaries continued to visit and stay and regularly regaled the children with their stories. Russell Abel from the South Pacific Mission thrilled them with stories of having to flee from cannibals, while L. L. Legters spoke about Indian tribes in Mexico that no one outside of that country even knew existed. A single woman, Helen Yost, a missionary among the Indians of Arizona, opened Betty’s mind to the importance of Bible translation work.
