A BIT OF WALL HISTORY

A BIT OF WALL HISTORY

I was thinking that when John and I pass, there is much that the Wall family wouldn't know about Tallie and Lena. Some you already know, mostly through gossip, but I thought I would tell you what I was told happened to them through the years.

You may or may not know that the building to the right of Tallie and Lena's house once belonged to Lena's family, the Anconas. Lena's mother's maiden name was Torregrossa. They were full Italians and looked it. Anyway, the building once housed a store. It burned down and I guess it was rebuilt because it's still standing today.

Lena said her dad was a really mean man, so mean that when he died no one shed a tear. When the building burned down, Lena said they had no shoes to wear. They were given some but her dad refused "charity." So they had to wrap plastic bags around their feet.

John Sr. told me a story one time and then later denied it happening. I told him I didn't pull it out of thin air and it made sense. The story he told me was that when Tallie and Lena got married they started building the house they lived in. The grandpa didn't like the way it was being built so he threatened Tallie. John (your dad) was really scared for several days. He would have been aware of how mean the grandpa was. It could be he told me a repressed memory and then repressed it again.

Another story he told me was that the grandpa just disappeared one day and they didn't know where he went. He was gone for two weeks and when he returned he went to bed for a month or two and then he got up and got back to business. No one knows what happened to him in those two weeks and he would never tell.

As you know, Tallie had another family before Lena. There were 4 or 5 kids. The only name I remember is Helen. They were not allowed to speak the name of the ex-wife. One of the boys would visit Tallie on a rare occasion and he would write to one of the girls. Supposedly the ex ran up a bunch of bills before she left/he left. They thought that was awful but I later realized that she did that because she knew she was on her own and had 4-5 kids to raise. But as far as I know, she was a witch.

One more story I remember that he may have told you is that for his birthday one year his dad made him a baseball bat. But when he went to open his present, the bat was super thick. John was very disappointed and kind of held that against his dad. Maybe his dad made the bat thick to give him more surface to hit the ball. But the extra weight would have counteracted that so I don't know. Tallie was a smart man, an inventor. He did everything precise and John knew that, so he may have been hurt for that reason too.

Tallie accidentally ran over Donnie with the car. I don't know much about that story. John always said they liked Donnie best. Of course he was the baby.

Tallie's one brother, Vic, lived across the street. They had a son named Marvin. He never married and was a teacher at Summersville Grade School. He is the one who talked your dad into becoming a teacher. Also across the street was another couple kin to Tallie. Glenn and Eloise Wall were their names. Glenn was Vic's son and Marvin's brother.

Vic worked on airplanes. He helped start Outland Aviation, which is now the Mt. Vernon Airport. He too was a smart man. Neither brother had a college education and I don't know how much of an elementary education they had.

Tallie also had a brother named Cloyce. He rode a bicycle around town. He was not quite right. I was told he had a nervous breakdown, possibly because he had 13 kids, but it wasn't uncommon back then for families to be that large.

I don't know about any other of Tallie's siblings but there probably were more.

Lena's siblings were Tony, Josie, Big John, and Elizabeth.