Holly A. Abbe and Dr. Susan Howe, Department of English

My father, Henry Reed, grew up in a small town in upper state New York where the sleepy hills turn orange and gold in the fall, where a man wearing white brings milk in bottles every morning to each door step, and where the church bells of the old Baptist Church are heard clearly every hour of the day. Fabius, New York is a wonderful town of only two hundred people. Every time I visited Fabius I felt as if I had traveled back in time when life was more simple and in many ways more enchanting. This is what I wanted to research, capture, and preserve in a collection of short stories based on my grandfather and my father.

The research grant was very helpful in providing the means to collect the numerous stories from different sources. Since my grandfather passed away two years ago and my grandmother has lost her ability to communicate, I contacted my grandfather’s sister and brother to gather stories from them. I flew out to visit my father and record names, dates, and stories from him. I also found a history of Fabius entitled Fabius Past and Present compiled by the Fabius Central School District that was very useful for my writing. The contact I had with my relatives during this time was extremely rewarding. The conversations, written material, and collected information is priceless to me and my future family. I obtained pages of information about life in Fabius, my grandfather’s life, and my father’s adventures. I narrowed this information down to seven solid ideas for stories, and I wrote five.

One main challenge I faced while writing the stories was deciding how to write them. I learned that there is a great difference between writing personal history and short stories. I have more experience writing fictional short stories and found myself taking the historical facts and weaving them into a story frame. Thus, the stories are not perfect representations of what actually happened in my father’s and grandfather’s lives, but I think they accurately capture the mood, feelings, and events that made them who they are.

The first story in the collection, is about an incident involving my grandfather, Frank Reed. One day Frank brought home a puppy for my dad. His explanation was that there had been a man at the town’s tavern who was getting ready to drown a litter of puppies because he did not have enough money to feed them all. Frank had taken home one of those puppies. In this story I tried to relay the hardships that many people in Fabius were experiencing with jobs and low income during the post World War II years. The winter setting, descriptions of the stark landscape, and the attitudes of the characters help depict this sentiment. Next, I tried to show the need and the existence of hope during this time with the symbolic crocus and my grandfather.

The next two stories in the collection are about my father, Henry, and some of his childhood adventures in Fabius. “The Game” is about Henry and his friend, Leo, who became very bored at the end of a lazy summer. In their desire to find action, they played a game using a tall old oak tree, fruit, and passing cars. The game started out harmless and fun. Then one afternoon Leo decided to add an extra twist; he and Henry retrieved the scarecrow from Mrs. Patrick’s garden. With a light and humorous overtone, the story is probably my favorite. I used a great deal of description of the town and the town’s folk with an almost Norman Rockwell style.

“Herby Doole” is about an experience my father had in Junior High School during an initiation into a club. Herby Doole was a hermit that lived just barely within the city limits near a good fishing lake. With his pack of mean dogs, ragged appearance, and drinking habits, Herby was a topic of gossip and fear with people of Fabius. The story combines the element of suspense with humor and ends with the whole town scouring the woods all because of a prank. Within the playfulness of the story, I tried to add a serious overtone of the negative and positive power of judgment. I wrote it using a style similar to young adult novels such as “Where the Red Fern Grows.”

The story, “Memories,” is a series of memories that I have of my father. It borders on the stream of conscious style. The memories tie in with the other stories because they are a continuation of the character Henry and an even greater continuation of my grandfather. I tried to bring out the similarities between my grandfather as an adult and Henry as an adult. The descriptions are probably the most vivid because they are true memories that I’ve experienced.

Last summer my father drove through Provo on his way from New York to Washington state. He came with a U-Haul truck full of treasures from his home in Fabius. My grandma had decided to sell the house, and he had helped her pack up and move. It was an autumn afternoon in Provo with cool air and falling leaves. My father pulled out different relics from the truck and gave them to me. With each treasure, he told a story. This is the basis for my final story in the collection, “Cardboard Box of Treasures.”

I have at least two more stories that I plan to write about Fabius using the same characters and setting. I’ve already sent two of the stories to writing contests and journals in the hope of publication. Eventually, I would love to try to publish the stories together as a collection. But whether or not these stories ever get publicly recognized as literature or even published in a journal, they will always be precious to my living family and my family to come.