It must have been sometime in the early to mid 90s, I guess. My parents were living in Lebanon, PA, and I had just arrived for my annual Christmas visit. Reed, my mother’s brother who is only three years older than I am, was there already and they were discussing the final plans for that evening, I think.

That’s when Reed asked if my mother had made any olive cookies.

Huh? 

When she pointed to the cookie jar, I realized I had misheard. He had asked about Olive’s cookies. A simple, pale sugar cookie, usually covered with a white frosting and optionally sprinkled with a multi-colored sugar topping, my mother had been baking these treats ever since Olive Geiss gave her the recipe over 30 years earlier. She might bake other kinds of cookies as well, but Olive’s cookies were the ones that everyone seemed to like.

We had moved to Richland in 1957, and for the first few months we stayed in the second floor of Lynn and Isobel Klopp’s house that they rented out as an apartment. By November my parents had bought what we used to call a half a house where the other half was owned by Mary Haak. But our neighbors on the other side were Roy and Olive Geiss and their 22 year old daughter Sally Ann.

Roy was one of the two barbers in Richland; he had his shop in the basement of the building that housed the Richland National Bank.

I remember going there and it was a large room with a low ceiling, not very well lighted, but it served its purpose, and Roy was a pleasant fellow as I recall, late 40s, balding on top with a fringe of graying hair around the sides and back, if memory serves me correctly.

His wife, the former Olive Forry, was in her mid-40s, amiable, and made her home a neighborhood gathering place, as the following newspaper clipping from November 14, 1957 shows. She welcomed us to the neighborhood.

Meanwhile, their daughter Sally Ann was involved with some theater company, doing the makeup and costumes, I think, and I remember often seeing a convertible filled with handsome young men, presumably from that theater troupe, stopping by the Geiss house to pick up Sally Ann and whisk her away.

The Geiss family seemed to be very happy.

Sadly, we didn’t live next door to them very long before tragedy struck.

To be continued