Among my early memories from when we lived in the Great Stone House on my grandparents’ farm is a couple named Johnny and Myra. They lived in Palmyra, PA, which was about a half hour drive from our farm, and we used to visit them occasionally.

Now this was when I was about four or five years old, so my memory of them is rather dim. I would guess that they were significantly older than my parents, probably in their mid-40s, each of them with slightly graying hair.

They seemed to be a pleasant enough couple but I was always bored when we went to visit them. They didn’t have any children, or perhaps their children were all grown and had moved away, I don’t know. But there just wasn’t anything to do, and they and my parents just sat around and talked about grown-up stuff. So it was boring.

I think they must have come to visit us on the farm as well, though I have no specific memories of that.

I don’t know if we were related to them, but I strongly suspect that they were just friends, but again, I really don’t know.

Anyway there must have come a time when we hadn’t seen them for a while, probably once my sister was born, we didn’t go to visit them, but that’s just a guess.

Somewhere along the way we did go to a hockey game in Hershey, as that’s something that we used to do fairly regularly in those days, and we saw Johnny there sitting by himself.

The obvious question elicited the answer that Myra had recently died.

My mother asked if it was from cancer.

No, said Johnny. And he was adamant about that.

As far as I can recall, that’s the last time we ever saw Johnny.

I mentioned it to my grandmother (my father’s mother) and she thought she remembered Myra. “She was a big woman,” said my grandmother, meaning tall. I was probably six or so at the time and might not have been particularly discerning about the relative heights of adults.

When my mother saw other of our relatives who had known Johnny and Myra, she told them about Myra’s passing. She would always add, “Johnny said it wasn’t cancer, but I’m sure it was.” 

I think that may have been the first time I had heard of cancer as a disease, but it was certainly the first time I became aware that there was something special about it, something that made adults so nervous that they didn’t want to admit that it even existed.

Like so many other aspects of our family history, I waited too long, and now there’s nobody left to ask about Johnny and Myra. Well, there’s one person who might remember something, but given the difference in our politics, I’d rather not ask him. As I don’t even know their last name, there’s not much chance of searching for them in my usual places, so I guess they’ll always remain a mystery.

Later: Oh, JT of little faith. No faith actually. Apparently not even in myself.

Shortly after writing the above I realized I did have one resource available to me. The 1950 census. So I searched  for “Myra” in Palmyra in the 1950 census records and came up with two hits. One was obviously not what I was looking for and the other one was the wife of a John Bachman.

The ages, 45 and 42, seem right, so that gives me something for further research.

And armed with that information I found Myra’s obituary. It appears that she actually died a couple years after we moved from the farm in 1958, so my memory is a bit faulty, no big surprise. It turns out she and Johnny did have a daughter whom I either never met or have forgotten. In any case I now have enough information to see if Johnny and Myra were related to us in some way. If they weren’t, I’ll probably never know just how my parents got to know them.

Oh, and now that I know that Myra lived a bit longer than I had remembered, it’s also likely that we had continued to visit them longer than I thought. So my memory of Johnny and Myra may not be based on the recollections of a four or five year old, but perhaps of a six or seven year old. I would have been nine when she died in June 1958, so we learned of her death some time after that, I’d guess at least six months later as it was during hockey season.

Later Still: Johnny Bachman was my fourth cousin three times removed, which means he was the fourth cousin of my great-grandmother Emma Zeller. That’s a pretty distant relationship, so I suspect the relationship was unknown to all parties, but I don’t really know, of course. Also, Johnny remarried and lived until the age of 82 in 1987, but as I said, as far as I can recall we never saw him again after learning of Myra’s death.

So I’ve learned quite a bit about Johnny and Myra, but I still don’t know how my parents came to know them. It seems that Johnny and Myra’s daughter is still living; I wonder if she might remember my parents and know how they met her parents. Hmmm.