NOTES FROM THE VAGABOND JOURNAL: VANDALIA, ILLINOIS, FEBRUARY 2, 2003 - (3)

I'm to stay tonight and tomorrow night

at the Brazle Inn, a bed and breakfast out in the country northwest of Brownstown. Late enough in the afternoon, I headed in that direction. When I arrived, I was greeted by Vernon Brazle, who had one wing in a contraption to keep it from moving. He'd had surgery on his left shoulder January 3rd. He had been icing his shoulder when I came to the door. His wife Judy was upstairs making up my bed.

Judy came downstairs and we talked. She comes from a railroad family of long standing. Her great-grandfather had moved from the upper peninsula of Michigan to Lincoln, Nebraska, where he worked as a farm hand, then got on with the railroad. When the workers on the railway out of Danville, Illinois, went out on strike, Great-grandfather came east to Danville as a strike-breaker. His grandson, Judy's father, would be the union president of those same crews two generations later. Great-grandfather, the scab worker, was eventually killed in a railway accident; his grandson, the union president, Judy's father, was killed in another train accident. Would this be the Danville train? No, that was in Virginia, wasn't it?

Judy and Vernon met at the University of Illinois. Vernon was raised on a homestead just across the creek from the bed and breakfast. When I'm offered my choice of rooms upstairs, the one commemorating the railroad side of the family or the one with farm implements that Vernon's dad had used and quilts that his mother had made, I pick the more local farm implements and quilts. I always picked the local; that's part of my problem, I suppose - insisting the local is important. That's how I ended up on this Vagabond expedition, isn't it?

To be continued....

Comments

[June Gaylord]

I read in the Benton Review in Fowler, Indiana that you will be coming through Fowler in the near future.
I am the innkeeper/owner of the Pheasant Country Bed & Breakfast, 900 E. 5th St. Fowler, IN. 47944. 765-884-1252.
I am a news correspondent to the Review Republican Newspaper in Warren County and the Indiana Spirit in Watseka, IL.
I would be most interested in having you as my guest and interviewing you for an article in the above mentioned newspapers.
June Gaylord