Friendly Fire (4 page)

At his death Dobshire left his 120-acre homestead to his wife, Ellen who in turn deeded it over to their daughter, Mary Ann, on the condition that she “agree to support and maintain said Ellen Dobshire during her natural life and furnish her with proper food, suitable clothing, proper attention and medical care during sickness, and pay all funeral expenses after her death.” If Mary Ann should prove willing, then “this land shall stand as security for the faithful performance of said contract.”

John Dobshire was buried in the small Catholic cemetery at Eagle Center on Section 15, about five miles southwest of his farm. Andrew Jackson, himself the son of Irish immigrants, had been President of the United States when John Dobshire emigrated to America; Grover Cleveland was President when Dobshire died. While John Dobshire had gone about his daily chores, the first oil wells at Titusville were dug. Mrs. O'Leary's cow set fire to Chicago's heart. General Custer was massacred at the Little Bighorn. Thomas Edison invented the electric light, Alexander Graham Bell the telephone. Four major railroads now crossed the Iowa prairies; New York to San Francisco was but a seven-day trip. John Dobshire lived long enough to see the “Far West” he had helped settle become but a passing glance out the window of a transcontinental train. After the funeral Ellen Dobshire moved into her daughter and son-in-law's new house.

Patrick J. Mullen had become one of the most successful farmers in Black Hawk County, land-rich enough to provide each of his five sons with his own driving team. The new two-story frame house, built to shelter his growing family, was on a slight hill about a mile south of his original quarry homestead near one of the loops of Miller's Creek. By 1910 Patrick J. Mullen owned more than 1,000 acres in Black Hawk County and an additional 640 acres in Palo Alto County 180 miles to the northwest.

Northwest Iowa was still open range, and during the summers some of Patrick's sons would load their father's purebred Herefords onto the railroad cars at Waterloo and travel with them to Fort Dodge. There the boys would unload the cattle and drive them north to Emmetsburg, where the livestock would remain all summer fattening up on Patrick Mullen's grazing land. Patrick's other sons would meanwhile be tending the Black Hawk County farmlands, one-third of which would be in row corn, one-third in wheat and the remaining third resting up as pastureland. The quarry continued in operation, and in addition to the Herefords, Patrick raised Percheron horses for sale to the Chicago breweries and never had fewer than seventy draft and driving horses in his huge new L-shaped barn.

Oscar L. Mullen and Margaret McDermott, Gene's mother and father, were married at Blessing, Iowa, on February 12, 1908. By 1910 Gene's father was listed as the manager of his father's Grand Hereford Stock Farm, and Gene's mother, had already become involved in local Democratic politics—an activity which would remain the consuming interest of her life. Oscar's older brother, L. G. Mullen, managed their father's Miller Creek Stock Farm which adjoined the Grand Hereford farm in Section 18's northwest corner. Patrick's oldest son had become a lawyer; the two youngest still worked in the fields.

Although Patrick Mullen had retired at the turn of the century, he retained titular control of his lands. On the 1910 maps of Cedar, Eagle and Big Creek townships in Black Hawk County a total of 1186.64 acres, valued at between $80 and $125 an acre, is listed in the Mullen name. In addition, the 640 acres of northwest rangeland was worth about $50 an acre at that time. So Patrick and Mary Ann Mullen had reason to be pleased with themselves, and evidence exists that they were.

Patrick paid to have a photograph of his austere two-story frame house included in the
1910 Atlas of Black Hawk County
. The house was painted gray with contrasting white trim edging the corners and the eaves beneath the roof. There were ornate carved lintels over the windows and doors, neat white shutters for every downstairs window and the two windows on the second floor beneath the peak of the roof. The house had two chimneys and a tidy front walk of crushed quarry gravel leading directly to the larger of the two porches. With his proper farmer's sense of perspective, however, Patrick paid to have two other photographs placed in the
Atlas
, too. They depicted his Percheron and Hereford breeding stock posed in front of his barns.

The photographs are small, no more than 2½ by 2 inches, but one can recognize Patrick and Mary Ann Mullen seated stiffly on their porch above their sons and daughters gathered on the porch steps and lawn below. Their faces are no larger than the head of a pin, but with the help of a magnifying glass it is possible to make out five young men and five young women, one of whom appears to be holding a child. The Mullen sons are wearing dark suits and soft derbies; the daughters are in long skirts and high-collared puffed-sleeved blouses, their faces shaded by elaborately fashionable hats. Patrick and Mary Ann, alone, are bareheaded. They are seated on almost opposite sides of the porch from each other, she with her white hair pulled severely back, one hand covering the other in her lap. Patrick is sitting ramrod straight, his feet planted squarely in front of him. Their posture—rigid, proud, formal, all sharp horizontals and verticals—curiously resembles the house.

Gene Mullen tells of his Grandmother Mullen developing a “felon,” an extremely painful pus-producing infection at the end of her little finger beneath the nail. To rid herself of the agony it caused her, she simply chopped the end of that finger off. It could not have seemed to her a particularly significant act compared to what she had already been through. After all, she had survived the potato famine and pestilence in Ireland, the absence of her father for seventeen years. She had braved the ocean crossing, made the physical and perhaps more difficult emotional adjustment to the new land. She had overcome the terrible isolation of those early years, the loss of two sons in infancy, and had had the strength to rear ten children more. She had helped her young Irish husband “bust” through the thick prairie sod, survive the fierce winters, the prairie fires, tornadoes, floods, blistering heat. She had buried her father and unhesitatingly taken her mother in, and when her mother's time had come, Mary Ann buried her, too, next to her father in the Eagle Center plot. She had placed her trust in God and seen her faith and devotion rewarded. There is then a strange Biblical sensibility to her act: if thy fingertip offend thee, cast it off.

Even La Porte City was booming. What did it matter if Main Street was dust-blown in the summer, a mud bog in the spring and icebound in winter? It was wide enough to accommodate the wagon trains that continued to pass through with their loads of lumber, wheat, corn and hogs. The sidewalks were wooden planks placed upon the dirt with boardwalks laid to cross to the corners. Patrick could ride his old black mare, Dolly, into town to purchase his Dan Patch chewing tobacco, fill himself with whiskey and sell his eggs. His youngest boys could get a Coca-Cola at the brick-fronted Norris Drug Company where there existed even a fair selection of cigars. It was possible to buy Paine's Celery Compound which was 21 percent alcohol or, for sore muscles, Barker's Liniment, whose slogan was “Joy to the World, Relief has Come!” La Porte's population had reached 1,400, and “As a business location and place of residence,” crowed the
1910 Black Hawk County Atlas
, “La Porte City cannot be excelled in Iowa.”

Unfortunately, neither La Porte nor the Mullens would have it quite so good again.

Chapter Three

Mary Ann Dobshire Mullen died in 1914; she was seventy-six. Patrick J. Mullen died eleven years later on March 26, 1925, just nine days after his ninety-first birthday. Gene Mullen was nine years old at the time.

By then “The Old Eagle Tree” had fallen, and there were no eagles in Black Hawk County anymore. There were no wild turkey, no prairie wolves, no buffalo and few—if any—deer. The last passenger pigeon had died in captivity eleven years before. The rich prairie earth once held fast by the thick roots of the vast fields of shoulder-high grass now lay exposed by the plow. And the chill winter winds were stripping the topsoil. Miller's Creek was slowly silting in.

There is a photograph of Gene Mullen and his sister, Mary Lois, sitting with their grandfather before a little grove of cottonwood trees. Patrick is wearing thick black woolen pants and a vest over a white shirt and tie. A wide, pleated, broad-visored tweed cap shades his stern face, and although his thin, straight mouth is unsmiling, there is considerable humor in his eyes. Gene and his sister—Gene must have been about five years old here—are seated in the grass on either side of Patrick Mullen. This is no photograph of a maudlin old man hugging his grandchildren; it is a photograph of a
pioneer
. And the grandchildren, as if aware of the legend, seemed too cowed to sit close.

Patrick J. Mullen died while the rural Midwest was suffering from an agricultural depression. Almost his entire estate was locked up in land and each of his children demanded an equal share. None of the daughters wanted to farm and by the time the estate was settled Gene's father's share was reduced to the original Dobshire holdings: the land grant 40 acres and the 80 acres purchased from the Walker brothers. Gene's Uncle Edward was the only other Mullen to want to hold onto the land. The other brothers, the bank, taxes, lawyers' fees, insurance and sisters liquidated all the rest. Although the quarry remains in operation, its current owners have blasted through the stone upon which Patrick's original homestead stood. However, the austere two-story frame house he later built remains, but it, too, has passed out of the family's hands.

Still, even though John Dobshire's house was torn down in 1960 when Gene and Peg built their modern ranch-style house, an indelible mark of that old man's spirit too exists: almost the only break in the regular checkerboard pattern of Black Hawk County's section line boundary roads is the dirt road passing Gene Mullen's farm. Dobshire, instead of following the boundary, wore down his own road about a quarter mile south of the section line. He did it for no better reason than that was the direction his house faced, and the path provided him the most direct route to Forbes' post office by the Cedar River and, later, the main La Porte to Waterloo road.

Although Gene's father, Oscar, liked the land, he never really wanted to work it. Whenever he had a chance he would escape to play baseball. During the Depression, while Gene was working his way through Marquette University in Milwaukee, his father was managing the semiprofessional Waterloo Cardinals. Between 1929 and 1931, under his management, the Cardinals lost but four games those entire three years. Gene's mother, Margaret McDermott Mullen, had continued to work hard for local and state Democratic organizations, but she was sick for most of their married life.

One winter when Gene was still very young, his mother, pregnant with a second child, was stricken with appendicitis. A severe blizzard had rendered the roads impassable, and Margaret Mullen had to be pulled into Waterloo by sled. Although she recovered from the appendicitis, she miscarried from the rough journey and was confined to the hospital for six months. Oscar Mullen took a job in Waterloo selling farm implements. In 1941 it was discovered that Margaret Mullen had cancer and again had to be confined to a hospital in Waterloo. Oscar Mullen never returned to the farm. He supported himself by being groundkeeper for the old Waterloo baseball park and by designing and laying out ballfields in a number of nearby towns. His baseball diamonds had a reputation for such excellence that in 1955 he was offered the job of park custodian for the then newly franchised Kansas City Athletics of the American League. Oscar Mullen was tempted enough to go to Kansas City to look the ball park over, but he couldn't find any place to live that he liked. So when Waterloo offered him a raise, he happily returned home.

Everyone in Waterloo knew Oscar Mullen; he was an affable, gregarious man. If he had any failing, it was that he wasn't especially ambitious. He just loved baseball more than anything else in the world. Oscar Mullen died in 1960 a few months short of his eightieth birthday and three weeks before he was to have been given the honor of throwing out the first baseball of the season when the Waterloo Hawks opened their Midwest League games.

Gene Mullen, now in his late fifties, has the powerful sloping shoulders and strong forearms of a man who has worked all his life with his hands. He has a round face—more a Dobshire shape than the long, thin face of Patrick Mullen—and an Irish-pink complexion set off by a full head of silver-white hair as fine as a child's. He wears plain black half-frame glasses, the bottom halves of the lenses held in place by simple metal rims. And a thin wire curls up to the hearing aid in his right ear. Gene's voice is low, deep, surprisingly gentle. When he speaks of his land, his voice grows hushed, almost reverent. He will talk of turning that first spring furrow of rich black soil, a dirt far darker than any in the East, and of kneeling down to smell it, cupping the sweet earth to inhale its fragrance in his hands. “There's an odor in that ground,” Gene will say, “that's not in any catalogue of smells.” He is an unabashedly sentimental man who describes farmers as “just a breed. It's a love of the land, the soil, the grade.”

In late November, 1941, Gene Mullen married Margaret “Peg” Goodyear of Pocahontas County northwest of Fort Dodge. It was the tail end of the Depression, and Gene was working for the Census Department because the only jobs that existed at this time were government jobs. Peg was working for the government, too. Her office with the Work Projects Administration (WPA) was in the same Waterloo office building as Gene's.

Peg had been working for the government since 1936. She was graduated from high school in 1935, and although she had been awarded scholarships to Buena Vista College at Storm Lake, Iowa, and Briar Cliff in Sioux City, she was unable to attend because she didn't have enough money for train fare. So Peg took a Civil Service examination to achieve a stenographic eligibility rating instead. She passed, and armed with her eligibility certificate, Peg went with her mother to see Senator Guy Gillette at his home office in Cherokee, Iowa, about getting a job.