It was a poor man’s vanity publication just three copies were made. He carefully clipped the columns and glued them into the pages of blank books he paid to have printed with the column’s title on the cover and spine: Away From Glen Echo. In the early 1930s, his wartime letters and diary entries were published as weekly columns in the Bloomington Evening World (he took his five-year-old daughter with him to deliver them, and she got bit by the newspaper bug). From there I went “down the valley” on the “troop-train” with a lot of other Monroe County boys, in 1918. Elmer kept a diary and asked his family to keep the letters he sent home he had an idea he wanted to be a writer.įrom the same 1976 letter: From that house one could hear the “echo down the valley” as the trains went a-whistlin’ south-bound. His post was Gare Montparnasse in Paris, after Armistice and during the peace talks at Versailles. Few of his unit survived battle.īeing six feet tall, Elmer was reassigned to Military Police once he had recovered his health. He had trained as a machine gunner the flu was probably what saved his life. He graduated and went off to the Great War in 1918, came down with the Spanish Flu and shipped to an infirmary in a chateau the minute he set foot in France. (The creek he mentions is Clear Creek, and the creosote plant was still in operation at the south end of the Monon Switchyard, during my childhood in the 1960s.)Īt Bloomington High School, Elmer won honors for his poetry and essays. engines set fire to the pasture grass, and I would have to run down the hill, & grab the bucket of water and jute-sack I kept there, to try and beat out the fire, before it ruined the pasture-land. Highway #37 came later, but when I sold, it was very inaccessible – across two railroads and the creek that often flooded, carry (sic) raw sewage from the “city plant” and creosote from the plant ¼ mile north. I have never “set foot on the 28 hopeless acres” since 1924. He wrote in a 1976 letter (all quote marks are his): The farm house was built in 1848 and burned in the 1930s, after Elmer finally sold the place. After a few years in Tipton County, they wound up south of Bloomington on South Rogers Street, on acreage bordering the Monon track between Indianapolis and Louisville.

His parents had come north from Kentucky to work more fruitful land in Indiana. He had two years of military service in Paris and fifteen years as a Veterans Administration payroll accountant in Washington, DC, but lived most of his life in Bloomington and Monroe County.Įlmer Smith had more poetry in his nature than was entirely helpful to a farming family teetering on the edge of poverty.

Elmer Guy Smith had been born in Tipton County in 1895, the late baby of four children. An autopsy showed that he had been enduring Alzheimer’s, which explained the bad temper of his last years. Granddaughter meets Grandfather’s writings in a file folder stashed away in a trunk.

“Would you please go through this trunk,” she said, “and throw out some of Papaw’s papers?” A classic setup, and a classic payoff. In 2007, I moved back to Bloomington from Seattle to get Mom through knee replacement surgery. Shayne will read “The Last” - based on her great grandfather’s encounter with a mystery on the Kansas prairie - at 1:30 pm, Saturday, August 31, at the 2013 Fourth Street Festival’s Spoken Word Stage. This story from the Papaw Project collection, “The Stronger,” was published in the Spring 2011 Bacopa Literary Review. A Family Re-enchantment ◆ by Shayne Laughter

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