Creative Joy

Emily Clark

Kelly Baker was all over facebook yesterday. The Florida State University facebook page was full of updates about the FSU Zombie Apocalypse in anticipation of Kellys public lecture yesterday afternoon hosted by FSUs Department of Religion entitled Theres us and the dead: The Zombie Apocalypse in American Culture. One of these updates identified Kelly as patient zero, or the origin of the zombie outbreak. On our way to the auditorium yesterday to set up Kellys lecture, we passed some students filming brief interviews with others who participate in the popular Humans vs. Zombies tag-oriented game. The Tallahassee Democrat (city paper) ran a story on the lecture to encourage attendees, and there was even an extra from AMCs The Walking Dead in attendance. This picture was posted live to the FSU facebook page.

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Paul Harvey

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Janine Giordano Drake

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Paul Harvey

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by Emily Clark

A secret infant baptism orchestrated by a formerly Catholic wife who renounced her faith when she married into an anti-Catholic family sounds like a plotline to an early twentieth century soap opera. And it makes me think of my family. Randalls recent post with David Hall discussing his interest in history got me thinking about my own familys history. My family may not be Italian, but my great-grandmother Stella Foster Myer was a sort of German version of theimmigrants daughters that Robert Orsis earlier work focuses upon, because Stella too was caught between early twentieth century tensions of family and religion.
Stella Foster was born in 1898 to a very Catholic, very German immigrant family on a Midwest farm. As she grew up, she considered becoming a nun an idea further enforced by remaining single for as long as she did. In 1922 she married my great-grandfather Paul Myer, a 25 year old son of German immigrants who were Lutheran and anti-Catholic. (The picture is of the renovated barn at the farm where Stella and Paul raised their family, circa now). When my mother first told me this story, my immediate question for her and her older sister was: how on earth did Stella and Paul meet, let alone engage in a courtship? The simple answer is that they were neighbors. The Foster family lived on a farm south of Topeka, Kansas down the county road from one of the Myer familys farms. Stella and Pauls marriage may have been a bit of one of convenience at its outset they married old for the small-town early 1920s but my aunt in particular remembers seeing her grandparents engage in light-hearted teasing indicative of a strong bond.

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[Cross-posted from the HS blog]

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