Locating Elizabeth

Locating Elizabeth

By Pauline Masson

He was almost shy about, wanting to locate his grandmothers grave, and had no passable excuse not having done it before now. He had an enviable history of travel. Certainly it would have been the envy of anyone who had wanted to travel and had not done so. He had been to Europe several times. Crisscrossed the United States far too many times to count. He knew the air traffic pattern and major roadway connections of an astonishing number of American citizens. He could find factories, schools, and hospitals in every remote section of the country. Yet in this small hamlet of his memory, 140 miles from his residence, there was a grave that he had neglected. Now at 62, he was compelled to act. He was convinced it was going to be difficult.

"I'm sure it won't have a marker on it,” he said. "They didn't have much. “

The distance from St. Louis to Vincennes, Indiana is 142 miles straight across southern Illinois on Highway 50. From Vincennes, it is 18 miles to Linton. The trip is less than four hours if there are no travel problems.

I was traveling with my new husband on a trip to locate his grandmothers grave. I had no M previous impressions of Indiana. I cannot conjure up an image of the state. I had a vague memory of her Shriner, a comedian, popular in the 60s would look shyly at the television camera and say,

“One of these days I'm going back to Indiana, I don't care what Bob Hope says." So Indiana must be one of those places you go back to.

Bob had gone back there once; he had stopped there on the return trip from Michigan to St. Louis. Someone had told him there were three cemeteries in Linton. He had driven to each one and looked at the rows of markers. But it had seemed a lost cause. And so, he had left. But this undone business troubled him. want to try again. He wanted to try again.troubled

It was tough to not point out that he had not tried, that he had, in fact, given up without trying. Deaths and burials are a matter of public record. He jumped at the suggestion that someone at the county courthouse could find a record of where she was buried.

Locating the correct cemetery was a simple matter, accomplished with one phone call to the Green County Department of Health the week before we were to leave. He asked whether he could get a copy of the death certificate of someone who had died in green county between 1942 and 1945. The woman in the health department asked the name of the deceased.

“Elizabeth Courto”

"Spell Courto”

“C o u r t o”

“And who are you to her?”

"I'm her grandson. I wanted to locate her grave.”

"Yes, she died September 25, 1943. She she's very in Fairview Cemetery in Linton.”

We pulled a 23 foot travel trailer. We would go to Shakamak State

Park, leave the trailer and drive to Linton. He wanted to see her house again, and the old neighborhood.

On departure day, the truck needed a repair. It took longer than estimated. We weren't ready to leave until 4 PM. He was anxious to get started. We arrived in Sullivan near the entrance to Shakamak at 1:30 AM. We couldn't get in. This was not the planning of a man who had ran a division of one of the Fortune 500 firms. I realized there was much more emotional at work then he was voicing

“We could drive into Linton and see if there is a motel,” he said.

The motel had a guest guide with a city map so miniaturized that the street names were barely visible. He poured over it, looking for familiar names.

"Here it is," he said. "Fairview Cemetery.”

The Linton of his memory was his grandparents house, Jule and Elizabeth Courto. He and his brother Bill had been brought there to stay with them when he was nine and bill was seven.

His father had gone to work one day and did not return home. After a few weeks, his mother had to return the car that had been bought on credit, and then, the Christmas presents.

The Volunteers of America gave his mother a job. But what to do with two small sons? So she took them to Linton to her mother and returned to Detroit to work.

Elizabeth became aware that the Linton boys were teasing Bob and Bill about their knickers and knee sock. She cut up pairs of Jule’s bib overalls and made them each a pair of jeans, a feat for which Bob was always grateful.

“She was so good to me,” he said.

He doesn't remember his grandmother’s funeral. “I'm sure mom went,” he said. But he has a vague memory that the grave was near a tree line at the back edge of the cemetery, so he must've been there.

He recalled his brother Ralph, 21, home on emergency leave from the army, and he, 12 at the time, went to Linton to collect Jule and bring him to Detroit. Bob remembers Jule was working at a gas station in Switz. He operated one of those gas pumps where you literally pumped the gasoline up by hand into a glass jar and it flowed by gravity into the car gas tank. Joe and the two boys must have visited the cemetery before going north.

In Detroit, Jule would shuck the overalls, don a navy blue blazer with gold buttons, a white starched shirt and silk cravat, and mortify his daughter, by courting the ladies at the local saloon, gathering nerve to bring them back to his daughters rooming house. When she found one there one morning, Marie ordered her father out of the house. He moved into another rooming house in the neighborhood, one in which his nighttime visitors, were not questioned. The boys, saw him almost daily, groomed and dashing, escorting one of the ladies to the corner tavern. Although Marie did not let him back into the house to live, they remained a close family. Sometimes Marie and her new husband Jim would take the boys and sit with Jule and his current friend for a meal and drinks.

When the boys had gone to London, their mother had been operating a boarding house. She had a new tenant. When they returned two years later, she and the tenants were married. Bob remembers Jim as being a mean man. He has no good memories of their years together.

“You don't have enough sense to pound nails,” Jim said to him.

At 15 Bob lied about his age and enlisted in the army. He qualified for jump school and became a paratrooper, mostly for the $50 a month extra pay. He qualified as a sharpshooter, and began a lifelong love of guns.

“The first time I shot a gun I was eight or nine years old at a carnival,” he said. “It was a cork gun, like a little pump 22 rifle fired a little metal target.”

The drive through Linton did not reveal the poor farm town of his memory. Wide streets gave way to generous lawns, groomed and planted with spruce juniper, and every known species of flowers. Almost every house had a porch with some feature that distinguished it from every other house. An upstairs balcony set under the roofline had two pillars and a rail with turned uprights. Leaded glass windows in beautiful paneled doors, and dormers windows that gleamed in front of lace curtains. Most of the houses were white, but an occasional gray, blue, or yellow, one set off the distinctiveness of the architecture.

He wanted to drive to his grandmothers house; he asked the fire chief, leaning back in a chair in front of the fire station, for directions to the church at the corner near his grandmothers street.

“I have a good memories of Linton,” he said. :I wanted to be home in Detroit with my mother but she had to work. She had no one to take care of Bill and me.’ He finds the house quickly; it is dwarfed by four huge spruce trees.

He approached a white haired lady in the rear yard. He apologized for interrupting her. “My brother and I used to live here,” he said.

“No, Bob,” the lady said matter-of-factly. “You lived next-door; the houses were almost the same. Your grandparents house was torn down some years ago.”

The cemetery was as dramatic as the town, vest as cemeteries go with carved markers to rival Roman ruins. We found a small caretaker’s building. Inside an oversizes book sat on the counter that stood against the wall. A cord secured the binder to the wall, reminding users to not take it out of the pavilion. We located Elizabeth's gray. L lot W 1/2 No. 983 space 4.

About ten rows from the back of the cemetery, a few yards from a majestic tree line we found several rows with blank spaces. He was nervous and agitated.

“I can’t make sense of the numbers,” he said.

There was nothing about the number system. I look at the last number grade and stepped off the pieces. It has to be right here I said.

He knelt and with his hand, wiggled his fingers in the grass.He felt something firm. He took out his pocket knife and began to cut away the thick grass and earth. Inquick firm slices he cleared a four-inchby twelve inch piece of concrete that clearly. E COURTO, 1876–1943.

We drove into Linton and ordered a pink granite marker. The young man promised to put it in within a couple of months. It was a good day.

Locating Elizabeth was the first shared adventure of our marriage.