Page 149 - People & Places In Time

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200 mile Indy car race at Marchbanks race track around 1961.
and car part in the place. My dad continued as well, staying until I had graduated from high school, then he would move on. I left Exeter in the mid 60’s for college and yet, have returned to buy my cars here when I could. The F-150 pickup I drive today was bought at Monarch Ford; The most recent name change for “the Ford Garage”.
After a few years Dr. Feldmyer would sell to Dana Huffman, who stayed in Exeter for perhaps ten years, before selling to Carl Hill and so it has continued through a succession of owners.
Perhaps twenty years ago I accompanied my mom to the funeral for Les Brown who had been a long-time friend of both my father and Frank; Les was at my fathers’ side at Kaweah Delta when he died. We saw Frank List standing nearby while at Visalia Cemetery, I asked mom if she wanted to walk over to say hello, and she de- clined. Perhaps it had been too long or not long enough; yet I was sure that she didn’t want to say anything; that perhaps a wound had not healed
My own years have passed enough to describe a lifetime; I’m eight years older than my dad was at his passing. Only now, as I revisit the failed Ford dealership my father and his longtime friends built, do the sentiments begin to emerge
those not possible sixty years ago. Emerald Smith my dad returned to the town where he
had grown to manhood, he came home to family, friends and his new wife whom he had not seen in three years . . . he came home a highly deco- rated war hero.
To begin building a new business in his
hometown, with and among friends, within this
“getting back to normal” community, following
the very difficult previous five years . . . this was
heady stuff. To taste success and begin a family,
to build a new house, and then, to see this oppor-
tunity vanish by an incipient chain of events, thru
no fault of his own, this had to have been over-
whelming. To comprehend this event as a twelve-
year-old shielded from the emotional difficulties
my parents were facing, wasn’t possible; I was barley aware of what had happened.
Fifteen years after my dad’s loss I would suffer my own emotional upheaval with the loss of my own business. These were dissimilar occurrences, to be sure, but the emotional devastation is the same result.
It’s only now, sixty years following my dad’s catastrophe, forty years after my own, that I can fully contemplate the degree to which these things can affect the whole of one’s life.
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