Lyle Minor Denman (1896-1997) – 52 Ancestors # 24 Father’s Day

Since Sunday June 17th is designated as Father’s Day in the U.S. I will focus on Lyle M. Denman, my maternal grandfather.   I have written about my paternal grandfather previously, and although I have written a number of times about my maternal grandfather I haven’t devoted a post to him exclusively.  So here it is.

Lyle was the second child and only son born to F.A. Denman and Mary L. Minor.  Although I had always had a full birth date for him, it was only recently that I actually found an official record of his birth.  The family was living on a farm in Florence Township, Erie, Ohio although as Lyle described it his parents moved into town, Wakeman, Ohio, when he was about 5  years old, and his mother was pregnant with his younger sister Doris.  (Lyle was wrong about the something here: his younger sister Doris wasn’t born until he was ten years old but the family moved into Wakeman more like 1901-1902 when he was younger.)   Although Lyle’s older sister started school out in the country,  Lyle attended school in Wakeman from the beginning, and  graduated from high school in 1913, which he said was a year early because he had skipped the 2nd grade.  After working a year after high school, and taking a couple of business skill courses (touch typing and accounting), he attended a year at Ohio State in Columbus.  He wanted to be an electrical engineer.

My grandfather was a talker and a story-teller, and my mother did 2 series of interviews with him in his later years, so I have a fair amount of information about his life from those.  He was also a foodie, interested in people, and interested in how things worked or went together.  Grandpa Lyle worked at a variety of jobs over the years, starting as a youngster working in his father’s fields and mill, and traveling the local area to sell their produce and flours.  For awhile he used the local train, inter-urban, system to travel to various nearby towns selling to various stores etc.  Lyle didn’t have enough money to go back to Ohio State after his first year,  and so instead worked in an uncle’s store in Lorain, Ohio that was a supply store for the boats on Lake Erie that moved coal and steel.  That job lasted until the war in Europe had caused the military draft to be instituted in America (1917).

Lyle left his uncle’s marine supply shop and worked for a few months as an office boy in the Lorain steel plant and then in the local bank in Lorain.  He was drafted and got married and went into the Army between April and August 1918.  His stint at the bank and doing accounting and office work led to an assignment with the mess hall sergeant to help with his books, and then to do office work with the medical detachment to the Officers Training School.  This led Lyle to apply for officers training and he was given an appointment for an interview on the 11th of November, the day the Armistice was signed.  Shortly thereafter he got himself a hardship discharge through the bank job in Lorain and was able to return to his new wife and civilian life.  He worked for the bank, then briefly with his uncle’s store again as a partner.  Things were difficult with his uncle as a partner, however, and Lyle now had a family to support.  Thinking he could do better working for someone else, he negotiated a job with the G. H. Hammond meat packing company out of Chicago (where the marine store had gotten most of its meat) to do sales for them.  Lyle worked for Hammond, in several different territories for a number of years.  By about 1924 he was centered in Canton, Ohio and the family lived there for close to 30 years.  Lyle moved from outside sales exclusively to including office work, eventually becoming a credit manager for the meat packing company.

During the Great Depression he did not lose his job but his salary was cut in half and he lost the house he had bought, needing to move the family to a rental across town.  City directories have allowed me to track the family’s movements in Canton, and reminded me that Lyle and grandma Cena moved south to Texas in about 1952.  I think Lyle was slowing down but was not ready to retire completely, and in addition I think they wanted to move closer to their son and to get away from the cold snowy Ohio winters.  Lyle continued to work in Texas, in shoe sales I remember, as well as being a civilian employee at the Air Force Base for awhile.   He may have done other jobs as well.

Texas offered fishing and swimming in the ocean and new places to discover, new weather to experience, and young grandchildren to visit.  After my uncle and his family settled in San Antonio and then my cousins started leaving home, my grandparents moved from Harlingen, Texas to San Antonio in about 1968.  This picture was taken in September 1964 and is how Lyle looked pretty much my whole childhood.

After Grandma Cena died in 1971, Lyle pretty quickly found himself married to another widow, which gave him a new family to take be interested in as well.  He and Frances were married for nine years before she died.  Lyle was already 84 years old, but decided he was lonely for companionship.  Thinking back to his earlier days, and to his wife Cena’s concern that he should remarry, he contacted an old work friend in Florida and started visiting her.  He was very persuasive and it wasn’t long before he and Hazel married and he relocated to Jacksonville, Florida.  He and Hazel only had three years together before she died.

After Hazel died, Lyle was persuaded to try living in Massachusetts near his daughter Elizabeth, my mother.  It turned out that this was too big a change for him, and he moved back to San Antonio nearer my uncle and where he knew his way around.  The weather was preferable as well!  I’m not sure how long he was able to live independently after that, and he spent the last years of his life at a residence that provided assisted living to nursing home care.  He apparently settled in there comfortably and for some time was known as “the Mayor” because of his presence everywhere and knowing and taking care of so many of the other residents.  Lyle developed cognitive issues and then dementia and died after a very long and full life, one day short of his 101st birthday.