First of all, both my grandfather, Floyd Stoda, and my grandmother, Gertrude (Leibold) Stoda, were both born on or near the Mississippi in Wisconsin and Illinois. As a matter of fact, I recall my Granny Gert telling me of how she used to take a boat across the Mississippi to go dancing in Iowa near the Quad Cities on weekend nights back in the World War I era.. (Granny Gert didn’t know how to swim, so it was fascinating for me to thinkk how she overcame her fear of the mighty river regularly, i.e. when she wanted to go dancing. Dad says that his mom and dad danced avidly for many decades after there meeting near the Quad Cities.)
In the early 1990s, Granny Gert had also shared with me how her own Grandmother and Grandmother Shiffman had arrived in New Orleans, the mouth of the Mississippi River, in the latter part of the 19th Century from near Hamburg, Germany.
Later, through further research, I learned that the oldest mention of the family Stoda in the USA dates to the memory of Friedrich Stoda, who is buried in a small town, called Victory, on the Mississippi River in Wisconsin. Friedrich Stoda would have been my father’s great grand parent and had been German-born. Nonetheless, he was also a Civil War veteran. I visited Friedrich’s grave there in Wisconsin two summers ago and took several photos of his plot. (I also ate at a German restaurant on the Mississippi River at the nearby town of Victory.)
I thought long and hard about traveling up to that very ancient cemetery in Wisconsin to deposit Dad’s ashes from my mother’s home in southwestern Missouri in July (where I met with my siblings and other family members for a memorial afternoon), but I decided I did not need to travel that far to find appropriate places to disperse Dad’s ashes.
Along side the fact that the Mississippi River was a place where I best understand my father’s heritage in America, there were several other reasons related to childhood and family memories that led me to place my father’s ashes in the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers.
The first such reason is that the border between the states of Missouri and Illinois is the Mississippi River itself.
Let me explain!
In June of 1960, my Dad, Ronald John Stoda, of Genoa, Illinois married my own mother, Deloris Jean Whisner of Sarcoxie, Missouri—the same year Dad got his first drivers’ license and the year the Pittsburgh Pirates beat the Yankees in the World Series.
NOTES: First, Dad had been diagnosed with epilepsy as a teenager, so he had to eventually cross the river to Missouri and get his driver’s license at the age of 26. Second, Dad was a Pittsburgh Pirate fan, so all-in-all Dad must have had a great 1960—with the wedding and all. My mom was considered a Southerner when she moved north to live with my Dad.My mother had been born in the part of Missouri, the town of Sarcoxie, which had been pro-Dixie throughout the Civil War. It is reported that in the whole state of Missouri, Sarcoxie was the first town to flight a confederate flag following the Battle of Fort Sumter, which had marked the start of America’s Civil War. The decisive Battle of Carthage had also been fought quite nearby Sarcoxie.
Meanwhile, my Dad was from the Land of Lincoln—Illinois! He was from Dekalb County where the corn grows high.
Thus, the 500 mile-long visits between our families involved the equivalent of a race across the Mason-Dixon line each year at either Thanksgiving, Christmas and/or summer vacation—only, for our family, the Mississippi River served as our Mason-Dixon line.
On these annual pilgrimages to family and ancestors scattered between northern Illinois and southern Missouri, we children were made aware at a young age that America was still fairly divided culturally and socially. Nonetheless, throughout the tumultuous l960s and early 1970s, it was also clear that America was still one single unified country (despite its lack of hegemonic views and histories).
Before my parents divorce in 1980, they had lived together in Iowa (where older brother Paul was born), Illinois, Missouri and Kansas. In this time we had crossed the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers dozens and dozens of times.
During this traveling era, we 4 children had also grown up at least 4 ½ years of our lives near the junction of the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers. This is when father and mother moved out of DeKalb County in Illinois, and planted our residence in St. Charles County, exactly where a great old Missouri River bridge stands less than an hour west of where the Mighty Mo weds itself to the Mighty Mississippi—i.e. just north of St. Louis.
In short, in my childhood memories concerning the crossings or approaches to the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers, these two rivers became a normal part of my childhood sense of American geography and experience. (NOTE: Both these rivers had been explored by great men such as De Soto, Lafayette, and Lewis & Clark. All American school children have to memorize these facts numerous times in public school.)
These rivers were the backbone of America, and I had grown up playing cards and going to ballgames with my father in this part of our Great Land.
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