Mabel Irene Linger

My mother’s older sister, Mabel Irene Linger, was fourth in the birth order of the ten Linger siblings born to John Curry Linger and Mary Effie Carter.

**(Above)** The Lingers circa 1922, Lewis County, West Virginia
Back row: Robert, Ora
Middle row: Mabel, Helen, Reuben (on his mother’s lap), John, Carter
Front Row: Roderick, Paul Stephen
My mother, Margaret Ruth, was not yet born (her birth date, October 21, 1923)

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Mabel Irene Linger, March 4, 1910 to June 16, 1995. Never married. No children.
- “Attended W. Va. Wesleyan College.”¹

(Above) From **“The Carter, Alkire, Kennedy, Williams, and Related Families,”** by Judge James M. Carter

(Above) This appears to be taken in WV, with a young Helen on left, probably her boyfriend (?Rex?) center, and Mabel Irene on the far right. There is a comment notated at the top, **“He’s choking me. O! Ouch!”** It also appears a notation over Helen that says **“Diz, Me.”** My interpretation of this photo which was found among Aunt Mabel’s albums is that Helen made the notations and gave the photo to her sister, Mabel **(“Mabel, my sis”** is also notated.

(Above) I am guessing Aunt Mabel was visiting my parents in Wilmington, Delaware in this photo. She is seated by a desk that belonged to my parents and that I still own. The marble fountain pen holder and the lamp with the pheasant shade were also items my parents had. It appears on the left side of the desk is the small doll-sized model of a cast iron stove my mother had and I played Barbie’s with. My mother would speak with distant nostalgia at times about her mother cooking over a cast iron stove. In this memory, I have a vague sense she told me that once she pulled a pan of scalding water off the stove but I am not sure. My mother spoke of a “wringer washer” that children had to keep their hands out of, since it sounded like the mechanism could do damage. According to my mother and another family source, my mother was raised for her first three years by a spinster aunt named **Aunt Biddie.** I recalled my mother said that her mother had an appendicitis that became “gangrenous” as the reason, but another relative said it was because Mrs. Linger (my grandmother) had a nervous breakdown. I do not know where this aunt lived, whether in WV or in CA nor if she was on Mary or John’s side, a blood relative or an in-law. My mother’s diary notes in 1967 mentions a letter from her around that time saying Aunt Biddie is 90 years old, which would date her birth around 1877. My mother was somehow returned to the family when she was three years old and according to another relative, seemed traumatized by her older siblings. If she was kept somewhere else in WV, didn’t the family visit her during those years? How did she “not know them,” thus being traumatized. What kind of breakdown did my grandmother have, and why? What about her father – did John Curry abandon my mother in terms of contact, too?

(Above) Mabel with roses – probably in backyard at 300 East 3rd Street, Frederick, MD

On the back of one of the above three photos, was a hand-notation that it was taken at Glen Echo. Since the attire of Aunt Mabel and her friend are identical, I grouped the three images together.
I Googled “Glen Echo” and discovered a bit of interesting history.
It was an amusement park in the DC area and has some associations with the Civil Rights Movement.

For those interested in more of the history, there is a YouTube video below
and Glen Echo Park History link.

Aunt Mabel’s Education

Among items I was given around the time of Mabel’s death included her high school transcripts, a small college freshman book from West Virginia Wesleyan and another letter from Fairmont Teacher’s College.

As I look through Aunt Mabel’s high school grades (which include on the back signatures by my grandfather John Curry Linger and on one, appears to be a signature by my grandmother, Mary Effie Carter Linger) it does not strike me that Mabel Irene Linger was a particularly good student. Perhaps she did not have as much interest in school, or perhaps there were other reasons. To be fair, it was her grades toward the end of high school that seemed to be in decline, although they also seemed much in the realm of history and science, which might have been understandably a weakness.

She was one of the older siblings, fourth in birth order of the ten. According to family stories, my grandfather John was a strict and demanding school master and it seems that he also carried those traits into the Linger homestead family life. I recall my mother, Margaret Ruth, speaking and highly valuing some little McGuffy readers she had and speaking of her father drilling grammar and such into her. In other family history her brother, Robert, notes how good of a speller his father, John Curry Linger, was known to be.

My mother, the youngest of the ten siblings (and having her own mother die during her senior year of high school when she was seventeen years old) had fairly high grades. I do have her transcripts both from Buckhannon Upshur High School and from West Virginia University, and intend to get her transcripts from the other two colleges she attended prior to that.

As for Aunt Mabel, it appears she graduated high school at age nineteen in 1929, having been born March of 1910. My mother, on the other hand, had an October birthdate in 1923 and she graduated at age seventeen in 1941. While the high school could not provide me with my mother’s class ranking, according to my mother, she was “almost valedictorian” and stated on a taped recording to another family member that had her mother not died that year, she believes that she would have been valedictorian.

There are some mentions of this by my mother in a phone conversation she recorded during the 1970’s and can be listened to about midway through this audio-visual work.

Two family genealogy books state that Mabel Irene attend West Virginia University, but she never obtained any degree (that I know of). Since the stock market crash occurred September of 1929, I don’t know how that may have impacted her pursuit of college financially or otherwise (perhaps it increased her family obligations, which I perceive in various ways were very high in regard to older siblings taking on various roles in that home life). It appears from the letter that she was interested in attending Fairmont Teacher’s College about eight years later, but the letter indicates somewhat that she may have been in contact the previous fall and not followed through. I do not know.

Aunt Mabel never married, but from photos it seems she was quite a snazzy dresser and enjoyed what one might call the high life, perhaps. How often she was able to socialize and travel as an older single woman (she worked as a waitress) I do not know. This type of persona and living was in sharp contrast to anything I ever knew of my own mother but of course, she was married at age twenty-six to my father and held various secretarial positions up until when I was born in 1963.

However, from old photographs of my mother during her own college years she was also a sharply-dressed (and very beautiful) young woman. This was prior to the incident in 1946 when her siblings Robert, Carter and Mabel showed up at the home she was living in at Morgantown while attending West Virginia University, withdrew her (a student in good standing who was also working her way through school) against her will on a Wednesday, April 3, 1946, and according to diary notations they “prevented her from attending classes” on Thursday, April 4, 1946, and then on Friday, April 5, 1946 had her committed to the Weston Hospital, a horrific institution where the local community routinely dropped off elderly with dementia that were a burden, un-submissive, quarrelsome wives, and other family members who were somehow troublemakers. Among their complaints was that my mother was “spending too much money on clothing.”

In studying various old photos, I also note that my mother’s taste in clothing and general look seemed more classic, wholesome and business-like than that of this sister. My mother’s writings in her young diaries do indicate that she, too, had a lot of interest in various boys, men and dating encounters – but what young woman does not, at that age? Surely, it is hard to retroactively interpret the personalities, pursuits and value systems that came into collision within this family system. Yet, I am attempting to do just that.

VINDICATING MARGARET

WHEN PECULIAR PEOPLE DECIDE THAT YOU ARE ACTING PECULIAR!

This is now known as the Trans-Alleghany Lunatic asylum. Here is a link to a video I made during my trip to Buckhannon, WV this past summer.

I find this incident in my mother’s life fascinating, and as I write here (November 20, 2022) I am early in the process of various writings and researchings of records; I simply am alluding to a bit of a spoiler alert, I suppose. As with any monumental project, it seems needful to lay things out just a bit at a time – especially given my time constraints in squeezing in this personal project.