Here are 2 more pages from the journals of Blanche Darnell. Both are from 1998. It’s a good example of her style. She loves markers. Sometimes she will cover an entire page with an illustration, and other times she will leave room for writing. I think she would write first, and fit drawings, or “penners” as she would call her marker pictures, into any available crevice. Very similar to her gardening style. Most of her art is about plants, as you might expect from such a prolific gardener.

Blanche’s writing is interesting as well. She records the price of milk, what time she got up in the morning, word games, what she was watching on tv, as well as spiritual inspirations & tips for growing plants. It’s a good example of balancing big and little thoughts to give a complete picture of someone’s life and times.

You think you know somebody. And then you discover they played the ukulele on television. That’s what happened when we discovered a copy of my husband’s great-grandmother’s memoirs lurking in a forgotten bookshelf. Oleona Andrews deGraffenreid Edwards Cochrane was quite a woman. She was born in 1898 in Richmond, Virginia. Sometime in the late 1970’s, probably just after my husband Gabriel was born, she sat down and began to write her life story. Ninety pages later, she had recorded all kinds of crazy adventures, including the now famous (or infamous) ukulele incident of 1927:

(I left the spelling mistakes in when I retyped these memoirs…)

COL. CHARLES A. LINDBERG
I was working at The Principia when Slim flew over the ocean, and like the whole country, I fell in love with him. We watched his plane as it circled over Saint Louis before taking off, and followed his progress with great interest. When he came back Saint Louis felt it had a vested interest in him and the whole town celebrated. One of the TV stations put on an all night program to celebrate and I sang a little song which I made up, accompanying myself on the ukulele. I doubt whether he ever knew of any part of the program. He had just come from a New York welcome and Saint Louis’ celebration was peanuts in proportion.

For my contribution, the TV station presented me with quite a portfolio of Lindberg material, among other things, a wonderful big picture of him. That same year, I married Roy Cochrane in Washington, D. C., and we sailed down the Potomac and spent one day with my family in Virginia, and of course there was much to say about Lindberg. My youngest sister carried around his picture all day and every now and then she would kiss it passionately. Finally Barbara asked me, “Onie, why didn’t you marry Lindberg?” “One reason only,” I said. “he didn’t ask me.” And what a blessing! I could never have been the help to him that his wife gave him. I am not at all mechanically minded, and am not a writer, and many other things that Ann Morrow supplied.

Yikes! I bet lots of us have interesting grandparents and we didn’t even know it! I never got to meet Oleona, but I feel like I know her personally after retyping her memoirs into the computer. Personal accounts of history are so valuable - both to families and historians!