Arthus Standing in 1947: A Self-Interview

Arthur Standing was my maternal grandfather.In 1947, he was fifty-three years old, a farmer farming outside of Earlham, Iowa, in a small Quaker community.Earlham was just one of many small Quaker farming communities across the Midwest settled in the nineteenth century, a phenomenon that included other religious groups such as the Amish, the Mennonites, and the Anabaptists.The early Quakers in the Midwest dressed in plain clothes and spoke the "plain language," using thee instead of you, for example.These religious communities were very tightly knit, with marriage to outsiders discouraged.By 1947, Arthur had been married to my grandmother for twenty-two years, and they had two daughters-my mother Reva and her sister, my aunt Wanda.Both were away at college.If you draw a line under the date, Sunday, January 12, 1947, I believe the Arthur Standing before January 12 was not the same Arthur Standing who eventually emerged from the experience-the grandfather I knew.This wasn't a car accident or war wound.He'd come in from chores to rest and read that Sunday morning, and then suddenly was in the throes of a convulsion.My sense is that what he experienced in his living room was something he didn't really survive.Yet he lived another twenty-three years, dying in 1970, after a massive stroke.