You Can’t Tell about People

Abstract

Julia didn’t have the best luck with husbands; she was divorced three times. She didn’t tell me about her first marriage, when she was so young her mother had to sign her acquiescence, and asked her brother to leave it out of the family geneabgy. She never denied her marriage to Butch Bertram—her child and her involvement with the woodworkers came out of it—but she said she soon recognized it was a mistake, though they didn’t separate permanently until 1940 after fourteen years of marriage. Her third marriage, to Ben Eaton, was also omitted from her brother’s genealogy, at her request, but she admitted it to me, though it was short-lived.