The photo below is from page 59 of Eula Bodine's 1908 Year Book of Transylvania University in Lexington, Kentucky. Charles Sharp Bodine may have been listed as a sophomore, but I couldn't find that. He is on the baseball and track teams and some other clubs.
Charles Sharp Bodine was born on April 26, 1890 in Central City, Muhlenberg County, Kentucky. He studied in the College of Liberal Arts at Transylvania University in Lexington, Kentucky from 1907 to 1909. (These dates came from a call to the Archives Department in the library at the University.) Grandma said that Granddad went to school with Helen Steiner Rice, the poet. He and his schoolmates used to kid Miss Rice for being so studious. Granddad regretted it later on. He said he ended up "hopping cobs and she's a great writer." Due to financial pressures after his father had three bad years of crops, Granddad had to come home. From June of 1918 until his honorable discharge in March of 1919, he served as a private in a field artillery division of the National Army. From September of 1918 to February of 1919, he served in France. (Discharge Book 8, p. 403. The rest of the reference info for this is uncertain.) He married Mary Jane Goodman, Grandma, on December 29, 1927. He was thirty-seven and she was twenty. They were married in the parsonage in Rumsey, near Calhoun, Kentucky. She wore a blue dress and a blue hat. Present were the pastor, his wife, Grandma's father and the cab driver.
The following is taken from an original copy of a wedding announcement in the possession of Sally Bodine Snyder as of January 4, 1997:
After they got married, Granddad tried several things to earn a living. He went to California with a friend to start a business out there, but things fell through. He also worked in construction in Central City and in the tire industry in Detroit. But after his father died in 1929, he returned to Central City and he and Grandma settled down on the 240 acre farm on the Green River. This was bequeathed to Granddad, Eula, and Eunice. But it was given to Granddad to live on and work until he decided to leave.
Another of her son-in-laws (she has had seven of them), Tom Cox, told a story about Granddad. One day, Tom came out to the farm as the family was getting ready for a meal. Granddad wanted to eat chicken so he asked Tom to go kill one and handed him a double-barreled shotgun. Tom went out and took aim at a chicken, but he accidentally shot both barrels. He ended up killing the chicken and a rooster standing behind it. Tom was a little nervous about having killed the rooster. But when he told Granddad that he had accidentally shot both barrels, all Granddad said was, "You didn't kill the whole flock, did you?"
Granddad's obiturary was in THE MESSENGER & INQUIRER, Owensboro, Kentucky, Saturday, June 10, 1967: CHARLES SHARP BODINE CENTRAL CITY - Charles Sharp Bodine, 77, of Route 2, Central City, died at Veteran's Hospital in Louisville Thursday at 7:45 a.m. He was born in Muhlenberg County April 26, 1890, and was a member of the First Methodist Church in Central City. Bodine is survived by his wife, Mrs. Mary Bodine, of Central City; one son, Robert of Lambertsville, Mich.; seven daughters, Mrs Randall Stuart and Mrs. Charles Shaver, both of Central City, Mrs. Howard Grise of Owensboro, Mrs. Richard Ruck of Antioch, Ill., Mrs. Quinton Walker of Columbus, Ga., Mrs. Jack Snider of Boden, Switzerland, and Miss Peggy Bodine of Central City; 12 grandchildren; two sisters, Mrs. Eula Rowland and Mrs. Eunice Short, both of Central City. Bodine was a veteran of World War I and a farmer. Services will be held today at 2 p.m. at the Tucker Funeral Home, the Rev. Richard Ramsey officiating. Burial will be in Fairmount Cemetery.
Here is a picture of Sally Bodine, Peggy Bodine, and Pat Grice (their niece) on the front steps of one of the former houses on the farm in Central City, Kentucky. The date on the side of the picture says April 1956 so Sally would have been 11, Peggy 9, and Pat 1 1/2. Peggy's daughter Alanna Frodge sent this to me.
Mr. and Mrs. A. G. Goodman
announce the marriage of their daughter
Mary Jane
to
Mr. Charles S. Bodine
Thursday, December the twenty-ninth
Nineteen hundred and twenty-seven
Calhoun, Kentucky
Granddad loved to hunt and fish. Sometimes he loved it a little too much. One winter, when Dad was about thirteen, they were out hunting when their dog ran an animal into an old chicken coop. Granddad wanted Dad to go in there and flush it out, but he said no way. It was so dark in that coop that he couldn't see a thing and neither did he know what kind of animal it was. So Granddad and the dog went in and were sprayed by a polecat. They soon came running back out. Granddad got sick and the dog rolled all over in the snow. When they got back to the house, Grandma wouldn't let him in the house because he smelled so bad. He had to change his clothes and take a bath out in the cold in one of the buildings. It was probably about fifteen degrees that day. However, none of that changed Granddad's love for hunting.
Times were hard on the farm in those days. There were a number of fires. The family car burned up in one of these with the barn in the late 30's. There were also many floods in that area of the Green River. The 1937 flood was especially disastrous. At the height of that flood, the water rose a foot an hour for twenty-four hours. The barn floated off and the only part of the house showing was the top of the chimney. The water was nearly fifty feet over flood stage. It was after this flood that they found a huge catfish in their net. After the water went down, Granddad pulled up the net and found a catfish that was almost seven feet long.
Grandma kept busy raising the kids and taking care of the house. Not long ago, when Grandma saw an old washboard hanging on the wall, she told her granddaughter, Dana, "That's how I used to wash clothes." Dana asked her, "Where'd you put the water?" Grandma laughed and answered, "I put it in a tub." Dana then asked, "What's a tub?" Someone also asked Grandma how they had any fun out on the farm without radio and TV. She said they didn't have any radio or TV, but they had plenty of trees to climb, grapevine swings, and they could play cat and mouse all they wanted. One time, a snake bit Grandma when she was getting wood from the lumber pile. She thought she had just pricked her arm since she didn't see a snake. Later on she had to lie down because she was feeling sick. While lying in bed, all kinds of hallucinations danced through her head. In the morning, she was weak but feeling better. Grandma wanted to call a doctor just to make sure she was okay. But Granddad said, "If that snake was going to kill you, you'd be dead by now." So they didn't call a doctor. Another day, her son-in-law, Jack Snyder, was sitting on the porch with Grandma, waiting for Sally to get ready for a date. At about the same time they both noticed a poisonous copperhead snake slither between their chairs. Jack says Grandma calmly reached over, grabbed a broom handle and slung the snake off the porch. He thought, "That's my kind of woman!"
Granddad was seventy-seven when he passed away on June 8, 1967. He is buried in Central City at Fairmount Cemetery. His stone says that he died on June 10, but that is incorrect. He and Grandma had eight children (two others died in infancy). Dad was the only boy. One of the babies who died in infancy was a girl who was stillborn. She was born and died on April 25, 1935. I have a death certificate for her. No sex is marked on the death certificate or place of burial. We are not sure if this was the infant buried in Mt. Olivet or if it was the other one.
Sally (Bodine) Snyder said that Grandma's funeral went well. The chapel at Tucker's Funeral Home [Central City, KY] was almost full. A lot of family was present and many friends of Grandma's children were also there. There were bunches of flowers, too. Sally said that the morticians did a great job with Grandma. She looked very pretty. They got a lot of comments about what a pretty woman she was.
† - This symbol means the information comes from the Charles Sharp Family Bible.
On May 29, 2010, the family put a marker in Mt. Olivet Cemetery near Nelson, Kentucky. It reads something to the order of "In memory of infant son 1928 and daughter 1935 of Charlie & Mary Bodine." There is a death certificate (Muhlenberg Co., #10634) for the infant who was stillborn on April 25, 1935. The sex is not mentioned and no name was given. No burial place is mentioned either. There has always been some confusion in the family if it was a boy or a girl who was buried out there, but only one is out there. Aunt Susie says it is the girl who was buried out there. Aunt Susie was 3 1/2 years old and remembers seeing it in a little casket. She said it looked like a doll. The other was buried somewhere else, but Ernest Fulkerson said someone up the river had made caskets for both of them. The boy had been dead about two weeks when he was born, but the girl was stillborn. Sally and my dad both said that Grandma (Mary Jane Bodine) had said the boy was buried out at Mt. Olivet Cemetery, but others don't agree. The boy was born before Emily and the girl after my dad, Robert Bodine. There is no confusion about that part. The only confusion in the family has been if the girl or the boy was buried at Mt. Olivet.
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Aunt Suzy told me that once when the backwater was up, Grandma and Grandpa took an oil furnace and put it in the barn and surrounded it with hay bales and lived there until the backwater went down. It was pretty dangerous, but it worked out for them.
Grandma was a good cook and a good seamstress. Grandpa was a good ball player. The had to jump the ball each score. They sometimes went to Nelson's and Ralph's Grocery (those stores aren't there now). They took a wagon until they got a small black car in about 1947.
Grandpa read the Bible to the kids pretty regularly. They didn't go to church when the kids were young since it was so far, and they really didn't have clothes to go. They went barefoot most of the time since they could not afford shoes.
When Suzy stayed with Aunt Eula while going to high school, she had to have oats every morning with no sugar or salt. That's one reason she does not like oats even to this day. Emily, Dad, and Nancy stayed there some, too. Aunt Eula was very frugal.
Aunt Suzy says that they had running water - they had to run and get it. They got e- in the 50's or so. They studied by kerosene lamp. Suzy has one that has a bulb in it now.
