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A selection of photos
IT'S BEEN A GOOD LIFE: A MEMOIR
By John D. Donnell Hard Cover 8.5 x 11 230 pages Send This Page To a FriendPreface Table of Contents First Chapter Last Chapter Photos Go to Page 1 Page 2 Page 3 Page 4 Page 5 Page 6
I, my own siblings and other family members as well as others would have enjoyed and possibly even profited from what he would have told us of days gone by and his part in building Waterloo, Iowa. He was disinclined to do this and gave me no encouragement at all to think he might be so persuaded. I suppose he did not think of himself as a writer, although his letters to me at college were well written. I resolved then that I would in my later years, if possible, write an account of my life for the benefit of my grandchildren. Unlike J.W. I have been a writer almost all of my life: a journalist, speech writer, textbook writer, chronicler of The Rath Packing Company, etc. What I did not appreciate so many years ago is the benefit to the writer of such an effort. It has given me considerable pleasure to bring back to mind many activities and thoughts I had many decades ago and to look back to see connections between interests of those earlier days with later paths I have taken. My pack rat tendencies have been a boon to this endeavor. The files I have preserved despite many moves—for example those on the Iowa Flying Club and on the early days of Waterloo’s United Services, Inc.—have not only proven useful for this project but reviewing them has been pleasurable and rather gratifying for me. I have always been a very busy person, planning more future activities and projects than I could undertake, leaving little time for introspection or even reflection. I believe a bit of self analysis provides balance to a life, but except for my long struggle to choose a career path, I have done very little of this. I doubt that my grandchildren or others will find reading this work profitable, but I hope that it will for them be informative and perhaps entertaining. However, whether this memoir is ever read, I think the effort has been worthwhile for me, although it has been a big task. It has taken a lot of my time and attention for more than four years. This long time span is the result of two detours I took. As I got started I thought it appropriate to write briefly about those of my ancestors with whose histories I was familiar. This effort stretched into an essay of 65 pages plus 7 pages of photos and family trees that I titled Family Ancestry. In that monograph I wrote about my grandfather and grandmother Donnell--Thomas and Letitia Kyle Donnell, who lived most of their lives in Mattoon, Illinois. I never knew Grandfather Donnell; he died in 1924. I may have visited Mattoon before he died, but, if so, I do not remember it. I do recall visiting Mattoon when I was about eight years old, and I remember Grandmother Donnell as what I then thought to be an old lady. She died in 1929 at the age of 71. So I never knew the Donnell grandparents like I did the Raths. They were neighbors and we saw them every Sunday and frequently in between. One of those ancestors I wrote about in Family Ancestry was my great grandfather John Rath of Ackley, Iowa. Another great grandfather was George Washington Harbin. Both had written very interesting but quite different diaries while serving in the Federal forces in the Civil War. As I reread them I resolved to write in some detail about their wartime experiences. For this purpose I read biographies of Generals Grant and Sherman as well as parts of several Civil War histories to help me understand and put in perspective what they wrote about. As this effort expanded I could see that it really would overwhelm the family history, so I decided to let it stand alone. As I talked about it with my wife Florence, she suggested that I also look at the Civil War diaries of her grandfather Isaac Bentz. His diaries were written in very small, commercially-produced, predated pocket-sized books, and they had never been transcribed. So I undertook that job. The daily entries were very brief but not easy to decipher. It produced a work of 36 pages that I labeled The Civil War Diaries of Isaac E. Bentz. Then after reviewing the diaries of all three men and with the benefit of considerable reading of Civil War history, I wrote what I called Three Ancestors in the Civil War. It is 92 pages long, the last four comprised of photographs. So after more than two years on what I had expected would be only brief diversions, I went back to writing about my life. That too has stretched both in pages and in time in process much longer than I anticipated. In fact its bulk will probably put off potential readers. Of course, work on it has not been continuous, as my accounts of travels and other activities make clear. However, it reaches back and covers some of the material I discussed in my 1993 booklet entitled, Why The Rath Packing Company Failed. I’ve tried not to duplicate much of that work, but the months I spent in preparation of the earlier work were in part groundwork for this effort. I can say that the completion of this memoir is a welcomed event because I can now devote more time to other projects; yet it has been such a big part of my life recently that I may well miss that focus. Acknowledgments are due to those who have encouraged this project, especially my sister Jean Parker. My brother Jim read and made suggestions on the first draft of the first nine chapters. Judy Donnell proofread the entire manuscript and made valuable suggestions and Cathy Donnell helped with computer problems. Despite their help, I’m sure some of my errors remain.
1. My Earliest Memories
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