WILL'S STORY: ~THE STORY~---related-pages---site navigation
A brief and incomplete biography of Will:
Will was my paternal grandfather.  Here he is in 1921:
All the photos I’ve seen of Will (which isn’t very many) make him look stern.  But his letters are full of jokes, and Mama Margaret said more than once: “Will is a tease.”  And apparently his face was quite expressive.  Alma once wrote to him about somebody she met:

He wiggles his eyebrows the way you do but he does not look at all like you.

And Eva wrote to him in 1898:

Do you know I can’t imagine you any way but as you were here wherever I want to see you with my mind’s eye I can always see you just going into the parlor from the sitting room blowing your nose your old fashioned way and laughing so heartily.

So take another look at that picture of Will, and imagine him wiggling his eyebrows and laughing heartily as he blew his nose.

Will was born on November 3, 1875, the first of Mama Margaret’s five children.  Here he is around 1886, with Fred, four years younger, on his right:

The two boys are all dressed up for a photograph by a professional photographer and look very serious and angelic, but both took an interest in photography later on.  We have many of Will’s photographs, often developed by himself.  So when they weren’t posing for the picture, Will and Fred may have been much more lively, looking all around the photographer’s studio and asking way too many questions while their mother told them not to mess up their good clothes.

Will graduated from Canton High School on June 20, 1894.  We have the program from the graduation.  It took place at 7:30 pm.  Will was one of eleven graduates from the Classical Course.  All eleven gave a speech, leading me to wonder what time it was when the graduation ceremony finally finished.

We have the first four pages of Will’s speech, written in longhand on lined paper.  It is entitled The Source of Power, and in the pages that we have, Will talks about how, in the end, all sources of power can be traced to the sun.  Will’s father was a part-time government weather observer, and apparently Will had taken an interest in the weather station.

At home, a problem was arising in the family: Will’s father, whom I call Papa Charles, was becoming difficult, abusing Mama Margaret and occasionally his children.  There was a particularly hair-raising incident in December of 1895, when Will tried to defend Mama Margaret against physical attack.  Papa Charles grabbed a butcher knife and went after Will.  Laura came to Will’s defense and he ran out of the house.

Meanwhile Papa Charles was giving his family less and less financial support.  The family was very happy in April 1896 when Will received an appointment to the United States Military Academy at West Point.  Aside from the fact that his education would be paid for and his future career assured, he would also be paid a stipend starting from his first year at West Point.  For the next decade and a half, Will would send money to his family, helping them through their own education and supporting his mother.  He never ever complained.

In fairness to Papa Charles, it should be noted that he had political connections, including William McKinley, that probably helped Will to get the appointment to West Point.  In fact, the letter notifying Will of his appointment was sent to Papa Charles to deliver to Will.

Cadets - or rather, cadet candidates - reported to West Point on June 18.  I don’t know when Will started hating the Army, but it was a hatred that lasted for the rest of his life.  Sometime during his West Point career he got the appropriate number of demerits for giving an order in a perfunctory manner.  Maybe that was an indication that he had gone sour on the army already, or maybe he was just having a bad day.

Will graduated from West Point in 1900.  The Stark County Democrat reported on July 27:

Lieutenant William Stokey left for Akron, Monday.  He will proceed to New York city, August 1, to report for duty, having been assigned to the Fourth heavy artillery, and will be stationed at Havana, Cuba, with rank of second lieutenant.  At West Point those who stand highest in their classes are assigned to the engineering corps.  Stokey stood well in his classes.  He preferred the artillery corps to that of engineering, and was therefore given his choice.

He was eventually in the Army Corp of Engineers.  For the first three years after graduation from West Point he was assigned to places fairly close to home - New York, Savannah, Cuba - but in the spring of 1903 he was sent to The Philippines, which at that time was owned by the US.  He and some fellow officers took a train from Virginia to San Francisco, where they boarded a ship for the Philippines.  We have a letter that he wrote to Alma from the train.  I like this bit:

Last evening we passed Lookout Mountain, and about 4:10 this morning we passed over the Mississippi at Memphis.  I had the Pullman conductor wake me up so that I could look out the window and see it.  I got a very good view as the moon was shining brightly.  The rest of them all thought it was very funny for me to be wakened up.

​I don’t know what he did in the Philippines for the Army.  Early in his time there he became ill.  Mama Margaret wrote to him in November 1903:

It seems a long long time since that letter was written saying you were sick.  I hope you are well and contented.

That sounds as though it was somebody from the Army notifying Will’s mother that he was ill, but I don’t know.

Will was never an avid traveler, and although he did send some nice Filipino things home to his family, there is no impression that he had any interest in being overseas.  I haven’t noticed any sign that he had any lingering interest in the Philippines after he came back to the US in 1905.
He was assigned to Savannah and for a while, and then sent out to California around the beginning of 1910.  (The exact date is somewhere.  Need to find it.)

He was assigned to San Francisco, but in the August of 1910 he wrote to Mama Margaret:

I have been down here since the second taking the place of Lieut. Leeds.  He has had tuberculosis and about two weeks ago he had a hemorrhage and then had three more in the next four days.  He had no more after that and seems to be improving.  He has had to lie almost perfectly still so that the doctors have not been able to make a thorough examination.

I don't think Lieutenant Leeds had tuberculosis, because he lived to the ripe old age of 80.  And furthermore, the Los Angeles Herald said on July 30:

Lieutenant Leeds has been granted leave of absence on account of his health. He recently sprained his ankle while inspecting work on the Los Angeles harbor and has been compelled to go about on crutches since receiving the Injury. It is believed that this Injury undermined his health, and in order to avoid a complete breakdown ho was given an indefinite leave of absence by the war department.

Whatever Lieutenant Leeds's problem was, it was quite an important one for Will, because it was while Will was filling in for his brother officer and living at the Hotel Fremont in Los Angeles that he met and fell for Sarah Margaret Clarke, a fellow guest at the Fremont.  His letters indicate that he was totally, absolutely besotted with her, but I wonder if the fact that his sister Alma had completed her education and now had a full-time paying academic job made him feel freer to become totally, absolutely besotted with a girl.

Fortunately the girl returned his interest, and in October he was ready to write to his mother about it...but where was she?  I haven't included (and therefore need to include) the umpteen times Alma and Eva asked him, begged him, ordered him to write.  And now that he had something to write about, he didn't know where they were.  Alma had been in England over the summer - was she home yet?  And he knew that Mama Margaret had been staying with Laura in Alliance, Ohio while Alma was away - was she still there?  And so he wrote:

I don’t know where to send this so I will send it Alliance.  None of you ever say where you will be two weeks ahead.  I didn’t know Alma’s address all summer so she can’t blame me for not writing.  I was just crazy to write.

It makes me laugh.

And then he got down to business:

I have been very busy.  My office work has occupied my time during the day and most of the rest of my time was taken up by Miss Margaret Clarke.  You see we have been trying to find out if we liked one another.  We have decided that we do.  Isn’t that dear of us.  She has been an orphan ever since she was a young child.  She was raised by some aunts in Mobile.  She came out here on a visit and while out here found that she would have to make her own living and learned the millinery business.  She is head designer at “The Marvel”.  She has brown hair, blue eyes, is about 5 ft 2 in. tall, weighs about 120.  She likes horses and dogs but does not care for cats.

Here's how you can tell that Will was in love: He was willing to overlook the fact that Margaret didn't like cats.  (Will loved cats.  That's another thing I need to add in here.)

At the end he said:

Am sending check for $150.00.

Will was such a good son, even if he didn't write as often as his family wanted him to.

I want to write more about Will and Margaret.  For the moment, I'll mention that, while still engaged, they went to Mount Lowe for Thanksgiving.  Will sent Alma a postcard from there with a pictorial indication that he had given Margaret an engagement ring:




They were married in March of 1911.

Margaret was a Christian Scientist, and Will converted to the religion.  My cousin Barbara has suggested that the difficulties with his father made him more open to the idea of Christian Science.  They may well have, but I think a large part of it was Will being agreeable.  Will was so nice!  I’m sure he was sincere in his conversion, but I’ll bet he would have gone along with whatever flavor of Christianity Margaret favored.  I’m not so sure he would have converted if she had been a Muslim, but Christian Science was fine with him.

The marriage was very happy - I need to add in more here about that.  But alas, Margaret died in childbirth in November 1912, leaving behind a very tiny baby, also named Margaret.  Mama Margaret came out west to take care of her, and lived with Will and little Margaret.

Will did not blame his wife’s death on Christian Science.  He felt that the religion was part of what had made his brief marriage such a success, and he remained a Christian Scientist, though not necessarily a particularly devout one.  He sent his daughter to Christian Science Sunday school, and Mama Margaret - originally a Methodist - took an interest in it as well.  When Eva was having problems with her marriage, Will recommended Christian Science to her: 

I think that if even one of you had science you would find it much easier, and if both of you had it, it would be no trouble at all.

And so Eva became a Christian Scientist, although it didn’t save her marriage.

Will was stationed back East in 1913.  He was assigned to help at the Gettysburg 50th reunion in Pennsylvania, while Mama Margaret took care of baby Margaret in Massachusetts.  

He wrote to Mama Margaret about it afterwards:

We had to assign the vets to tents and distribute blankets to them, find their tents for them when they were lost, send for the ambulances when they were sick, and help them to find their friends.  To show how helpless some of them were, there are still in the unclaimed articles tent 3 sets of false teeth innumerable “specs”, and a tent full of grips and suitcases.  Some of them were lost from their tents over two days.  They would go out and forget their tent numbers and the number of their street and it would be almost impossible to find their tents because they could not remember anything about how it was located and they were not able to walk very far in helping you to look for tents.

I've uploaded the whole letter; you see it in the list of his outgoing documents - July 6, 1913.

He also wrote in the letter:

I was delighted to hear how Margaret has grown and to hear that she is getting so strong.  Does she still yell the way she did?

He was assigned next to Washington DC, where Mama Margaret joined him with little Margaret, and then, in 1915, he was assigned to Savannah, Georgia.  He and the two Margarets moved there, and at this point, in the spring of 1915, Mama Margaret and Alma decided to take a long summer trip to California, visiting relatives and the Panama-Pacific International Exposition, with a botanical conference for Alma.  I’m sure Will provided money to Mama Margaret for this trip, because that’s how Will was.

Eva, on summer break from teaching in Philadelphia, came down from Savannah to take care of Margaret while Mama Margaret was away.  It was at this point that Will revealed himself to be not inconsolable over the death of his wife.  I can’t help wondering if he found Eva to be not such a pleasant presence at home as Mama Margaret was.

He started seeing a young woman named Helen.  Possibly Helen Kehoe; we don’t have the exact name.  Apparently he went so far as to become engaged to her, and then he told Eva what he had done, surely hoping that she would be happy for him.

She was not happy for him.  She was appalled.  Helen was a Catholic!  Will must not allow a Catholic to raise his sweet little Christian Science daughter!

Will was probably too nice to wonder to herself, “Did I create a monster when I recommended Christian Science to Eva?”

Poor Will.  He was so very nice, and here he was, stuck with choosing between his sister and the girl he had planned to marry, with no possibility of compromise.

He chose his sister.  If there was an engagement, he broke it.

Perhaps he was influenced by the fact that in those days Christian Scientists weren’t the only people who were prejudiced against Catholics.  He may have feared that there would be others in the family with objections to Helen - but that’s something that isn’t in the story that I got.

Perhaps the scales were tipped by the fact that Eva pointed out to him a reasonable alternative.  Two reasonable alternatives, in fact: the Farmer sisters, Ruth and Kathleen, devout Christian Scientists from England, who lived with their parents quite close to the Stokeys.  In fact, Eva couldn’t understand why he hadn’t noticed them already.

Mama Margaret came back to Savannah and Eva returned to Philadelphia, and Will drove the Farmers to church even when he did not attend.  Nobody knew if it was Ruth or Kathleen that interested him.  Perhaps he didn’t know himself.  But the Farmers and the Stokeys got along very well together.  The Farmers loved little Margaret.  Mama Margaret liked Mrs. Farmer.

In early June 1916, Will received word that the Army was transferring him to be in charge of their Cincinnati office.  A couple of weeks later he and Kathleen were married.

If Will had been lukewarm about getting married, or about Kathleen, the transfer to Cincinnati offered him the perfect out.  He apparently hadn’t proposed yet, and Mama Margaret was busily thinking about the logistics of the move.  But when push came to shove, he moved quickly.

So what did Will see in this 27-year-old woman who had not initially caught his eye?  (The following is disjointed; I hope to weave it together better later.)

Clearly it wasn’t that she was a Christian Scientist; that merely meant that she had Eva’s seal of approval.  Left to his own devices, he would have married Helen the Catholic, and quite possibly he would have ended up converting to Catholicism himself.

But there were other things to like about Kathleen.

Like him, she liked music.  There is a mention of them playing duets together after their marriage.

She loved Margaret, and she loved children in general.

She enjoyed riding around in a car.  Will had a Buick that he had bought in the summer of 1915.  It was his first car, but for the rest of his life he always bought Buicks.  My father (Will’s youngest son Roger) once noted that Will liked to do his research and then stick with a company.  My father was talking about Will always buying Gillette razors, but the same principle applied to cars.  Not that Buicks were perfect: there are lots of mentions in various letters of Will working on the car, even in mid-trip, but Will was an engineer and probably enjoyed it.

Like Will, Kathleen tried to be good.  I think that his first wife, for all her adherence to Christian Science, was a bit of a firecracker.  Quite possibly Helen the Catholic was like that too.  But Kathleen was quieter and more dutiful.  Nearly thirty years later, my mother wrote about the difference between Maggie, Will’s daughter by his first wife, and Kay, his daughter by Kathleen.  The two of them were planning to live together, and my mother said:

I think the arrangement will be good for both of them.  Kay leans toward being too good, M. toward abruptness and outspokenness, regardless of the feelings of the victim.  So they should sort of act on each other, I think.

I suspect that Maggie and Kay were both like their respective mothers.  It must have been interesting to Will.  I can’t help wondering if he was secretly amused when Maggie married a Catholic.

Will’s marriage to Kathleen, however it was initiated, was a successful one.  You can see that in their letters.

The wedding took place in the morning on June 22, 1916, a Thursday, and then Will, Kathleen, and little Margaret set out to drive the 700 miles to Cincinnati in the Buick.

More to come, of course.  I need to find more photos.  The problem is, Will was usually the one taking the photos.  But there’s a picture of the first Buick.  Need that.  (Got it!  See Will's pictures page.)

[Disjointed here, will fill in more later.]  Here’s a story that I got from my sister Betsy, which she got from our father Roger, from one summer when the family was in Woods Hole at Fernbank.  Roger, very young, got into a rowboat.  Probably it was the one on the Mill Pond that Alma used often when she raked the algae off the surface of the pond, so she might have been rather casual about securing it.  Maybe Roger was playing and didn’t realize what he was doing, because suddenly he found himself away from the shore with no idea how to get the boat back to the starting place.  But his father saw the problem - or maybe heard little Roger yelling? - and, standing on the shore, called to Roger telling him how to use the oars to row back.  And that is how Roger learned to row.

Will retired in 1928.  I heard a reference in passing from Kay's youngest daughter to something she heard from her mother, which was that Kathleen wasn’t too thrilled about the retirement because it would mean less money coming in.  But he didn’t like the army - that comes from my mother, who said “He was a nice, nice man, but he hated the Army.”  Additionally, the family was settled in Atlanta, near to Savannah where Kathleen’s beloved parents and sister were, and I daresay there was no guarantee that the next posting would not be somewhere that Kathleen and the kids hated.  This way, they didn’t grow up being Army brats.

Atlanta cannot have been always comfortable for Will.  This was the heart of the Jim Crow era, and the Stokeys were a Northern family.  I don’t currently have much information about how that was for them.  All I have is an anecdote from Bill, Will’s older son.  In 1985, on the day after the memorial service for Roger, Bill’s younger brother and my father, Bill told me that as a child Roger had created a fuss in school when he told his classmates that Robert E. Lee was a traitor.  That attitude has to have come from Will.  But that was about secession.  I don’t know how Will felt about segregation.

Kathleen died in December of 1940 of peritonitis.  Antibiotics were available, and probably could have saved her, but she was a devout Christian Scientist and chose not to try modern medicine.  Will, though he was also a Christian Scientist, was not as strong an adherent as Kathleen was.  I don’t know if he ever discussed treatment with her.  His 1915 acquiescence to Eva in the matter of marrying Helen the Catholic indicates that he did not enjoy confrontation with his loved ones.

When Kathleen became too ill to write letters to the children, he took over that duty, but did not mention in his letters that their mother was ill.

Thirty years later, Roger (my father, Will's younger son) commented to me that when he went off to his junior year in college in 1940, his father was a middle-aged man, but when he came home in December after his mother’s death, his father was an old man.  At the time, I assumed that the change was caused by grief.  Now I think there may have been more than that involved.  Will had Parkinson’s disease.  Such a thing would surely not be discussed in a Christian Science family, and the children may not have noticed a difference yet.  But it may be that Kathleen was supporting him in ways that they didn’t know, and that when she was no longer there to support him, issues became more visible.

Will stayed in Atlanta, after everybody else was gone - all the Farmers dead, his wife dead, and his children grown up and living all over the United States.  Eva, age 55 in 1940, ended her teaching career in Philadelphia and came to Atlanta to keep house for him.  In the summers they went up to Woods Hole and stayed at Fernbank with Alma and Fred.  My mother described how he would arrive at the beginning of the summer and dump his stuff in a heap on the bedroom floor…and that was that for the summer.  Not exactly regulation Army behavior.

Here’s a story that I like: On Friday, May 7, 1943, Will and Eva were in their Atlanta home, working on closing up the house so they could go up to Woods Hole for the summer, when they received exciting news: Roger was getting married the following Monday.  In Massachusetts!  The girl was Edie (that’s my mother), so that was fine; they knew Edie.  And it was wartime, so Roger and Edie hadn’t known in advance when they would be able to schedule the wedding, so that was fine - but so soon!  Will didn’t see how he could go, what with all that was needed to be done to close up the Atlanta house.  But Eva was made of sterner stuff.  (This is the one story of her life in which Eva is the heroine.  Let us make the most of it.)  She told Will that she would finish closing up the house.  He had to go to his son’s wedding.  Bravo, Eva!

So Will took the train up to Massachusetts, arriving at the home of Edie’s parents on Monday morning.  Meanwhile, Edie’s Grandma Packard had already arrived and taken a look around the house.  The reception was going to be held in the living room, and it wasn’t up to snuff for the occasion.  (Typical Grandma Packard, but that’s another story.)  It needed gussying up.  Time was short, and she took whatever help she could get.  So she enlisted Will.

Edie had gone to Boston to run last-minute errands (yet another story), and when she returned home, she found her soon-to-be father-in-law the retired Army colonel in the living room, helping her grandmother to sew rosettes onto the tiebacks of the curtains.  Nearly seventy years later, that memory still made her laugh.

Another detail of that wedding: When Roger and Edie came out of the church, they walked under two crossed swords held up for them.  One was from Edie’s family (still another story), and one was Will’s ceremonial West Point sword.  Here is what I don’t know: Did Will bring that sword up from Atlanta on the train?  In wartime?

More details needed: Will loved music, and his earlier letters mention hours spent at piano practice.  He also liked taking photographs.  Plus he did occasional drawings, as needed.

And he loved cats.  Got to include some of the stuff in his letters about the cats, because it’s fun.

The Parkinson’s continued its course, along with kidney trouble, which I assume was related to the Parkinson’s.  My mother reported to my father in 1944 that Will was constantly having to go to the bathroom.  This was a problem when the bathroom at Fernbank was enlarged in 1946, according to AG.  The floor was painted, and Will had to use the bathroom before the paint was dry.  Often.  And, because of his Parkinson's disease, he couldn't lift his feet when he walked; he could only shuffle along, so he kept making a mess of the nice new bathroom floor.  AG, aged 10, was very much annoyed with him.

He was not at his daughter Kay's wedding in Cambridge on January 26, 1948.  I assume that making the trip from Atlanta to Boston and then back again only a few days later would have been too much for him.

A granddaughter of his (my sister Ming) was born on November 17, 1950.  Apparently he was aware, but only just to communicate; he agreed with someone - Eva, maybe? - that it was "a good day".

He died exactly a month later, on December 17, 1950, ten years and three days after Kathleen died.
In the year 2000, my mother Edie, my two sisters Betsy and Ming, and I attended a reunion at West Point for the Class of 1900.  Obviously none of that Class was there; it was for the descendents of the class.  I do not know if this is something done every year.  The current cadets did a review (is that the correct term?) for us, and we wandered around the campus, and there was a banquet.  One could check up on the records of past cadets, and it was on this occasion that Betsy found that our grandfather had been given demerits for giving an order in a perfunctory manner.

At the banquet, a representative from the family of each member of the class stood up and gave memories.  My mother - Will's daughter-in-law - performed this function for our family, since my sisters and I had no memories of our grandfather Stokey.  (My father had been dead for 15 years.)  She didn't give any personal memories; instead she talked about the Gettysburg Reunion of 1913.

One of the surprises of the weekend was to discover that our cousin Sally (on my mother's side) was married to a grandson of a classmate of Will's named Upton Birney.  Sally's husband, also named Upton, told about his West Point grandfather, always strictly punctual: never late, but also never early.  So it was quite a surprise to this Upton to discover that his grandfather had received demerits for being late!

They handed out engraved wine glasses.  Each family was supposed to take one, but Betsy liked them, so she managed to get away with two, and she still treasures them.  Her husband Ron took a picture of them for me:
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