Inky is the black dog in the photo with my aunt and father. They had to give him up for “bothering sheep” and found him a new home in Rolla, Missouri.

Inky ran away.

This photo was taken outside my grandparents’ farmhouse on his return to Raymondville, Missouri. Raymondville is forty miles south of Rolla, but Inky found the people he loved.

My friend Wendy Taylor read the Inky story on Facebook. We went to AGHS together. She told me that her father’s family was living in Raymondville in the 1930s. The odds are staggering because I think the YOU ARE NOW ENTERING and YOU ARE NOW LEAVING signs are on the same signpost in tiny Raymondville.

Wendy the Arroyo Grande High School Homecoming Princess, from my senior yearbook. Her career—her calling—was that of a nurse, so she’s one of my heroes, too.


And, sure enough, my Aunt Aggie married Mr. Charles A. Taylor in Raymondville in 1912. They were both 19.

I don’t know that this Taylor is related to my friend Wendy, but I found something else out about my family.

This is Aunt Aggie, on the right, later in life. That’s her mother, the scary lady, my step-grandmother, Dorriska Rose Trail. (She died and my grandfather John, widower, married my grandmother, Dora, widow.) The noses give their connection away—DNA does not lie much—but Aggie’s a softer person and she loves her pearls. Me, too.


Charles and Aggie were living in Illinois when, sadly, he passed away at 49. Aggie would live another 38 years. I found his obituary in a Houston, Missouri, Herald from July 1942, and it contained this poignant detail:



And then I found their son in the World War II casualty books:


And then I found their son.

He’s a nice-looking boy, isn’t he? He’s remembered on this particular marble wall, along with two sailors, just two years older, who grew up in Arroyo Grande:



I didn’t remember the whole story, but Dad used to talk about a cousin who was killed on Arizona. It was Wendy Taylor’s comment that set me to thinking. I had no idea that a morning spent researching my aunt, Aggie Caroline Gregory Taylor, would take me back, once again, to Pearl Harbor and December 7, back to a war that took my Dad, an Army lieutenant, from Raymondville and Taft, California, to London and Paris.

I think it was Inky who led me to this young sailor, so his sense of direction remains unerring. What a good dog.

Last Mooring, by artist Tom Freeman. Arizona ties up at her quay on Battleship Row on the morning of December 5, 1941.