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So would you say in Wheeling standards they were the upper crust in the town?

I would say that my mother's father was upper crust and my father's father was sort of middle crust.

My father's education was rather erratic, I gather, although I don't know the details, and at an early age he took off and went around the world, partly working his way around on a boat and got to be quite cosmopolitan in the sense that, unlike other people in Wheeling, who tended to be brought up and lived in Wheeling, he had seen the world. My mother was--

But he did this while working?

He did some work, I think, on his tour of the world. He must have known my mother before, but apparently he came back to Wheeling and there the inevitable occurred. My mother was a raving beauty, and he was pretty handsome. Of course, I suppose he was also glamorous in the sense that he had been out and seen the world. Very few people in Wheeling at the turn of the century had done that.

Do you know their birthdates--more or less when they were born?

More or less would be in the case of my mother, around 1886, and my father, maybe, about a year or two earlier.

They got married. The only thing I know about the marriage is