Isabella Tiger Moth

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With so many Woolly Bear caterpillars around here all the time, you'd think I would have seen an Isabella Tiger Moth before now.

The adult moth has a lifespan of five to ten days. Maybe that has something to do with why I don't see them. The larvae, as far as I can tell, have a very, very long lifespan.

I've been trying to find out why it's called the Isabella Tiger Moth, but no one says anything about that. There's plenty about the folklore around Woolly Bears. "Isabella" is still a mystery to me.

She Was Wrong, But She Was Right

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Hobart Gazette, 14 Aug. 1952.

Obviously, burning down your house is not a productive way to address any marital problems you might be having. But it does appear that Alice was right about Rex's feelings toward her.

Alice, born in 1914, was the daughter of our favorite plumber, Charles Lee, and his wife Anna. She married Rex Albany Roll (b. 1908) in 1942. The Hobart telephone directory for 1952-1953 lists the Rolls at 1219 Jackson Street, so they had probably just moved to their "West Third street" house when this event occurred.[1]

The children Alice took to Lakeview Park were Grace, Eileen, and Shirley.

Alice and Rex apparently tried to continue with their marriage for a few more years: they had another child, Rex Jr., around 1953 or 1954. But in the 1956 Hobart directory Rex (Sr.) is absent from the Roll family listing. I can't find any information about him until January 1969, when his death certificate describes him as a Hobart resident, divorced.

Sometime after 1958, Alice remarried, to a widower named Herman Alpert. They moved to Sheperdsville, Kentucky, where Herman died in 1989. Alice returned to this area and was living with her married daughter, Shirley, when she died in 1992.

I hope the second marriage was happier than the first.


I spent a little time looking in my 1947 and 1962 Hobart directories for any listing involving counseling, therapy, or psychiatry. There were none. I couldn't find any in 1952 Gary directories, either. Some quick internet research tells me that marriage counseling developed in the 1920s from the eugenics movement. "While in 1932 there were only three marriage counseling centers in the entire U.S., by 1968 there were 1,800 licensed marriage counselors in California alone."[2] The Ladies' Home Journal column called, "Can This Marriage Be Saved?," started in 1953.[3]

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[1] The Hobart phone directory for 1956 lists the Roll family at 1364 W. Third Street. I can't find any such address now.
[2] Wendy Kline, "The Surprising History of Marriage Counseling," American Experience, 19 Oct. 2018, https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/eugenics-surprising-history-of-marriage-counseling/.
[3] "America's Longest-Running Magazine Column - Ladies' Home Journal's Can This Marriage Be Saved? - Launches as Webisode Series," Cision PR Newswire, 26 Mar. 2010, https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/americas-longest-running-magazine-column---ladies-home-journals-can-this-marriage-be-saved---launches-as-webisode-series-89015517.html.

The Second One Didn't Count

I came across the 1952 obituary of Belle (Norton) Mitchell, former restaurant owner of Hobart and Valpo, and found that she died as the wife of Miles Garland …


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Vidette-Messenger (Valparaiso, Ind.), 9 June 1952.

… but she was buried as the wife of Tymon Mitchell.

As the obituary states, she died while visiting one of her children. It occurs to me to wonder whether Miles Garland went with her on this visit, and whether he paid for the funeral, and whether he put up any kind of a fight about the name she would be buried under. Perhaps he understood how the children felt about their mother being Belle Mitchell for eternity.

He had children of his own. His first marriage, in 1899, was to Ida May Martin. But it appears that Miles and Ida divorced some time after the 1930 Census — the last census where they are recorded living together. By 1940 they were living apart, and Ida described herself as widowed. (In the 1950 census, she was listed as divorced.)

In fact, the first Mrs. Garland died shortly before the second.


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Courier and Press (Evansville, Ind.), 20 Apr. 1952.

Normally, a husband would be mentioned, either as surviving or as having "preceded her in death."

Divorce was not common in those days, as we all know — there had to be something seriously wrong in the marriage. Now I'm wondering whether Belle went to Hebron to get away from her unbearable second husband.

This stuff is like a cross between putting together a jigsaw puzzle and writing a novel.

A Time to Plant, and a Time to Blog

These days it's not the Farm Room that's sucking up all my blogging time; it's the usual springtime yard/garden work. So in honor of that endless chore, here's a couple of springtime gardening-related ads from the Hobart Gazette of April 10, 1952.

First, from the Hobart Coal & Feed Store, formerly known as the Lake County Co-Op:


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Secondly, an ad for a business I'd never heard of before, in a location where I'm surprised there was room for a business:



$134 in 1952 dollars would be about $1,532 today — a comparatively high price for a little garden rototiller. Especially one with an exposed drive mechanism that's just waiting to catch somebody's fingers.