From both papers, we learn that one of the Ainsworth schoolteachers, Delmer Fisher, had spent the last ten weeks sick in bed at the home of John Miller in Ainsworth. I believe Delmer was just a boarder there, as I've found no evidence of a family relationship, and he wouldn't have been the first local schoolteacher to board chez Miller. The fact that Martha Miller nursed him for so long (and it probably was Martha who bore the greater part of the nursing duties) is evidence of … something, and I want it to be something nice — not that the Millers wanted to wring all the rent money they could get out of him, but rather that they were compassionate and their home comfortable, and that Delmer maintained a touching hope that he would soon get well and return to his teaching duties.
But he didn't. After ten weeks, with Delmer still too sick to teach or to travel by himself, someone hired a limousine from Merrillville to carry him to Hebron, where his sister and brother-in-law offered him a bed.
His World War I draft card, completed in early June 1917, states in the section on physical disability that he had been "bed fast for seven months," and in another section, a barely legible note seems to say he'd been disabled for ten years with kidney trouble. And then, by his signature, someone has scrawled "Deceased."
The News follows its Ross Township column with this hopeful note:
So would I, "Ed." So would I!
And thus ends 1916.
Sources:
♦ "Ainsworth Pick-Ups." Hobart Gazette 2 Sept. 1910; 9 Sept. 1910.
♦ "Ross Township Items." Hobart News 28 Dec. 1916.
♦ "Ross Township News." Hobart Gazette 29 Dec. 1916.
♦ WWI Draft Cards.
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