Norma Barth
Autobiographical Sketch of Norma Bell.
Written in 1957 by Norma Bell for a course at Ohio State University, General Studies 520.
An Introspective Autobiography
My name is Norma Jane Bell Barth. Who I am seems not to be summarized in a name, as one may sometimes do. (Who is that? Why don't you know? That is
Norma Barth). So here is a sort of running account of me with a small attempt to follow Socrates' advice to "know thyself."
In the first place, I was conceived and born. Insofar as heredity and earliest environment may have shaped me, I was about to say the ultimate me, but quickly
realized that there is no ultimate me this side of the grave. Perhaps with the passage of the years, the rate of change within me will be less, I will be more set in my
ways, and potential learning experiences will leave me less and less changed. If so, I might then think of myself in more static terms.
Well, to go on, my father and my mother met and were married in a small semi rural Missouri community. My father died when I was five and so my knowledge
of him is somewhat sketchy. He came from a middle class farming family, had gone to St. Louis, and to college for a year or so. He married my mother when he
was twenty five and she was twenty one years old.
My mother was one of the older sisters in a family of seven children. My maternal grandfather had married a hired girl, moved to the town where I was born, and
with hard work and business acumen, became the leading entrepreneur in this small community. My grandfather ruled his family in patriarchal fashion, and possibly
as a result, those children who had not inherited some of his strong will tended toward character weaknesses when as young adults they depended on his largess at
the price of their own independence.
My mother, Elizabeth, was not one of these, but possessed a strong will even though it was tempered with reason and affection. I mention this because both
physically and temperamentally, I resemble my mother more than my father. My mother's independent nature is reflected in me.
As far as I know, both of my parents wanted children. Only my younger sister and I survived the process of birth. Two children did not live to draw a breath.
I remember my father kindly, of being carried on his back in a sack, of being tossed up in the air, and of being put in a lace drawer with a glass top at the store.
He crossed my hands, told me to close my eyes, and then he called my mother to come see what he had. I remember the fuss she made that her baby should
"play dead." I remember these and many other small incidents that seem inconsequential in a larger sense, but which children remember vividly.
Perhaps the early major environmental factors that conditioned my growth were the following:
- I was normal physically and mentally at birth, and did not suffer any crippling diseases.
- I was a girl and so almost automatically started down the more or less broad road that females travel from the cradle onward.
- My father died when I was five.
The last of these three factors, the unexpected illness and death of my father, and his burial in the small "grave yard" at Eugene, Missouri, cast a long shadow
back of me. One may walk out of the shadow of even the tallest tree when the moon is low on a summers night, in a few minutes. But half a lifetime has not been
sufficient for me to walk out of the long shadow cast by the granite stone, marking my father's grave in that little, poorly kept, cemetery on the hilltop at
Eugene.
Within the month after my father's passing, my maternal grandmother died of cancer. My grandfather took my mother, my sister and me to live with him at the
big old frame Ritchie house. It was and is the most pretentious in the town. After a year or so, the four of us went on a camping trip in Texas. I remember many
incidents of this year clearly, and no doubt there are many more hidden in my subconscious.
After this trip, my mother asserted her independence and we moved to a larger town in Missouri named Windsor. My father's death had left us with a fixed sum of
money, and with careful management, my mother made this last, by dint of many economies and self disciplines, from the days at Windsor through my and my
sister's college years. That one man's meat is another man's poison was illustrated by the aid the depression years gave us in making our savings last. I learned to
"do without" some of the things I dearly wanted, for example a bicycle. Further, I learned to wait before spending money, to be sure that I wanted an item a few
months later as much as I did at the moment. This discipline against impulsive spending persists to this day. My husband will not learn this! Perhaps my role as
the older child brought me to accept this responsibility as my sister five years younger did not.
We moved to Denver when I was thirteen. One of my mother's sisters was in Denver [Leoda Ritchie]. She was divorced and had a boy about my age [Milburn Klindt].
For the next four years the five of us lived together. My aunt worked and my mother kept the home fires burning. We were "cliff dwellers," living in one apartment
after another, sharing the same fire escape with people we never bothered to learn the names of. Each time we moved we had a better place in which to live, but this
apartment life is really for the birds. Very few of the apartments had any children mostly young working girls or older people who did not want the responsibilities
that go with a house and lot. So there was little chance for boy girl association. My mother did a lot of church work and most of her associations were not with
families. My cousin was more or less like a brother. We fought, quarreled, teased, worked, and played together. I think we tended to be self sufficient as a family
and did not seek strong bonds outside the family. Part of this sufficiency was due to my mother's independent spirit.
About fifteen, I began complaining to my mother about not having a father. I felt a tremendous need for a man to talk to who could help me with some of my
problems. I can't put my finger on any of them, but I wouldn't want to relive that phase of my life for all the tea in China.
Just as a well fed child does not know how it is to starve for the lack of food, so the girls whom I knew in adolescence, could not know how it is to be without a
father.
One man, above all others, fulfilled this father role for me. He was the minister of our church, Dr. Mathieson, a man of real stature.
For two years I had been baby sitting with the Mathieson children. I liked and admired Dr. Mathieson and latched on to him as a confident. He was able to see
and meet some of the needs I felt for a father. We spent many hours at the car stop, where I caught the car for home, just talking. He guided me in forming many
of my ideals and attitudes. He met most of my boy friends. He was a good listener and one of the most important adults in my teen years. He was my ideal and
no daughter could have been more proud than I, when I found his name in "Who's Who in America" when I was in college.
Years later, after I was married and had a family of my own, my mother told me that Dr. Mathieson had talked with her at the time and had told her of his role in
meeting the need I felt for a father.
I spent a lot of time with a classmate and her family. Her dad and his father relation with his family made me feel more strongly than ever the lack of my own
father and so I formed a strong but complex emotional attachment to this girl's family.
My major fear during adolescence was that something would happen to my mother and I would be sent to an orphanage. I was about seventeen when this fear
was outgrown.
Our mother always discussed our financial problems with us. She answered out sex questions and we were prepared for menstruation. I knew very little about
boys or men until I took a course in "How to Teach Sex in the Public Schools" while in college.
As far back as I can remember, I planned to go to college. My parents had planned I should go before I was born, however, I don't think they planned I should be
going at forty two.
In the ninth grade I decided to become a teacher. I knew that I must be able to support myself and my family in case my life followed the unfortunate pattern of my
mother's life.
Our mother tried to give us the advantage she felt our father wanted us to have. Also, he was used as leverage: "Your father would want you to take Latin." (I
did and hated every moment). I took music lessons, too. "Your father would be proud of you," or "What would your father think of such behavior?"
A major crisis developed when I wanted to try my wings and go away to college. My mother thought it would be better for me and less costly for me to stay at
home and go to the University of Denver. I wrote to the Colorado State College of Education in Greeley for information on cost and proved in black and white that she
had no ground to stand on. Tuition at the University of Denver outweighed board and room. This illustrates the independent character of my psychological makeup.
To this day, I like or dislike people for themselves alone, and my independent judgements are not shaken by social positions or the possession of money or position.
I have never entertained my husband's "boss" because he was the "boss," nor have I tried to crash the "upper crust" bridge group. However, I know that I could crash
it if I so desired.
I went away to school for three years. Then a teaching job was offered to me in 1936. This seemed to be on a silver platter since jobs were so hard to obtain.
This job was in a consolidated school in the small town of Lyons, Colorado. I taught there for three years, saved my meager earnings, and went to school in the
summers. My major aim at this time was to graduate from college.
While a junior in High School, I met the boy who was to be my husband. We saw each other occasionally when I came home from college. He was socially
backward where girls were concerned, and although I had no strong feeling for him, and actually was "taken with" more glamorous boys, he was the steady type
(he says "second fiddle") and kept coming by to see me.
We wrote infrequent letters while he was in Nevada and California working. Then he came back to Denver for a few weeks with his life's savings and plans to
go to the University of Michigan to get his masters degree. I think it was at this time I decided he was the one for me: I thought he had matured. Perhaps I had
done so. I had always compared all of my dates to him and none had ever measured up to him. He had high standards and ideals, was a real gentleman, and I
always enjoyed being with him, even thought he seemed perpetually short of money. It is also true that I liked his family, especially his father. I am not sure that
I am sufficiently introspective in nature to know in the fullest detail why I was "in love." I certainly had shopped around and in some ways had the cold calculating
approach of a woman out to get the best coat for her money.
The spring before he came back through Denver, he had written from San Francisco asking me to come there to go to school, and that perhaps I would like to
stay. He says that was a proposal, but I had plans to go to Madison, Wisconsin to school. This so called proposal was a guarded suggestion that would have
allowed him to back out of any legal predicament had it seemed necessary.
I spent that summer at the University of Wisconsin in full enjoyment, far away from home and as independent as a bird on the wing.
The next summer, 1937, I went to school in Greeley. Then my sister and I drove with a sorority sister of mine to Madison to visit a mutual friend. My plans were
to go on to Ann Arbor to see Vincent, but instead, he came to Madison. His father was in Chicago at the time, so my sister and I went with Vincent to Chicago
where we were going to do some "rubber necking," then head for Denver. Four days later Vincent and I were married and he and I headed for Denver. After the
wedding we shipped my sister off to Missouri. We sent wires to his mother and mine to come to Chicago, but they couldn't get away. (Oh, yes, my mother was
married in January of 1937. I do not believe that her husband could have fulfilled the father role for me!)
I wanted to teach one more year and finish my college work for a degree. It would have been fatal, job wise, to let the townspeople know that I was Mrs. Barth.
Therefore, the pattern I had set as a teacher for two years had to be continued. That was going home every two weeks.
Jobs were hard to find in my husband's field of Chemistry, so he left Denver in the early spring. Summer school again for me. We were together a few days
to celebrate our first anniversary. Only our closest friends knew that we were married. I graduated in December 1938, sixteen months after getting married. I
announced it at my sorority Christmas party. That was a relief. I guess the best reason for not saying that I was married when I went back to college was that
married women just did not go to school.
As I look back at this first sixteen months of being married, I am amazed that it ever worked out. The mechanics of my adjustment to intercourse was, I am
sure, much slower than average. The fear of getting pregnant was ever present when we were together on those few weekends. This relationship was more like
an engagement with legal sex liberties. My husband seemingly fearing arrest part of the time. I had been to a doctor and was prepared, but I also knew of cases
where "those things" didn't work.
By the time I had that important piece of paper, the degree, Vincent was working in Seattle. His mother and father were there on an assignment, also. As if it
were yesterday, I can hear my mother saying, "The Barths will want you to live with them to help you out financially, but don't do it." We lived with the Barths
four months. In a way, it was good I got to know his parents much better and they to know me. But that arrangement did not help us to become adjusted to
each other, and we had a lot of it to do.
In 1940 we decided it was time to start our family. This was easier said than done in my case. An infection accompanying a ruptured appendix when I was
eight had sealed the fallopian tubes. (If I had only known!) Finally, a gynecologist to whom I was going for treatment was able to correct the situation and in 1942
David was born. Duncan arrived in 1944, and in 1946 we hit the jackpot a girl, Naoma. As I recovered from delivery each time, I had blamed my husband for the
sex of the two boys, so he thought he should have (and he got) credit for the sex of our female child.
We came to Columbus in 1947. Vincent's obsession to obtain a master's degree, first tried fourteen years earlier at Michigan (his life savings ran out), was still
latent and now it rose up and dominated his thinking. During the six years of course at a time work at Ohio State University and some difficult job adjustments, I
stood by him. I neither encouraged him strongly or discouraged him. But the children and I did endure a long siege of strain. In general, my husband and I have
avoided "owning" each other, so that within the framework of our marriage, each of us has a fair amount of latitude.
At the same time, while each of us has subjected the other to small abuses (he has failed to fix dripping water faucets, I have failed to make the beds), neither
of us had engaged in a major wrong. The tensions between us have largely been brought about by weariness from too many activities. In the occasional, typical
small "discussions" between us, I have a ready tongue and a vocal defense mechanism close to the surface. If I feel that my husband is making a disparaging
inference about me, I follow the idea that the best defense is a good offence. In about five sentences, and in a fairly sharp tone, I have catalogued the worst of his
failings. This usually stops him cold since he lacks the ready tongue. On the other hand, he tends to sulk after such an encounter. I regard sulking a far worse
trait than a sharp tongue, but I'm sure it is better that both of us are not expert in verbal attack procedures.
My technique in a domestic argument is a manifestation of my positive, somewhat aggressive nature. I have some tendency to call a spade a spade when I
recognize it as a spade. (My husband thinks I might benefit by instruction in semantics, since he feels I sometimes tend to assume there is no other evaluation
than mine.) Vincent tends to be introverted, more docile, yet unyieldingly stubborn on occasions. My tactic is to maneuver around these stubborn islands so that
head on clashes are avoided. I tend to be comparatively uninhibited, more so than my husband.
One seemingly strange fact as far as my husband is concerned is that although I tend toward aggressiveness in dealing with problems sometimes, I am still very
much of a female in the sexual approach to copulation, and cannot (and will not) permit a sexual encounter without at least a minimum duration of active passive
male and female roles such as constitute a normal prelude to a satisfactory sex experience.
I like people and I rarely meet a stranger. I love teaching.
Our most fun as a family, I think, is camping. We usually spend two to four weeks each summer traveling and camping. I like gardening, bird watching,
learning to know the trees and wild flowers. I enjoy most of the crafts and have taught adult classes metal tooling, metal enameling, and leather craft.
I have some vices. I tend to let things go that I don't want to do such as housework. If I should die in the night and have not done the dishes, someone else will
do them and I will not have missed doing something more pleasant before I died. As I have said before, I have a sharp tongue. Sometimes I am opinionated. I do not
readily admit that I am wrong.
Also I have some virtues. I am loyal. I am absolutely sincere and honest in marital relations. I have uncompromising personal moral principles. I have a good
degree of tolerance for someone else's vices unless they are major vices such as drunkenness, infidelity, or cruelty. I am an affectionate wife and mother. I think
I am a good manager, money wise.
From where I stand, life looks good to me. I am happy. I am doing some of the things I want to do. The things I want to do that I am not doing I will make time for in
the future. I have a fine, happy, healthy, loving family, and a kind, loving, understanding husband. May God see fit to allow us more time on this earth together to enjoy
the marriage we have built with love and devotion.
Within the month after my father's passing, my maternal grandmother died of cancer. My grandfather took my mother, my sister and me to live with him at the big old frame Ritchie house. It was and is the most pretentious in the town. After a year or so, the four of us went on a camping trip in Texas. I remember many incidents of this year clearly, and no doubt there are many more hidden in my subconscious.
After this trip, my mother asserted her independence and we moved to a larger town in Missouri named Windsor. My father's death had left us with a fixed sum of money, and with careful management, my mother made this last, by dint of many economies and self disciplines, from the days at Windsor through my and my sister's college years. That one man's meat is another man's poison was illustrated by the aid the depression years gave us in making our savings last. I learned to "do without" some of the things I dearly wanted, for example a bicycle. Further, I learned to wait before spending money, to be sure that I wanted an item a few months later as much as I did at the moment. This discipline against impulsive spending persists to this day. My husband will not learn this! Perhaps my role as the older child brought me to accept this responsibility as my sister five years younger did not.
We moved to Denver when I was thirteen. One of my mother's sisters was in Denver [Leoda Ritchie]. She was divorced and had a boy about my age [Milburn Klindt]. For the next four years the five of us lived together. My aunt worked and my mother kept the home fires burning. We were "cliff dwellers," living in one apartment after another, sharing the same fire escape with people we never bothered to learn the names of. Each time we moved we had a better place in which to live, but this apartment life is really for the birds. Very few of the apartments had any children mostly young working girls or older people who did not want the responsibilities that go with a house and lot. So there was little chance for boy girl association. My mother did a lot of church work and most of her associations were not with families. My cousin was more or less like a brother. We fought, quarreled, teased, worked, and played together. I think we tended to be self sufficient as a family and did not seek strong bonds outside the family. Part of this sufficiency was due to my mother's independent spirit.
About fifteen, I began complaining to my mother about not having a father. I felt a tremendous need for a man to talk to who could help me with some of my problems. I can't put my finger on any of them, but I wouldn't want to relive that phase of my life for all the tea in China.
Just as a well fed child does not know how it is to starve for the lack of food, so the girls whom I knew in adolescence, could not know how it is to be without a father.
One man, above all others, fulfilled this father role for me. He was the minister of our church, Dr. Mathieson, a man of real stature.
For two years I had been baby sitting with the Mathieson children. I liked and admired Dr. Mathieson and latched on to him as a confident. He was able to see and meet some of the needs I felt for a father. We spent many hours at the car stop, where I caught the car for home, just talking. He guided me in forming many of my ideals and attitudes. He met most of my boy friends. He was a good listener and one of the most important adults in my teen years. He was my ideal and no daughter could have been more proud than I, when I found his name in "Who's Who in America" when I was in college.
Years later, after I was married and had a family of my own, my mother told me that Dr. Mathieson had talked with her at the time and had told her of his role in meeting the need I felt for a father.
I spent a lot of time with a classmate and her family. Her dad and his father relation with his family made me feel more strongly than ever the lack of my own father and so I formed a strong but complex emotional attachment to this girl's family.
My major fear during adolescence was that something would happen to my mother and I would be sent to an orphanage. I was about seventeen when this fear was outgrown.
Our mother always discussed our financial problems with us. She answered out sex questions and we were prepared for menstruation. I knew very little about boys or men until I took a course in "How to Teach Sex in the Public Schools" while in college.
As far back as I can remember, I planned to go to college. My parents had planned I should go before I was born, however, I don't think they planned I should be going at forty two.
In the ninth grade I decided to become a teacher. I knew that I must be able to support myself and my family in case my life followed the unfortunate pattern of my mother's life.
Our mother tried to give us the advantage she felt our father wanted us to have. Also, he was used as leverage: "Your father would want you to take Latin." (I did and hated every moment). I took music lessons, too. "Your father would be proud of you," or "What would your father think of such behavior?"
A major crisis developed when I wanted to try my wings and go away to college. My mother thought it would be better for me and less costly for me to stay at home and go to the University of Denver. I wrote to the Colorado State College of Education in Greeley for information on cost and proved in black and white that she had no ground to stand on. Tuition at the University of Denver outweighed board and room. This illustrates the independent character of my psychological makeup. To this day, I like or dislike people for themselves alone, and my independent judgements are not shaken by social positions or the possession of money or position. I have never entertained my husband's "boss" because he was the "boss," nor have I tried to crash the "upper crust" bridge group. However, I know that I could crash it if I so desired.
I went away to school for three years. Then a teaching job was offered to me in 1936. This seemed to be on a silver platter since jobs were so hard to obtain. This job was in a consolidated school in the small town of Lyons, Colorado. I taught there for three years, saved my meager earnings, and went to school in the summers. My major aim at this time was to graduate from college.
While a junior in High School, I met the boy who was to be my husband. We saw each other occasionally when I came home from college. He was socially backward where girls were concerned, and although I had no strong feeling for him, and actually was "taken with" more glamorous boys, he was the steady type (he says "second fiddle") and kept coming by to see me.
We wrote infrequent letters while he was in Nevada and California working. Then he came back to Denver for a few weeks with his life's savings and plans to go to the University of Michigan to get his masters degree. I think it was at this time I decided he was the one for me: I thought he had matured. Perhaps I had done so. I had always compared all of my dates to him and none had ever measured up to him. He had high standards and ideals, was a real gentleman, and I always enjoyed being with him, even thought he seemed perpetually short of money. It is also true that I liked his family, especially his father. I am not sure that I am sufficiently introspective in nature to know in the fullest detail why I was "in love." I certainly had shopped around and in some ways had the cold calculating approach of a woman out to get the best coat for her money.
The spring before he came back through Denver, he had written from San Francisco asking me to come there to go to school, and that perhaps I would like to stay. He says that was a proposal, but I had plans to go to Madison, Wisconsin to school. This so called proposal was a guarded suggestion that would have allowed him to back out of any legal predicament had it seemed necessary.
I spent that summer at the University of Wisconsin in full enjoyment, far away from home and as independent as a bird on the wing.
The next summer, 1937, I went to school in Greeley. Then my sister and I drove with a sorority sister of mine to Madison to visit a mutual friend. My plans were to go on to Ann Arbor to see Vincent, but instead, he came to Madison. His father was in Chicago at the time, so my sister and I went with Vincent to Chicago where we were going to do some "rubber necking," then head for Denver. Four days later Vincent and I were married and he and I headed for Denver. After the wedding we shipped my sister off to Missouri. We sent wires to his mother and mine to come to Chicago, but they couldn't get away. (Oh, yes, my mother was married in January of 1937. I do not believe that her husband could have fulfilled the father role for me!)
I wanted to teach one more year and finish my college work for a degree. It would have been fatal, job wise, to let the townspeople know that I was Mrs. Barth. Therefore, the pattern I had set as a teacher for two years had to be continued. That was going home every two weeks.
Jobs were hard to find in my husband's field of Chemistry, so he left Denver in the early spring. Summer school again for me. We were together a few days to celebrate our first anniversary. Only our closest friends knew that we were married. I graduated in December 1938, sixteen months after getting married. I announced it at my sorority Christmas party. That was a relief. I guess the best reason for not saying that I was married when I went back to college was that married women just did not go to school.
As I look back at this first sixteen months of being married, I am amazed that it ever worked out. The mechanics of my adjustment to intercourse was, I am sure, much slower than average. The fear of getting pregnant was ever present when we were together on those few weekends. This relationship was more like an engagement with legal sex liberties. My husband seemingly fearing arrest part of the time. I had been to a doctor and was prepared, but I also knew of cases where "those things" didn't work.
By the time I had that important piece of paper, the degree, Vincent was working in Seattle. His mother and father were there on an assignment, also. As if it were yesterday, I can hear my mother saying, "The Barths will want you to live with them to help you out financially, but don't do it." We lived with the Barths four months. In a way, it was good I got to know his parents much better and they to know me. But that arrangement did not help us to become adjusted to each other, and we had a lot of it to do.
In 1940 we decided it was time to start our family. This was easier said than done in my case. An infection accompanying a ruptured appendix when I was eight had sealed the fallopian tubes. (If I had only known!) Finally, a gynecologist to whom I was going for treatment was able to correct the situation and in 1942 David was born. Duncan arrived in 1944, and in 1946 we hit the jackpot a girl, Naoma. As I recovered from delivery each time, I had blamed my husband for the sex of the two boys, so he thought he should have (and he got) credit for the sex of our female child.
We came to Columbus in 1947. Vincent's obsession to obtain a master's degree, first tried fourteen years earlier at Michigan (his life savings ran out), was still latent and now it rose up and dominated his thinking. During the six years of course at a time work at Ohio State University and some difficult job adjustments, I stood by him. I neither encouraged him strongly or discouraged him. But the children and I did endure a long siege of strain. In general, my husband and I have avoided "owning" each other, so that within the framework of our marriage, each of us has a fair amount of latitude.
At the same time, while each of us has subjected the other to small abuses (he has failed to fix dripping water faucets, I have failed to make the beds), neither of us had engaged in a major wrong. The tensions between us have largely been brought about by weariness from too many activities. In the occasional, typical small "discussions" between us, I have a ready tongue and a vocal defense mechanism close to the surface. If I feel that my husband is making a disparaging inference about me, I follow the idea that the best defense is a good offence. In about five sentences, and in a fairly sharp tone, I have catalogued the worst of his failings. This usually stops him cold since he lacks the ready tongue. On the other hand, he tends to sulk after such an encounter. I regard sulking a far worse trait than a sharp tongue, but I'm sure it is better that both of us are not expert in verbal attack procedures.
My technique in a domestic argument is a manifestation of my positive, somewhat aggressive nature. I have some tendency to call a spade a spade when I recognize it as a spade. (My husband thinks I might benefit by instruction in semantics, since he feels I sometimes tend to assume there is no other evaluation than mine.) Vincent tends to be introverted, more docile, yet unyieldingly stubborn on occasions. My tactic is to maneuver around these stubborn islands so that head on clashes are avoided. I tend to be comparatively uninhibited, more so than my husband.
One seemingly strange fact as far as my husband is concerned is that although I tend toward aggressiveness in dealing with problems sometimes, I am still very much of a female in the sexual approach to copulation, and cannot (and will not) permit a sexual encounter without at least a minimum duration of active passive male and female roles such as constitute a normal prelude to a satisfactory sex experience.
I like people and I rarely meet a stranger. I love teaching.
Our most fun as a family, I think, is camping. We usually spend two to four weeks each summer traveling and camping. I like gardening, bird watching, learning to know the trees and wild flowers. I enjoy most of the crafts and have taught adult classes metal tooling, metal enameling, and leather craft.
I have some vices. I tend to let things go that I don't want to do such as housework. If I should die in the night and have not done the dishes, someone else will do them and I will not have missed doing something more pleasant before I died. As I have said before, I have a sharp tongue. Sometimes I am opinionated. I do not readily admit that I am wrong.
Also I have some virtues. I am loyal. I am absolutely sincere and honest in marital relations. I have uncompromising personal moral principles. I have a good degree of tolerance for someone else's vices unless they are major vices such as drunkenness, infidelity, or cruelty. I am an affectionate wife and mother. I think I am a good manager, money wise.
From where I stand, life looks good to me. I am happy. I am doing some of the things I want to do. The things I want to do that I am not doing I will make time for in the future. I have a fine, happy, healthy, loving family, and a kind, loving, understanding husband. May God see fit to allow us more time on this earth together to enjoy the marriage we have built with love and devotion.
 |
This is a photo of Norma Barth with a Second Grade Class, probably taken in the mid-1950s at Sharon School in Worthington, Ohio. |
Post script written by Norma's eldest son, David in January 2008:
When Norma was about seven, she realized that she had not been given a middle name as had her younger sister, Ruby Fae Bell. Norma asked her mother why she didn't have a middle name like her sister and her friends did. Her mother, Hattie Elizabeth Bell, told Norma that she could have a middle name, and that all she had to do was choose one. Norma thought a minute and decided her middle name would be "Jane." She liked the sound of "Norma Jane Bell," and she used it throughout her life, but it was never an official name. Official records show her name as "Norma Bell."
At the time she wrote this autobiography in 1957, Norma was 43. After the three children had left home to begin their own lives, Norma and Vincent decided to do some traveling. Norma wanted to see Hawaii, and Vincent wanted to visit his grandfather's, Jacob Barth's, home country of Germany. Norma agreed to go to Germany if they visited Hawaii first. The Hawaiian visit was a highlight of her life.
In preparation for the trip to Germany, they purchased a new Mercedes Benz to be picked up from the Daimler factory in Stuttgart. On the trip, in July 1971, they went to the factory, picked up their new car, and drove it around Europe. In Apeldoorn, Holland, while Vincent was driving, they had an accident at a blind intersection. While they were making a left turn onto a thoroughfare, large truck suddenly appeared from their right, was unable to stop, and hit the Mercedes on Norma's side of the car. She was killed and Vincent sustained a concussion from which he recovered.
When she died, Norma was 57 years of age.