From: “Virginia DeMarce” <virginiademarce@yahoo.com>
Date: Mon Sep 23, 2002 5:24:24 PM US/Pacific
Subject: Darlene, Jenny, and the whole Pilcher menage
Here are Darlene and Jenny’s maiden/married names, along with an overview of:
The Pilcher Menage
Keith is short, stocky but not overweight, going bald on top, with the remaining hair a straight dishwater blond. He has risen to second-in-command for Ollie at the machine shop. He and Maxine, having very decent regular incomes for Grantville, have one of the newer three-bedroom ramblers on the outskirts of town (mortgaged to an out-of-town bank that no longer exists).
The background of Keith:
Keith Raymond Pilcher, born 28 October 1968 in Detroit, MI. His father, Albert Raymond Pilcher, was working there in an automobile factory (union man, but sort of lackadaisical about it); his mother, Stella (nee Burroughs) was a housewife. In 1973, Albert and Stella broke up. She moved back to Grantville to live with her father, bringing her sons Keith and Lyman along (Lyman, who moved to Pittsburgh, didn’t make the trip to the 1632-verse).
Stella went to work clerking groceries (which she is still doing, and rather whining about all the changes in her job, but then Stella always did whine and people are used to it). The boys spent summers with their Dad, but went to school in Grantville. When Keith graduated from high school, he went to live with his Dad for two years of technical college; then went into the army for two years for experience (heavy equipment maintenance), and then came back to Grantville, because when they were juniors in high school, he and Maxine had decided (1) that they were going to get married, but (2) they weren’t going to frazzle anyone about it by moving too fast.
Keith’s wife:
Maxine Mae Pilcher (nee Maddox) was born 19 February 1969 in Grantville. At 5’6″, she’s almost an inch taller than Keith, and thinner than she ought to be (caused by the high level of exercise when one is chasing kindergartners around all day). She has been forced to give up tinting her hair Autumn Copper by the exhaustion of Grantville’s hair dye supplies. To her great dismay, she has discovered that the light brown that she thought was under the tint has been going prematurely gray.
Maxine got her degree in elementary education (early childhood emphasis) at WV State University at Morgantown. She and Keith married in June 1992, right after she graduated. She got a job right away teaching kindergarten in Grantville and that’s what she’s been doing ever since, with very limited time out for the arrivals of Joshua Raymond Pilcher (age 7 the summer of 1631 in the 1632-verse) and Megan Mae Pilcher (age 5 the summer of 1631 in the 1632-verse). Maxine and Keith consider their family to be complete and she is far from happy about the disappearance of reliable contraceptive methods in the RoF.
Maxine has two sisters still in Grantville:
Jenny Rae Maddox, age 38. Jenny, the oldest Maddox girl, never wanted to marry and never did. She got an AA degree in business at a community college, has worked as receptionist for the funeral home in [town equivalent to Fairmont] for 18 years, and has the dressy wardrobe to go with the job. She’s taller than Maxine, bigger boned, broader in the shoulders, and generally what my grandfather called, `a fine figure of a woman.’ It was widely suspected in Grantville that she and her former employer (a married man!) had a long-term, meaningful, relationship, but Jenny never talked. She kept living with the Maddox parents who having acquired an RV and taken to spending the winters in Florida were left behind in the RoF. Jenny now has the Old Maddox House and also has, given the circumstances, four of the college girls who were at Tom and Rita’s wedding as boarders. She has assumed the management of one of Grantville’s own funeral parlors (the owner died shortly after the RoF and left no heirs in Grantville, so it escheated to the town and is now one of the main income sources that keep the town hall budget afloat).
and
Darlene Kae Szymanski (nee Maddox), age 32, the youngest Maddox girl. Darlene isn’t fat, everyone agrees, but she’s hippy. She got married right out of high school and has been working for the Grantville veterinarian ever since. She and Bob Szymanski have a nine-year-old daughter, Kayla Brooke Szymanski. Bob formerly worked as a general mechanic at the largest filling station in Grantville he’s now been pulled into vehicle maintenance for the NewUS army. They hadn’t intended to have any more kids, because one was all they could really afford, especially if she wanted to go to college you know what tuition is costing these days and goodness only knows how much it will have gone up by the time Kayla is 18. But now, post-RoF, they are talking about increasing the Szymanski family just on the general principle that when you’ve left so much behind, you ought to start making up for it.
The fourth and fifth Maddox sisters, Donna Jae and Carole Fae (twins, age 36), had married and moved to Morgantown. It is a great comfort to Maxine, Jenny, and Darlene that Donna and Carole are still in the Old US with their parents.
Yes, of course, Mr. and Mrs. Maddox deliberately did that to their daughters’ middle names. This is, after all, the Spirit of West Virginia 🙂
Virginia