The man stayed for seventeen years, and though it felt crowded at times, the Reichsteins were good to him and treated him like family.
Mabel inherited her parents’ compassion, and she, too, developed a reputation for her generosity. She fell in love with Bret Beem Bisbee, a man every bit as kind as she was. They married in February 1923 when she was twenty and Bret was twenty-one. They were living on the south side of Macedonia near the railroad tracks when The Great Depression hit. Hobos rode the rails, stowaways in empty boxcars, and a steady stream of them hopped off on the south side of Macedonia. From there, they walked to town where they could spend a night in jail and get a free meal.
Word soon got out that a nice lady who lived near the railroad tracks never turned away a hungry person who knocked on her door. It was Mabel, of course. She and Bret had their own cows, and they were happy to share the milk. Mabel handed each man a thick slice of home-baked bread with sugar and a glass of milk. So many vagrants showed up that sometimes it seemed there wouldn’t be enough food to go around, but Mabel somehow always managed to feed everyone.
Mabel and Bret had four children, including Nancy’s father, Max. They eventually moved away from the house by the tracks and bought a home closer to town. The new Bisbee house would stay in the family for decades. It would one day be Cari’s house, and she loved the fact that Mabel’s old dresser held a place of honor in her bedroom.
Nancy wished that Cari could have met her Great-Grandpa Bret. He died at age seventy before Cari was born. “Grandpa had rheumatic fever when he was a kid and had an enlarged heart. I don’t believe his childhood was as loving and caring as my grandmother’s. As he was getting better, his father made him work on the farm, even though he probably shouldn’t have been working so hard. It affected his health for the rest of his life.”
Mabel, however, lived till she was ninety-six, nearly three decades without Bret. Cari had twenty-four years to bond with her great-grandmother Mabel, and the two were close. Mabel could expertly twist Cari’s fine blond hair into a magnificent French braid, something Nancy admits that she could never master. “Grandma had a way with all of her grandkids. In all of my life, I never heard her say anything cross or bad about anyone. She never raised her voice. She was a very special lady.”
Though Cari had not met Great-Grandpa Bret, she heard lots of stories about him from her mother. Nancy looked up to him and was so proud to share a Fourth of July birthday with her grandfather. “My grandpa loved kids. He was a bus driver the entire time I was in school here. All the kids loved riding on his bus,” she says, emphasizing it was easy for him to keep the peace because the kids respected him too much to misbehave.
While Cari inherited the Bisbee heart of gold, she got her musical talent from her Grandma Ella Luanne Clark, who always went by Luanne and became a Bisbee when she married Max. Not only could Luanne sing, she played the piano. She studied vocal performance at Simpson College in Indianola, Iowa, and mesmerized audiences with her beautiful soprano voice. While she sometimes performed in public arenas, her stage was most often Macedonia’s Methodist Church where she was frequently called upon to sing at special events.
Her talent was actually passed down daughter to daughter—from Luanne to Nancy to Cari. From the time Cari was a tiny girl, she and her mom would sing along with tapes of their favorite musicians, Billy Joel, Emmylou Harris, and Ricky Lee Jones. “We would dance around the house singing, and when we listened to music in the car, we sang at the top of our lungs!” They harmonized beautifully and knew they sounded good. They were talented singers and actresses, and though neither pursued careers in the arts, they were active in their community theater. Nancy performed there recently, playing a nun in Sister Act, and Cari also performed there over the years. A framed 1985 photograph hanging in the theater shows Cari, at age eleven, among the costumed cast members of The Miracle Worker. “She played one of Helen Keller’s friends,” Nancy recalls. “When she was in fifth or sixth