My In Between Uncles

My other uncles on Mother`s side were Marlin Dewey Phillips and Garland Roy Phillips.  I knew Garland the least.  He tried to farm out by Freedom in his earlier adult years.  He couldn`t make a go of it, pulled up and moved to Washington state.  There he farmed a truck farm.  I remember visiting there at about age 6 and seeing irrigation ditches, foreign to me, and the cannery where he sold his vegetables.  Garland suffered from a mild form of epilepsy.

Marlin went to OU in the late 1920`s.  He was short, maybe 5' 8", but played football there.  I researched those years.  They didn`t have  very successful seasons about that time.  I remember people referring to him as Uncle Stub.  He was a pharmacist and set up a drugstore in Mooreland until his first wife died of diptheria leaving him with an infant son, Martin George.  He moved to California and lived there until Martin George at age 5 died after a tonsillectomy.  He had always promised his son he could visit Grandma Phillips on the farm.  When Marlin brought him home to bury next to his mother he took him to the farm to lie in state.  It was so cold the flowers around the casket froze in the unheated room.  Marlin returned to California, eventually married again, and had a daughter Marlene who was an artist.  The flower painting (supposedly done by a new technique Marlene developed) in my blue bedroom is her work.  She married beneath her according to her parents and had several children.  Marlin was the one who gave the old pictures of the great grandparents to me when they divided up things of Grandma Phillips.  Told me an old fashioned gift to go with an old fashioned husband of my future.

The other uncle on Dad`s side was Leo Joseph Balk or Joseph Leo we`re not sure which is first name.  He was a school teacher but developed a brain tumor that took his life at an early age.  He had 2 sons and a daughter.  The girl died young.  My dad always thought it from a botched abortion.  One son was mentally retarded and lived out his life in a nursing home in Enid.  The other son I never knew but grew to adulthood and had a family.