Third Time’s a Charm
Cody Kirby was a handsome rascal who caught my aunt Helen’s eye too soon. She was only 19 when they married in 1936; her father built the couple a house in Galen, Tennessee, next to his own on Pumpkintown Road, where Cody’s parents also lived. Cody was the second son born to farmer Connie Kirby and Minnie Blankenship; their first boy lived only 10 days. After Cody’s birth in 1917, 10 more babies came along. Cody and Helen had no children and divorced sometime after 1940. He died of lung cancer at age 79.
The divorce from Cody Kirby didn’t mean my aunt Helen had lost her taste for rakish men. The Tennessee girl moved to Louisville, where she found employment in a cigarette factory and met Gilbert Newton, a Kentucky-born World War II veteran who had grown up on a farm with four brothers and four sisters. In 1949, Helen, 30, and Gilbert, 32, married. What made her say “yes” may have been the hat, the one he always wore, tilted just so. It suited a man who smoked cigars and drank too much. Childless, they divorced in 1960; he died in 1997, at age 80.
Time was running out to get it right and so, in 1961, my aunt Helen, 42, married Frank Kessinger, another Kentuckian with a tilt to his hat. Small, lean and crackling with energy, he could fix anything, including his own breakfast. At 46, he came with a teenage son, and the three of them settled down to a life of work, school and church. They took in her elderly mother. On Friday evenings in the summer, Frank mowed the lawn and enjoyed his weekly can of beer, about which Helen fussed a little. When she developed Alzheimer’s, he tenderly cared for her until he couldn’t. Helen died at 71; Frank at 81. Married 28 years, they lie together in a Louisville cemetery.
