One hundred and 40 years ago today, a baby boy was born at a homestead outside of Wapello, Iowa. His parents, Jasper and Rebecca Riggs, named him George Oliver.
The birth occurred on a Saturday, two days after Thanksgiving – a national celebration that President Lincoln initiated in 1863. Now it was 1870, Lincoln had been in his grave for five years, and former Union Gen. Ulysses S. Grant had become president.
I can’t say whether that day in 1870 was a raw, windy day, a snowy one or one filled with sunshine. Perhaps an old Farmers’ Almanac could enlighten me. Because I have few details to go on, I choose to picture a fictional scene where Rebecca is assisted by a kindly neighbor in a curtained off area of the home, while Jasper entertains 5-year-old daughter Loie with songs and stories. It’s like something out of Little House on the Prairie, which probably is a reasonable comparison. Charles “Pa” Ingalls and his family traversed the Midwest around the same time that the Riggs family did; Laura Ingalls was born in Wisconsin three years before G. Oliver’s birth.
Like Pa, Jasper Riggs played the violin and was handy with a rifle. Unlike Pa, Jasper was a Civil War veteran who’d served in Grant’s Army. Toward the war’s end, Jasper was shot in the left leg at Jonesboro, N.C. The ball lodged against the bone below his knee and was never removed. The constant pain he experienced made it difficult for him to resume farming when he returned home to Mercer County, Illinois. He and his wife and daughter moved to southwest Missouri for four years and then to Iowa.
Jasper and Rebecca’s good fortune with the birth of their son was followed by heartbreak in 1871 when Loie died. Although the 6-year-old’s death was mentioned in Rebecca’s obituary, I’ve yet to learn the cause.
The family moved next to Nebraska, where daughter Daisy was born, and where Jasper ran a general store in the town of Dorchester. A year or two later, the family moved to Kansas, but by 1880 they were back in Dorchester, and Jasper went into the hardware business with his father-in-law.
Like the Ingalls children, G. Oliver and Daisy spent some time in a one-room schoolhouse. In Dorchester, 10-year-old Oliver, as he was known then, received excellent marks in his October 1881 report: 100 percent in deportment and no tardies. This nugget of information, gleaned from a school report published in the local paper, would not surprise those who knew him in his later years as a punctual and exacting man with excellent posture.
After the death of Rebecca’s father in 1883, Jasper continued the hardware business for three more years before moving his family back to Kansas. By this time. G. Oliver played E-flat cornet, violin, piano, and organ, and he decided to start his own band. He was either 15 or 16 years old; G. Oliver’s own accounts offer differing dates. In 1886, he enrolled at the Oberlin College Conservatory of Music, and after taking some breaks to earn money for tuition, he graduated in 1892.
Despite the information I’ve accumulated, and the hours I’ve spent pouring over brittle scrapbooks and scouring blurry newspaper accounts on microfilm, I’ve been unable to pinpoint when and why G. Oliver decided to become a musician. It’s fun to speculate about how it all started, though. Was it in the womb, influenced by his mother, an accomplished accordionist? Did he find his calling when, as a toddler, he perched on the knee of his champion fiddler father?
Reflecting upon his career decades later, G. Oliver told a newspaper reporter that he first learned music by ear.
“I don’t remember when I couldn’t play some instrument,” he told the St. Cloud Daily Times when he retired in May 1944. “I started on the mouth organ, and later played anything else I could get my hands on.”
It’s difficult for me to picture G. Oliver as a baby. Sadly, we have no pictures of him before the age of 15. But it isn't difficult to imagine him being able to create music from an early age, as naturally as learning to walk or speak. He was, after all, a true music man.
Happy Birthday, Great-Grandfather. May your legacy endure for at least another 140 years.
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