My Lobotomy

Chapter 1 June This much I know for sure: I was born in Peralta Hospital in Oakland, California, on November 30, 1948. My parents were Rodney Lloyd Dully and June Louise Pierce Dully. I was their first child, and they named me Howard August Dully, after my father's father. Rodney was twenty-three. June was thirty-four. They had been married less than a year. Their wedding was held on Sunday, December 28, 1947, three days after Christmas, at one o'clock in the afternoon, at the Westminster Presbyterian Church in Sacramento, California. The wedding photographs show an eager, nervous couple. He's in white tie and tails, with a white carnation in his lapel. She's in white satin, and a veil decorated with white flowers. They are both dark-haired and dark-eyed. Together they are cutting the cakestaring at the cake, not at each otherand smiling. A reception followed at 917 Forty-fifth Street, at the home of my mother's uncle Ross and aunt Ruth Pierce. My father's mother attended. So did his two brothers. One of them, his younger brother, Kenneth, wore a tuxedo all the way up from San Jose on the train. My father's relatives were railroad workers and lumberjack types from the area around Chehalis and Centralia, Washington. My dad spent his summers in a lumber camp with one of his uncles. They were logging people. My father's father was an immigrant, born in 1899 in a place called Revel, Estonia, in what would later be the Soviet Union. When he left Estonia, his name was August Tulle. When he got to America, where he joined his brothers, Alexander and John he had two sisters, Marja and Lovisa, whom he left behind in Estoniahe was called August Dully. He later added the first name Howard, because it sounded American to him. My father's mother was the child of immigrants from Ireland. She was born Beulah Belle Cowan in Litchfield, Michigan, in 1902. Her family later moved to Portland, Oregon, in time for Beulah to attend high school, where she was so smart she skipped two grades. August went to Portland, too, because that's where his brothers were. According to his World War I draft registration card, he was brown-haired, blue-eyed, and of medium height. He got work as a window dresser for the Columbia River Ship Company. He became a mason. He met the redheaded Beulah at a dance. She told her mother that night, "I just met the man I'm going to marry." She was sixteen. A short while later, they tied the knot and took a freighter to San Francisco for their honeymoon, and stayed. A 1920 U.S. Census survey shows them living in an apartment building on Fourth Street. Howard A. Dully was now a naturalized citizen, working as a laborer in the shipyards. Sometime after, they moved to Washington, where my grandfather went to work on the railroads. They started having sonsEugene, Rodney, and Kennethbefore August got sick with tuberculosis. Beulah believed he caught it on that freighter going to San Francisco. He died at home, in bed, on New Year's Day, 1929. My dad was three years old. His baby brother was only fourteen months old. Beulah Belle never remarried. She was hardheaded and strong-willed. She said, "I will never again have a man tell me what to do." But she had a hard time taking care of her family. She couldn't keep up payments on the house. When she lost it, the boys went to stay with relatives. My dad was sent to live with an aunt and uncle at age six, and was shuffled from place to place after that. By his own account, he lived in six different cities before he finished high schoolborn in Centralia, Washington; then shipped around Oregon to Marshfield, Grants Pass, Medford, and Eugene; then to Ryderwood, Washington,Dully, Howard is the author of 'My Lobotomy ', published 2007 under ISBN 9780307381262 and ISBN 0307381269.