The 1920 census showed George living at 432 SW 3rd Street. He was an "Electrician, Electric Company." He lived with May, George, Jr., and Mary.
Books: Alice's Adventures In Wonderland by Lewis Carroll- George Hayward Fairfield, Ind Xmas 98
Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll- George Hayward Fairfield, Ind Jan 98.
Hammond's Handy Atlas of the World- G.H. Hayward 1917.
George Homsher Hayward, early 1960's tape: "This is George Homsher Hayward and I am going to start out with my grandfather, Thomas E. Hayward, who was born in [Salina (?), Carolina (?)], and he married a girl by the name of tilda Proctor and she came from Union City. So they moved to a little town by the name of Alquina, a little distance from Connersville and they had a store there and they didn't stay there very long and they moved away from there after a little while and went to Fairfield, Indiana and started a store there and what they had was a general store and my grandfather he run a huckster wagon about five days out of the week and one day he would take his stuff to Brookville and ship it to Cincinnatta and my father was born in Alquina and he was..and that was back in '55, eighteen and fifty five and so he stayed in the store he got to be a young man he stayed in the store with my grandmother while grandfather huckstered. And there was a family of us two sisters and two others now I was the brother the baby for about fourteen years and then my younger brother was born. And so we stayed in Fairfield there until I was about thirteen and then we moved to Richmond, Indiana.
June: "You took us back to the Grandfather, could you remember anything of the family before that, for instance it seems to me that I've heard you say that your mother was born in Kentucky?
"And I'll tell you about my mother. She was born in Elizabethtown [J: no, Petersburg], Kentucky and stayed there awhile, and her mother passed away when she was about two years old and an aunt and uncle raised her by the name of Stage. And they lived in Greensburg. And my father and mother were together all that time and up until nineteen and forty they lived together all that there time and I like to tell you.
J: "Just one thing about this store business, if I remember the store was a general store and Jacob Joel was the Postmaster, and perhaps his father was before him and he also had the town band in which he played the coronet, and Uncle Tom played the drums and you'll also tell about your brothers and sisters.
"Well, as I say I stayed down to Fairfield and when they moved to Richmond for a while and we had the telephone put in and that's the first telephone that was in that town and I made the first call on that. I rode uh horseback to about...six miles and I charged the fella 50 cents and he liked ta had a fit. (laughter)
J: "We're having more fun here than we are adding to the history of the family.
(May talks for the while)
J: "Did you name your sisters?
"I was the baby for fourteen years and along come another one and knocked my nose out of joint. That's the only one that's left in our family now, he's a Paul is his name and a he's the only one that's left.
(May talks for a while)
J: "I'm wondering what happened about the telephone in Fairfield, Indiana, and Dad is going to tell us about that.
"I'll finish that story now about the telephone message. Some people used to live in Fairfield there and they moved to Harrison, don't know if it was Ohio or Indiana, it was right on the line but anyhow, her father lived here in Fairfield over about six miles from Fairfield so of course at that time we didn't have automobiles so we was the first people to have a telephone this was the only telephone and it was in the grocery store and this call come in she wanted her father to know about this new grandson so I took the message, it was at night, and she wanted me to take it right away so I jumped on the horse and started for this place and I finally found him I didn't know exactly where they lived but found him and told him about this here grandson and uh he didn't say much and I told him, I says that'll be 50 cents and he said, well that's not worth fifty cents to be a grandfather but anyway ah he paid me the fifty cents but boy it was like pulling teeth."
The (Unpublished) biography of George C. Hayward: "...George Homsher Hayward, born November 30, 1885, progressed from grocery store clerk, to street car conductor, to motorman, to interurban (Indianapolis to Dayton, Ohio) motorman, to roofing business partner with father-in-law, to electrical contractor, with store and shop at the northwest corner of East Main and Fifth Streets in Richmond."
"...I...was born in Richmond, Indiana at 432 Southwest Third Street in a house built for the family. In 1912, my father moved the family temporarily to West Alexandria, Ohio due to job relocation. An older sister, Alice, died in the same month that Mary was born there."
George and May at top right
"There had been a vigorous pursuit [for violin lessons], climaxing with a paternal threat that, if resistance to practice or desire to change instruments again became the subjects of debate, the fickle musician would be "pitched out that window, followed shortly by the instrument!"
George described Junior high activities: "...weekend camping at the Burgess Farm, south of Centerville; work horse bareback riding; corn plowing and tomato picking at Uncle Ed Horner's in Sugar Valley, south of Eaton, Ohio; skinny dipping at Flat Rock in Clear Creek, west of Earlham College (which was 3 blocks from home); playing marbles and mumbledepeg; kite flying; building go-carts which fell apart, boats which sank, and radios, with Roger Lindley, which never transmitted nor received...The father-son relationship was good, with rabbit-squirrel-quail hunts as annual outings. Even the neighborhood mothers-and-kids dandelion digging picnics, and visits to nearby Earlham Cemetary (where rested family members back to great-grandparents) were fun. The first out-of-state venture was to Cincinnati to visit the Zoo and its Opera, Coney Island Amusement Park via the Island Queen, and to cross the mighty Ohio River and climb the Kentucky Hills. The biggest trip was to Chicago, marked by having lock the doors at the height of the Al Capone gangster regime, and getting to drive the Overland Sedan all the way home at age fifteen (no driver's license required then).
"The S.W. Third Street home was rented the last two years before college. The second and third floors of the electric store at 5th and Main became a temporary home because the whole family worked there almost around the clock. Living quarters were included in the store rental. It was also a way to close out a 10-year free boarding/rooming house situation for a parade of foster children, cousins, and other relatives looking for work and deciding to 'stay for a while.' About this time, Hayward grandparents needed personal care and persuaded their son and family to move in with them. They had built a 1900 two-story building for their grocery store business. Located on the northeast corner of West Main and N.W. 1st Sts., at the west end of the Main Street Bridge, it had good living quarters upstairs."
The dog, Tippie was given to George C. by a schoolteacher friend of his cousin Virginia Jones. She ran wild and got into rat poison, and became "inhibited." She got into rat poison again and ended up dead. They buried her in the back yard in a burlap bag.
George C. Hayward, Rearranged Interview (1994): "Dad did not finish school. The family, living in Fairfield, decided to move to Richmond and he didn't want to go. He stayed with his grandparents and so, OK. But he would go to school there, but he didn't stay in school. In fact he got a big kick out of dropping from the second floor window down to the ground, to the floor, so that he could cut school. So, then he finally did go up to Richmond, but he didn't go into school, so he never, I don't think he even...I guess he barely got into high school, but he quit and got a job. He didn't like school; didn't like it at all. "Dad didn't [have a fine writing hand]. His was a scribble. He could care less, but hers was fine.
"Now Dad was not that much of a student but he certainly must have had a lot of abilities from the fact that he came up from this little bitty town south of Richmond and although he started out as a streetcar conductor he started his own business finally, or bought a business of the Crane Electric Company and managed it very well. But in the meantime, mother was a fine stenographer- bookkeeper and that's what she did for the operation of the Crane Electric Company...never changed the name of it even though it bore the name of the former owner, but they...uh...
J.G.: "When did they buy it?
George: "It was in the very early twenties and that coincided with the invention and beginning of the promotion of the Frigid-Aire...the electric refrigerator, the very first one that was ahead of Kelvinator and the rest of them. It began in Dayton, Ohio about 35 miles to the east of Richmond, and Dad got the franchise for that and he hired the then-current mayor of Liberty, Indiana south of Richmond and put to work about half a dozen salesmen and two servicemen. Then it was very successful, in fact he practically and really did sell everybody that was available and eligible financially and so on in the City of Richmond with electric refrigerators and I was employed by him too. I don't remember what he paid me but I'm sure he did because he was very fair. It was my job to clear the basement of the store to receive the shipment of Frigid-Aires in the basement that then would be unwrapped so to speak, uncrated, ready for installation the next week. Every week, that basement was filled with refrigerators and emptied...a very successful operation and when he retired, it was remarkable...there'd been so many people, other electrical contractors who were after his franchise...he was not at all reluctant to give it up because after all he'd sold the whole town. Anyway, I think it was the Richmond Electrical Company who got the franchise but with that they had the obligation of servicing all of these refrigerators he'd sold so that they didn't have any possibilities of selling any but they had the responsibility of servicing all of these refrigerators.
1998
"And then in our house, in our room my dad being in the electrical business, they came out with a kind of a gadget that you could put onto the faucet and I don't remember, it must have had an electrical connection that would heat the water. And, gosh, that was a very primitive arrangement, but that's what it was. That's how we had our hot water. And even when our part of town was developed, Dad had his house built by...took great pride in myself in having been in charge of building two houses by myself for my own living and family But he had, when they built that particular area, they had no sewer facilities momentarily so every house had to have with it a kind of outhouse, privy or whatever thing you want to call it. I don't remember having to use that as a kid because it was very shortly after that they installed sewer lines so that we had inside toilets and the house was built with a bathroom and toilet facilities too. But then we converted that outhouse into a workshop. It wasn't very big, but it was big enough to accommodate a vise, workbench and so on, but that was in the back yard of course. In fact the people next door to us they still retained that outhouse at their place. I remember there was an oldish woman and her son who lived there and she was forever going back and forth...Meissner was her name, Freddy and Mrs. Meissner.
"I remember there was a Starr piano in it. I remember that bay window that I...yes, I remember the layout of the house. It was peculiar, my dad had that built, as I told you, and...but put off doing anything about the second floor. And it was a problem with that because of having to create a stairway. And I remember that you went, of course, from the living room through a little vestibule into the kitchen or to a bedroom or to the bathroom and a bedroom to the front of the house off the living room, oddly enough, too. Only one bathroom, of course, but that little hallway between the living room and the kitchen was so small that it was a problem of being able to create a stairway. It was almost like you'd have a fireman's pole, something to get up there. I remember going up there, we'd just use it as an attic. But you had a step-ladder to get up to it. But...so it was never designed...as a matter of fact, my folks were very generous. Uncle Ed had two of his daughters, Ada and Sarah, who were ten years or more older than I, and they came up to Richmond to work as secretaries, and so the folks housed them and that put me out of the bedroom and I had to sleep on a couch in the living room and that didn't bother me particularly, I just accepted it. No, it was in the dining room. It was a roll away bed. But then after they left, got married, then Uncle "Dutch" Snyder, who was from Fairfield came up...
"Then we built a garage too. Come to think of it, two car garage and oh I was so proud. In high school, I was in high school and I elected for our final project in metal work class was to build a basketball goal. Had to take a steel rod and shape it on an anvil so that it would make a circle and then I had the 2 support things for it and had to weld those on to it and put it up onto the garage. And that was really an accomplishment. But it was a crowd because we also had a flagpole going up on there. It was always in the way of the shots. Couldn't very well bank the shots because it was no backboard to the thing. But that was what the house was like. It had a nice front porch on it and I used to peek when Sarah was dating with Raymond Erk...
"My dad, he was a pretty good entrepreneur. Across the street but down about 4 or 5 lots he bought another lot besides having the lot on which our house was. A vacant lot, and his idea in buying it was to finance at least my start at college. And I think he paid like $90 for it or something and it was a good sized lot. Probably, well, at most it was 50 feet wide and 150 feet, just about comparable to this property here, but not quite as wide. And so I had developed gardens over there and I raised even potatoes as I got older and tomatoes and carrots and...it was pretty profitable because the soil was very good but he finally sold it because he got a good sale. Oh, between that lot and the house across the street, the Daggats lived. There were these three or four other lots and on all of them I developed a baseball field and installed bases and a sand pit for high jumping and pole vaulting...did a lot of that over there. But it was a good playground. It became a playground for the whole neighborhood.
"When we lived momentarily with the grandparents there on 1st and West Main Street, there was a church nearby they called the English Lutheran Church. And on my own, I went to Sunday school there. The folks didn't go and then when we built the house on SW 3rd, we were close to Earlham College, and I went out to the Quaker church there for Sunday school and from the time I was six years old, I never missed a time. Then, however, and my mother, it bothered her that Dad wouldn't go to church. The reason he wouldn't go was that as soon as he got related to the First Christian Church, the Disciples of Christ denomination, he got a...they hired him to do some work at the church and by golly the first time he went there to do some work, the paneling in the doorway all fell in, in the vestibule of the church. And he took that as an omen that he wasn't supposed to do anything in a church. So he not only didn't take the job, he left it hanging. He also didn't go to church at all. That was his story. And mother was provoked, she gave money to the church, and the preacher would come around from the church and spend some time discussing things with her. She invited me to get interested in the Bible.
"He took me along [hunting] many times. Several times, I remember going hunting. And it was mostly rabbit or squirrel or sometimes quail. And he had an array of guns that were very good, in fact I've still got a rifle. He had a .22 Remington rifle, and a shotgun, he had a nice pistol, and he would take me along. I don't know that he would put me on the gun as I was too young to be allowed to do that, but he was a good shot. And we'd always bring home stuff to eat.
J.G.: "Where would you go?
George: "We would go down south of Richmond into the Garfield Woods areas, but I don't know that...I guess they were just farms that people he knew and would allow him to do that. And we had...always had a pick-up truck as opposed to a car because the pick-up truck was with the business, the company, I remember that so well. That was before the days of automatic, electrically controlled windshield-wipers. And you had to open up the windshield and wipe it off from the inside sometimes.
"Dad wouldn't [go to violin recitals]...he'd be bored by doing something like that. He had to be running things. He had to be in something. So he wouldn't sit in an audience and listen to something like that. He...I remember he complimented me one time one of the few times, though he was always so nice to me. But we had, at the end of the baseball season in which George's team had been playing. We had a family picnic and they had a keg of beer there and everything which attracted Dad, so in any event, we had a made-up baseball team divided amongst the kids, and I played short stop. And a couple of hot liners came right at me and I snagged them. Then I was very happy with that and by golly, he came around to me and he said, "You're a pretty good ball player." Ha ha. I about fell over. But we started that ball game and they decided I would be pitcher...it was softball although the kids were playing hard ball in our league. So I started pitching and I pitched a couple balls and George was playing short stop and he came over to me and he says, "This is slow pitch." I didn't know, I'd never heard of slow pitch. Do you know about slow pitch?
J.G. "I don't know anything about slow pitch.
George: "So I had to learn to...I gave up. I didn't know how to slow pitch. You had to make a big arch to it and so on, so I moved on over to short stop.
"He was a husky guy. I remember one time...generally, at the ends of the summers when I was playing in dance bands, as a little vacation thing for them, they'd come after me. Whether it was at Totnabee [?} at the northern part of the southern Lower Peninsula of Michigan or up into Wisconsin or wherever, and one time then we stayed over night in...near Grand Rapids, Michigan, and we went swimming. I got pictures there someplace. I can remember Mary being in that picture. She was along too. And she was leaning up against Dad with her legs crossed like this, maybe you've seen it sometime and sometime or another he and I got into an wrestling match, and got quite a crowd around us. Course he was so strong and everything that I couldn't have possibly...even though it was all fun anyway. But that's something for a father and son to get in a wrestling match. I was in my late 20's by then, was I? Yeh. But those were nice things to do. And it was a funny thing. When they came up after me in Wisconsin that one summer, and they got there ahead of where I was playing the last night in the dance band, and I saw Dad standing out there, and smiling and everything, and waving to me, after he says, "You know, outside of when you'd be in a parade, or playing in a band in Richmond, you know this is the first time I ever heard you play." And he got a big kick out of it and I was glad that...
"The Palladium newspaper for which cousin Horace, son of one of my sisters...my Mother's sisters, was in charge of circulation I think for the Palladium-Item newspaper. And so they employed Dad. I think he had done a lot of work installing electrical equipment for them as a part of his business and so it was a natural thing for going to get to him for repair work after he retired and then it just came very natural to hire him to be in charge of all their equipment. So that was what he busied himself with. He played golf with me a few times, but he...there wasn't much extra time apparently, he kept busy.
Newspaper Article 9/25/52?: "George Hayward, plant maintenance man and electrician, completed his last day here on Thursday of this wek. He and Mrs. Hayward plan to spend the winter in Birmingham, Ala., with their son-in-law and daughter, Mr. and Mrs. Robert Gennett.
"George began employment here, early in 1943, during the war, when it was particularly important that all electrical equipment be maintained, and supplies and electricians were on the hard-to-get list.
"All Palladium-Item personnel wish him good luck in his new role of semi-retirement."
George C. Hayward, letter (1994): "I just thought of a 'dinger' about my Dad. He didn't indulge at all in liquor, except beer. So, with Prohibition a reality, he undertook to brew some beer in the cellar. All went well until one night the cellar seemed to be attacked by cavalry-- the beer got wild and exploded all the bottles all over the cellar. I thought it was funny- he didn't. Dad's middle name (Homsher) came from the Doctor who brought him. His mother was enamored with the Doctor, and, in fact, she wanted all her children to get into Medicine- especially Paul. Granddaughter, Virginia, whom she raised for deceased mother, became famous from being a nurse."
George Hayward, Interview (1994): "My Dad ended his life down at your place in Alabama as he was visiting down there. I remember something of his good sense of humor as I, when I found out that he was in bad shape, I drove down, I flew down on the plane and then drove back in his car, which he had driven down. He was very proud of it. It was a 1950 Pontiac, one of the first 8-Cylinder Pontiacs. So anyway, I visited him at the hospital and he said, "I've got one last request, if I'm gonna have to give up on this deal, is I want you to get me a casket in Richmond, bring it down here and strap it on the top of the car, but put me in it first and put me up on the top of the car." And he did it just to be silly. But that was his kind of macabre sense of humor. One of the most memorable things with him was the fact that I started piano lessons when I was six years old and at the end of six months we gave a piano recital and I did all right. And I came home and I put the music the couch or someplace and so I kissed it goodbye and they said "What's this all about?" And I said "Well, I don't need any more lessons, you heard them all applaud me after I played my piece. I know how to play." Well, they looked kind of griped about it, but they didn't complain. Until I started on them. I wanted to learn how to play the violin. And with that in mind, it meant that there had to be a purchasable violin and I had to take the lessons and all that sort of stuff and my mother thought that would be alright. My dad was the one to make the big decision. So we, uh, she said talk to your father so I sat down with him in the living room and we had a nice bay window at the end of the room and we sat there. And I explained the whole thing to him. And he listened patiently and he was mostly just a fun guy, but he was being very serious and he said "OK," finally, "We'll do it, but if I ever hear that you want to play another instrument or don't want to practice you're going to go right out that window and it's going to be closed when you go through it and the violin's gonna go right with you, too."
The Officer of City Controller, Richmond, Ind., licensed George as an Electrical Contractor, Jan. 3, 1958, address 321 S. 15th Street. A membership card to the Fraternal Order of Eagles 5-25-68 identifies him as a 40 year member. An Ohio drivers license described him as born 11-30-85, 5'4" with grey eyes and grey hair, living at 5148 Salem Hills Lane in Cincinnati; a license from Indiana 11/65, address 514 1/2 West Main in Richmond describes him as Grey eyes, 160 pounds 5'5." In 1966 he registered a 1950 Pontiac 4S; I remember it as a Chieftain, light sea green, with a visor, and woven plastic upholstery on the seats. A tally of funeral expenses states that he had $627.20 cash in his possession at his death
Obituary: "Mr. Hayward was a native of Fairfield and a retired electrical contractor. He formerly owned the Crane Electric Co., which was located at Fifth and East Main Streets here. After selling the business, he was employed at the Palladium-Item for several years until retiring. He was a member of Wayne Aerie Eagles Lodge No. 666."
G.C. Hayward gave his father's interests as "hunting game, card games, lodge [Eagles]."
He married Laura May Belle Horner (14) (A15), 18 Aug 1906, in Dublin,
Wayne Co., IN[3].
LEFT: May, June, Mary, George RIGHT: Alice 1910
Interview with George C. Hayward
Children: