Maroa woman finds kindred spirit from distant past

CISCO — In the beginning, there was the cotton bloomers and a desire to reveal more.

Now there's a 1916 Model T Ford to drive DaLette Stowell of Maroa forward in her strange friendship with a woman whom she never met and has been dead since 1967.

Stowell says it's all to do with “synchronicity,” the idea that seemingly random events are, in fact, connected by a wider cosmic karma in the universe. It's hard to argue that point with a woman who is wearing a deceased woman's circa early 1900s bloomers, petticoats, shirt waist, camisole, skirt, apron and boots that all fit like they had been made to measure.

“There have just been so many synchronistic events since I started investigating the life of Miriam Reid,” explains Stowell, 56. “I just can't figure anything else; I believe I was meant to find this stuff.”

Before we get to the Model T, we'd better go back to the start of the desire and the unearthing of the underwear. Stowell had discovered it all in a series of bird-pooped and forlorn suitcases going cheap at a local flea market seven years ago. Cracking open the cases revealed a lot of clothes that had belonged to Reid — born 1890 — along with schoolbooks, textbooks, pictures, letters and keepsakes.

It was basically the remains of an entire life lived on a remote farmhouse northeast of Argenta. Stowell was fascinated by the Edwardian-era clothes and found they fit her perfectly. She read the little notes and stories Reid wrote about herself, and it fueled the fires of desire to know ever more about her, as if discovering a long-lost sister.

Stowell recorded her experiences in a book “Miriam's Time Capsule,” and when the Herald & Review did a story about that in 2009, it triggered a chain of events that would lead her to getting costumed rides in Reid's very own Model T.

Eugene “Gene” Pirtle had seen that story and remembered Reid as the pleasant but driven driver of hard-bargains he had bought the Model T from as a 14-year-old nipper while his country, in her righteous might, rose up to fight the forces of evil in 1943 during World War II.

Pirtle was living where he still lives, in Cisco, and busy fighting to build up his savings, which he was remarkably good at. “I worked my butt off at the local grocery store, and I was making 25 cents an hour,” says the 84-year-old, recalling it all as though it was yesterday afternoon.

“My mom was mad as hell; she was a telephone operator, and she made 12½ cents an hour.”

Pirtle saved his quarters and pedaled around to Reid's farm, where he knew the Model T slumbered, disused, in a barn.

“She wouldn't budge; she wanted $20 for it, and I gave it to her,” he says. “My dad said, `You gave her $20 for that piece of junk?' I said, `It ain't a piece of junk, and I'm going to run it.' “

Which he duly did, proving fathers don't always know best. He drove it to high school in Argenta to get away from the local school, “where the principal was dumber than the kids,” and never lost his affection for it as the years rolled by. “It was mine. I didn't want to sell it, and I still liked to play around with it,” he said.

When he saw the story about Reid and Stowell, relatives finally put them in touch, and Stowell had to come and visit. Encountering the car was like touching an all-black magic carpet back to the past: “When I climbed in there, it just gave me goose bumps,” she said. “It was like the car had eventually found me.”

Stowell's enthusiasm for Reid and her artifacts is infectious — and motivating. Pirtle's son, Gary, said the car hadn't been running for about 15 years and, after Stowell's visits, he rolled up his sleeves and fixed various engine and carburetion maladies to jolt it back to clattering life. He's since taken the Tin Lizzie, with Stowell in costume, to do presentations at Clinton's Apple ‘n Pork Festival. “With her being all enthused about it, it just gave me the little extra kick to get it going again,” he explains.

Whenever Stowell appears as Reid, she has encyclopedic knowledge to go with the underwear and now the car. She has traced Reid's family tree back to her own — they're related in three ways, citing more synchronicity — and she even discovered Reid is kin with Abraham Lincoln. Once, when giving a costumed presentation to the Prairie Homemaker's Club of Argenta, she found herself reading at random from one of Reid's schoolbooks.

“`Vinegar is sour, sugar is sweet, Argenta girls are hard to beat,”' quoted Stowell from a writing book Reid had used at the one-room Argenta schoolhouse that educated her. “When I looked at the date on the book, I suddenly realized I was reading it on St. Patrick's Day, just exactly 104 years to the day she wrote it,” recalls Stowell. “See, synchronicity again. We all got goose bumps, started crying, and they made Miriam an honorary member of their club.”

Reid's own life didn't have much of a storybook ending. Resisting offers of marriage, she stayed behind at the farm to care for her widowed mother, who suffered from Alzheimer's disease and would die in 1953. Even her old farmhouse is gone now, torn down after falling into ruin. All that is left are the splendid car, the underwear, the clothes, the books and some furniture and other keepsakes Stowell has been able to salvage.

And, of course, there remains one woman's extraordinary desire not to let another woman have lived in vain, unremarked. “When I found her grave, I made her a promise that she would not be forgotten,” Stowell says. “I've kept my promise.”