"No, you dummy, I met her in Cape Girardeau while she was living just up the road from us with her granddad and uncle in 1915." "Wait a minute you old cradle robber, you were twenty one and she was sixteen, how do you explain that?" "Simple, her mother signed for her. Besides, Mae at sixteen was at least ten years older than my twenty one years." Note: It would be about forty years later that I discovered my Grandfather, Ralph W. Brasher Sr, did not always tell the truth. I discovered on Betty and Ralph's marriage license that Ralph's mother signed for Betty as the bride's mother, not her own mother, Josie Roper. Josie had died in childbirth in 1899 when Betty was born. "Gramps, why do you say that she was older if she was sixteen and you were twenty one?: "Because most people, especially the big industrialists of the world know that money makes the wheels of progress turn. Mae knew the wheels turned on sex." "What the hell are you talking about now?" "Listen up dummy and learn so that later in life you won't fall into the clutches of some female weaving a web bent on sucking your life's blood from your carcass. Mae started her married life by holding off her wifely duties unless she got some clothes or some other doo-dad or favor. Even on our honeymoon she didn't give in until I promised her a trip to Hot Springs, Arkansas. Good thing her daddy worked for the railroad too, otherwise we would have had to walk." "Walk? You would have had to have the stamina of a Missouri mule." "At twenty one, I did have the staying power of a Missouri mule." "What about Betty?" "She had the staying power of a dying Missouri Butterfly." "Gramps, what the heck are we talking about here?" "For the almost four years we were married Mae showed more interest in the men folk around us than she paid to me or any other member of her family." "Four years? You mean you and Betty were married only four years?" "Yep, about four years." "When the heck did you have time enough to make babies, and where did my dad and aunt Nolda come from?" "If I remember correctly, it was the two times I made love to Mae and she was having sex that they appeared shortly there after." "Good lord gramps, wasn't there any romance in your first marriage?" "Can't seem to remember any, but there was a lot of excitement every time I had to go looking for her when she didn't come home." "Gramps, what was your marriage really like, what happened?" "What happened was that I finally got fed up after we moved to St Louis in 1918. If you'll remember, we got married in 1915, by 1916 your dad was born, then in 1917 we moved to St Louis while Mae was pregnant with your Aunt Nolda who was born the following year of 1918, by 1919 I had been called into the Army and when I was discharged and found Mae missing, I had enough and filed for divorce when I saw she would never change and moved back to my stepfather and mother's house with the two babies. By this time my mother had moved to St Louis and it was 1920." "What made you finally decide to divorce Betty?" "It was right around that time she started to talk about moving out to California to become a Moving picture star. She said she owed it to the world to share her great beauty and she wouldn't stop talking about it, she kept pestering me about moving the kids to some place called Hollywood." "Seems to me that maybe you should have moved, you might have become, "Ralph Mix, The Singing Troubadour." "Jim, why do you always have to be a gol-darn Jackass?" "Well gramps, I think it's because it's in-bred." "Yeah, I guess it is, you are Mae's grandson."