Raymond and Leila, a sad story

I don’t know much about my dad’s parents.  I never met my Grandfather, Raymond Oliver Frederick Henderson, and the only time I saw my Grandmother, Leila Irene Mason, was at her funeral.  They lived in Omaha, Nebraska, and the few stories that have been passed down indicate they had a stormy relationship that ended after the birth of six children over a period of twelve years.  Apparently, at that time, Leila left Raymond with all her children in tow and set up residence in the adjacent town of Council Bluffs, Iowa, just across the Missouri River from Omaha.

She remained separated from Raymond long enough to have the kids enrolled in school, but eventually, circumstances caught up with her.  At this point details are kind of sketchy but for some reason Raymond, with the help of the local police, had Leila forcibly separated from the children and committed to an asylum in Lincoln, Nebraska where she remained for the rest of her life.  His motivation was not the children, because he promptly farmed them out to four other families.  So what was the motivation?  In an early photo I have of Leila, she appears to be very bright and strong willed.

  She was an accomplished musician and a trained nurse who was the personal attendant to Omaha’s Chief of Police.  In a later photograph she seems to be forcing a smile and looks tired and haggard, with what appears to be a large goiter on the left side of her neck.

If I’m guessing the ages of the children correctly (9, 8, 6, and 4) then the photo was taken in 1926 and Leila had just given birth to her fifth child Ralph, who is not shown in the photo.  That might be why she looks so tired.  About 18 months after this photo was taken, Leila gave birth to her sixth and final child, William, and almost immediately after that she left Raymond and moved to Council Bluffs.

After the children grew up, they made several attempts to gain Leila’s release from the hospital where she was incarcerated but were not successful until the mid 1950’s when she was finally reunited with her children in Sacramento, California.  It was only a few years later in 1962 when she died and I attended her funeral.  She is buried in the cemetery there in Sacramento.  Except for one small interaction with Ralph and his wife Marjorie, there is no indication that the children made any attempt at reconciliation with their father.

Most of the kids did not think well of their father and the accounts given by them (my aunts & uncles) tend to denigrate Raymond and place most of the blame on him.  He was a religious fanatic, he was lazy and couldn’t keep a job, and he was seldom at home are some of the comments I have heard but to me, it all seems to be one sided.  If Leila was a good parent, why would Raymond take the kids from her unless he wanted them himself, which he obviously did not!  Since most of the players in this saga are gone to their final reward, that question may never be answered.  Raymond died of cancer in the hospital in Minneapolis, Minnesota and is buried in a pauper’s grave in that city without so much as a headstone.  A sad ending to a sad life.