Leland Francis “Hap” Hastings

Leland Francis Hastings, second of the eight children of Mary Lena Brown and Frank Opal Hastings, was born 1 October 1898 in DeQueen, Sevier County, AR. He was widely known as Hap rather than Leland, this nickname having started out as Happy. Hap never thought of himself as being a child of Arkansas. He had been born in DeQueen because that was where his grandparents Emma Ann Martin and Cullen Penny Brown had just moved (for good), and his parents were temporarily trying out the location as a place to live when the pregnancy came to term. From the time he was a few months old until he was eight, Hap and his family lived in a house in Martintown on the north bank of the Pecatonica River in which his mother had been raised, a house which lay just east of the residence of his great-grandparents Nathaniel Martin and Hannah Strader. Technically the house was owned during those years by Hap’s grandparents Emma and Cullen, but his parents had the use of it as if it belonged to them. In 1907, Lena and Frank and family moved to Dilly, Vernon County, IL because Frank, a railroad-track maintenance man for Illinois Central Railroad, was temporarily posted there. At the end of 1907, Frank was posted to Monroe, Green County, WI, and this was so close to Martintown that the family moved back to their familiar village. They did not return to the same house, though. Their former home had been sold in order to best deal with the estate division following the late-1906 death of Cullen Penny Brown. Instead the family acquired a new home in the main part of the village. It was only a five-minute walk from their former abode, but it was on the other side of the Pecatonia River and up on the top of the hill near the church Nathaniel Martin had built in 1879. Hap’s parents would continue to be based out of this residence for many years to come, and it was where Hap lived until his marriage.

By the time Hap was a teenager, most of the surviving members of the Martin/Strader clan had moved away from the village that Nathaniel and Hannah had founded. Frank and Lena’s household was the biggest of the exceptions. Hap attended the one-room Martin School and then went on to Winslow High School, from which he graduated in June, 1915. He was not yet seventeen at the time of graduation because Winslow High in those days was only a two-year institution. By this point, his mother was one of elderly Hannah Strader Martin’s primary caregivers. It was just one of many ways he was made conscious of his Martintown roots. He never lost that sense of place. Even today descendants of Hap and descendants of several of his siblings can still be found in communities and farms within an hour’s drive, including Winslow, Stephenson County, IL, Martintown’s sister village a mile south over the state line.

At right, a juvenile Hap sits in the passenger seat of an automobile driven by Martintown neighbor Ernest Leck. Note that the steering wheel Ernest is holding is on the right side of the vehicle; apparently it was not yet standard in U.S. car manufacturing that steering wheels always be on the left. The building in the background on the right is the village depot.

One of Hap’s earliest paid jobs was serving on the evening shift at the family’s legacy mills. By the 1910s, the old waterwheel was earning money a new way -- by generating the power for an electric dynamo installed in the winter of 1908-09 by Hap’s great uncle Elwood Bucher, who after the death of Nathaniel Martin and Nathaniel’s son Horatio had become the boss of the mills. Elwood had the contract to supply the electricity for the street lights in Winslow. It was Hap’s responsibility to shut down the power plant at eleven o’clock each evening. The cost of electricity was still considered an extravagance so Winslow preferred not to pay for all-night service; the village committee felt that by eleven, nearly everyone was in bed and there was no sense in paying to light the streets any further into the night. Once in a while, though, when there was a dance or other special function, the committee would authorize an additional hour, and pay Elwood a fee to cover the extra usage. On one such night, Hap decided to play a joke. He flashed the lights three times at 10:45pm, the usual warning at the usual time that the lights were about to go out. Soon he found himself confronted by about fifteen men from Winslow pointedly informing him that they had paid for an extra hour. Much to his chagrin, he was razzed about his smart-ass maneuver for decades to come. A description of the incident even made it into the 1991 book Early History of Winslow, Illinois by Harold Fowler.

Hap was wed at age twenty-four to Hulda Jane Blaisdell, daughter of Arthur Colby Blaisdell and Emma F. Zweifel. Hulda had been born 2 July 1905 in nearby Wayne Township, Lafayette County, WI and so she was not yet eighteen at the time of the wedding, which took place 18 January 1923 in Rockford, Winnebago County, IL. The bride gave birth to the first of the couple’s two children, Gerald Edward “Jerry” Hastings, later that same year.

Hap and Hulda (shown at left) stayed in Martintown during the early years of their union, where they operated Hastings General Merchandise. This store, which during Hap’s boyhood had been overseen by such proprietors as his mother’s first cousin John Martin Warner and then by Elwood Bucher’s brother Tom, doubled as the post office, a tradition that dated back more than fifty years. (Hap was declared postmaster of Martintown by decree of the Postmaster General 15 November 1923.) The upstairs portion of the building was Hap and Hulda’s place of residence. That was where their second child, Roscoe Alvin “Ike” Hastings, was born in the second half of 1924.

When railroad service to the community was minimized at the end of the 1920s, it sealed the fate of the few remaining retail establishments. The final straw for Hap and Hulda occurred 27 December 1927 when the store was broken into as part of a burglary -- or an attempt at one. Enough was enough. The couple moved themselves and their business in early 1930 to Winslow. They conducted the relocation in the dead of winter. Snow was thick on the ground. They transported some of the family possessions and store inventory by means of bobsled. Their new place of residence was a house owned by Elwood Bucher, but which had until 1920 long been the dwelling place of Lavina Watson Martin, wife of Elias Martin, eldest son of Nathaniel and Hannah.

Soon the store was back in operation. Hap and Hulda did not transport the Martintown store building to a new lot. Instead they purchased an existing store from Annie Schramm and simply changed the name and combined the inventories. There was enough of a customer base within the village of Winslow to sustain them for further decades. Hulda was an active part of the shopkeeping. Young Jerry and Ike, ages five and six at the time of the move, spent their non-school hours supervised by the young woman Hap and Hulda employed to do the housekeeping and cooking.

In the spring of 1932, harkening back to the situation during the Martintown years, the rooms above the store became the family residence. Naturally Hap and Hulda appreciated being able to commute to work in no more than twenty seconds. However, the timing of the move had to do with the need to vacate the Lavina Martin house. A local man, Fred Stubbe, had purchased the property from Elwood Bucher’s estate -- Elwood having died back in 1930 only weeks after Hap and Hulda had moved in -- and Mr. Stubbe did not want to rent the house, but to occupy it himself. Living where they worked was not always the perfect arrangement, of course, so when Hap and Hulda needed to escape, or when they wanted to entertain a substantial number of guests, they resorted to the old home in Martintown. Hap’s father died in 1940 and his mother occupied that house on an increasingly sporadic basis as the 1940s and 1950s progressed, so the dwelling became a kind of “getaway cottage.”

World War II was an especially anxious period for Hap and Hulda. Both sons were over eighteen by the end of 1942 and they decided to volunteer for the U.S. Army together. They joined 22 February 1943, becoming part of the Combat Engineers. They received their training next to one another at Camp Pickett, VA, after which they were deployed to the Pacific. They rose through the ranks together (ending up as Spec 4 technical sergeants), and were discharged at Camp McCoy, WI 20 December 1945. They were never separated. This was unusual during World War II. During the Civil War, so many sets of brothers served side-by-side and died on the same battlefield that subsequently the U.S. military typically arranged to separate siblings so that one family would not be hit by multiple tragedies on the same day. Jerry and Ike were persuasive, and talked their superiors into making an exception in their case. Fortunately the boys made it through, both surviving to well past ninety (Jerry is still alive as of April, 2017), but had things gone poorly, Hap and Hulda would have been deprived of all of their offspring at once.

In 1952, Hap opted for a change of pace and retired from storekeeping. Naturally that meant moving out of the second-floor living space. He and Hulda acquired a house just across the street from Winslow Methodist Church. They were returning to almost the same spot where they had lived in the early 1930s, the Lavina Martin home having been located just south of the church. Hap became a postal carrier, a natural occupation for a former postmaster to slip into.

Hap was a fifty-year member of Masonic Lodge #564 in Winslow.

Hap passed away 13 May 1972 in Winslow. Hulda survived him by decades. She remained in the general vicinity, finally passing away at Lena Living Center in Lena, Stephenson County, IL 28 December 2006 at the impressive age of one hundred one.

Both husband and wife were buried at Rock Lily Cemetery, Winslow, IL, amid many graves of the Hastings clan.

This four-generations photograph was taken at the 75th-birthday celebration for Hap’s grandmother Ann Hastings (aka Barbara Ann Spece Hastings) held at Ann’s home near Browntown, Green County, WI in June, 1924. An area newspaper, the Monroe Sun, published a short article about the event and included this image. (This scan was made from an original print, not from the newsprint version.) Hap is holding his infant son, Jerry. His father Frank is on the other side of the birthday gal.

Descendants of Leland Francis Hastings and Hulda Jane Blaisdell

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