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Once upon a time, in a small town, a boy and girl grew up next door to each other. They played together and walked to school every day, until one day, quite suddenly, the girl left town. Many years pass, and then the girl, now long-grown, returns to the small town of her childhood, where she finds that her friend is not only still alive, but still living there, leading to a reunion 80 years in the making.
If that reminds you of something out of a Hallmark movie, you’re not alone. That’s the reaction most people have when Debbie Turnquist tells them the story of her mother, Lorraine Kerley, and Edgar Walker. Walker and Kerley lived next door to each other in Goshen in the 1930s and, after a decades-long hiatus, were reunited in 2021. Trips to Goshen and visits with Edgar have become a tradition for Kerley and Turquist, with the duo making the trip every spring for Kerley’s birthday, including this year when both were interviewed for this story.
The story of the reunion actually began in 2019, when Turnquist, while at the family cottage in Massachusetts, pulled up the town on Google Street View and showed it to her mother.
“She’s looking at it and saying, ‘Go that way, go that way! There’s my dad’s factory, there’s the store where mom used to shop,’” she recalled.
Just past the Stillwater Plant where her father worked is a metal bridge, which the Street View tour took them over. Kerley then saw the house she and her family lived in, which is still standing. Her mother’s reaction inspired Turnquist to plan a trip to Goshen with her mother for the following spring. The trip was delayed a year due to the COVID-19 pandemic, but in April of 2021, Turnquist and her sister brought Kerley to Goshen for her 89th birthday. It was the first time she had been to the town in decades.
One of the first stops when they got to town was at Kerley’s old house, and while looking at it and the surrounding houses, she pointed to one next to hers and said, “That was Edgar’s house!”
“That was the first I’d ever heard of Edgar,” Turnquist said. “It was very cute because she just said, ‘He was my’ – and she did the air quotes – ‘boyfriend.’” Prior to coming down, Turnquist contacted Shelia Sampson, Goshen’s town clerk, in hopes of finding maps of the town in the 1930s and ‘40s. Sampson told her that the town didn’t have any maps from that era, but put her in touch with Wyatt Canady, a local amateur historian who had a lot of information about the history of Goshen. Upon arriving in town, she found that she had no cell service and didn’t know where Canady lived. He had given her the address to his mother’s house in town, so Turnquist, her mother and sister went there and met Marie Canady. During their visit, Walker’s name came up again and Marie informed them that she had just seen him that morning.
While at Canady’s house the next day, Canady called Walker and told him that Kerley was there, a call that Walker said he was “very surprised” to get.
“I was excited and really shocked, because I didn’t think I would ever see her again,” he said. “I didn’t even know if she was still alive. It was a pleasant surprise for me.”
Wright got together some old yearbooks and photos and made his way to Canady’s house where the two friends were reunited after 80 years.
“It was great [seeing him again],” Kerley said. “I don’t want to say he’s the oldest person, but the longest person I remember [knowing].”
“He just kept looking at her and said, ‘I never thought I’d see you again,’” Turnquist said.
‘A Nice Little Town’
Kerley was born Lorraine Soule in April 1932 in Harrisville, Rhode Island, where her father, Meldon Soule, worked for Stillwater Manufacturing. When she was 1 year old, her father, mother (Florence) and older sister (Arlene) moved to Goshen for her father to take a position as a foreman at the town’s Stillwater plant.
“I always thought they were very rich because Mr. Soule always wore a white shirt and a tie and a suit to work because he was one of the big bosses,” Walker said. “My father was a farmer so he always wore old, raggedy clothes, so I thought they were rich people.”
Growing up next door, Walker and Kerley did many activities together, including sledding on Paxton Hill in the winter and playing on the clay tennis courts that the Stillwater Company installed across the streets from their houses, and watching Kerley’s father play tennis with Mr. Armentrout, another of the foremen at the plant, on the weekends.
“They’d dress up in their white shirts and white shorts and play tennis and we would watch,” Walker recalled.
In the fall of 1939, at age 7, Kerley and Walker began attending first grade at the town’s school. Goshen, at the time, did not have a kindergarten glass and students began attending school in the first grade.
“That bothered my mother tremendously,” Kerley recalled, “because she was hoping that we would be moving north again [someday] and they had kindergarten and started [school] at age 6.”
Walker and Kerley would walk to the two-story school house each morning, with Arlene, who was three years older, serving as a chaperone for the two. Goshen’s elementary school housed grades one through six in a two-story building with three classrooms on each floor. The first, second and third grade classrooms were on the first floor and grades four through six were on the second. Kerley and Walker were in a class of about 33 students in school.
“As far as I know, she and I are the only two still living now,” Walker said.
Outside of school, Kerley recalls walking up to the town store and getting candies from the owner, as well as playing with other neighborhood children. She also recalls getting into a fair share of trouble, including falling out of the tree in her front yard and breaking her arm and falling into the hole their neighbors had dug for their cesspool.
“Nosy me, I had to go walk a little too close and I fell in,” she recalled. “I don’t remember how I got out, if they pulled me out, but I couldn’t get out by myself.”
“I always have fond memories of Goshen,” she added. “It’s a nice little town.”
The Accident
Kerley and her family lived in Goshen until the spring of 1941. That April, shortly after Kerley’s ninth birthday, she and her family took a trip to Washington, D.C., to take one of her father’s aunts to meet the train to return to Maine after a visit to Goshen. On their return trip, outside of Charlottesville, the Soule family was in a car accident. As Kerley recalls, they were hit head-on by a car passing another vehicle on a curve.
“All I really remember is laying on the ground yelling, ‘Get off my leg! Get off my leg!’” she said. “Nobody was on my leg – the leg was broken.”
Another detail that Kerley remembers is that a pair of sailors came upon the site of the accident, picked her up, and took her to the hospital because she was the least injured of the four people in the car. She can’t remember their names anymore, though she does recall knowing them at one point due to having received cards from them while she was recovering. What she does remember about the pair of Good Samaritans is the ship they were on their way to report in to when they stopped to help her – The USS Arizona in Pearl Harbor. Both men were among the casualties aboard the ship when the Japanese attacked the harbor on Dec. 7, 1941.
“I’ve been there and I’ve seen the memorial,” she said. “Their names are on it. I don’t remember it all together, and I can’t look it up unfortunately. I had cards from them, so I knew their names at the time, but once I went to college all my stuff got cleared out of the house.”
Arlene survived the crash along with Kerley, but their parents did not. Meldon and Florence Soule are buried in Rhode Island, but before being laid to rest, a funeral service was held in Goshen. Kerley and her sister were recovering in the hospital and were unable to attend, but Walker, along with the rest of both sisters’ classmates, did attend. The funeral was held in the new gymnasium/auditorium at the school, because, as Walker noted, “everybody knew that no church in Goshen would hold the number of people [who would attend] because they were so highly respected and so well-liked.”
“I remember our teacher, Mrs. Moore, lined us up in the hallway and we walked in and we sat on the front row on the right of the auditorium, and Arlene’s class sat on the left side of the auditorium, and I remember there were two caskets up against the stage,” Walker said. “Who conducted the funeral I don’t remember, but that’s the last thing I remember.”
Kerley and her sister never returned to live in Goshen. One of their aunts came down from Douglas, Massachusetts, and took them back to live with her. Shortly after, the aunt held an estate sale of the family’s belongings in Goshen. Walker’s mother bought a desk that had belonged to the Soules and he still has it today. The two items from Goshen that stayed in the family were a piano that went to Arlene and a cedar chest belonging to their mother that Kerley inherited.
Kerley stayed in touch with several of her friends and classmates over the years, but she and Walker ultimately fell out of touch, the last correspondence between them being a Christmas card she sent him in December of 1947.
“Of course, dumb me, I never answered it,” Walker said, although he did recently find it among his possessions.
A Lifetime Since
Kerley continued her schooling in Massachusetts, but due to starting a year later, was placed in a class a year behind where she would have been, ultimately graduating high school at age 19. Following graduation, she attended Bay Path College (now Bay Path University) in Longmeadow, Mass. While there, she met Ralph Kerley, a student at nearby Springfield College. They married on Sept. 11, 1954. Ralph served as an officer in the United States Navy and later as a high school principal. He died in 1991 after being hit by a vehicle whose driver was incapacitated due to a medical condition.
Walker continued his education in Rockbridge County’s school system, then attended Virginia Polytechnic Institute (Virginia Tech) in Blacksburg. Following his graduation from college, he joined the United States Army, serving until his retirement in 1981. After leaving the Army, Walker returned to Goshen, where he still lives today.
Although they didn’t realize it until years later, for a brief time, Walker and Kerley were neighbors thanks to their connections with the military. In 1961, Ralph’s career brought his family to Hudson Valley, New York, and at the same time, 10 miles away, Walker was training at the United States Military Academy at West Point.
Kerley and Turnquist have made the trip to Rockbridge County each of the past three years for Kerley’s birthday, making sure to visit with Walker while they’re in the area.
“I look forward to her coming down to visit,” Walker said. “I wish we lived closer so we could see one another more often, but that’s the way it is.”
In the interim, Walker and Kerley stay in touch by email, or at least try to.
“I email her, but she doesn’t receive them,” Walker said with a chuckle.
“I receive them, but I don’t always think to look,” Kerley clarified.
