Otha Allen

Otha Allen

My family moved to Indiana when I was young, but every summer I would head back to Casey County to spend several weeks with both sets of my grandparents.  While at the Choate farm I would always go to visit my g-uncle Check.

Check's real name was Otha Allen, and he was my grandmother's younger brother.  He died in 2001, at age 84.  I don't know where the nickname originated, but I have never heard her use it.  To her it was always Otha.

He was a favorite of all the visiting grandchildren.  He would make us popguns from poplar, sling shots, bows and arrows, and the girls sometimes got a homemade doll.  He was very poor, but he often gave the kids money, that he could ill afford.

I was forty-two two when he died, but my whole life he believed something was killing him.  He believed he inhaled glass dust from a broken car window, and the glass was cutting his lungs.  He often swore he had cancer.  He truly believed this, and my father said he had been the same way all of HIS life.  The truly ironic part is, though he believed he was dying, he probably walked over ten miles a day.

When I was about ten, I asked him why he never married.  His answer was, "I noticed that when people marry, they have children, grow old, and die.  If I never marry and don't have kids, I should live forever."  It worked for him for 84 years! 

He was such a nice man that all of us grandnieces and nephews, and later great- grandnieces and nephews, would rush as soon as possible to see him.  He gave me my first sling shot. 

People would often get exasperated with his constant complaining, but his kind heart more than made up for it.  Uncle Check is greatly missed.