By the middle of the twentieth century, two families with deep roots in the Illinois coal and prairie country were drawn together in a single Taylorville household. The McWards had long been fixtures of Christian County life, and the White–O'Connell line reached back into the mining towns of Williamson County to the south. Their union in the wartime spring of 1942 established the modern McWard family in Taylorville, the central Illinois county seat where so much of this story had already unfolded.
Taylorville, the Ground Beneath Them
Taylorville sits near the geographic center of Illinois, on the flat-to-gently-rolling prairie that made this stretch of the state some of the richest farmland in the nation. Christian County was carved out of the surrounding prairie in 1839, and Taylorville, laid out shortly after and serving as the county seat, took shape as a modest courthouse town in the early 1840s. Early settlers came largely from the older states to the east and the upland South, and the settlement grew slowly around the square where the courthouse stood.
The great turn in Taylorville's fortunes came with the railroads and, beneath the soil, with coal. Central Illinois lay atop enormous bituminous coal seams, and by the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries mining transformed the quiet agricultural county seat into a working industrial town. The Peabody Coal Company and other operators sank shafts around the community, drawing laborers who filled out the neighborhoods. This was the Taylorville the family knew in the early twentieth century — a town where the deep mines and the farm country existed side by side, and where the courthouse square still governed the county's legal and civic life.
Mining was dangerous, unforgiving work, the kind of labor that could end a young married man's life in an instant and leave a widow and children behind — a reality that shadowed the White family in particular. By the first decades of the century, though, Taylorville was a settled, self-contained small city of several thousand, large enough to have its own newspaper, hotels, churches, and schools, yet small enough that families knew their neighbors, their sheriff, and their local officials by name. Civic and professional life clustered around the county government: the courthouse, the sheriff's office with its jail, and the attorneys and judges who made their careers in local law. It was a town that ran on ties of kinship and long acquaintance, on card games with neighbors, church membership, and the pride of a local football team.
The census-takers who recorded these households in 1930, 1935, and 1940 were moving through a country in the grip of the Great Depression, and coal towns felt it sharply — mines cut back, prices fell, and steady work grew scarce. The 1930s were also years of bitter labor conflict in the central Illinois coalfields. The Second World War then pulled the town's young men into service, and the postwar years reshaped Taylorville physically: the Veterans Addition, a neighborhood of nearly identical modest tract homes built for returning servicemen and their young families, grew up on the edge of town. There, and in the older two-story houses on established streets near the square, the family's postwar generation came of age.
Robert Darrel McWard
Robert Darrel McWard — known all his life as "Bob" — was the younger son of Elmer Richard McWard and Helen (Hobson) McWard, born in Taylorville on 10 September 1919 and raised in the family home at 314 West Poplar Street. His was a household woven tightly into the civic fabric of Christian County. His grandfather Hobson had been a blacksmith and later mayor of Taylorville; his father Elmer served as a county supervisor, county treasurer, and, from 1946 to 1950, sheriff of the county. The census enumerations of 1920, 1930, and 1940 trace Bob steadily to the town of his birth, where he grew up through the lean years of the Depression.
By any measure he was a gifted young man. At Taylorville Township High School he was a star guard on the 1936–37 basketball team, scoring 171 points across twenty-five games — seventy-three field goals and twenty-five free throws — for an average of 6.8 points a game. A local account captured the impression he left on the court: "Always fast and alert it was almost impossible for an opponent to get past him." He starred at quarterback in the 1936 football season, played clarinet for four years in the nationally honored school band, served in the summer of 1936 as a lifeguard at the Manners Park pool — passing both the Junior and Senior life-saving tests — and was chosen a Junior Rotarian. Even at seventeen his path was forming in his own mind: he hoped to enter college the following fall and "thinks that he would like to be a lawyer."
He graduated in 1937 and pursued that ambition first at James Millikin University in Decatur and then at Illinois College in Jacksonville. The war interrupted, and in a sense accelerated, his early adulthood. In his senior year at Illinois College he enlisted in the U.S. Naval Air Corps, completing his training at Pensacola, Florida, and receiving his commission as ensign on 10 October 1941 — just weeks before the attack that brought the United States into the war. Posted to Corpus Christi, Texas, he served as an instructor in instrument flying, and his time there brought an unusual brush with fame: the movie star and orchestra leader Charles "Buddy" Rogers, husband of Mary Pickford, was assigned to his squadron as a student. By July 1943 Bob had been promoted to lieutenant (j.g.) and ordered to the naval air base at San Diego. A residence record places him at the Corpus Christi Army Depot in March 1945, in the closing months of a service that lasted roughly five years before his discharge in September 1945.
Marjorie Anne White
Margie White grew up in the coalfields of southern Illinois, the youngest daughter of Philip White and Mary Ellen O'Connell. She was born on 19 October 1918 in East Marion, in Williamson County, a region defined in the early twentieth century by its coal mines and the tight-knit towns that grew up around them. The census of 1920 found her family in East Marion, where she spent her earliest childhood. The shadow over those early years was her father's death — Philip White was killed in the West Frankfort mine in 1920, the very hazard that haunted mining communities and left his widow to raise the family.
By 1930 the household had moved north to Taylorville, and it was there that much of Marjorie's young life unfolded. A graduate of Taylorville Township High School, she was crowned May Queen in her senior year. She went on to William Woods College for Girls at Fulton, Missouri, where she was a member of the swim team, and before her marriage she owned and operated The Woman's Dress Shop at Carlinville. The census of 1 April 1940 found her in Springfield, in Sangamon County, a twenty-one-year-old single woman living in the household of a sibling — a brief season of independence on the threshold of her married life.
A Navy Wedding
Marjorie's mother, Mary Ellen (O'Connell) White, announced the engagement at a dinner party on 13 March 1942, held at the family's Main Street house. The announcement was made in a manner no guest was likely to forget: Marjorie's brother, Philip Conrad White, rigged a public address system to the family radio and, playing the part of a radio announcer, delivered the news of his sister's engagement over the air — a touch of showmanship befitting a bride who had reigned as May Queen.
Nine days later, on the afternoon of 22 March 1942, at four o'clock, Bob married Marjorie Anne White at the First Methodist Church in Taylorville, with Dr. A. S. Chapman performing a single ring ceremony. The bride, given in marriage by her brother Philip C. White, wore a gown of old ivory bridal satin; the groom's cousin Joseph McWard of Palmer served as best man. The couple left immediately for their home in Corpus Christi, where Bob was then stationed and where Marjorie was later honored at a going-away shower.
The first years of their married life were shaped by the movements of wartime. In 1942 Marjorie was living in Corpus Christi; by 1945 she had relocated to Lakehurst, in Ocean County, New Jersey, another site tied to naval aviation. These moves trace the pattern of a service family following postings from one coast to another through the war effort.
With peace, the McWards returned to familiar ground. Bob resumed the ambition he had voiced at seventeen, managing a farm implement store while attending night school at the Lincoln College of Law in Springfield. He graduated in 1949, was admitted to the bar in 1950, and in 1951 opened law offices in Taylorville with his brother Gail, who would himself serve as alderman, city attorney, and later county and circuit judge — the two McWard brothers thus set squarely at the center of Christian County's legal life. The census of 1950 records Bob as head of his own household, married and established in Taylorville. In March 1954 he announced his candidacy for the Democratic nomination for representative in the General Assembly for the 40th Senatorial District, which took in Christian, Cumberland, Fayette, and Shelby counties — his first venture into public office. He was then a member of the Christian Church, the American Legion, the Elks and Lions clubs, and a director of the Palmer State Bank at Palmer.
Away from the courtroom and the lodge hall, Bob kept the sociable habits of a man at home in his community, playing poker at the country club and taking Margie to the dances held there. Marjorie shared that love of music and gatherings. She would sing along and loved to dance, kept up a neighborly rhythm of card games with a friend named Annabelle, and, when hunger struck, was known to declare, "I'm so hungry my stomach thinks my throat's been cut!" Her fondness for her grandchildren was equally memorable; she once got her grandson Bobby out of a load of chores by telling his father that friends were coming over to play cards.
The Children
Bob and Marjorie raised two children. Their son, Robert Gail McWard — also called Bob — was born on 8 March 1945 at Lakehurst, Ocean County, New Jersey. His earliest memories reached back to a family trip out west in 1950, the year of a serious automobile accident in which, at the age of five, he was riding between his grandparents Elmer and Helen when the car crashed. In those years his grandparents lived below the county jail, where his mother cooked meals for the prisoners.
The family lived in Taylorville's Veterans Addition, in one of a row of cookie-cutter homes, until Robert Gail was in the second grade, among neighbors he remembered by name — the Kauffolds, Redferns, Cashines, and Blanchettis, and his Uncle Gail. His father then bought the family's Market Street home, a big two-story house with a full basement and floored attic, where they lived until moving to the Phoenix area at the end of Robert Gail's freshman year — a hard departure that meant leaving friends and relatives behind.
Bob and Marjorie's daughter, Ellen Lou McWard, was born on 31 December 1948 in Illinois. In the 1954 account of her father's candidacy she appears as a girl of five, the younger of the two McWard children. Her adult life carried her east, with homes in Vermont — chiefly Wallingford, in Rutland County — as well as in Connecticut and Delaware, and for a time in Lebanon, Illinois. She married Philip H. Marcell Jr. on 22 July 1970, and later married Jill Ryan on 21 October 2000.
For a period the McWard family lived at Phoenix, Arizona, but Taylorville remained home ground. A residence record for 1985 confirms that Bob had returned to the town of his birth, and there Robert Darrel McWard died on 3 December 1986, at the age of sixty-seven, a little over a year after his brother Gail. He was buried that same year in Springfield, Sangamon County. Marjorie outlived him by fifteen years. In her later years she left Illinois for the Southwest, moving into an assisted living residence in Tucson, Arizona, where she died on 13 October 2001, six days short of her eighty-third birthday. She was returned to Illinois in death, laid to rest in Springfield, in the same city where, decades earlier, she had lived as a young single woman on the threshold of her married life.