Reading afterwhile: K. C. Ice’s marginalia in a second-hand copy of William Jay

I am trying to reengage a writing habit here.  Please forbear while I stretch and work out the kinks.

I am almost always reading, and usually in old Restoration Movement material.  I cannot fathom another way if I want to claim with integrity to be a librarian, archivist, and bibliographer of the Stone-Campbell Movement.  As a diversion I enjoy mining my library for the traces left by earlier readers.  I especially like to read after my forebears by looking for the marginalia left by K. C. Ice, or M. C. Ice, or R. D. Ice.  Just so happens that is often in other old Restoration material.  If my diversion leads to the English Bible, it could just as often be one owned and used by Rosa B. Sandige Ice.  

K. C. Ice assembled a Restoration library, to which his son (my grandfather) added, and to which his son (my uncle) added, all of which I inherited and to which I have added my own.  K. C. Ice had a distinctive manner of marking sentences or paragraphs using marginal parentheses or brackets.  He would sometimes partially underline within the bracketed text, or put a check mark in the margin.  Two or more kinds of markings indicate especially noteworthy passages.   The exceptional cases merited a parenthetical comment.  Grandad and Uncle Rhod also left traces in these same books.  While Discipliana was a special interest for all of them, they scrounged for books wherever they could find them, and whatever was of use and within reach found its way to the shelves. 

I am unfailingly fascinated when I read after them.  

Such is the case here, an odd volume of William Jay K. C. picked up second hand.  Upon receipt, he almost always signed and dated his books, then noted where he lived at the time of acquisition.  He and Rosa moved several times, and not until I mined his inscriptions in his books did we in the family have a fairly firm grasp of the timeline of some of those moves.  Such is about all the trail I had to go on for the decade of 1901-1910, and to a lesser degree 1910-1920 when my grandfather was able to fill-in from his living memory.

Those years, aside from his retirement, were his most active as a reader.  He alternated between practicing medicine and holding forth from a pulpit, and at some points both at once.  Intake and outgo.  He read because Sunday comes every week.

Back to William Jay.  In February 1903 K. C. Ice is about to begin his final term at St. Louis College of Physicians and Surgeons, the training and credential from which will be necessary for his intended work (so far as we know) of service as a medical missionary to either China or India under the auspices of the Foreign Christian Missionary Society.  That dream did not materialize and I do not definitively know why, but that is another post for another day.  But in 1903 all indications suggest he had his eye on a medical mission abroad.  Meanwhile he trained for this work in the classrooms and laboratories at the St. Louis college, and in the churches whatsoever would be open to him.  I do not know which congregation in St. Louis he attended.  But in February 1903 he acquired a copy of William Jay at a Salvation Army store on Franklin Avenue in St. Louis.

Why he later erased part of his last name, but retained his initials, is also anyone’s guess.  

Psalm 119.11, in the 1901 American Standard Version, which KC Ice used at this time, reads:

Thy word have I laid up in my heart,

That I might not sin against thee.

 

I cannot speak to the origin of the flyer pasted on the front board.  It does not read as a product of the Restoration Movement.  But it does make quite the use of lyrics of gospel songs, doesn’t it?  

Though it lacks its title page, I located the edition online and supply it here:

The scans below contain only a couple of marked passages.  There are are such markings throughout.  He either read through it at once, or much of it here and there over the years.  Possibly both.  Look for the marginal parentheses and underlines:  

So, what merited his parenthetical note? 

Deliver us from the views and dispositions of those who in their self-deception think and live and move and breathe as if in this life they have it all 

“Born from above and bound for glory…”

“Rectify all our principles, and give us clear, and consistent, and influential views of divine truth…”

That’s rich.

Traces, sometimes that is all you have.  Traces to read afterwhile.  Traces which are at once a diversion and a world unto themselves.

Ice Family Portrait, ca. 1915

Kromer Columbus Ice holding daughter Areta (b. 1914); Rosa Birdie Sandige Ice holding son McGarvey (b. 1909).  About two year after this photo was taken Rosa and the children lived in Shreve, Ohio while First Lieutenant KC Ice tried in vain to save soldiers from epidemic flu in stateside base hospitals.  At times he had one orderly to assist.  Her raven hair turned white from worrying about him.  Overseas orders in hand, he was waiting in Maryland for the next departing ship when the truce was signed ending the war.  He resumed his medical practice in small town Jerry City, then Bladensburg, Ohio.