The Pilot News - Ready’s new book features Culverites’ stories

The history Ready unravels in her memoirs tells the story of her own childhood as well as that of her sister Ellen and two brothers – both well-known in the Culver area – Kenny and John Reininga, in the Evansville area.
“The book is not written in a very serious way,” she explains. “Most of it is quite humorous, but it did have a very serious beginning: I get tired of the media excusing bad behavior because of poverty. You’re poor in childhood or have a dysfunctional family…that’s no excuse for bad, mean behavior in kids or adults. So I said to my sister, “Let’s write about our childhood. We could be excused for any bad behavior! It turned into entertaining my brother, sister, and (me) with the stories. People would read it and say, ‘You’ve got to put it in a book,’ and I did.”
Ready says Kenny Reininga’s first wife, the late Donna, had two grandmothers who lived in Culver, one of whom was a Cromley, an early family name here perhaps best known for “Neighbor” Cromley, the area’s last Civil War veteran. Kenny Reininga, however, actually came to Culver after serving the Army as a Communications specialist which led to his working nearby at AT&T on State Road 10, west of Culver. Reininga was also involved with the Top Shop waterbed shop in Culver and for a time owned the Leiters Ford tavern (“If his truck was there, it was full,” recalls Ready with a smile. “If not, it was just the regulars).”
John Reininga and his first wife moved to Culver where he was a pharmacist at Hook’s Drugs and its subsequent manifestations (today it’s CVS). He later married the former Gail Ruhnow – today of the aforementioned Gail’s shop on Main Street.
Ready herself spent many years moving around with her former husband, developing a career as an elementary school teacher from which she is now retired. Today she lived in Southboro, Massachusetts where she’s near her daughters Lauren and Becky. She still visits Culver frequently, and notes her son David Ready plans to be here this summer.
A public library lecture by a woman who owned a Massachusetts publishing company near her, Discovery Enterprises, prepared Ready to take her writings to the level of an actual book; Discovery published the book, which Ready markets and helps distribute.
Ready says she plans to donate 30 percent of the book’s proceeds to t he Antiquarian and Historical Society of Culver’s ongoing museum project in the lower level of the Culver Public Library. She recently donated a 1929 quilt created by Donna Reininga’s Cromley-family mother, to the museum for its collection. “That’s something that’s in my soul, I don’t know why,” says Ready. “I’m just a history buff. I was so happy when you got that (Culver museum) area in the basement.”
Ready also sees her book in the broader context of the importance of memoir writing as part of local history, something she hopes others will consider.
“You can quit (writing) anytime,” she notes. “People say (writing one’s memoirs is) too big a commitment, but if you write it story by story, you’ve got what you wrote…there are a lot fewer records than you would think of what actually went on in families.”
Ready’s book, which ends with the story of her brothers’ exodus to the Culver-Lake Maxinkuckee area, weaves together themes of emphasizing the good grown from less than ideal circumstances. “In the prolog, I say in my account of one family’s struggles it becomes clear that poverty does not have to dictate one’s life. Poverty often creates necessity and results in invention and creativity.”
The book, she says, “invites readers to the carefree and often perplexing existence of a rural childhood, circa 1935 through the 1950s, in southern Indiana… it’s a modest book, but I think it records how we looked at things then.”