the Genung Funeral Home was started by Seth
Genung and he turned it into a very successful business. After several such
years, he realized he could no longer keep up with day to day operations so he
turned it over to his son, Charles, who earned enduring fame (at least in
Waterloo) for embalming Bill Bailey.
It did not take Seth
long to realize that retirement was not for him so he arranged to have the city
fathers award him a volunteer job. He became the custodian of Lafayette Park,
the beautiful area adjacent to Waterloo High School and conveniently, just
across the street from the Genung Funeral Home. Below is a picture of Lafayette
Park.
History is silent about what Seth did in this volunteer job to keep himself busy-- with one exception: He reported to his overseeing committee that upon examination of one of the two Civil War cannons in the park, he noted that one of them still contained a cannon ball.
It is a well known fact that in any small town when something unusual happens, almost immediately, two stories circulate—one, the official story and two, the local version of what REALLY happened. So here are the two versions:
The Official Story:
Seth decided that it was
not safe to have a cannon with a cannon ball in its barrel so he decided he
would put a very tiny amount of gun powder into the cannon and then light a
fuse to “puff” the ball out. When he did this, instead of one ball exiting the
cannon mouth and falling harmlessly to the ground a few feet away, two cannon
balls roared out and landed on a Main Street building a quarter of a mile away.
There was damage to the building but fortunately, no one was hurt.
The Local Version
Everybody knew that Seth
and his wife were not getting along. Everybody knew he would do anything to get
rid of her. And everybody knew that the cannon in question was 200 feet
from the Genung Funeral Home and was aimed directly at the room that Seth’s
wife always did her knitting every afternoon. To add credence to this version,
the cannon balls did pass his wife’s knitting room within a few feet on their
way down Main Street.
In addition to all the above, there is a direct connection to this story and the Taylor blog. Harold B. Taylor has his own version of what REALLY happened that fateful day when the Civil War cannon went off:
Harold always insisted
there were really three balls in the cannon and the third ball traveled another
mile south of the other two and struck his house. As proof, he would point to
an eight inch diameter round hole on his kitchen wall. Whenever any of his
grandkids or nieces or nephews asked what caused this large round hole, he
couldn’t wait to tell them his cannon ball story. He did admit it only worked
while they were still quite young. After they reached about five years old,
they begin to doubt his story. They would say smarty things like “cannon balls
weren’t that big” or “that hole looks like a stovepipe for a stove went there
once.“ Harold would just laugh and say, “I have learned to only tell the
story to the young kids.”
