Wyoming and the Megas Diamonds

Dad's One Year A.A. Anniversary

Lest there be any misunderstanding about our Colorado Road Trip, I don't advocate drinking and driving.

In fact, those silly Coors photos were taken on our way into the brewery.

We tasted beer, but none of us became drunk in Colorado.  Coffee remains our beverage addiction of choice, but we all must be careful.

My dad was a member of Alcoholics Anonymous for the final 43 years of his life, and he became much happier as well as more successful after he quit drinking, parlaying the tips he formerly spent in bars into his own beauty salon and then a comfortable suburban home.

To commemorate his good fortune of ten sober years and then twenty years of marriage, he bought us all diamond rings, including a diamond horseshoe ring and a wedding ring with a big square diamond for himself.  However, this is not the story of Harry's Diamonds.  Shortly after I graduated from high school, he made the biggest mistake of his life, divorcing Mom, proving nobody's perfect, even cold sober.

Once again I seem to have digressed pretty far from the subject, which is Wyoming and the Megas Diamonds, but there is a link of sorts.   Alcoholism, which Dad overcame, can be the ruin of many lives, and it touched Julie's family in Rock Springs, Wyoming, where we spent the night at less-than-palatial but certainly palatable America's Best Value Inn (nee The Inn at Rock Springs before the new banner was raised with the old signage still in place).

Over our complimentary breakfast, which included great biscuits and gravy, Jay and Amy finally read my blog from a couple of years ago about Julie's father John's childhood home in Rock Springs, prompting Amy to ask if I'd written about the Megas Diamonds.

I had previously left that in the domain of Julie's Aunt Myrtle, a retired head librarian who is an excellent story-teller and the unofficial keeper of Megas family lore, but here goes....

According to Find a Grave, Margaret Paterson was born in Durham County, England, in 1855, and moved to Pennsylvania with her parents in 1864.

Seven years later, at age 16, Margaret married Stephen Stewart, with whom she went on to have four children before he died in 1880.

Being a 25 year-old single mother couldn't have been easy, and one year later, in 1881, she married bartender Frank Hodge in Iowa.  The next year, Margaret gave birth to John Hodge, the rascal in this story.

Julie, Johnny, John, Jacque and Cheryl Megas

Margaret and Frank also had a daughter, but whether due to death, divorce or some other reason, Frank dropped out of the picture altogether at this point.

From one or both of her husbands, Margaret came into bereavement funds.  I would guess the inheritance came from Stephen Stewart's estate (possibly some kind of government job?), since bartenders don't tend to have lucrative benefits packages, although for all we know either might have had some sort of military pension or something.

John, Julie, Johnny (foreground) and stepmother Julia

In any case, as Aunt Myrtle tells the story, Margaret "used her widow money to buy a large livery stable in Rock Springs. She made it very profitable, supplying the town with buggies for all occasions -- courtings, weddings, funerals and drayage."

I looked up the definition of drayage, by the way, and it means shipment of goods over short distances, a field in which my brother-in-law John Megas works on the periphery doing maintenance on commercial warehouse doors, and he has also managed to make very profitable.

However, John Megas's namesake, Margaret's "son John Hodge, was considered a big drunk and a gambler.  He put away a lot of liquor and played a lot of poker."

As frequently is the case with that type of personality, however, John Hodge had beguiling allure to the fairer sex, and he managed to marry Myrtle Demerest, namesake of Aunt Myrtle Megas Cordon, who wrote:

Myrtle finally divorced him, married a railroad man from Livingston, Montana, and moved to Montana.

Margaret wanted her grandchild Ellenor to be near her, and believing neither John nor Myrtle were fit parents, she spirited Ellenor away to a convent in Nebraska until the dust settled.

Ellenor returned to Wyoming to be raised by her grandmother, Margaret.

One night in a wild poker game, John Hodge won two diamond earrings -- not quite a matched set, one being slightly large than the other.

Bachelor John Megas (far right) with Surveyor Crew 1950

Margaret managed to snatch the earrings from her drunken son and hide them in a small bag which she often wore around her neck.

Just to fill a couple of gaps in Aunt Myrtle's narrative that she wrote to help our son Jay with a school project about family lore, I'll add that the way I've heard the story told verbally over the years is that the unmatched diamonds were loose when John Hodge won them, and Margaret had them made into earrings so that she could wear them as she slept, effectively stopping John Hodge from losing them in another drunken late night poker game.

Soldier John Megas On Leave in WWII

Eventually, Margaret's granddaughter Ellenor married coal miner Nick Megas, whose boyhood home in Madaro near Chania Harbor on the Greek Isle of Crete has been written about several times in this blog.  

After Margaret died (in 1926), the diamonds were given to her granddaughter, Ellenor, who also kept them in the same small bag and would also often wear them around her neck.

During the depression years, if money were needed for rent or food or doctor bills, Ellenor would leave the small bag with the diamonds in the hands of a banker relative as collateral for cash. She always managed to retrieve them.

John and George Megas in 1928

In later years and better times, when Ellenor's two sons, John Megas (Julie's father), and his brother, George Megas, were grown men,  each was given one of the "Hodge" diamonds to become a gift to their brides in the form of a ring.

Which goes to show you, playing poker can turn out be a very romantic adventure.

Back to the recent past, we'd walked around Rock Springs the previous evening, so after breakfast we hit the road for much greener Western Wyoming.


In Jackson, we picked up some pricey but delicious sandwiches, which we enjoyed at a scenic stop on a hike in Grand Teton National Park.

By the way, if you've reached 62 years of age, you can purchase a lifetime National Parks pass for only $10 like I did.


That senior pass gives me and up to three guests unlimited free admissions to all of our wonderful National Parks for the rest of my life.

We took a $9 boat ride across Grand Teton's Jenny Lake to Hidden Falls, which proved to be quite hidden indeed, but it was a beautiful hike all the way up and then for three miles back to the parking lot.

On the road again, we continued motoring north toward Big Sky, Montana, in our snug Ford Escape.