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Madeline
Clint Johnson’s second husband was Charles H. Wilkey, who went by the
nickname “Bud”. After her divorce from Fred Johnson, Madeline
moved to
In later years Madeline told her
daughter-in-law, Caroline, stories of her good times in
Madeline met Charles (Bud) Wilkey, who was
a traveling salesman, selling advertisement for a prestigious
construction magazine, The Practical Builder. Unmarried,
Madeline joined Bud on the road, which must have been very scandalous
for the era. They married in 1938, and a year later Mary Clint,
was made Walter’s legal guardian.
Bud smoked cigars, chewed tobacco, and was
a heavy drinker. In his earlier years, he had been diagnosed with TB
while in the military, and for a time lived in a sanitarium. Because of
his TB, he was discharged from the service with a lifetime pension.
Bud was a fastidious dresser and both he
and Madeline enjoyed expensive clothing, jewelry, and fine things.
He wore a small pencil mustache, and was a slender man who, when he
gained weight, did so in his middle, in the form of a protruding pot
belly stomach. His penchant for meticulous grooming included shaving his
legs and under his arms.
Eventually his sales territory was along
the pacific coast. He and Madeline kept an apartment in
Aside from being a salesman, Bud dabbled in
various questionable activities, which included book making. One
family legend tells of Madeline and Bud participating in a scheme that
was very similar to the plot in Paul Newman and Robert Redford’s
The Sting.
Bud had been married before Madeline, yet
he had no children of his own. By the time Bud’s stepson, Walt, was 15
years old, his mother-in-law, Mary Clint, had passed away, and Walt was
living with Madeline’s father and her sister’s family. Unhappy
with his aunt and uncle, Walt ran away from
Bud was not happy to have his stepson move
in with them. Possessing a self-centered nature, Bud was jealous of
Walt, unwilling to have Madeline’s attention diverted away from himself.
He was often sarcastic to Walt, and one time dumped a bucket of ice into
the sleeping teenager’s bed, which was his way of teaching him to wake
up earlier.
Bud, a heavy drinker, would often go on
drunken binges that might last for several weeks at a time. He was not a
friendly drunk, but a man who would become verbally abusive and
sarcastic.
Pressured by his mother and stepfather to
move out, Walt left high school early, and joined the Navy at age 17.
Yet, when Walt returned from the Navy, Bud took him on the road,
attempting to teach him the trade of advertising salesman. It was
a generous effort on Bud’s part, yet Walt’s niche was not that of
advertising salesman.
Bud had one sibling, Margaret, who doted on
her younger brother. She was very jealous of Madeline, and had a
poor relationship with the sister-in-law. She and her husband,
Earl Anderson, had one son, who died as a young man. Over the
years, they remained close with Toynette, their widowed daughter-in-law.
In later years Margaret shared Thanksgiving dinners with Bud, Madeline,
and Walt’s family.
Bud’s mother, Mrs. Haworth, called Caroline
“Carolena”. Madeline commented to her daughter-in-law, Caroline,
that she didn’t understand why Bud was so good to his mother, who had
abandoned him in his youth, to pursue her own adventures.
Ironically, Madeline had done a similar thing.
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