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Forbears of Bert Raymond Hoobler, written by his son, Sibley Worth Hoobler.

    Dr. Bert Raymond Hoobler was born 1872. According to what dad told me, he was born near the now non-existent Indian Village of Sanganang on Saginaw Bay not far from Pinconning, Michigan. I was told that his father Samual Hoobler was a school teacher in the nearby village and his mother, Mary Worth was the typical pioneer woman, cooking for the family, washing the clothes, and placating an occasional Indian who came begging to the back door. At dads birth the popular Prince Albert of England, called "Bertie" by the populace, was touring America. Dad was named Bert Raymond, called "Bertie" which he hated! Mary Worth’s roots I do not know, but she bore the name that was a descendent of Major General Worth, a New Yorker, who starred in the Mexican American War of the 1840s. Her family must have retained some prominence, though I do not know in what way, but an overpass of 1-75 bears the title "Worth Road".

 In those days the Hooblers lived on the fringe of the great pine forest, which covered all of Michigan to the North and was just to be lumbered. Father told tales of walking through the deep woods in the evening, coming back from the nearest store, and being terrified by the sudden hooting of the Owls. Later the family moved to Standish Michigan. Dad had finished schooling and went to work at the Michigan Central Railroad Freight Terminal. His facility at translating the letters on boxcars and determining the railroad or origin was phenomenal. He impressed us at every stop at a railroad crossing! One day there was an accident at the railway at Bay City. A hastily summoned surgeon was the hero of the day and inspired dad to go for a medical career. Hal Chamberlain, a Standish banker, asked him how to realize his dream. Dad worked his way through Wabash College and Cornell Medical School graduating in 1905, helped on the way by many kindly college professors. Alter medical school, he entered and did some of the first pediatric research at Presbyterian Hospital under the direction of Professor Graham Rusk.

My father was from a large family. Of his brothers and sisters, I remember only a few. Uncle Hal became a pediatrician and practiced for many years in Alameda, California. His wife Aunt Marion was a wonderful woman whom we frequently sited while in San Francisco. Uncle Curt was the senior brother, and a kindly gentleman who with Aunt Stella lived in and around Bay City and in her final years occupied a small house near Kawkalin with unmarried daughter Verona until ousted by someone who wanted to put down an oil and gas well on her property. Another member of the family was Aunt Claudine who married a Southerner and lived for many years in Ruston, Louisiana, a pleasant southern town that we visited several times. But more unusual was her later marriage to a nice older man, Mr. Boylan, who in retirement served as our church janitor in Ann Arbor. Somehow he learned that his old "flame" of Michigan days was widowed. Claudine came north; they were married and lived in Ann Arbor several years until death took Mr. Boylan. Claudine was a good piano player and I remember clustering around her piano to sing old songs on many a Sunday afternoon. The last members of the family I remember — and loved the mast — were Uncle Rolla and Aunt Bess together with their daughter, Leila, a playmate of my age. Uncle Rolla was a wonderful cheerful man who loved to fish with my dad. We had some unforgettable fishing and camping trips in the Upper Peninsula and on the White River, north of Thessalonica Ontario. In the depression years they left their lovely home on Bay City’s East Side to live on Detroit’s West Side where Uncle Rolla did maintenance work on rental properties. Dad built in gratitude a small wooden cabin near ours, on the banks of the Pigeon River and it was our joy to share the woodlands with them for many summers before I went of to college. Of the other family members I know only by hearsay and the offspring of the Hoobler Family, all my age were numerous and confusing. However I am sure they all did well in life and justified the faith of their parents.