Character Study of John Holt (Pop) in The Honey Harvest

The Honey Harvest

Author Liz Fentress

The playwright's  description:

Time, the present.  John Holt (Pop) Mel’s father, a slender man, who has just been released from the hospital where he was treated (unsuccessfully) for psychotic depression; he suffers from a disabling lack of faith in life and in himself.  A meek, gentle man he is most at home in the natural world.  He is in his mid-sixties and retired.                                   

John Holt character back story by John Lina:

John Holt was born on Christmas Eve in 1951 in Janesville Wisconsin at Mount Mercy Hospital to Mary Jones Holt and Joseph Kenneth Holt.  Mary died during his birth.  His father was helped with raising John, and his four brothers, by his paternal grandmother, Ann.  Joseph’s father had already died at the time of John Holt’s birth.  Joseph never remarried.

His grandmother was a kind and sincere woman, religious to the point of distraction and put things into the “hands of God” as she tried to cope with the shenanigans of the five boys.  She often left the discipline to Joey when he got home from a long day of working at the local grain elevator.  

Discipline was often severe because he was tired and not in a mood to put up with both sides of the story.  He wasn’t, however, cruel and only handed out corporal punishment for particularly brazen breaches of rules.

John was the youngest by 2 years and as a result was often the butt of his brothers need for superiority.  He, like many youngest boys, was not treated kindly by his brothers.  His third older brother, Clarence, was often his protector and he could count on Clarence to defend him from harsh treatment from the others.

This is not to say that it was always bad for John.  As a brother in the family he could count on all of his brothers to uphold, protect, and defend him in situations outside the home.  If anyone picked on any of the Holt boys, he had to be prepared to take on all of them.  This boded well for all of them and they rarely had trouble from anyone.

John attended St Williams Catholic Elementary school in Janesville and was a good student.   He graduated from St Mary’s High school in 1968.  He took well to math and science, had little interest in literature or art.   He then went to University of Wisconsin-Rock County for two years and finished his four year Civil Engineering degree at U of WI-Madison.  

He worked in Janesville for Rock County as an Engineer for 40 years, retiring at age 62.  As an engineer for the county he participated in the design, review, and supervised construction of all the Civil Engineering projects in the county.

He married Jeanne Addington when he was 37 years of age and she was 33.  She was a clerk of the Rock County court and they’d known each other for 15 years before finally falling in love and getting married.  

They tried for a long time to have a child and were finally successful when Melissa was born in 1996 when John was 45 and Jeanne was 41.  The pregnancy was not without its difficulties but the birth was normal and easy.

As the birth day approached, John became more and more worried about Jeanne, probably harking back to the fact that his mother died during his birth.  His worries, however, were unfounded because both mother and daughter were fine.

Melissa was raised in a loving home by parents who treated her well.  They attended Mass every Sunday at St Patrick’s church, she attended parochial school there and went to high school at Joseph H Craig, which was still relatively new at the time.  She graduated and went away to college at U of WI-Madison.

Jeanne, meanwhile, was diagnosed with uterine cancer when Melissa was still in grade school.  She died when Melissa was in her second year of high school.  John seemed to handle the situation well, at first.  He grieved but seemed to adjust to her death after a short time; some friends thought too short of a time.  

Melissa and he carried on without Jeanne; John buried himself in his work and did engineering projects in the area that were, more or less, gratis for people he knew.  Melissa continued without mom; she had a full and normal social life there in Janesville and had many friends.

When Melissa left for college, John began a steep decline into depression.  His work didn’t falter but his mood and attitude were noticeably changed.  He seemed not to care very much about what was going on around him.  He dropped out of the Rotary Club and only occasionally went to church, usually when Melissa came home for the weekend and during the summer.  He just didn’t seem to be interested in anything except the design projects had did around the county for friends.

One weekend Melissa came home to find him sitting in his recliner chair, not watching TV, not reading, not doing anything, just sitting there; he was non-committal in his responses to her.  She became alarmed when he continued this behavior after her trying her best to get through to him.  She called the family physician and was told to take him to the ER at Mercy Health and Trauma center.

Dr. Gillespie met them there and diagnosed John with Major Depression and arranged to have him admitted to the hospital for observation.  During the time he was being observed, several alarming factors emerged and the diagnosis was escalated to Psychotic Depression. 

His grief for Jeanne was festering in his mind, he felt guilty about his strong desire for her to have a child; that somehow this triggered her illness.  We was doing okay until Feb/Mar when he even considered ending it all to give Melissa a good start in life with an inheritance that would have been significant.  He went missing.

Dr. Gillespie had treated him with medication but it no longer seemed to be effective; he reluctantly concluded that ECT was indicated as a last resort.  It seemed to work.  John was stable and less symptomatic but needed some time to recover.

Melissa was concerned about him and so sure that she could bring him back to normal that she arranged to have him come home under her care.  She arranged to be away from college for a while, as long as it took, to take care of him.  He helped her move home in January but then the March episode triggered a relapse and back into the hospital he went.  Now it was May and, as of yesterday, he  was home again. 

She decided on a long-dormant desire to keep bees as something they could do together that would pique his interest and hasten his recovery.  Where she got that from he didn’t know; was she not aware of the allergic reaction he’d had to a bee sting as a youth?