I Plan to Know Them

Born in December of 1918, and raised in Appomattox County, Virginia, my mother came from a large close-knit farm family. Proud of her heritage and home, mother took us to visit her sisters, her parents, and on walking tours of the farm. She loved to recount stories of her up-bringing, experiences of hard work, frugal living, and Christian standards.

 The Chilton family on the steps of Lynchburg College, 1938, my mother is front left.

By the time I was born in 1954, my mother had mourned for and buried both of her brothers. Since only one of my mother’s five sisters had married [and my dad an only child], we grew up with only one uncle, Berlin.  Uncle BW, as we called him, married my mother’s oldest sister Nancy. Aunt Nancy became his second wife and step-mother to his almost grown daughter, who seemed, by the time I recognized such things, much older than me. 

BW did his uncle duties when we saw him, and I loved his white hair, his gravely voice, and sweet demeanor, but I always longed for the uncles I had lost before I was born. I perhaps desired them because I couldn’t have them, and in my romanticized imagination, I wished to be tossed in the air, swung in circles, tickled, and loved by these men I only knew from the black and white photos adhered to black paper and held by black, adhesive corners in the pages of the photograph albums belonging to my grandmother and aunts.

With the full head of hair of young men and ready smiles, Uncle Robert and Uncle Chapman grew larger than life in my reveries, and the absence of them made me “different” than some of my friends. I envied those friends who talked of their "Uncle Walter" or "Uncle Mike" – I knew I had lost something valuable, precious, a God gift as my mother's sisters were delightful relatives full of vigor and spit and fun. I created in my mind what my uncles, and the families I expected they would have, would have been like.

 Robert, 1938

Told the story of his death when I asked about it,  I knew that Uncle Robert had been killed in a train accident in July of 1941. Having graduated from college in 1938 at the end of the Depression, he could not find work, and after several attempts at making a living, he was back at home living on “the farm.” Coming home from a dance and driving in the pouring rain, the windows of his car rolled up and the radio playing, Robert approached a railroad crossing in Appomattox -- it was after midnight. The railroad operator, who went off duty at twelve o’clock, was not there to bring down the safety bar, and Robert, peering around the buildings that backed up the road on both sides, did not see the train.

The train dragged his car a mile before it could stop. 

These facts to my young mind were both fascinating and ghoulish, and I know that I heard the story, but that it wasn’t a story that was told too many times. They simply didn’t talk about it to us much.

My mother noted, “the memory[of Robert's death] faded, but for years my heart ached when I came to that railroad crossing. A year or so after he died, I was riding the train home from St.Louis, and as we approached Appomattox, the conductor said, ‘I’ll never forget the wreck we had here. A young boy was coming home late at night and his car hit the train…’”

 Chapman, 1939

Working a night job and attending medical school during the day, only surviving son Chapman, smart and driven, appeared headed for a career as a doctor. Interrupted by World War II, the US Army underwrote Chapman’s last two years of medical school and then shipped him overseas in 1944 for duty, but not before Chapman married Eleanor, a beautiful girl he met while interning in Memphis..

When he returned two years later in May of 1946, his wife, my grandmother, and aunts saw a changed man. No longer confident in his skills at being a doctor, he felt he atrophied during his stint in the army where he dispensed pills and gave out bandages. Bored and restless, the usual busy Chapman didn't adjust well to Army life. He told my mother when he returned: “I’ve forgotten everything I knew.” Believing he would have to intern and start all over, he became depressed. He and his wife rented an apartment in Richmond, a "small, dark one," as my mother noted, and he accepted a position at nearby Stewart Hospital. At one point,  he commented to his wife Eleanor: “ I can’t even write up a chart.”

With all of his family and friends expecting him to succeed, in retrospect, they assumed he carried a weight of their expectations for him, ones of which he felt he couldn’t meet, and in September of 1946, he took his own life.

As Grandma wrote “we are taking the shock very well, I think.” My mother, who said that she and Chapman were very close, did not make it back in time for the funeral. A mix up in preferred seating on the plane from St. Louis, she arrived home late to a "stunned" family.

As happy of a childhood as I had, and I did, the cloud of my uncles’ deaths existed. I wondered about them, dreamed about them, and wished I had known them.It was not until I was an adult that my mother told me that about his death -- I always thought he had been killed cleaning a gun.

As my husband and I attended the 90^th birthday celebration for his aunt last weekend, I paused to think of my own family and the “what ifs” of their lives, and it spurred me to write about my uncles, the men I never knew but so longed for in the ways a young girl would.

BTW: I plan to know them --- in God’s time.

ETA: In 1993, my mother wrote a short memoir [about 90 pages] of some of the events of her life growing up on a working farm, her family, and especially her parents. Titled Will and Mimi’s Farm, she writes of the loss of her brothers and the impact it had on her family. I used her summary to write this.

 Robert and Chapman [and Spot, lol], 1923

To America

In a 2010 article in the New Yorker by Richard Rayner, he discusses his uncovering the information from one of Eisenhower's coterie that Stephen Ambrose fabricated the number of  interviews he had with Dwight Eisenhower for the sake of “narrative panache.”

Never liking to read that an author of “history” has pulled a fast one, I went ahead and completed Ambrose’s last work, To America. The work had been on my list since it came out in 2002. {I don’t need to remind you here that my approach to what I read is based on library availability and which of the eight pages of my book list on which I happen to glance. Not chronological -- not scientific -- just random.}

In this work sub-titled Personal Reflections of an Historian, Ambrose writes short chapters on a variety of subjects of historical interest --  from Thomas Jefferson to immigration to the Korean War. In each of these, his commentary highlights certain aspects of these historical people or events that he concludes interested him or impacted the course of history.  Ambrose is more complimentary than critical. Call it patriotism or my lack of patience with the latter, but I liked these essays --  he reminded me of events I had forgotten:  how Andrew Jackson got the scar on his face or the small steps that led to our full scale involvement in Vietnam.

To America is a gentle, “history” book -- as Ambrose’s approach reads like a series of letters he might have written or a conversation he might have had over the dinner table with a colleague. In these he illustrated his own biases, mistakes, as well as opinions on issues that he’s either changed his mind or developed an even stronger stance.  His own personal life interwoven with these essays makes for an even better read.

Note: In many of his revelations he chats about how he ended up being a writer, and he credits his Professor at the University of Wisconsin who encouraged him as well as made comments on his papers "[that were] sometimes humorous, usually insightful, frequently helpful, often scathing. Many times it seemed he wrote more in the way of comments than we had written in the paper.”

My kind of teacher.
Just sayin’.

*wink, wink*

The Desk

When my parents got married in June of 1948, and settled in St. Louis, my dad worked for the furniture store Styx, Bayer, and Fuller. Since he received a discount on purchases, in the first years of their marriage, they bought several good pieces: a desk, end tables, lamps, and a bedroom set.

All of those pieces, distributed among us when my parents died in 1995, and their home closed, still remain in my family,

I inherited the desk.

I call it “the desk” because that’s how we referred to it as children. Always a fixture in our living room, the desk traveled from St. Louis to Jacksonville to Atlanta, where it moved two more times in my parents’ lifetime as they lived in two house in Atlanta, and then finished out the last sixteen years of their lives in Roswell, Georgia.

I primarily remember my father sitting at that desk. His tall back slumped a little, Daddy pulled a Pugh chair, which actually wasn’t the right height for the desk,  to the front of and using the working surface, begin to do his weekly correspondence – which in a time before, well, you know, a time before now, had to be kept up with by and through handwriting.

He wrote and answered letters, paid bills, and each Saturday evening in order to be ready for the mad dash of getting a family of six ready for church, took a tithing envelope from a pigeon hole and wrote the check for the tithe.

When the fall front of the desk was down, which was most of the time, the desk was a messy place: mail, opened and not, keys, pens and pencils, various periodicals, writing paper, and other desk detritus lay about. It was never very neat – and the only time the fall front was closed was when we expected company.

Many a time in anticipation of visitors, I shoved the pile on the desk’s writing service to the back, sometimes crinkling and smashing things together, and closed the fall front to give the appearance of order. I never remember the desk being in a state of clutter free – it was always open – the curved pieces of metal which held the flip top exposed.

We were chastised many a time for leaning against that flip top and straining its strength.

Since the desk lay in between the hall door and the front door a major thoroughfare in our small house, anyone could bump into one of the sharp corners of the writing surface and be mortally wounded. 

On the very top of the desk was usually a light and a clock and various hard back books, supported by book ends. Above the desk hung a painting of Jesus knocking at a door, an image created by Warner Sallman. That painting, known as Christ at Heart’s Door, is a part of my siblings and my memories, but none of us knows what  happened to it – *sigh*. We don’t even remember if it made Mother and Daddy’s last move.

As a curious child, I loved to poke and prod in the confines of that desk. 

 I run because I can -- it's 1955. Desk is at right.

When the desk’s fall front was open and its working surface exposed, also clearly in view were the many “cool” storage spaces. I imagined what kinds of secrets could be hidden in the six pigeon holes (used mainly by Daddy for envelopes, old letters, and for some reason playing cards), four small drawers which held stamps, return address labels, anonymous old keys, and old small black and white photo of people long dead), and in the center of the work space – the absolutely most fabulous space -- a little door with a small door knob that opened and closed. What lay behind that little door now has left my memory.

I peered and peeked and examined everything in that desk – looking for some secrets I knew had to be hidden there. I never found any, but it didn’t keep me from snooping.

As my brother Hunter noted, “That desk was always there.”

 In St Louis in 1950, brother Hunter plays with a toy, given to him by his Aunt Eleanor -- desk is to the back right.

The other day I opened the desk that now belongs to me and sorted and tossed stuff that had gathered there. I have primarily used it for storage, and I haven’t sat at it at a long time and used its writing surface – even though, once, when I was teaching school, I had the wild notion that it would be super for grading papers. Actually, a super place for grading papers does not exist – but I digress.

As I cleaned out the desk’s many places, I came across the address return labels from my parents’ second home in Atlanta – one they left in 1979, as well as some old stamps and old keys. I guess I moved it as it was in 1995, and didn’t bother to clean out those small drawers.

Behind the small door, I had put a 20 ml bottle of Liquid Paper.

*shrugs*

The other stuff I found --- well, readers, is for another blog.

 Brother Hunter in some nifty black socks stares at the parents on his graduation from kindergarten, 1955.

In 1958, my sister did some vamping for the camera.

 Sister Margaret and I pose before ... a fashion show... bwha... kidding -- Easter, 1967.

ETA: I couldn't find a single photo of my brother Kenneth in front of that desk. Sorry, bro.

Circle Time with Tallulah

Yo?

 Psst. 

Tallulah?

Come on.

Point out the circle.

 Tallulah?

Please.

Thanks.

*tee hee*

*twirls*

Loving Frank

Nancy Horan writes in her Afterword, “Loving Frank is a work of fiction based on events relating to the love affair of the brilliant and controversial architect Frank Lloyd Wright and one of his clients, Mamah Borthwick Cheney.”

When Mamah Cheney and her husband Edwin commissioned Wright in 1903 to design a house for their family in Oak Park, Illinois [also childhood home of Ernest Hemingway], Mamah and Frank developed a intellectual relationship that eventually led to an affair. The depth of that affair and its repercussions, imagined by Horan, covers a period in history from 1907 to 1914.

Since very little is known about Mamah Cheney, Horan, “as close as possible,” used a historical approach to document this period in Frank Lloyd Wright’s life.  Using Wright’s closely examined life as her basis, Horan filled in Mamah’s as it “played out in her letters and other records” and laid it with the “ideas and events that enlivened the times and places in which they lived.” By doing this, Horan created the personal relationship that Cheney had with Wright.

Loving Frank is well done historical fiction;  part novel, part history, and part imagination, Horan’s work is believable, realistic, and compelling.  About ½ through the book, I emailed my friend Celia, who loaned it to me,  and told her that I did not like the “selfish” Mamah or the “arrogant” Wright. She emailed me back -- “just wait.”

Keenly interesting, Horan builds a momentum that kept me turning pages to see what happened to end the affair, and so subtle is Horan‘s writing, that I didn’t see it coming.

"Really Smart" with a small tribute to Mr. Burger

As I talked to my oldest brother this past week on the telephone to wish him sweet returns for his 63rd birthday [he lives in Boulder], I asked him about what he remembers about the oratorical contests he entered about fifty years ago.

Note: He entered three different years [it was probably an age qualifier] -- and placed each time.

My mother, who had encouraged him -- better word -- made, was thrilled when he did so well.

My oldest brother Hunter has a lovely speaking [and singing] voice, which came in handy when he gave his valedictorian speech at his high school graduation in 1967, and handsomely paid off as he wrote a speech and presented it at this local speech contest for the Optimist Club. This learned skill gave him the poise and aplomb to later deliver that speech at graduation, or at least, that's my version of it.

He doesn’t remember how old he was exactly [he guessed 12 or 13] when he entered those Optimist oratorical contests, but he does remember that my mother relentlessly hounded him until he performed the speeches perfectly.{I have the best memory in the family -- thus, the writer that I think I am as I chronicle these childhood events.}

I’ve written about my mother's task-mastering spirit [see blog on weeding, kitchen chores, etc.],  and my single recollection of these competitions involved his being a pretty reluctant contestant.

My oldest brother Hunter had/has some serious brains. A natural linguist, mathematician, as well as avid reader, he grew up with  having academics come easy to him.  In elementary school, he had the reputation as a child prodigy. Students in our young era weren’t labeled as “gifted” or “talented” -- they were called “really smart."  By high school, as three primary schools converged into one school, everyone knew him as "smart. Really smart." My mother recognized his abilities and wished for him to capitalize on it. He, well, wasn't that keen on "capitalizing."

As a student he did little work outside the classroom as he could pretty much listen in class and be done with it. I wanted that. Didn’t have it.

By the time I got to high school in the fall of 1967, Hunter, graduated and headed to the University of Virginia, left behind at Sylvan HS his academic legacy. Not fun to follow.

Each teacher I had, who had taught Hunter, seemed amazed that we shared a common biology.

Math teacher: Are you sure you are Hunter’s sister?

History teacher:  You’re Hunter’s sister? Really? You're kidding?

Science teacher: I take it you are not related to Hunter.

Social studies teacher: You? No. Hunter’s sister?  *rolls eyes in disbelief*

The hardest academic area  in which to follow Hunter was Latin. Taught by the infamous Mr. Rufus Burger, a frightening Academician with high standards, I enrolled in Latin I as an eighth grader, and the struggle to master it began. I have no ear for language, and the toil I endured to conjugate verbs with the right inflection, learn vocabulary quickly -- as many as 100 words a week, much less translate those epic battles involving Julius Caesar in the Gallic wars, those long, boring stories of the travails of Romulus and Remus, or the daily life of Cato  --- still give me nightmares.

Bloody argh.

When he reigned over his Latin classroom in the late 1960s, Mr. Burger seemed elderly. He might have been in his 40s -- hard to know since under his tutelage, I stayed a nervous wreck -- he had a daunting presence and elicited respect.

Mr. Burger, in his horned rims, paraded his classroom by moving up and down each row with his hands behind his back, the waistband of his pants seemingly high on his short waist-ed physique, his tie and white shirt impeccably tucked, and his eagle eye trained on any student who might be out of line, and if one dared cross him, he'd quip, "I'll have your life's blood." Funny now. Then, not so much.

As he tapped the front of my desk with his forefinger and demanded in his deep voice, “Read, girl, read," I took a huge swallow and prayed that I could get through even some of my weak and less than fluid translations with some accuracy.

Mr. Burger’s classroom demands were legendary: not only translating the long Latin passages, he also crazily and randomly called on us to conjugate any Latin verb in any tense or demanded for us to recite the   declensions of any pronoun in the masculine or the feminine. Hic -- Haec -- Hoc....

*shudders*

I dared not show up un-prepared -- but I did show up average.


I mostly let Mr. Burger down, and he and I both sighed with relief when I stopped with the required two years of foreign language with Latin II. Hunter, of course, had taken up through Latin V, some of them independent studies, and made Mr. Burger proud. Very proud. Magnificus.

Mr. Burger adored my smart brother Hunter, who also picked Mr. Burger as his Star teacher, a recognition by the student with the highest SAT score in his class for the teacher who was most influential, and when I came after with my puny skills, needless to say, I was a disappointment. Hopefully, Mr. Burger found me amusing -- :-)

All of my siblings and I took Latin [my parents thought it a better language to study] and “following Hunter” not fun --- as I couldn’t measure up. Not even close. But I digress as usual.

One of the years that Hunter entered the Optimist Oratorical contest was 1962. With my mother’s relentless coaching and critiquing of his speech and always on his back to work on it or practice it or refine it or polish it, his total lack of enthusiasm had him half-heartedly writing his speech [the topic provided by the club] and then, go figure, winning.  So. Hunter.

My memory, of course, is of the constant struggle of wills between Hunter and my mother, both so alike in their trench digging and drawing of lines in the sand. An obedient son, perhaps not dutiful, and an accomplished procrastinator, he did as she asked, but he wasn’t happy or in a hurry.

He dragged his feet a lot on the writing of the speech and then on the practicing of it; we all suffered together. We were that kind of family. *snickers*

For many evenings and weekends, she sat by his side as he went through the speech over and over until every sentence, word, syllable had been analyzed for the maximum effect.  She did it out of love for wanting to showcase his talent; he did it because she expected it, but he wasn’t about to make it easy.

*sigh*

As I noted, Hunter doesn’t remember too much about it -- not the topics of the speeches, not how many other boys and girls entered, not even giving them, but he does remember how much he hated the preparation for it. We lived in a small house, I reminded him, and we hated it too.
:-)

He did tell me this: the year he won first place -- he thinks he might have been in seventh grade -- the prize for winning was a trip to St. Simons Island, Georgia, with the rest of the first place winners from the state. He said, “As we toured the area, I thought it was the neatest place. The history fascinated me.”

BTW: In the summer of 1962, my brother Hunter and I spent a week in Virginia with my aunts where we toured Appomattox Civil War historical park and the Blue Ridge Parkway. Those are the pictures I posted on this blog. There is a picture somewhere of Hunter and his trophy for winning the oratorical contest, but I couldn’t find it.

ETA: About ten years ago, Mr. Burger died. He outlived my parents who died in 1995. As a career educator spanning over forty years, he left the Atlanta Public School system in the late 1970s and went to the private sector. He lived into his late 80s. A terrific teacher, he deserves a place in my family's collective memory. 

Requiescat in pace

Confederacy of Silence

In 1995, as most of the country [not I, btw] was captured by the murder trial of former NFL player O.J. Simpson in Los Angeles, California, the small town of Batesville, Mississippi, had its own trial of a former football player in that of Handy Campbell of Greenwood, Mississippi, in the murder of one of his friends [the trial moved to Batesville, about 75 miles north of Greenwood, because no one in Greenwood seemed unacquainted with either the victim or the defendant].

In his book Confederacy of Silence: A True Tale of the New Old South, published in 2002, Richard Rubin heads south in 1988, as a “cub” reporter for the one newspaper in Greenwood, Mississippi: his primary beat  -- sports. In the football loving Delta, Rubin meets Handy Campbell, an African American quarterbacking phenom, who wows the fans of Greenwood High School as he takes them to a state championship. When Rubin packs his bags to head back north after a year working in Greenwood, Handy’s future seems assured  --  a football scholarship to Old Miss, and after a stint at the collegiate level, the National Football League. 

Six years later, Handy Campbell sits in jail awaiting his trial, and Rubin returns south to investigate what happened in the years in between the state championship and a murder rap. The South that Rubin encounters this time is not the one he left before….and even he was surprised by the changes.

Filled with anecdotes, interviews, personal life narrative, history, social commentary, and well-drawn characters, Rubin’s honesty, direct style, and fascinating look at  this small Southern town stuck in the past held my attention. At times, Rubin’s comments on racism and religion smarts if you care about stuff like that, but his confronting  his own flaws, feelings, prejudices, and perhaps at times, total misunderstanding of situations makes his attempt to make sense of what went wrong palpable.

If you like thorough examination of everything from state roads to murder trials, this book's for you -- Rubin did his research and weaved a fine, but tragic, story.