The pictures my brother sent are from my mother's family. A bunch had water damage but there are some good studio shots of her brothers and some snapshots of her sister.
I know less about her family so this won't be quite so long.
Her mother, Allie, was the longest lived of my grandparents, lasting into her nineties. Her husband had died when my mother was about sixteen or seventeen (yes, an echo of my own loss of my mother at the same age). There were five children.
Sam was the oldest and he and my mother were very close. She was just a year younger. He would come home from school and tell her everything so that when she started the next year, they promptly moved her ahead a grade. She ended up graduating from high school at about fifteen. Sam apparently lost an eye at an early age, something to do with sewing scissors, so of the three brothers, he was the only one to not serve in World War II.
Close meant writing letters then, and unfortunately none of those correspondences survive. My mother wrote letters to her siblings often. I can still recognize her hand when I see it. Sam lived in Florida and was an accountant. Oddly, I'm not aware that he had children, but he may have. I never met any nor did I meet him.
Then came my mother, Magdalene ("like Mary Magdalene in the Bible" she would say) and after her was Alfred (I think). Alfred was known as "Bozo" as a kid and was apparently something of a cutup. There was an often told story about how he nearly cut his foot off chopping a skunk out of a tree stump. Cut off his foot or not, it seems the craziest of stunts. He had huge standout ears and a great smile.
He served in the infantry in the Pacific during the war, participating in three or four landings. He came home with what we would now call Post-Traumatic Stress Syndrome and hid out for the better part of three years in the attic room of his mother's house. His mother would lock him in at night because she was afraid of him. Eventually he used his GI Bill benefits to get a degree in civil engineering, and with that in hand set off to see the world.
I remember a visit from him when I was about nine or ten. He had been in Brazil doing a mapping project prior to some highway construction. He brought my mother back a deep honey colored topaz in an emerald cut that was nearly an inch long. There were things for us kids and he played with us. He was a sweet engaging man.
He went off to travel some more and eventually met and married a Latina woman from Central America, and had three children. He settled outside of San Diego and I visited in the eighties. Raised a Southern Baptist, I suspect Alfred was as lapsed as his sister, but his wife was a Seventh Day Adventist and he willingly supported their upbringing in that religion.
Marian was the sister. She may have been older than Alfred. My image of Marian is what I thought of when I read the character "Hilly" in "The Help." One of the pictures we got from my brother shows her sitting movie star languorously on a divan in something that looks like a full length negligee. Another her son, Allen, is labeled "Allen in his new tux for Cotillion." She was apparently that kind of girl. She married in succession the two richest men in the town.
She always struck me as tightly wired and edgy. We stayed with her for a bit just after my parents separated. The story goes that she had a nervous breakdown in the late thirties maybe early forties and that her mother's response was to read the Bible to her. My mother apparently snagged her away and got her to treatment. I would not be surprised if it had been electroshock therapy, which was commonly used at the time. My sister reported that when she went back to live with Marian, that she was "starved." Quite probably an exaggeration, but Marian was notoriously stingy. When the youngest brother needed some help, she didn't participate.
Her son, Allen, became a mortician, I think partly at his mother's urging because of the income potential. Alas, the cotillion dreams were not to be realized as at some point in his young adult life Allen "came out." My sister, who had "come out" to me (significantly) on a Father's Day in 1978 used to see him often in the city where they both lived. Counting my father that makes three, and I'm not so sure about cousin Johnny.
The last child was son George, about ten years younger than my mother. He ended up serving on sub chasers in the Atlantic during the war and the Navy sent him to Dartmouth after the war. He ended up getting at least one graduate degree in Engineering, worked for the Air Force for a time until the work he was doing became part of NASA and he became a fairly senior manager in Huntsville. He would call every year during the holidays to catch up and was always advising me to get a job with a good company that I could stay with for a career. Not sure he appreciated the world that employment has become.
I miss his calls. He died only about three years ago about a year after Alfred and Sam. I knew him better than the rest because I lived with him for a while in the fifties. He married late, an older woman with two sons who were and apparently still are hellions. Thaddis died before him leaving him with a developmentally disabled son of their own in his twenties. He had another son with her as well. In his retirement he still went to the office for NASA liftoffs and played a lot of golf.
He was kind of a fussy man. He had some kind of digestive issues and Thaddis was always preparing him special things or watching out for what he ate in restaurants. But he had a playful streak. I remember him learning how and teaching us boys how to strike a match from a paper matchbook with one hand, "in case I ever lose a hand." It was easier before they moved the striking surface to the back. The irony--he smoked his whole life and Thaddis did not, but a form of lung cancer not related to second hand smoke is what took her.
When my mother was ill and was obviously going to end her days in nursing care, he stepped in. My brother went to live with him and he made arrangements for my sister and me. Maybe not the best arrangements but at least we would be with family such as it was. He then went around the state where we had lived cleaning up my mother's trail of debt. My father had paid no child support and we had lived for four years on her meager salary and credit. George was a mench. I know I never thanked him enough.
I know other families have similar fractures as mine but sometimes this feels like such a loss to me. In the eighties I did go around and visit a few of them, notably George and Alfred and their families. A few years ago my brother organized a Thanksgiving at George's. My wife and I couldn't go because things were tight and we had just been traveling expensively for my graduate program. My younger son went. I wish now that I had.
I think the estrangement has its root largely in my father's family. He had a problem early on. There was another oft told story of falling off of the train on the way home from prep school, often told along with the one about sister Nancy falling off of a porch after drinking "Zombies." Our culture clearly had something of a different relationship with alcohol in the forties and fifties, probably dating back to the end of prohibition. It was as if the whole culture was self-medicating. My parents had two martini evenings at home fairly frequently. They all avoided it and then Magdalene was stuck with it. Not surprised that she might have felt she got sold a bill of goods. He was a charming fellow. But his parents didn't deal with it at all, and his sibs except Nancy avoided him.
Physically closer to his family, we saw little of it, not that I would have wanted to have a relationship with Frank, and I wasn't any more comfortable with Nancy and her "boyfriends'" drinking than with his. Mother's family was spread over the continent and beyond and there was no money for travel. When I did finally see them as an adult, I was often a little uncomfortable and out of place, probably not as communicative and engaging as I might have been. In the end George's patience and duty was a little glue to keep me in touch.
Now my sibs are across continent. I have broken the connection fairly completely with my second life out here on the coast, and my sister isn't speaking to anyone anyway, while there are other things that keep my brother and me from having much of a relationship.
Bittersweet to think of them.
I know less about her family so this won't be quite so long.
Her mother, Allie, was the longest lived of my grandparents, lasting into her nineties. Her husband had died when my mother was about sixteen or seventeen (yes, an echo of my own loss of my mother at the same age). There were five children.
Sam was the oldest and he and my mother were very close. She was just a year younger. He would come home from school and tell her everything so that when she started the next year, they promptly moved her ahead a grade. She ended up graduating from high school at about fifteen. Sam apparently lost an eye at an early age, something to do with sewing scissors, so of the three brothers, he was the only one to not serve in World War II.
Close meant writing letters then, and unfortunately none of those correspondences survive. My mother wrote letters to her siblings often. I can still recognize her hand when I see it. Sam lived in Florida and was an accountant. Oddly, I'm not aware that he had children, but he may have. I never met any nor did I meet him.
Then came my mother, Magdalene ("like Mary Magdalene in the Bible" she would say) and after her was Alfred (I think). Alfred was known as "Bozo" as a kid and was apparently something of a cutup. There was an often told story about how he nearly cut his foot off chopping a skunk out of a tree stump. Cut off his foot or not, it seems the craziest of stunts. He had huge standout ears and a great smile.
He served in the infantry in the Pacific during the war, participating in three or four landings. He came home with what we would now call Post-Traumatic Stress Syndrome and hid out for the better part of three years in the attic room of his mother's house. His mother would lock him in at night because she was afraid of him. Eventually he used his GI Bill benefits to get a degree in civil engineering, and with that in hand set off to see the world.
I remember a visit from him when I was about nine or ten. He had been in Brazil doing a mapping project prior to some highway construction. He brought my mother back a deep honey colored topaz in an emerald cut that was nearly an inch long. There were things for us kids and he played with us. He was a sweet engaging man.
He went off to travel some more and eventually met and married a Latina woman from Central America, and had three children. He settled outside of San Diego and I visited in the eighties. Raised a Southern Baptist, I suspect Alfred was as lapsed as his sister, but his wife was a Seventh Day Adventist and he willingly supported their upbringing in that religion.
Marian was the sister. She may have been older than Alfred. My image of Marian is what I thought of when I read the character "Hilly" in "The Help." One of the pictures we got from my brother shows her sitting movie star languorously on a divan in something that looks like a full length negligee. Another her son, Allen, is labeled "Allen in his new tux for Cotillion." She was apparently that kind of girl. She married in succession the two richest men in the town.
She always struck me as tightly wired and edgy. We stayed with her for a bit just after my parents separated. The story goes that she had a nervous breakdown in the late thirties maybe early forties and that her mother's response was to read the Bible to her. My mother apparently snagged her away and got her to treatment. I would not be surprised if it had been electroshock therapy, which was commonly used at the time. My sister reported that when she went back to live with Marian, that she was "starved." Quite probably an exaggeration, but Marian was notoriously stingy. When the youngest brother needed some help, she didn't participate.
Her son, Allen, became a mortician, I think partly at his mother's urging because of the income potential. Alas, the cotillion dreams were not to be realized as at some point in his young adult life Allen "came out." My sister, who had "come out" to me (significantly) on a Father's Day in 1978 used to see him often in the city where they both lived. Counting my father that makes three, and I'm not so sure about cousin Johnny.
The last child was son George, about ten years younger than my mother. He ended up serving on sub chasers in the Atlantic during the war and the Navy sent him to Dartmouth after the war. He ended up getting at least one graduate degree in Engineering, worked for the Air Force for a time until the work he was doing became part of NASA and he became a fairly senior manager in Huntsville. He would call every year during the holidays to catch up and was always advising me to get a job with a good company that I could stay with for a career. Not sure he appreciated the world that employment has become.
I miss his calls. He died only about three years ago about a year after Alfred and Sam. I knew him better than the rest because I lived with him for a while in the fifties. He married late, an older woman with two sons who were and apparently still are hellions. Thaddis died before him leaving him with a developmentally disabled son of their own in his twenties. He had another son with her as well. In his retirement he still went to the office for NASA liftoffs and played a lot of golf.
He was kind of a fussy man. He had some kind of digestive issues and Thaddis was always preparing him special things or watching out for what he ate in restaurants. But he had a playful streak. I remember him learning how and teaching us boys how to strike a match from a paper matchbook with one hand, "in case I ever lose a hand." It was easier before they moved the striking surface to the back. The irony--he smoked his whole life and Thaddis did not, but a form of lung cancer not related to second hand smoke is what took her.
When my mother was ill and was obviously going to end her days in nursing care, he stepped in. My brother went to live with him and he made arrangements for my sister and me. Maybe not the best arrangements but at least we would be with family such as it was. He then went around the state where we had lived cleaning up my mother's trail of debt. My father had paid no child support and we had lived for four years on her meager salary and credit. George was a mench. I know I never thanked him enough.
I know other families have similar fractures as mine but sometimes this feels like such a loss to me. In the eighties I did go around and visit a few of them, notably George and Alfred and their families. A few years ago my brother organized a Thanksgiving at George's. My wife and I couldn't go because things were tight and we had just been traveling expensively for my graduate program. My younger son went. I wish now that I had.
I think the estrangement has its root largely in my father's family. He had a problem early on. There was another oft told story of falling off of the train on the way home from prep school, often told along with the one about sister Nancy falling off of a porch after drinking "Zombies." Our culture clearly had something of a different relationship with alcohol in the forties and fifties, probably dating back to the end of prohibition. It was as if the whole culture was self-medicating. My parents had two martini evenings at home fairly frequently. They all avoided it and then Magdalene was stuck with it. Not surprised that she might have felt she got sold a bill of goods. He was a charming fellow. But his parents didn't deal with it at all, and his sibs except Nancy avoided him.
Physically closer to his family, we saw little of it, not that I would have wanted to have a relationship with Frank, and I wasn't any more comfortable with Nancy and her "boyfriends'" drinking than with his. Mother's family was spread over the continent and beyond and there was no money for travel. When I did finally see them as an adult, I was often a little uncomfortable and out of place, probably not as communicative and engaging as I might have been. In the end George's patience and duty was a little glue to keep me in touch.
Now my sibs are across continent. I have broken the connection fairly completely with my second life out here on the coast, and my sister isn't speaking to anyone anyway, while there are other things that keep my brother and me from having much of a relationship.
Bittersweet to think of them.
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