Hot on the Trail of Family

(1) Heat index = 120. Dew point = 80. That means it feels very much like a steam bath outdoors right now. When I got out of my air-conditioned car (thank God I have an air-conditioned car) today, my glasses steamed up so that I could not see through them. I am home now and grateful for our big window a-c and the option to stay indoors today.

(2) Don't know much about an-ces-try!
Don't know gen-e-al-o-gy!

(My parody of that perennial favorite of schoolkids)

I'm using documents to find out the location and names of my ancestors. My daddy's family, which in 1900 consisted of him, Noble, at age 2, his brother Ethel (that's right, that's the name), at age 3, and his parents, Tom and Annie Evans, lived in the Providence District of Trimble County, Kentucky, according to the Federal Census of that year. In 1910, according to the Federal Census, they lived in the Locust District of Carroll County, Kentucky, which was a rural community in the narrow valley of Locust Creek, which empties into the Ohio River downstream from Carrollton and the Kentucky River about five miles or so. My daddy said his sister, Lillian, was born in a "holler" and I think he must have been referring to Locust Hollow.

Today I determined that Locust Road is Ky. 1492, off Ky. 36, between Hunter's Bottom Road and US 42, and drove up it. I stopped at a garage at a switchback on the road and saw a young man lying on the floor, the only person around. I walked up to him and said, "Are you all right?"

He assured me he was, just resting in the stifling, wet heat. The sensible thing to do, I told him. He had the usual attire of rural Kentucky men working in such heat, namely no shirt and blue jeans. His straight black hair was cut short, he had dark brown eyes and little hair on his upper body, and he spoke good English with a Spanish accent.

I said, "Is this the community of Locust? Is Locust Creek around here?"

"This is Locust Road," he said.

I told him my grandfather and father had lived in the Locust District in 1910 and I wanted to find out if there was any trace of them now. Perhaps there was a cemetery in the vicinity?

He said he thought there was and produced a smart phone with a Google landscape and showed me the road and the dense forest and high hills on either side of it as it snaked up the "mountain," as he called it. (I told him, "They didn't have that when they lived here." He smiled.) He thought there was some sort of cemetery or churchyard near the summit. I thanked him and went on.

I didn't find a cemetery and it was just too damned hot, but the limestone stream-bed and the trees that line it and the houses to either side and the bridges crossing the creek to people's homes constituted a lovely country setting. I stopped the car beside the stream at the Hopewell Church and looked to see if anyone was around but the church's door was locked. But inside was a chapel with a high A-shaped ceiling and a modest stained-glass window that was glorified by the afternoon sun shining through it. I walked back to the car and stood beside the stream and it was so quiet all I could hear was the whispering of tree-leaves in the light breeze.

I looked at a sycamore four feet in girth standing in the nearly dry stream-bed and looked up through its leaves to apertures to the sky and wondered if my daddy had looked up at it when he lived there as an eleven-year-old boy a century ago.

Music! Music! Music!

"Put another nickel in,
In the nickelodeon
All I want is havin' you
And Music! Music! Music!"

We didn't call it a nickelodeon but we listened to that song on a jukebox (same thing) in 1950 (I was 11) in the Stoplight Grill on West Main, catty cornered from the shotgun house that sat back from the street, the one I was born in. (Wonder years, those. Pee Wee Anderson and I pre-dated Harold and Kumar by eating as many sliders as we could afford from our paper routes and that we didn't spend on the pinball machine.) Teresa Brewer sang the hit; she was "hot" in 1950. She herself was only 19 then. She would become a jazz singer after many pop hits before she died in 2007 at the age of 76.

The tune of the "refrain," where she sings

"Closer, my dear come closer,
The nicest part of any melody
Is when you're dancin' close to me..."

is kind of lifted from a piano work by Franz Lizst, I can't say which but I recognize the melody when I hear it. It's OK to borrow the phrase, good composers flattered one another by borrowing here and there, besides Lizst has long been in the public domain. Perry Como's "Hot Diggety" was Chabrier's "Espana Rhapsody."

And in the 70's the lead-in to the tune "All By Myself" is even the same orchestral arrangement as that of Rachmaninoff in a piano concerto. And I confess I like the modern composer's resolution of that lead-in better than the original Rachmaninoff composition, which leaves me kind of frustrated. Rachmaninoff, though, is all in all one of my favorite composers. One of my favorite movie scenes is the fantasy seduction of Marilyn Monroe by Tom Ewell (he in his "smoking jacket") in "The Seven Year Itch" accompanied by a Rachmaninoff Piano Concerto.*

Listening to the finale of Mozart's "Haffner" Symphony. No TV tonight (although I will probably look in on The Daily Show, the best #@! news show on the air). And I'm still enjoying soundtracks -- catch "Ratatouille," a great feature-length cartoon. The music is by Michael Giacchino, one of the better Hollywood composers, I'd say, judging from this.

And "The Milagro Beanfield War" is on Turner tonight. I love its theme by Dave Grusin.

Music! Music! Music!

(*No. 2 -- in c minor, Op. 18, if you give a ...)

She Sells Sea Shells

My library research so far has involved (1) fires, (2) doctors, and (3) mussels. I've related some anecdotes about fires, and a history of doctors revealed some nifty ones, included one of the pioneer women doctors of the US. Mussels are freshwater clams, found in the Ohio River (along with crawdads, also known as crayfish, which you might say are freshwater lobsters. We have our ersatz imitations out here in the provinces.) This town had a thriving industry of making buttons from mussel shells in the first two decades of the twentieth century.

My local comrades and I have started a meeting at Cragmont College, and it's caused me to reflect on my early days there. I was such a scared, immature kid who tried to cover up his fear by being brash and mouthy -- more or less, I suppose. Perhaps I really wasn't that bad, just a silly, fraudulent kid.

A fellow freshman made the dean's list the first semester I was there; he was on probation at the end of the Spring term. He was kicked out the next year. Booze. Wonder whatever happened to him.

In the eighties, I met an alcoholism counselor, Nan, who'd been in my class at Cragmont. She told me she was a recovering alcoholic, in AA. She happened to be from the same town as the aforementioned guy, a progressive town in northern Indiana. She told me about driving out with a classmate of mine, Ken, while we were students and the two of them got rip-roaring drunk in his car. They were both "pinned," but to different sweethearts. Ken is still married to the girl he "pinned" in college. Nan was still married to her frat pin man too, only her husband was an alcoholic, "practicing," as they say, and she was unhappy about that. (Ironic, that word "practicing," in his case, because he's a doctor of medicine.)

When she told me about getting drunk with Ken way back then I had a longing to go back to that time and be mature enough to -- drink with a coed that I was friends with! And to have been mature enough to be pinned to the person I was going to marry! Even while this woman colleague of mine was telling me that we were peers now in alcoholism. She had been on a pedestal while I was in college, so far above me ... That was then, and this was now, our retrospective, and by her admission we were not so far apart in maturity, but ... They say that some of us are "egomaniacs with inferiority complexes." I can't explain it. A writer in residence at Indiana University, Alyce Miller, has a volume of short stories called "The Nature of Longing." It's a worthy topic, and good luck to anybody who can explore it. Life is a mystery to be lived, rather than a problem to be solved, someone said.

Gentlemen -- goodnight.

"Ubi ignis est?"

I took Latin in high school a half-century ago, using a book that was published when Latin was not yet a dead language, I think. The book wasn't stodgy, though. It was kind of hip for a high school textbook published -- in the forties. Anyhow. I recall near the front of the book, before we had to buckle down to Julius Caesar's "Omnia Gallia in tres partes divisa est," and we were translating the Latin equivalent of Dick and Jane, there's a color cartoon of a Roman cop (looks a lot like one of those soldiers in Quo Vadis? red-plumed helmet?) making a bust of a comely, long-tressed girl in toga who's been driving her chariot too fast. "Ubi ignis est?" he says: "Where's the fire?" (The movies of the forties had stupid, grumpy cops who always hollered to speeders, "Where's the fire?" That was as big a cliche as a dog peeing on a red fire hydrant.) Mark Twain went to a Wagner opera while visiting Europe and he said it "sounded like a fire at an orphanage." Three Johnstowners who are to play the Magi show up for the Baptist Nativity pageant wearing back-billed hardhats and slicker raincoats. "What the--?" says the Sunday school teacher. "You said the three wise men came from afar, right?" they say.

Humor having to do with fires, right? Got some doozies. Today I began research for the Johnstown-Clifty County Library. I was compiling a list of Johnstown fires in the nineteenth century. Here are a couple of nuggets:

(1) 1845, March 19. Presbyterian Church ... [The church] had recently renovated the sanctuary and had also carpeted it. When the fireman arrived, the town marshal and several members of the church stood in the doorway and forbade anyone from throwing water on their new carpet. Soon the building was completely destroyed.

(2) 1890, September 28. The shift had just started at Richwood Distillery when workmen smelled smoke. They discovered fire in the cooperage shop where barrels were made to age whiskey.

Mr. Snyder, manager of the distillery near Milton, Kentucky, had seen the entire facility wiped out in an 1882 fire. And he quickly saw that there were not enough men or equipment to fight this blaze. So he phoned city hall at Johnstown, Indiana, asking that fire equipment and help be sent.

Joseph Brashear was Johnstown mayor and founder of Volunteer Co. No. 3. He ordered two of the horse-drawn steam pumpers to the ferry boat landing, bound for the distillery on the other side of the river. Within an hour the steamers arrived, crossing the river and going two miles upstream. Volunteers soon had four lines of 2-1/2 inch hose stretched to the burning building.

The two pumpers were from Fair Play Fire Co. No. 1 and Washington Fire Co. No. 2. The engines stayed on the boat and pumped water from the river at the rate of 400 gallons per minute.

The delay of getting the pumpers there allowed the fire to spread from the kiln to a warehouse holding 2,000 barrels of whiskey with government stamps already paid. They were for a Cincinnati broker who had sold them to some Western outlets.

Volunteers hosed the blaze for about seven hours until they thought it was extinguished, then took up the hose and the boat returned to Johnstown.

They had returned the engines to their stations and had gone home to clean up and have supper, when a call came from Snyder saying the embers had started blazing again. This time the No. 2 pumper went to the fire. It was daybreak before they got home.

But it seems that there were nearly as many battling "firewater" as fighting the fire. Several volunteers joined distillery workmen in trying to save the 2,000 barrels of whiskey. The three best known brands then were Crab Orchard, Teakettle Bourbon, and Susquehanna Rye.

Bungs on some of the barrels were lost and pulled out. Other barrels broke open in the confusion. A regular river of "likker" oozed down the bank to River Road. Some of it flowed near the buildings and caught fire.

Fast-thinking volunteers threw sand on the burning booze while others got feed sacks from the nearby barn, wet them, and smothered the blaze. Then some more volunteers thought of the horrid waste of the valuable liquid and began scooping it up with their hands -- putting it in any container they could find. Boots and shoes became "bottles." Derby hats were tried. But the fragrant contents leaked out.

A nearby watermelon field provided the answer. A large plug taken from the side made an opening through which the seeds and inner fruit could be removed. The melon filled with the whiskey could be stoppered with the plug.

Newspapers at the time were full of things that happened at the whiskey fire. One told of a bevy of good church women standing close to the the fire. They said they got dizzy from the whiskey fumes -- and none of them had ever touched the stuff.

But the finale was a drinking party held by several small boat owners who had visited the fire and scooped up several gallons of the escaping liquor. They had a party near the Johnstown Brewery at the corner of Park Avenue and Ferry Street. And after they got gloriously drunk, they had a free-for-all brawl. The sheriff put all of them in the brig to stop the bloodshed.

A final report of damages showed that of the 2,000 barrels of whiskey, only 96 were removed safely.

That's my hometown.

Event of My Lifetime

Event of My Lifetime

Barack Obama, African-American among his many identities, has become the President-elect of the United States. He accomplished this tour de force on his own. It was not due to affirmative action. He is not a token black. He won, fair and square, by running an extraordinary campaign and by inspiring enough people of all cultures and walks of America to vote for him and campaign for him.

President-elect Obama's election means a great deal to me.

Born in 1939, I grew up in a town on the Ohio River that, although touted by some as a stop on the Underground Railroad in the nineteenth century, a bastion of Abolition then, was strictly segregated all the years of my growing up, with a small African-American neighborhood at the north end of Broadway.

I am mortified to recall a minstrel show staged in about 1950 here. It had six "end men," white males in "blackface," cracking racially offensive jokes. I was naive about a lot of things and I recall becoming increasingly shocked by the pervading racism, cruel and crude, among several of the adolescents I knew and hung with.

Our high school yearbooks actually segregated the individual snapshots of the black students in our classes at the end of the pages for each class. We had a music teacher who deliberately excluded all African-Americans from band and choir and nobody ever challenged him about it while I was in school. Movie theaters were segregated. The municipal swimming pool, all restaurants, and all barber shops excluded blacks entirely.

Until Indiana grudgingly ended school segregation in the early 1950s, Johnstown’s black school was declared "separate but equal" -- as the Supreme Court in Plessy vs. Ferguson had nonsensically ruled in 1896. Although heroic teachers and students worked there, and many excellent graduates came from the school in spite of its deficiencies, that school was inherently unequal.

Discrimination was a silent conspiracy in public. As for the teachers we had for American history and social studies and current events, they were generally idiots. Or cowards. Just as my sophomore year of high school ended, Plessy vs. Ferguson was thrown out. It had been superseded by the Brown vs. Board of Education of Topeka decision, to wit, “integration is the law of the land.” My recall is that teachers glossed over even the facts of that momentous ruling, let alone the implications, getting back to more comfortable material, like George Washington’s sailing a silver dollar across the Potomac.

My dad was born in Kentucky in 1898 and, although he himself was not a pathological racist – he did not hate – he was taught at home and church that segregation was Biblically mandated, and he sincerely preached to us that separation of the races was morally imperative.

My mother's side of the family had and still has members who hold some of the most scurrilous, hate-filled views of African Americans I have ever encountered. I forgo talking with them, clamming up now when they hint at tirades or crude social commentary. Come to think of it, my dad's side had plenty of hateful racists too, whose attitude was not tempered by Christianity and idealism as his own attitude was.

I read a lot as a child and adolescent, much of it junk but also some pretty decent things, classical and modern literature, which also gave me a window on a world larger than little old Johnstown, Indiana. I read of current events and drew my own conclusions. I tended to be a rebel and a maverick and a malcontent, coming by that honestly, and the status quo with regard to racial relations in my immediate environment just didn't agree with me.

And I let those about me know it. At home we were not "polite," so we did "talk about religion and politics." So I disagreed vehemently with not only my friends but also my family at times. We talked a lot about race, in high school and in college. Always in all-white company: black people were an abstraction, not real human beings we actually knew – just like us! My brothers and sisters, all older, were intelligent and articulate and loved to debate, and in retrospect I am grateful to them for their contributions to my education.

I hope I don’t sound too pious. I’ve had my prejudices, and my education has been slow, halting, and painful. I’ve made some terrible blunders that I recall with shame. But I’ve been willing to learn.

My first attempt to act on my emerging ideals regarding racial equality and harmony was to apply to the new Peace Corps, and to ask to be assigned to sub-Saharan Africa. How thrilled I was when I was accepted! In October 1962 I set off for UCLA for training for living in Nigeria as an American emissary and teaching secondary school there. We trainees would gather evenings and among other activities often sing “We Shall Overcome.”

My idealism relating to freedom in this great nation got a gigantic boost when at age 21 in 1960 I campaigned for and voted for John F. Kennedy to be President, and he defeated Richard Nixon. We had a new leader, young and idealistic too, whose first executive order was to create the Peace Corps!

When I came home in 1965 the civil rights movement was apace and going brutally in the South. Dixie, particularly Alabama and Mississippi, was an inferno of hatred and strife that year. I wanted to have the courage to be a civil rights activist, participating in Freedom Rides and sit-ins, helping with voter registrations, but I had serious problems, most notably with alcohol, that kept me from doing so.

My own hometown had desegregation activities on its small scale and, mirabile dictu, without violence. At last all commercial institutions in the town removed their color bars. An undertone of racism still exists today but it is not as bad as it was. At least anybody can in theory live and work wherever they want, because the law is on their side. They’ve had to sue and demonstrate to get their due rights a good many times since the sixties but blatant Jim Crow is all but gone.

My return home was more than four decades ago. When the daughter of JFK endorsed Barack Obama in a New York Times op-ed column on January 27 this year, that spark of idealism I’d felt during her father’s Presidency was ignited again. Yes! Why not?

This has been an event of my lifetime.

Sister Sadie -- a Brief Note

Watching It Happened One Night on Turner, I recalled my sister Mary Virginia’s love of Clark Gable. I recall Mary V. -- "Sadie" -- who at the last of her life referred to me as her “baby brother.” I think she was pretty fond of me, which I always took for granted but did less so as the years went by. I know while growing up I idolized her as smart, funny, pretty, and successful. All of which she was.

Another event that prompted my nostalgia over My sis was the recent passing of the great World War II-era singer, Jo Stafford. Mary Virginia and I were fond of "G.I. Jo," whose beautiful, clear voice graced many hits of the days of Frank Sinatra and the Pied Pipers (Jo was one of them for several years). We laughed at Jo's mock hit, "Tem-tation." (You'd have to hear one of the original versions of that tune to appreciate her parody fully.) Of course, there is no disputing taste, but I think Sadie and I had unimpeachable taste in our love of Jo Stafford. Maybe Sadie and Jo have had the opportunity to meet at last.

Let's Go to the Slide! Aimlessness

When was it? Forty-two years ago? Or 44. Before I went to the Peace Corps. It must have been afterwards. Bud would put it to me: "Let's go to the Slide!" It must have been in the summer of 1965, after I got back from Ibadan and D.C. and Indianapolis and Tucson and El Paso and Ciudad Juarez* and Las Cruces and wherever in hell else I meandered that aimless year.

That's about all I remember from those trips to the Hillside Hotel cocktail lounge. Warm, sweaty nights with crickets and things. I recall one night when we were there a guy passed out and put his head on a table. John David Lucht, the owner of the bar and the bartender, with a white short-sleeved shirt and black necktie there night after night (Bud and I were there night after night and we knew how faithful John David was to that job), needed the table and he leaned the passed-out drunk on his chair up against a wall and took the table for some more genteel clients and they didn't mind and John David didn't mind and the drunk didn't mind and it was funny. Reminded me of the corpse in "The Real Inspector Hound" or Bernie in "Weekend at Bernie's." We laughed quietly and politely and went on with our merriment. The guy slept it off the entire evening we were there. He might still be there. Bud knew how to pick what my mother referred to as "saloons." We'd sit in the lounge and look out the window at night and it was a nice view, kind of like San Francisco -- I've sat in bars in Frisco and looked out at the night lights too. That's about it. Just a reminiscence.

We'd plummet down that little hill after a beery night (for me: Bud drank manhattans) and drive home in the still darkness hours in little old Madison (we both slept at our parents' house that summer) and sleep it off and the next day would come, and we were young and all of us were alive -- both parents and I had no idea that the old man had a bad heart (actually not a bad heart but blood vessels like mine, clogged up with plaque, and there was no Plavix then and no CABG) -- not thinking about croaking, you know, and life was damned good.

I'd have bacon and eggs next morning as soon as I could tolerate them and those were the days I'd do two drunks a day: I liked to take off shortly after noon to a bar in Chelsea, a "wide place in the road" en route to Louisville, beyond Hanover, in the early afternoon, where I would drink three or four beers, and then come home and sleep it off. I recall driving back from the "3-N-1" one afternoon and encountering some joker who was driving on the left side of the road. Just for the hell of it, I reckon. I got off the road and let him go by. Crazy somebitch.

Then there'd be the evening of drinking with Bud at the "Slide." He wouldn't go to the redneck places like the Crown Room. I would go there and because of my big stupid mouth would come close to getting the shit kicked out of me. Them t'backer farmers/factry workers liked to fight. Don't know why I went to that shit-kicking place. The sweetheart of the jukebox was Brenda Lee. I did/do despise her singing. No Anita O'Day, it goes without saying. Or Roberta Peters singing the "Queen of the Night" aria from Die Zauberfloete. Finally I got a job as a biochemistry lab tech at Muscatatuck and my wild-assed drinking continued in Miller's Tavern in North Vernon and in a dorm on the campus there. The to-be superintendent and I enjoyed getting fucked up in that saloon. It is my recollection that he was removed in disgrace later on. I believe the same principle applied to this chap as to me: One should not attempt to manage other people when one cannot manage oneself.

More reminiscences to come. Gentlemen: Goodnight.

* In that city across the Rio Grande from El Paso I met an incredibly beautiful Mexican woman. I'd marry her in a Madison minute if I had the perspective then that I have now. Now, I know which women are the keepers. I was too young and callow to marry anybody then and, to my credit, I knew it. I hope this lovely muchacha got out of that hellhole she was in. I hope she is alive and well and now a great-grandmother and prosperous and all her family is prosperous. She was a righteous lady. Vaya con dios, amigos y amigas.




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