My grandparents were married just over a century ago on August 16, 1922. Eunice was twenty-three and Morris was twenty-nine. Eunice passed away a month after they celebrated their sixty-seventh wedding anniversary. Morris passed away less than a year after that. It’s impossible for me to think of one without thinking of the other. They were always Eunice and Morris.
My grandmother kept countless photographs of her other beaus but not very many of the man she eventually married. Strangely, I can’t find any pictures of their wedding at all. In fact, from their early years as a couple, I have very few pictures of them together, period. They took a lot of pictures of my dad when he came along, but I only found two where they are both in the same frame with him. There are two photos of them from a day at the beach they spent together with friends. It may have been when they were dating, or even before, but they aren’t in the same shot. Morris, who smiled often in life, is almost never caught smiling when he’s having his picture taken. He usually looks somewhat miserable. Eunice, on the other hand, almost always looks happy and carefree and often a bit goofy.
It seems to me, looking at the collection of albums I have, that the pictures they took and saved were of people and events that they didn’t want to forget. I don’t think they thought that they’d ever need to have something to look back on to help them remember their lives together. Where were they going to go? There must have been rough patches and times of struggle, but to all of us, they fit together perfectly. That my mother’s mother married three times, seems exactly right given who she was. That Eunice and Morris would always be together as a single unit is equally fitting.
Michael and I each have our share of dramatic dating stories - guys we couldn’t keep our hands off, guys who broke our hearts, and I even had one I married before I met Michael. When Michael and I got together, though, it was different – for both of us, I think. It just seemed right. It clicked. That’s not to say that it’s always a smooth ride, but, unlike any of my previous relationships, in this one, I don’t have an escape route planned.
We don’t have a lot of pictures of our first years together either. It was only after I realized that was the case, that I started forcing Michael to start taking selfies with me. He doesn’t like having his picture taken at all, any more than, I think, my grandfather did. He’ll put up with it… sometimes. It’s only under extremely specific conditions will he ever suggest that I take his picture – and then it’s usually to send to someone as a joke.
Eunice grew up when she married Morris. The abandon that’s in all her younger pictures changes into something else. She went from being a wild kid to being a responsible teacher, wife, and mother – seemingly overnight. I recognize her in all the pictures taken after 1922, but I marvel at the passionate eccentric stranger in the ones taken before.
Morris graduated from High School in 1914. In his yearbook, the editors wrote this: “When we at last prepare to leave High School, we unconsciously look back over our years spent here to see what we have accomplished, and in this retrospection we always study the impressions left upon us by members of our class. Some have been giddy, others studious, while still others have been constant and always able to be relied upon. Of the last kind we find Morris, and to him, in leaving, we extend a most cheerful commendation for his work while here, and as he goes onward and upward in life may he find the ‘Grail’ of all men, ‘Success’.”
He went on to spend his undergrad years in college at Washington and Lee University. His dream had been to get his BFA there and then go to Yale Law School, but, instead, he stayed down south at Washington and Lee, close to home. After those early years, something happened to change his mind. It may have been World War I.
In the spring of 1918, Morris was drafted. He served at Camp Lee, Virginia which was a few hours’ drive away from Lynchburg. After a few months of basic training, he went into Officer’s Training School and was ultimately commissioned a second lieutenant. By the time that happened, however, the war was over, and he was discharged. Luckily, he never saw any action.
During his six months in the army, he met people from all over the country for the first time. For a short while, he was assigned to processing new recruits. He learned how to say “how are you” in Italian which he used every time he dealt with one of the many Italian American draftees. Fresh off the boat, as many of them were, they were thrilled to find somebody they could talk to only to have their hopes dashed when they realized that was the full extent of my grandfather’s Italian. He told a story about having to escort a supposedly insane Polish prisoner to the stockade. Terrified, he was only allowed to unsheathe his bayonet as protection, but not use his gun.
Many years later, on leave from his own basic training, my father commented that they were often given a packet of raisins to put on their oatmeal. “Oh yes, it used to make me sick to see those Yankees eating raisins and oatmeal in the army,” was my grandfather’s response. I guess I truly am a Yankee. For a very short time at the end of his service, he became part of the Ohio National Guard division. Everyone in his unit seemed to either know each other or be related. He felt like very much an outsider.
My grandfather was a shy man. Dreaming of Yale was one thing. Going there and being amongst all those northerners so far from home, was another. All the stories he told about his time in the army were about how strange and different situations and people were. He and his buddy losing their nerve on their trip to Chicago after a summer working at the railway yards and coming home before they got there is another of the same kind. My grandfather would end up spending almost the entirety of his life in the same house with the same woman working the same job. He did not like change.
I only have one letter that Morris wrote to his family. It is to his father. He wrote it in February of 1920. He was out of the army and now in law school. He’d taken science courses as an undergraduate and had a job working in the lab to help pay his expenses. In the letter he writes, “I feel as if today ought to be very unlucky for me; it is Friday and I had to kill two black cats in the laboratory, at least had to have them killed. I really hated to do it because one of them was very attractive. But I console myself with the thought that it will result in the betterment of humanity and, therefore, justifiable. It will probably teach some embryo doctor how to cut on one of his fellow beings.”
That year, the world was still reeling from the Spanish flu epidemic. Morris goes on to write, “We had three sad deaths in Lexington yesterday; Mayor Jackson died of heart trouble and pneumonia, Henry Boley’s sister died of influenza, and a Mr. Harper, the jailer also died of influenza. I am telling you their names so that you can tell Mack; he knows them all. One of the boys in the house was taken sick yesterday with the influenza but is not very bad off.”
He signs off by saying, “Tell Pudge not to read any more of Mary’s letters; it isn’t polite.”
After the Civil War, many formerly wealthy ‘First Families of Virginia’ fell on hard times. They had considered themselves the aristocracy of the South and did everything they could to maintain their pre-war lifestyles. Morris ate his evening meals in a boarding house run by one of these women. She would serve about fifteen students at a time at her elegant large table. Miss Mary Custis Lee, an elderly unmarried daughter of General Robert E. Lee, who Washington and Lee was named for, would sometimes join them. One night, seeing she was there, one of Morris’s friends asked the black butler, “What are we having tonight, besides ancestors?”
After graduating and passing the bar, Morris went to work with his father, Albert, at his office in Lynchburg. Hester & Hester was on the letterhead, but my dad could never really work out what their business relationship really was. They seemed to keep to their own cases rather than working together. It was around this time, that Morris started courting Eunice.
I don’t know how well they knew each other before they started dating, but for many years they had lived right around the corner from each other. Eunice was fresh out of college and Morris had his degree and a job. Eunice had no shortage of boyfriends, but Pete, the one she seems to have liked the best, was working out of the country indefinitely. Many of her friends from Randolph-Macon were getting married and starting to have kids. Their four-year age difference which likely kept them from paying any attention to each other when they were still in school, suddenly wasn’t an issue anymore.
Eunice told a story about her and Morris going to an Elk’s Dance with her father as chaperone. On the walk home, both Fred, my great-grandfather, and Morris were drunk. As they got to the house and started up the porch stairs, Fred started falling backward and Morris caught him. “What the hell do you think you are doing?” my great-grandfather yelled. “Nothing, mister!” Morris snapped back, utterly intimidated. My grandmother thought this was hysterical.
A year or two after they were married, Morris felt the need to strike out on his own, so he and Eunice took their newborn son, Albert, my dad, to Rustburg, and he started his own practice. Rustburg was less than an hour away from Lynchburg, but far enough away for Morris to feel like he could get out from underneath his father’s scrutiny.
As my father described Morris’s early career, “He took on any case that came his way, including murder and lesser crimes, divorces, bankruptcies, and various civil suits. During the worst of the Depression, he did a lot of bankruptcies. As much as he felt sorry for the people who had to give up most of their assets, he always appreciated the fact that he got his $15 fee immediately. Many clients were slow to pay, and some never did. He never sued them. In addition to strictly legal work, he sometimes helped people fill out various government forms, such as applications for exemption from the draft during World War II. Before the war, most people did not have to file Federal Income Tax. Afterward, when most people had to begin filing, he used to take care of these too. He had no special expertise in this but studied the guides available and kept up with the rules.
Except for hiring a stenographer to take depositions in divorce cases, he did all his own typing, hunting and pecking very effectively with two fingers. He seldom hurried to work unless he had to be in court early. He often had stories to tell at the supper table about the goings on in court that day. Many of his clients were poor and uneducated; black as often as white. They often referred to the Juvenile Court as the “Jubilee Court.” My mother pointed out that when he had serious cases, where a client’s life might be dependent upon how he handled the case, he would worry himself sick.”
To help make ends meet, Eunice started teaching. Her mother Jennie, along with Martha, her surprise baby sister, moved in with them after a year. It turned out to be a helpful arrangement. While Eunice was in school, Jennie watched over Albert and Martha.
After six years in Rustburg, the family moved back to Lynchburg. Morris and his father again shared their law office, an arrangement that would continue until Albert finally retired. Presumably, by now Morris had the confidence to not be bothered by his father’s criticisms. Eunice kept teaching in several schools around town notably at the High School where my grandfather had gone and now my father was going.
It never really struck me until now how strange it was that my grandfather never went anywhere. The rest of us, and I mean all the rest of us, went everywhere. As I write this, my eighteen-year-old nephew is spending six months working in Hawaii. He’s got the travel bug and is already giving me a run for the money. Even Morris’s two sisters moved north into Yankee territory and got married and raised their families there. We always thought that my aunt Helen, who ended up in Lynchburg, was borderline agoraphobic. She, however, lived and worked for a long time in Rahway, NJ. She traveled to different places around the world. I remember her visiting us in South Africa when we were kids. Morris, however, never went anywhere very far from home during his whole life. We did spend a couple of summers with them in Nag’s Head, North Carolina in rented ramshackle beach houses, but that may be as far as he ever traveled.
Did they come and visit us in New Jersey once? I honestly can’t be sure.
On some level, I think he was fearful of being anywhere else. I wonder what he made of his son and then his grandchildren flinging themselves around the world with the wild abandon that we did. And still do. We all moved around so much that its only because I am thinking about him so pointedly now that I realize how little he did. He was like the rock in the middle of the frantic rushing stream that was and is the rest of us.
If my grandmother ever regretted her decision to marry Morris, she never gave the slightest indication of it. She loved to talk about her time in the Philippines but never suggested that she would ever want to go back there to visit. They lived a full, local life. He and my grandmother were partners in the truest sense of the word. I think that my grandmother could have survived his passing, but there was no way that he could survive hers. His ability to be the anchor only came from the strength my grandmother gave him.
Eunice and Morris. They are such an indelible part of my upbringing and early adulthood. I will never be able to really think about one without the other. Why on earth would I want to?
Loved this. Beautifully written, Richard.
Love Eunice’s smiles of mirth, bemusement and love…all the way through till the last photo. Perhaps Morris had all needed in those smiles and that was that. Thanks as always for sharing.