Stories about my Father - 30
My grandmother Eunice and my grandfather always seemed ancient to me. Eunice was sixty-three when I was born, and Morris was sixty-eight. They both lived into their nineties, so I knew them for thirty years. Even so, they always seemed the same age to me. Eunice had wonderfully loose wrinkled skin, it seemed to hang everywhere – under her chin and from her arms. She had little wires behind the frames of her glasses over which she had to drape the folds of her eyelids so she could see out from behind them. She did most all the cooking when we’d come to visit, and I can picture her with one hand on the stove to support herself as she unsteadily bent over to look inside the oven at her always perfect turkeys. I watched everyone else in the family get older, but Eunice and Morris were already there. I never knew them any other way.
What was Eunice like as a kid? In contrast to her father, in almost every childhood picture I have of her she has a big smile on her face. In many of them, she is outright laughing. She grew up among wealthy and powerful people, pampered and privileged. Unlike her brother Scott, however, once she left the Philippines, she never tried to replicate that lifestyle back in the States.
When Fred became the Treasurer of the Moro Province and they moved to Zamboanga, there was no school for the Americans to go to, so he and Jennie set one up. The army gave them a room at the fort, and they hired a young schoolteacher named Miss Mamie Baldwin.
Neither Jennie nor Eunice ever had anything good to say about Miss Mamie Baldwin. She once punished Scott by hitting him which didn’t set well with Jennie who doted on her son, but I can’t believe that was the whole story. In an ex-pat community such as the one the Americans created in Zamboanga; young single women were in short supply. She was both young and reportedly attractive. She had no shortage of suitors. My trim, fit, and handsome six-foot-tall great-grandfather described her in a letter as a “charming young lady.” It seems clear to me why Jennie didn’t like her.
Despite that, Miss Baldwin seems to have been able to take care of herself. Turning down proposals over the years from a variety of captains and majors from well-placed old Virginia families, she eventually returned home to the United States and married the man she loved, a farmer. She must have felt like chum in those shark-infested waters. Miss Mamie Baldwin sounds impressive to me.
Eunice once wrote about what she remembered of her childhood. It frustratingly stops after five pages. I haven’t given up hope that I might find the rest of it, but in it, she talks about Zamboanga.
“In Zamboanga I was around 12 or 13 and very much bored. A friend of our family was Major Helford. He was a graduate of Heidelberg and West Point. He was born in Germany. He brought a little Filipino pony, which was like a western pony, and took me horseback riding. He taught me to ride and all the etiquette that went with it. At Christmas I got a saddle, and a riding crop and Major Helford gave me the pony. I had named her Betsey. Later when we went to Cebu, she had a colt. I had to leave her when I came home to school. Major Helford was not very tall, dark hair black snappy eyes and a stickler for perfection. When he spoke, everyone jumped. I thought he was wonderful.”
Eunice taught herself how to swim off the dock where the ships tied up. Even though they never lived more than a block away from the ocean, Jennie never learned to swim. She would send a servant off with Eunice to make sure she didn’t drown.
Aside from a few storms, her island childhood seems to have been idyllic. Typhoons are a regular occurrence in that part of the Pacific and the Wilsons went through several. While they were in Zamboanga a tidal wave filled the neighborhood houses with three feet of water. The mud that was left behind took months to clean up. Later when they were out at the mill, winds took the roof of the house off and flooding water rose shoulder-high in the streets.
At first, Eunice went with the family out into the jungle when Fred started working at the mill. Miss Baldwin stayed behind in Zamboanga so there was nobody out there to teach Eunice. When she was fourteen, she was sent home to Kentucky to go to high school. She made the journey on her own in the company of a couple who were friends of her parents. It was a long trip. They stopped in places like Singapore, Ceylon, and Aden. They went through the Suez Canal and docked in Malta before heading across the Atlantic. The sea voyage took 40 days all told. She must have then taken the train out to Lexington to meet her grandmother Mattie.
Eunice went to high school in Versailles and then on to Randolph-Macon Woman’s College in Lynchburg, Virginia. At the beginning of the twentieth century, about 60% of high school graduates in the United States were women. Men often dropped out to start working. Despite that, women only accounted for 19% of all college graduates. That my grandmother was one of them is remarkable because at the time, only 2% of the college-age population, men, or women, even went to college at all.
In Lynchburg, Eunice and Scott formed a dancing duo and called themselves The Wilsons. They performed at charity events all over town. At the thirteenth annual Virginia Bankers Association convention, they got reviewed in the paper. “A dance by Miss Eunice Wilson and Scott Wilson delighted the spectators. Giles Miller, who had arranged the attractions, announced an Egyptian dance by ‘Madame Ouida’ who was vigorously applauded especially after the removal of his wig let it be known that the performer was Mr. Wilson.”
For the annual engagement of the Elk’s Charity Minstrels at the Academy of Music, the response was equally as enthusiastic. “The real feature of the entire show was the dancing of The Wilsons, who gave one of the most finished and artistically clever performances ever witnessed on the Academy stage.”
The Elk’s Charity Minstrels was an actual minstrel show with white performers in blackface. It opened with a scene on an island in the Pacific with characters named things like King Cocoa-Bola and Jefferson Snowball. Eunice and Scott, of course, had lived on an island in the Pacific and had real experiences with the people there. The disconnect between that reality and what I am sure was presented as a grotesque caricature of life there seems enormous. Maybe it was so big a gulf that they weren’t really connected in anyone’s mind. It was just all in good fun for a worthy cause. I find the blissful innocence of that level of racism chilling. I can look at a line of MAGA-morons giving the Hitler salute and my response to it is pure repulsion. It’s not as easy to quantify looking at the century-old program for The Jollies of 1921 with the drawing of a well-heeled couple in blackface on the cover. The horrifying aspect of it to me here in 2022 is just how unthinking it all was. Talk about the unexamined life. My grandparents would likely be as revolted by the MAGA-morons as I am and yet, Eunice happily danced in the show and kept the program.
Eunice also kept letters from several of her old boyfriends. Interestingly, she doesn’t seem to have kept any from my grandfather. She had a very active dating life. Many beaus came courting. A dance card of hers I have from an Elks Dance in 1919 is quite full.
One guy named Bob wrote her a letter addressed to “Ma” and signed it “Pa.” Another one from a guy named Joe starts out, “Dear Eunice, you are simply an old dear to write me two such ripping letters! I am simply aghast. Have you decided to place your undivided affections at my feet – or did someone whisper to you that we were going to have a “prom” at Yale this year?” He addresses the envelope to, “A soul bored to distraction more generally known as Miss Eunice Wilson.” He does invite her later in the letter.
She kept several letters from another guy named Pete. Pete turns out to be a man named Raymond P. Brandt. According to his New York Times obituary, he went by his middle name Pete throughout his life. During World War I, he served in the artillery and afterward won a Rhodes scholarship to study at Oxford. He ended up as chief of the Washington bureau of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch for nearly thirty years. Presidents Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower and Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis were among his friends.
Pete seems to have been the one that got away. Before and after he was at Oxford, he worked for the American Relief Organization first in Vienna and then in Russia. They kept up a regular correspondence and Eunice saved at least three of his letters. He drew some wonderful caricatures of her that really do capture who she was. Eunice inherited her nose from her father and then passed it down to my father who, in turn, passed it down to my sister and me. Pete is hilariously merciless with it.
I don’t have the letter that she sent to him breaking things off, but I do have his response. Here is some of it:
“In your letter you ask me to believe that you played fair. Never in my life have I known a fairer girl. My regret is that it may seem that I did not play fair since you say that you did not know what my feelings were towards you. In many ways I am a conceited, ambitious person and at times somewhat ruthless. It has hurt me to know that I am that way and that I’ll sacrifice what may be the greatest thing in my life for my future… Neither I nor anyone else know when I’ll settle down. I don’t know whether I want to. I think you understood all of this. If you did I’ll know that I played square. In a great many ways I envy Morris. For one thing, he has more courage than I. But we have at least one thing in common – we know a wonderful girl when we see her. Please don’t think that I am trying to be nice in my last letter but I do want you to know that there has never been a girl for whom I had more respect. Morris is the person I want to congratulate most heartily.”
Eunice married my grandfather Morris on August 17, 1922, in Lynchburg. My father was born the following year. They moved to Rustburg and, to bring in more money, started teaching. Jennie and Fred separated, and Jennie moved in with them along with Eunice’s much younger sister, Martha. She put aside childish things.
Did she ever regret marrying Morris? They had been married for sixty-seven years when she passed away. It was impossible to think of one without thinking of the other. Morris, himself, passed away a few months later because he had no idea what to do without her.
After a childhood seemingly free from care, she spent a lot of the rest of her life taking care of everyone else. The one thing that she kept doing for herself, was paint. We have one of her paintings over our bed and a small collection of them leaning against the wall in the living room. She would also tell us stories. It was from her that I first heard about the Philippines and her life there. Listening to her parsing out who was who on our family tree is what sparked my interest in my ancestors. We looked forward to visiting Lynchburg and hearing all the old stories for the umpteenth time. I don’t know if she’d agree with all the conclusions that I’m making as I try and make sense of it all, but I think she’d be happy that I was interested.
I would have loved to have met my grandmother when she was young. Writing about her is as close as I am likely to get. That the older woman I knew as a kid once danced and swam and rode a pony is a revelation. Young Eunice fairly burst with energy. If she wasn’t moving, she was bored. The young woman who became a painter and a teacher was already taking in the world and reacting to it.
The memory of hers that sticks with me is one from the Philippines that I’ve written about before, but here it is in her own words. “I remember another time General Pershing came to the house and asked for my father. I went to the door barefooted and was old enough to be embarrassed because I didn’t have my shoes on. He was resplendent in white uniform with brass buttons and so handsome it took my breath away.”
What a story!!