After living in several different places around town, my great-grandfather Albert finally bought a big house in Lynchburg at 1 Vista Avenue but on the day they moved in, my great-grandmother Ormond had a heart attack and died.
For a while, after that, he remained single. A formidable widow named Miss Inge proposed to him, but he was terrified of her and said no. Eventually, he married a woman named Jean Taylor whom everyone called Miss Jean. She worked part-time in the Hester law office as a stenographer. She was a bit younger than he was but not by much. She had never married and lived with her parents on their farm just outside the city. My father remembers her as being quiet and standoffish but extremely attentive. She didn’t miss a thing. She dressed severely and kept her hair tied back in a bun. She never went out without a hat which she kept in place with a pin.
Their law office was in the Krise building in downtown Lynchburg. It had been built in 1905 and was known as “Lynchburg’s First Skyscraper.” It is seven stories tall. I remember going to meet my grandfather Morris there when I was a kid. My great-grandfather died before I was born so by that time, of course, Morris had it to himself. The room was lined with floor-to-ceiling glass-fronted bookshelves overflowing with huge law books. All the furniture was made of dark heavy golden oak. It felt like it was from a different era. I loved it, especially how it smelled of old paper and furniture polish – decades of it.
When Albert was still alive and they shared the space, he had a big wooden table that he’d gotten on sale from a department store that was going out of business. He’d lay the books he needed for a case out on it in an order that only he could understand. Miss Jean knew to leave them alone but years later, when my grandmother would stop by, she’d tidy them up which drove him crazy because then he couldn’t find anything.
When Morris started using the office by himself, the big table went to the house on Elmwood Avenue and became the kitchen table. We had more breakfasts and lunches around that table than I can count. Eventually, the table came down to me. It’s in our living room now and Michael and I use it for everything from eating meals to laying out our own papers and books – each using our own system that the other is baffled by. I also inherited the glass-fronted bookshelves from the office which now house our entire library in the bedroom.
My father had fond memories of the house on Vista Avenue.
“The house was quite large and on five acres of land at the end of the street with a beautiful view of the Blue Ridge Mountains in the distance (hence “Vista Avenue”). The house’s big entry hall, living room, and dining room had a lot of beautiful oak paneling and ceiling beams. A wide staircase, with a landing, led upstairs from the entry hall. A parlor off the entrance hall opposite the living room had light plaster walls. A sun porch opened off the parlor. There were numerous porches, around much of the ground floor as well as smaller ones that opened off some of the bedrooms upstairs. A back porch for entry into the kitchen had an open stairway to an upstairs porch.
Granddaddy bought the house from a family named Smith that had several children. Unusual at the time, it had two bathrooms. The larger one was a big square room with a red tile floor. The other bathroom, built for the Smith boys, was narrow and had a shower stall rather than a tub. The land around the rear and one side of the house sloped away steeply. A very old, dilapidated two-room house, which my grandfather used for storing feed and other supplies stood in the back. Further down the hill had a cow barn, which you entered on the top floor, where he kept bales of hay and other feed that could be dropped through a trap door into a feeding trough on the lower, dirt floor, for the cows. There was a big vegetable garden. The rest of the land consisted chiefly of pasture for the one or two milk cows. Occasionally one of the cows would break through the rickety fence and end up in the gardens of people living on neighboring streets. On one occasion Professor Hammacker, head of the biology department at Randolph Macon, caught the stray and fastened her up in his garage until Granddaddy paid him a dollar for the damage the cow and done to his garden.”
My grandmother Eunice’s family, the Wilsons, back from the Philippines, lived in the house next door. The lot was big enough that it was out of view and around a corner, but they were neighbors. I can see how that would have made a big difference to my grandmother’s feelings towards my grandfather. Morris was the boy next door. He had the home team advantage over her other beaus, especially the one she was serious about, Pete, who was overseas.
1 Vista Avenue was always full of people. That was how my great-grandfather liked it. He’d grown up in an enormous family and didn’t care for solitude. Before they were married, great-aunt Mary and great-aunt Pudge lived there. When Eunice and Morris were first married, they moved in, too, to a big airy upstairs bedroom with a door that opened out to a porch over the sunroom. After Mary and Pudge moved out and started raising families of their own, and Eunice and Morris had moved down to Rustburg, everyone would still gather there during the summers. The house would then be full of children which pleased great-grandfather Albert no end. My father remembers him crossing his leg so Dad could ride on his foot which he kicked up and down like a horse. Dad and his cousins also liked listening to his big old gold pocket watch tick.
Another memory from my father: “One of Granddaddy’s self-improvement projects was to learn Italian. A salesman came to town and sold him an early phonograph to play a set of cylinders recording lessons in the language. The salesman said that a lot of Italians would be coming to Lynchburg to work on the railroad, and he could get business from them if he spoke the language. Granddaddy never learned a word of Italian, or any other foreign language (other than his Latin), nor did many Italians come to Lynchburg. The machine and cylinders ended up in the attic and when Daddy and Mary were children, they used to get them out and listen to them, only because they liked to laugh at the funny sounds.”
Albert and Miss Jean had a live-in housekeeper named Miss Lucy who stayed in a big, finished room up in the attic. Char and Cornelia, Pudge’s daughters, remember being up there and having Lucy tell them ghost stories. Lucy did everything from cleaning to cooking and even churning butter from the milk that Albert would bring up from the cows. My father remembers her making biscuits every morning. The flour was run through a sifter and then mixed in with the other dry ingredients in a big bowl. Once the water was added, the dough was kneaded and then rolled with a wooden roller on a board and the biscuits were cut out with a cutter and placed on a greased pan for baking. The remaining dough was re-kneaded and rolled out and the process continued until the final piece of dough was rolled up into a small ball and put in the pan alongside the rest. I remember my grandmother doing the same thing and us fighting over who would get to eat the little leftover piece.
Lucy’s life cannot have been easy. While she was much loved by the family, I cannot imagine that from her perspective that she was always treated as an equal. She wasn’t educated, but was keenly intelligent and kept the household running smoothly. It must have been boring and repetitive work at times. Was she ever thanked? She never married, herself, but when she retired, she moved to a small house where she was surrounded by numerous relatives. Once when she was sick, Miss Jean asked her how she was doing. She responded, “Not good. Ah got the misery in mah side and Ah’m spittin’ up all my vittles.” That became what everyone in the family said, after that, when asked how they were.
When Eunice and Morris were in Rustburg, Albert, before he remarried, would come down from Lynchburg for Thanksgiving. He and Morris would go hunting in the morning. Albert would step off the train at the station with his gun and collect his two hunting dogs, Cannon and Ball, from the baggage car. They never managed to bag a turkey, but usually were able to get a few quail. Eunice would clean what they’d shot and cook the holiday meal.
After Albert and Miss Jean married, the family would gather and celebrate Christmas in the big house. They always had a big tree, both for my father’s benefit and also for all Miss Jean’s nieces and nephews.
Albert kept working as a lawyer well into his eighties. He had a leather-covered chaise in the office that he’d take naps on in-between clients. When he got older, he’d sometimes not leave the couch when consulting about a case. It didn’t seem to bother anybody. His clients were used to him.
Once, my dad met up with my grandfather and great-grandfather at the office and they went out for coffee at the nearby Woolworth’s lunch counter. Albert was using a cane by then and puffed a bit as he struggled to get into the booth. The waitress, who had served him for years, said, “What are you breathing so hard for old man?” He shot back, “You always make me breathe hard.”
Woolworths was also the site of another story. Albert had a set of dentures that didn’t fit him very well. They caused his jaw to jut out somewhat and made him, at times, difficult to understand. One day, as he was leaving the store, he had a coughing fit, and the dentures flew out and landed on the sidewalk. Without giving it another thought, he bent over, picked them up, popped them back in, and continued on his way. Somebody had seen the whole thing and the next day, the incident appeared in the Old Dominion column of the Lynchburg paper.
After he stopped working there were periods when, in declining health, he’d become bedridden. Lucy had retired by then and it was too much work for Miss Jean to take care of him herself. Eunice and Morris rented out their house and moved in to help. At that point, my father and his cousins all lived elsewhere and had families of their own. During one of his illnesses, the entire family made the trip down to visit. My grandfather had tried to convince him to make the effort to get out of bed, but he wouldn’t. Morris made everyone stay downstairs and left him up in his room. When he heard everyone talking and laughing, he couldn’t stand being left out and finally dragged himself up and tottered down the stairs with his cane.
Albert was an elder at the Westminster Presbyterian Church and, while he was able, never missed a Sunday. In his later years, he often read the bible. He sat in the same place in the same pew every week and fell asleep during every sermon. Once the preacher spoke up about people who only came to church to sleep but it fell on deaf ears because Albert was out.
Albert Sidney Hester died peacefully in his sleep one day at the age of 88. As my grandmother said, “He just wore out.” My father had nothing but fond memories of being with him. I can’t help but picture the movie Meet Me in St. Louis when I hear the stories about 1 Vista Avenue. That big old house with all its porches was certainly of its time – for better and for worse. I know that there was plenty of worse, but as I am writing this looking at our Christmas tree and thinking about Judy Garland singing about her love for the neighborhood boy in the movie, I am going to concentrate, for now, on the better.
Michael takes the same care in cooking our meals that my grandmother did. His mother Nancy did the same. Whether I’m alone with him or we have company, he only sits down and eats himself when everything is done. When he says that it’s ready, I know that I have a small buffer of time before he is truly ready. I realize thinking about this, that our meals do always remind me of the wonderful times we had around my great-grandfather’s table in the kitchen in Lynchburg. I can still smell my grandmother’s cooking and picture her wiping her hands on her apron once she’d set everything out on the table. That the table has traveled north with me, I am profoundly grateful.
The more ties that I discover my present life has to the people that came long before me, the more I start to feel a stronger connection to my family tree. I thought I was making it up, but much of my life, it seems, has been inevitable.
Without Michael, I have no idea what I’d be eating. I can make a good egg scramble, but beyond that, I don’t have the interest. When we’d visit Lynchburg, we’d always help with the washing up. My aunt would wash the dishes in the sink, and I’d dry them. Nothing has changed. Dishwashing is my contribution to the great meals that Michael prepares. I do always try to thank Michael for his cooking. For those times, though, that I’ve missed saying it, thank you, Michael. It is appreciated more than you know.
"The more ties that I discover my present life has to the people that came long before me, the more I start to feel a stronger connection to my family tree. I thought I was making it up, but much of my life, it seems, has been inevitable." -- I envy you the energy and resources to discover so much about your past. My parents pretty much separated themselves entirely from their own past, and I have no available connection to my own family history beyond just the little bits they ever shared.