My grandfather Morris was a soft-spoken and gentle man who sang bass in the church choir. He spoke with a distinctive deep drawl. A word like house sounded like “hoose” when he said it. My grandmother’s accent was more northern given that she came from Kentucky. Morris, on the other hand, was from Alabama which is almost as deep into the south as you can get.
He was a tall, thin, fit man whose ears stuck out from the side of his head like a cat’s. Fittingly, he, like most of the rest of us in the family, loved cats. Their last one was an enormous, fierce, scarred, monster named Buzz. Before he moved in, he’d terrorized the neighborhood, but as time went on, he took a liking to 418 Elmwood Avenue and the people who lived there. He’d had enough of the excitement outdoors, and once inside, that was it. He made for whoever’s lap was available and purred like a chainsaw. Whenever we called or visited, we would get a full update on Buzz long before we heard anything at all about the family.
Morris was a constant solid presence. His deep voice completed the vocal harmony lines in the house. I remember him always being slightly unsteady on his feet but that didn’t stop him from driving a car into his nineties. Even though I spent a lot of time with him over the years listening to our family stories, I find that I know almost nothing about my grandfather’s childhood.
My grandmother’s early years are well documented in countless photographs and letters. The Hesters, however, were not nearly as thorough record keepers as the Wilsons were. Pictures of young Morris are few and far between. My father heard many stories about Eunice’s early years from his grandmother Jennie after she moved in with them. There was less opportunity for that on Morris’s side because his mother died before Dad was born. Ormond died in 1919 when Morris was twenty-five. He was even further into his adult life when his father married Miss Jean. I have a small album he made while he was a student in college, but nothing before that. There are lots of pictures of his friends in it, but only one or two are identified. Aside from one studio picture of him and Mary as toddlers, I don’t have any pictures of him at all as a kid with his mother and father and sisters.
Keeping track of the family’s history was women’s work. At least it was in our family. The men wrote the occasional important date down in the family bible, but the women filled in the rest. It was the women who told stories during bath times and when their kids were sick and stuck in bed. Without any other distractions, like television or cell phones, the children listened.
Women, for generations, were trapped in strict and limited gender roles. I grew up during the moment in history when women truly started rebelling against those strictures. Bra burnings and fighting for the Equal Rights Amendment filled the news I watched as a kid. A generation before, with millions of young men being sent off to fight in World War II, women had stepped in to fill jobs that they never would have been allowed to do otherwise. They found that they enjoyed the work and were good at it. There was no going back after that.
The women in my family were all intelligent. Beginning with my great-grandparents, they all started to become educated – well ahead of the national curve. My grandmother, once she graduated from Randolph-Macon Women’s College, became a teacher in town. As the kid of “old lady Hester,” my father continually had to endure hazing from the other students. Eunice’s mother Jennie was a generation too early to be offered that opportunity, and, instead, had no choice but to advance herself through her husband. What could she have done with a full education and a choice of profession?
My grandfather’s two sisters, Mary and Pudge, both went to college, and both also became teachers. Because Lynchburg had Randolph-Macon and another single-sex college, Sweet Briar, young women tended to outnumber young men in the city, so graduates were encouraged to accept positions in other places. Mary and Pudge each went to work in different states. There, they met their husbands and eventually gave up their jobs to become homemakers and mothers. In the years before I was born, teaching was about the highest professional job a woman could expect to get in the workplace. Though, even if they taught, they were still expected to keep the house running and raise the children.
My aunt Helen, in the 1950s, moved north to Rahway, NJ after going to Randolph-Macon and became a librarian for Merck. She never married so she kept working until she retired and moved back down to Lynchburg. At her burial, several elderly lifelong friends of hers said how remarkably brave they thought she was for having lived the life she did. She knocked a crack into the glass ceiling.
I started keeping a scrapbook when I was ten years old. We went on a trip to South Africa, and I chronicled it. After half a century, I have filled up countless other books with theatre stubs, admission tickets, and postcards. I’ve listed all the books I’ve read and the movies I’ve seen. Their purpose, in my mind, was to have something to jog my future memory, not to create something that somebody else could look at.
When Jersey Boys started to explode in 2005 or 2006, I considered keeping a journal of what I was experiencing thinking that I might someday write about it. That I didn’t do that, I still regret. At several points well into the run, I thought about starting it, but I’d already missed so much of the early days, that it didn’t seem worth it. In truth, the work at the time was so difficult and the days so long and unrelenting that the last thing I wanted to do before I went to bed was relive it all by writing about it. I have all the playbills and the scrapbooks I put together, but I don’t have a record of what I thought or felt. I could recreate some of it, but my memories have been compromised by what I’ve learned since then and by how things have changed in the years between.
As the pandemic started, though, I was aware that we were at the beginning of something monumental. The fact that I’d missed my opportunity with Jersey Boys I am sure contributed to my starting to write about our shared COVID experience right away. That there was no work to do, in fact, there was nothing to do at all, made it much easier to write every day. No matter how quickly you do it, the act of writing still takes time. For me, at any rate, I also need enough time so that I can forget how much time it’s taking and get lost in it.
This last century created the perfect storm for family record-keeping. Photography became available to ordinary people. Before that, only the wealthy could afford to have paintings done of their loved ones. Accuracy depended on the artist. Education started expanding to include much more of the population. Before that, only wealthy men attended college. With the industrial revolution came weekends and downtime. Up until a century ago, my family were all farmers. Farmers don’t get a day off. Then came the internet.
The further back in time we go, the rarer accurate records become. Paper was expensive. It wasn’t wasted on anything that wasn’t deemed important. Kids wrote on slates in school which were erased after every class. Paper also decays. Now, with digital scanning, records, even about the most mundane and frivolous things, will be accessible indefinitely. We keep track of everything. I wonder, though, as we move forward how interested anyone is going to be in digging through it all. There is almost too much information about all of us. Our ancestors were usually photographed on special occasions and their pictures were treasured and kept safely. These days we photograph every meal, every workout, and every single moment that we are alive. None of it is printed out anymore so whatever scrapbooks are being created are all being done virtually. Who is going to care about any of it in a few decades?
Part of the joy of sifting through all the old documents and albums is their smell. There’s a distinctive musty smell to old paper that is magical and inspiring. One deep breath and you are taken back to another time. You don’t get that scrolling through pictures on your phone. We’ve come out of a time when only slivers of information survived, and we are now heading into one where there is too much of it. All the important data will be buried under tons of nonsense making it as hard to find as information from the 1700s. This century that we are living through is the sweet spot in-between.
My grandmother and great-grandmother labeled their albums well. Even so, there are still untold numbers of photographs in them that have total strangers staring up at me out of their frames. Sometimes, I can find a picture of someone who has been identified elsewhere and then recognize them again, but over time, people’s faces change. Fifty years can make someone unrecognizable. People didn’t create scrapbooks for the ages. Instead, I think, they made them for themselves. You don’t think that you’re going to forget the names of people who meant something to you, but a few decades go by and, I must admit, you do. I wonder if my great-grandmother ever thought her great-grandson was going to be spending so much time trying to figure out who everyone was.
My grandmother knew who everybody was in her albums. My father only knew some of them firsthand. I only met a few. My niece and nephew, sadly, have no connection to anyone in them at all. What I am doing now is continuing the work my great-grandmother and my grandmother started. I feel like I have a duty to finish it. My sister and I are the last people with any real connection to those black and white and sepia faces. After we’re gone, they’re gone. The thought of all those Hesters, Mastins, Wilsons, and Hamlets ending up piled anonymously in a basket in a junk shop is more than I can bear.
My grandfather was already sixty-eight when I came along. Like my grandmother, I only knew him as an old man. He lived well into his nineties, so I got to spend quite a bit of time with him, but he wasn’t as easy to talk to as my grandmother was. Eunice did the talking, and Morris dropped in comments as she went. He certainly had stories, but I am only now realizing how few of them he told were about his childhood. What was my grandfather like as a young man?
I know a few things. Morris and his twin sister Mary were born on June 30, 1894, in Russellville, Alabama. Two years later the family moved to Lynchburg, Virginia. When the twins fought, Ormond wouldn’t try and figure out who did what to whom, she’d just spank them both. The twins had their share of chores to do, but Morris resented having to be the one to milk the cow. Sometimes there would be brandied peaches for dessert. Mary was allowed to have one, but Morris wasn’t because it was thought that if a boy got a taste of brandy, it would lead him to drink later in life. I remember my grandfather drinking whiskey on the rocks in the evenings when he was an old man, but I never saw him anything close to drunk.
The Hesters lived in several different houses in Lynchburg including the farm called ‘the Adkin’s place.” My grandfather remembered a man who worked there named Mr. Shields. Mr. Shields had fought in the Civil War. My grandfather once asked him if he’d ever seen General Robert E. Lee in the flesh. “Oh, many’s the time,” he claimed. He told a somewhat dubious story about the war when he and another soldier were cooking something over a fire in a small clearing. Suddenly, there was a huge commotion behind them, and General Lee came charging out of the woods on his horse Traveller, beating him with his hat for all he was worth. Two Yankee soldiers were chasing him and one of them yelled, “We’ve got you this time, you old white-haired son-of-a-bitch!” Unfortunately, that’s where the tale ends. We have to imagine Mr. Shields’ heroics in standing up and saving the General’s hide.
Mr. Shields would often give Morris some money to go into town and buy him and his wife morphine. At that time, it was legal for anyone, even a child, to buy it over the counter. As he walked, Morris would collect discarded whiskey bottles and return them to the saloon and get some spending money that way.
My great-aunt Pudge came along when Morris and Mary were seven. She told my father that because of all the moving around, Morris and Mary’s education was spotty and uneven. He went to E.C. Glass High School, however, where he reportedly did very well. Maybe because it was what his father did, he knew that he wanted to be a lawyer early on. He studied Latin and German and got involved in the debating society. All of that would help him later. While he was still in school, he started working for his father part-time. He’d double-check the titles and deeds his father put together and began learning the trade.
Morris had dreams of going to law school at Yale. For his undergrad work, he went to Washington and Lee University which was in Lexington, VA about fifty miles away from Lynchburg. He was determined to put himself through school, but after a few months, his money ran out. Swallowing his pride, he wrote to his father to ask him for his help. Albert said yes, but Morris said it was the hardest letter he’d ever had to write.
Aside from the five years he spent in Rustburg, and the time he was in college, my grandfather never really left Lynchburg. The summer after he graduated from High School in 1914, he and a friend got a summer job working in the railroad yards. At the end of it, they were given a free pass to travel anywhere they liked on the train. They chose to go to Chicago. They spent the first night in Ohio on a layover. After walking around for a bit, they both lost their nerve and took the first train back to Lynchburg. My grandmother, who’d been all over the world, used to laughingly say to my dad, “Your father’s traveled a lot. He’s been to Columbus.”
It's almost as if Morris’s life began when he went to college. These years beforehand are almost blank. I wonder if there are childhood pictures of him that went down through Mary and Pudge’s families. I’d like to get to know the guy. In some ways, I feel like I have less of a handle on who he was than I do on who his father was. The strange thing about that is that I knew the older version of Morris for a very long time, and I never met his father at all.
I’ll have to do some more digging.
"No matter how quickly you do it, the act of writing still takes time. For me, at any rate, I also need enough time so that I can forget how much time it’s taking and get lost in it." -- Brother, did that line ever resonate with me.
The story about Buzz gave me a chuckle, but I am a cat person to the core.