AAAAACK!!! Has it been almost a YEAR???

Okay, so there's no question I've been neglecting this blog. I've been neglecting it ever since I started it in the middle of that gawd-awful thesis experience. But NINE frigging months is a tad excessive.

And SO much has happened that's worthy of a blog post. I've had a couple of SIGNIFICANT breakthroughs in my family history--each one worthy of its own post.

So here are my New Year's Resolutions. In no particular order:

1. Walk (preferably outside) for at least 20 minutes each day. I've long lost hope that I'll ever lose enough weight to actually LOOK good again, but I can hope to lose enough weight to FEEL reasonably good. The older I get, the worse the damn back, knees, and hands get so I think it's time to make an attempt to at least slow down the decay. I may still be old and fat, but perhaps I can be old, fat, and mobile.

2. Post to each of my two blogs at least once each month. Part of my problem with getting this done is I feel, like Elizabeth Bennett, that I'm "unwilling to speak unless (I) expect to say something that will amaze the whole room..." So if I can't be brilliant and the post can't be perfect, I don't write one. I need to remember--short posts are okay. Posts without multimedia presentations (that take FRICKING FOREVER and thoroughly piss me off) are okay, too.

3. Spend an hour each day (on the days I don't teach) on a family history related project. Sundays are traditionally my dead-people days, and that's when I tend to actually make progress collecting information on my family. I need to spend some time on the other days of the week organizing, preserving, and sharing what I've already found.

4. Reduce the number of people I owe money to by 50%. Right now I owe money to eight different entities. Eight. Shit. We won't discuss how fundamentally pathetic that is since I know better than to let myself get trapped that way. Let's just blame it all on Randy and leave it at that. Oh, and I should perhaps add that this particular goal has reference to the accounts I owe, not the actual people. I am not suggesting that someone take out American Express. Just pay off the account I have with them so that they're no longer on my list of creditors.

Four things. Not bad, eh? Let's see if I can do it.

And now for something completely different....

Comb-overs and air guitars

I discovered my first honest-to-john gray hair about 3 weeks ago, just in time for my 55th birthday. This didn't surprise me much since various and assorted events in the lives of my various and assorted children should have turned me gray about 30 years ago. Finding this gray hair didn't surprise me, but the nature of the hair did. It was thick and wiry and curly. My hair--or hairs, I should say, since I only have about 3 of them--is (are) thin and fine and straight as a board. That is, when they haven't been permed into something resembling a cross between a french poodle and Don King.

But my hate-hate relationship with my hair is not a new development. I have been threatening to shave my head and buy a wig for about 40 years now. My hair's been fine ever since I was a child, but when I was younger I had plenty of it. Now that I'm old, it's becoming more and more challenging to figure out ways to cover the bald spots. Or at least the bald spots I can see in the mirror. I take great pains to avoid looking at my hair from the back. I figure if I can't see it, I'm not gonna worry about it. But it does annoy the hell out of me to spend 30 minutes every morning with a curling iron and hair spray and know that in reality, I'm just indulging in the female version of the comb-over. I'm not fooling anybody. It's time to get a wig. But it won't be my first one.

We lived in San Diego from 1981 to 1984 while Randy served as the Naval intelligence officer for HS-8, a helicopter squadron that was based at North Island Naval Air Station and attached to the aircraft carrier USS Ranger. He left us for a nine month WESTPAC deployment in the summer of 1983, and had no choice but to do his Christmas shopping that year entirely through the catalogs that circulated among the guys on the ship. He bought toys for the kids through the Sears and Penney's catalogs and I'm sure he bought me a few things there as well. But a small package that arrived from him for me just before Christmas that year was wrapped in brown paper and bore a singular return address: Fredericks of Hollywood. Lingerie, I thought with a smile, as I tossed the package at the back of the Christmas tree and promptly forgot about it.

Mother and Daddy came down to San Diego that year for Christmas since I was alone, and it was such a treat to have them there for all the Christmas eve and Christmas morning festivities. My Dad played Santa that morning and handed out the presents, one at a time, just like he did when I was a little girl. The kids were having a blast and I was basking in the holiday glow until Daddy spotted the package at the back of the tree. I shot out of my chair to intercept the forgotten parcel, but before I could whisk it out of his hands, he read the label, handed it to me, and disappeared into the kitchen for a much-needed beer. My mother thought it was hilarious.

I opened enough of the package to discern that it did not, in fact, contain crotchless panties or a black lace teddie--it contained a wig. Relieved, I pulled it out and showed it to the folks until it dawned on me that there were still a number of naughty conclusions that one might draw from the fact that my husband was sending me a wig from Fredericks of Hollywood while he was out to sea. I stuffed it back in the package and under the couch cushions. Daddy got another beer. Mother still thought it was hilarious.

The truth was, Randy had been listening to me bitch about my hair for all the years we'd been married and while he might have been browsing the Frederick's catalog that year with other intentions in mind, he really, honestly, did want to try to fix my hair problem. It was a cute wig--shoulder length curls and in a color that was very near to my own. I tried it on dozens of times, but there was no escaping the fact that--on me--it LOOKED like a wig. I never actually wore it.

But my Frederick's of Hollywood wig DID actually see the light of day--on Randy. While we were living in Spain, our tiny little Rota Servicemen's Branch held a "Come As Your Favorite Fantasy" party (yes, you read that right--we had EXCELLENT parties in Spain!). For this particular party, it was perfectly clear what Randy would go as--he went as a rock star. With my wig, his British motoring cap, and a tennis racket, he played air guitar that would have put Van Halen to shame. I even threw a pair of panties at him. And I have photographic evidence (of the costume, not the panties):

After the party, I put the wig in a bag with some eyeglasses and other accessories from the evening and put it out in the carport. Our Spanish garbagemen accidentally took it out with the trash the next morning. I was heartbroken. I never told Daddy. I figured he'd need another beer.

Soothing the savage beast...

When I updated my blog header last month, one of my favorite features ended up on the cutting room floor. In a fit of pique, I got rid of the little embedded music player from Playlist.com when I forgot my password and the site made it extraordinarily difficult to retrieve it.

I admit I kind of miss it. It was fun to link the music that it played with the subject of my blog posts. I played Tom Lehrer's "Masochism Tango" when I wrote about the final, PAINFUL, stages of finishing my master's thesis. I played "Der Fuhrer's Face" when I wrote about my Dad's time in the 8th Air Force during World War II. I played Jimmy Buffett's "A**hole Song" when I posted about AT&T. It was fun. But the music could actually prove counterproductive since the older I get the harder it is for me to concentrate on writing while music is playing. It didn't used to be that way, but along with sagging boobs, disappearing shoulders, and painful joints, I guess it just goes with the process of aging.

But I LOVE music. I always have. There's a reason why every movie has a soundtrack. Music is the soundtrack of our lives. It always amazes me how a single song can instantly transport me back to a place and time that I never think about until those first few notes begin to play. Suddenly it's as if I'm there again--I can hear and see things I haven't heard or seen in decades--things that no longer exist. I can feel the way I felt then. The years simply evaporate and all of a sudden, I'm there.

I get it naturally. Both my parents loved music and I was raised in a home where it was always playing. Ever since I can remember, the stereo held pride of place in our house. I wouldn't be surprised if it was the first thing they ever bought; it was certainly always the biggest. This is a photo of the first one I remember (incidentally, the photo was taken at Randy's and my first apartment--they had purchased a better, bigger one by the time we married, and we were lucky enough to get the old one. We didn't have a couch, but by golly we had a stereo!)

Some of my fondest and earliest memories are of the music that came out of that stereo on Saturday nights. My childhood Saturdays were special. Our next door neighbors, the Joneses, were my Mom & Dad's best friends. They had a daughter, Susan, who was about my age and she was one of my best friends. Saturday nights meant that stereo would be playing at "the threshold of pain" while all the grownups sat around visiting over glasses of beer and whatever munchies they happened to have on hand. We kids got to stay up late and play outside to the strains of Hawaiian music (my mother was a great fan since she'd lived in Honolulu as a child) or Sinatra or Ella Fitzgerald or Sammy Davis, Jr. or Glenn Miller. Or Mitch Miller. To this day, the song "If you knew Susie, like I know Susie" takes my breath away--I can still hear my Dad singing it to me.

Once I hit the teenage years, my soundtrack changed. I still loved my parents' music, but now the Monkees, the Doors, Cream, and the Beach Boys took center stage. Later on they'd be joined by John Denver, Chicago, Jim Croce, and many others. Even now, all these decades later, certain songs will stop me in my tracks, reminding me of singular moments in my life.

I hear "Higher and Higher" by Jackie Wilson, and I'm suddenly driving a car for the very first time, long before it was legal for me to do so, because Daddy thought he was having a heart attack and he wanted me to drive him to the doctor. Have no idea how I made it, but I did. And he did too. But I worried about him for the rest of his life.

I hear John Denver's "Calypso" and I'm standing outside a store in Swansea, Wales, smelling the sea air and looking at my first Welsh love spoon--a gift from my first real hearthrob, Lynn Williams. I still have it. (The spoon, I mean:-)

I hear "You Make Me Feel Brand New" by the Spinners, and I'm dancing with the love of my life at Disneyland, wondering if he's going to be "the one." He was.

I hear "Longer" by Dan Fogelberg and I'm struggling up the stairs to work at the Administration Building at BYU, eight months pregnant with my second child, and marveling at my good fortune to be married to my best friend and bringing another healthy baby into the world.

I hear "El Nino Querido" by the King's Singers and I'm standing at my kitchen window, washing dishes and gazing across the Bay of Cadiz at the lighthouse in Rota while my children make graham cracker gingerbread houses on the table nearby. Bliss. Complete. Total. Utterly perfect. Bliss.

Nowadays I have to be a tad careful about the music I listen to. Some of the songs I just mentioned will bring me to tears, so I balance the sad ones with lots of upbeat stuff. I managed to make it through Randy's funeral with a liberal dose of ZZ-Top--again, at the "threshold of pain"--for an hour or so before the service. When I'm lonely and missing the west, I play a lot of Jimmy Buffett. On Sundays, when I'm hanging out with my favorite dead people, my music of choice is vintage 40's stuff with a smattering of the Smothers Brothers for good measure--they were another perennial favorite of my folks.

So here's a photo of my mom sitting in front of that new stereo they bought when it was many years old--you can see the thing is MASSIVE. And, just for ducks, I bit the bullet and put the music player back in. With a few of my favorites. Enjoy!

How do you like me now?

One free blog background + a longstanding desire to have a customized blog header + $35 that I probably shouldn't have spent = MY NEW LOOK. Whaddyathink? I think it's absolutely smashing!

I gathered a few family artifacts (trying to represent as many branches of my family tree as I could possibly cram into one photograph) and clustered them at one edge of my great-great grandfather's (Colonel's great-grandfather's) shaving stand. A photograph of Mother and Daddy leaving on their honeymoon in June of 1946. A turquoise necklace I made for Mother when I was a little girl. Randy's dogtags and his Navy Achievement Medal. Daddy's glasses. The beaded purse that Ruth's mother made for her when she was a little girl. The little wooden Bavarian-style chair that Colonel hand crafted and then carved Mother & Daddy's initials and marriage date on the seatback.

Once I had them all posed properly, I took a few photographs and my darling baby girl Megan spent some time Photoshopping them until they had that perfect sepia tone with the colors of Randy's medal popping right out of the frame.

Then I scanned several letters from my great-grandmother, Maria Ignacia Ramos Robbins, along with a photo taken on my wedding day at the Los Angeles Temple and one of my favorite pictures of me and my brothers, Chris and Mike.

I e-mailed the whole lot to Heather of BlessedLittleNest.com designs, and the rest, as they say, is history. Now every time I open my blog, I see reminders of so many people and places that made me who I am. And I LOVE that.

So maybe it was money well spent. At the very least, I hope it will inspire me to blog more often. So how DO ya like me now??

Searching for Sidney

A chance encounter with FindAGrave.com in June, 2009, was my first real break in solving yet another family history mystery—what happened to my uncle, Sidney Francis Atkins, Jr., during World War II?

I blogged about it when it happened, but it’s time to write “the rest of the story”—or at least the story as it’s been revealed up ‘til now. First, though, I want to express my undying gratitude again to Judy Rogers, the FindAGrave volunteer whose effort to survey the Lockhart City Cemetery in Caldwell County, Texas, set this long, crooked, wonderful chain of events in motion in the first place.

Judy was prompt in getting the photograph of Sidney’s headstone to me, and from the photograph, I was able to determine that Sidney had served in the 502nd Parachute Infantry Regiment of the 101st Airborne—otherwise known as “The Widowmakers.” Many attempts to locate an obituary in any of the Texas newspapers came up empty, but my request for an obit from the Lockhart County Historical Society resulted in a virtual gold mine of information about the other residents of Sidney’s cemetery plot. Judy had told me that Sidney was buried next to William J. Scott and Willie Atkins Scott. When the Lockhart County Historical Society couldn’t find an obit, the volunteer who handled my request went above and beyond the call of duty (bless her too!) and suggested I check the then-new pilot.familysearch.org website to see if I could locate any Texas death records there. Holy. Frigging. Cow. That website—which I should have been familiar with but wasn’t—turned up records galore on the Scott family AND on Sidney’s father and stepmother.

With dead people coming out of the woodwork, it was hard to drag my attention back to Sidney, but I mentioned my search for his obituary to a colleague at work. His subscription to GenealogyBank.com yielded TWO newspaper articles in about three clicks of the mouse. Resisting the impulse to leap across the desk and kiss him, I printed them both. One was an article printed in 1948 about Sidney's reburial service in the Lockhart Cemetery. The other article was worth it’s weight in gold. Written in July of 1944, it was one of those hometown newspaper gems with quotations from a letter Sidney had written home to the folks about his experiences on D-Day. “It’s a heck of a lot easier to run and kill Jerries than it is to sell chili, only I would rather be a salesman,” he wrote. “We were with the air-borne division that spearheaded the invasion and were the very first to land. In fact, I was the jumpmaster in No. 7 plane, and can also claim the honor of having the first combat platoon to land…it makes me feel kind of big.” WOW.

After I found the newspaper articles, I promptly fired off a standard request to the National Personnel Records Center in St. Louis to see if I could score a copy of Sidney’s service record. Not surprisingly I got the standard response—it was burned in the 1973 fire—but they did suggest that I contact the US Army Human Resources Command in Virginia to see if they had any casualty records for Sidney.

I wrote the HRC in late January and received a reply in late February stating that my request could take up to TWENTY-FOUR weeks to process. It did. One day in August, I came home to find a large manila envelope in my mailbox from Alexandria. I almost drove the car through the garage in my haste to get inside and open it.

I can’t even express the range of emotions I felt while sorting through the contents labeled: Individual Deceased Personnel File. A sterile and businesslike label for an envelope full of pain. The papers seemed to be in reverse order, so among the first pages I found a Receipt of Remains stating that Sidney’s body would arrive on Train Number Seven of the Missouri Kansas Texas Railroad. Ironic. My grandfather Jackson, Sidney’s stepfather, worked for the MKT for a number of years while Sidney was part of his little family.

Moving on, I found that Sidney had been buried in the United States Military Cemetery at Champigneul, Chalons Sur Marne, France, but that the War Department had, in 1946, received authorization to “remove at Government expense, to the final resting place designated by the next of kin, the remains of those American citizens who died while serving overseas.” A letter from the Red Cross to the Quartermaster General’s office stated that Mrs. J. F. Arnold (Blanche Atkins Arnold) was Sidney’s next of kin because she “reared the serviceman since his mother’s death when he was a very small boy.”

And then, buried about midway through the packet, there it was—a routing slip bearing the news that “First Lieutenant Sidney F. Atkins, Jr., died on 22 March 1945 due to a mortar shell that fell short.” Mystery solved. It was essentially friendly fire. A training exercise gone terribly wrong. More pages offered more details. He was posthumously awarded the Bronze Star. More details—some gruesome. The condition of his remains—fractured skull and mandible. The condition of the shipping casket. More details—more poignant. His personal effects. Souvenirs. An autographed $1.00 bill. Some French francs. “Religious articles.” A billfold.

“…his property is being forwarded to you in one package and one footlocker.”

I’m still sorting through those papers and each time I do, I tend to find another detail or two—another piece to another puzzle. Many questions still remain. Blanche Atkins Arnold isn’t buried in the plot at Lockhart. The papers state that she lived with her sister, Willie Atkins Scott, but what happened to Blanche? She worked long and hard to see to it that her beloved nephew finally came home. Her name isn’t mentioned in the reburial notice as a surviving family member. It was Willie Scott who filled out the paperwork requesting Sidney’s headstone. Did Blanche live to see him reach his final resting place?

One day I hope to find a descendant of the Arnolds or the Scotts who might be able to provide me with a photograph of Sidney all grown up. But for now, my father’s big brother will remain this sweet, smiling little boy.

Sidney, Nettie, Jackson, and my Dad, circa 1920

Sidney Francis Atkins, Jr. circa 1920

More pieces to the puzzle...

This blog was born out of a desire to share my family history with my children--lately, I'm afraid it's become more of a bully pulpit from which I've grumbled, griped, moaned, groaned, and generally bitched about everything from my cell phone provider to my thesis with just a smattering of family history thrown in for good measure.

But the past two weeks have produced two remarkable breakthroughs in my quest for information on my ancestors and so it's with a great deal of pleasure that I steer this "bully pulpit" away from the snarky and focus again on the sublime.

The gentleman whose photo is at the top of this post is William Bridgart Bower, my father's paternal grandfather. That I have this photograph is remarkable given the attrition that naturally occurs when you've lived in sixteen different places in thirty-three years. But perhaps more remarkable is the fact that I know his name. You'd think his last name would be my maiden name since last names in our society are generally passed down from father to child. But William Bridgart Bower's child, my grandfather, changed his name from Arthur Hoeft Bower to Jackson Hardy. Why he did this is probably the biggest mystery I've had to contend with as I've researched my family history. The story we were always told was that Arthur Hoeft Bower ran away from home at age 12 and changed his name. WHY he picked Jackson Hardy was never part of the story. Nobody ever really talked about it. My mother always said she'd heard he was involved in some type of romantic scandal with a cousin and that's why he did it. My father almost never talked about his father. At any rate, I never found out and since all my sources of information are dead now, it didn't seem likely that I would ever find out.

When my mother died, I inherited all the family papers and photographs and of all the photos that seemed to belong to Jackson, this one of his father is one of the few that were identified. Over the years, with a little help from census records and a few papers from that branch of the family, I found that William Bridgart Bower was born in Brooklyn in 1860 and married Dorothea Hoeft, the daughter of a prominent Brooklyn merchant, sometime around 1885.

Between 1886 and 1902 they brought eight children into the world. Camille died when she was 6, Marguerite died at age 5, Ruth at age 3, David at age 6. Evelyn survived to adulthood, but one morning in November of 1938, she calmly reported for work on the 25th floor of the French Building on Fifth Avenue, removed a ventilating panel from a rear window of the office, and jumped out. She was 41.

A number of years ago, we visited Brooklyn to try to gather more information on the family and after a visit to the local LDS Family History Center, I was able to locate the cemetery where the family were buried. The All Faiths Cemetery in Middle Village, New York, is overwhelmingly huge. But they keep good records in that neck of the woods, and I paid $35 to get all the burial records for the family plot. The results were staggering--children I never knew existed and information about so many family members came from that document. It was well worth the $35--AND the bill for back taxes on the plot that I received once they realized I might be the only heir they'd ever find! THAT's what I get for digging up my ancestors! :-)

ANYway--I plugged what I thought was all the info from that cemetery record into my family tree and moved on to other lines. Years and years passed. Just a few weeks ago, I took a day off and ran down to the National Archives in Morrow, hoping that my grandfather's World War I draft registration card might shed light on that mysterious name change. It didn't. What it did do is pique my curiosity yet again about William Bridgart Bower. On the draft card, my grandfather stated that he was responsible for providing at least 50% of the income for his mother. Why, I wondered, did she need her son's help? What had happened to William?

I ran all the names again through the census records at Ancestry.com and things got curiouser and curiouser. In the 1910 census, William was listed as a "boarder" in another household--NOT with his wife and children. In the 1920 census, Dorothea is listed as a widow. Hmmmm...

I took another look at that cemetery record I've had for about a decade and BAM, there it was. Have NO idea how I missed it!! Down at the bottom was an entry for: William B. Bower, age 80 years 8 days, place of death Suffolk County, NY, interred May 11, 1940. I ran his name through the 1930 census for Suffolk County, and there he was--listed as an inmate at the Kings Park State Hospital. WOW.

A quick Google search led me to a website with a ton of info and a few old photographs of the institution. There will be a postscript to this post, I hope, as I've been in contact with the Suffolk County Historical Society and I hope to squeeze a few more details out of this story if I'm lucky enough to score any patient records or photographs.

SO. Lots of puzzle pieces filled in, but I'm still left wondering about William. What was the diagnosis that placed him in a mental institution? Could it have been something simple, something that a modern day mental health professional could have treated? How was he treated in that day and age? What was his life like? How did his wife and children handle such a tragedy? A single woman with children, in that day and age--of course she would have claimed to be a widow. And maybe--just maybe--my grandfather changed his name to distance himself from his father. What is certain is that Arthur Hoeft Bower--aka Jackson Hardy--certainly had a complicated relationship with his own son--my father. But that's another story...

A breath of fresh aire....

How do you like my new look?

I've been wanting to come up with a permanent picture for my blog title for ages, but this smashing new look was created exclusively for me by my brilliant daughter, Annike--THANK YOU SWEETIE!! She managed to crank the whole thing out while sitting on her couch, watching some of the shows she TiVo'd while she was busy showing me the time of my life. Two glorious weeks in England spent in a perfect blend of activities. We drove down country roads peppered with grazing sheep, stone cottages, and patchworked fields. We toured historic homes with wavy glass windows, creaky floorboards, and flowers on every windowsill. We shopped in quirky antique stores, ate Polish food and Cornish pasties. We even spent four hours in a small fishing boat on incredibly choppy seas off the coast of Plymouth, while "Colin" and "Bob" showed us the finer points of casting for mackerel and Dover sole. About three days into the trip, Patrick, my darling son-in-law, looked at me and said, "So this is what you look like when you're not hopelessly stressed!"

He was right. It's been my sad experience that I spend way too much time hopelessly stressing and not nearly enough time eating Cornish pasties and driving down country roads. And the funny (or sad, depending on how you want to look at it) thing about it is, I've realized this before but have never been brave enough (or smart enough) to do something about it. I nearly stressed myself into an ulcer as a young wife and mother worrying about money, housecleaning, working, and how to raise our first three children and then Megan (our fourth) came along. I spent the first twelve months of her life following her around with a video camera--to hell with the puddle of Kool-Aid on the kitchen floor and the unopened bills on the dresser. I had a little girl to watch! I'm ashamed that Annike, Bryan, and Benjamin couldn't have enjoyed that kind of a mother. I don't suppose I was a bad mother or a worse mother for them--I was just a more relaxed mother with Megan. Randy was much better at "rolling with the punches." He understood what was important in life. One of those lessons I learned much too late since Megan was our last.

A year and a half ago, I spent a glorious ten days in Hawaii. Up to that point, I'd never taken a vacation that so completely relaxed me. I came home planning to change my ways and slow down a bit, but apparently--based on Patrick's observations--I didn't change a thing.

So this time, I'm determined. The older I get, the more I realize that there's a helluva lot of fluff in my life--things that demand center stage but should never have gotten past the first audition. Money. Worry. Perfectionism. Toxic people. They all elbow their way into my life, crowding out what's really important. Faith. Family. Friends. Maybe it's because I can still smell the salt in the air and hear the seagulls cry, or maybe it's because I can still see rays of sunshine lighting up those emerald green hillsides while the tulips nod in the breeze.


At any rate, I needed that breath of fresh aire...and I intend to make it last.