Salt-rising bread in the time of COVID-19

It is 10:50 on a workday morning and I’m sitting in my living room, in my pajamas, eagerly anticipating what has become a significant high point of my day:  the first bite. 

It is everything I knew it would be—crunchy, buttery, flavorful, perfect.  Two thin slices of salt-rising bread, toasted, buttered, and slathered with guava jam.  Comfort food at its finest.

I’m eating breakfast in my PJs at 10:50 on a workday morning because the Atlanta History Center is closed indefinitely due to the COVID-19 crisis.  I am, thankfully, working from home.  The world as we knew it has ceased to exist.  A virus that started as the butt of various beer jokes halfway around the world rapidly gained momentum over the course of just a few weeks.  It morphed into an alarming threat for anyone who traveled internationally and finally exploded into our sheltered, privileged, American world as a healthcare nightmare, bringing political chaos, shelter-in-place directives, and empty grocery store shelves with it.

That same COVID-19 crisis is, indirectly, the reason why toasted and guava-jammed salt-rising bread is now a significant high point of my days.

Let me back up a bit.  Back before the earth cooled, when I was a wee tyke, summers typically included a visit to the home of my maternal grandparents (known affectionately as Colonel and Dardy) in Fallston, Maryland.  It was paradise for me, a city girl raised in a mid-century modern ranch house in “the Valley,” just northwest of Los Angeles.  Set on fifteen acres of pine forests, fruit orchards, gardens, and chicken and pigeon coops, their home was filled with tasteful antiques and knick-knacks gathered from the places they lived while Colonel served in the Army.  But it was the two of them who made it magical.  Gifted storytellers who possessed wicked senses of humor, they were just fun people to be around.  And the food.  Oh, my goodness, the food.  My grandfather made peach ice cream from the fruit in his orchard.  We feasted on squab (young pigeons) for dinner.  Ritz crackers with home-made ham salad for lunch.  Vegetables of every kind, straight out of my grandmother’s garden.  And salt-rising bread.  I thought everybody ate salt-rising bread for breakfast.  We had it in Fallston every summer, but we could also get it at Van de Kamp’s bakeries in Southern California.  It wasn’t until after my grandparents passed away and the Van de Kamp’s chain folded that I realized—NOBODY knew what salt-rising bread was. Nobody had even heard of it.  One night last year, whilst feeling particularly nostalgic, I managed to find a single bakery online someplace in the east that carried it.  It’s apparently an Appalachian specialty. Ah, well, I thought—maybe someday I’ll order some and see if it’s the same.

Fast forward about forty years from my last piece of salt-rising bread to last month.  As luck would have it, I was planning a research trip to West Virginia just as the situation in Wuhan began dominating the headlines.  I am researching Colonel’s family and their history is inextricably connected with eastern West Virginia.  West Virginia University, in Morgantown, holds in its archives the personal papers of my third great-grandfather, Logan Osborne, on a single reel of microfilm.  I simply had to see it. 

I watched with growing alarm as the headlines grew more threatening with every passing day.  Sometimes with every passing hour.  It seemed like the world—certainly my world—was closing in on me.  I watched helplessly as Kuwait shut its borders, effectively trapping Annike and her family there.  Canada closed its borders, effectively trapping Megan and her family there.  I watched helplessly as the airline industry began to implode, seriously threatening Benjamin’s livelihood.  I watched helplessly as institutions and businesses everywhere began restricting their hours, then closing their doors.  Jacey closed her studio.  Bryan worked his last day at Coke downtown and shifted to working from home.

To ignore my growing conviction that AHC would soon follow suit—and that ultimately it would become impossible to travel--I found myself surfing the internet in the wee hours one morning, looking for places to eat in Morgantown.  I was determined to take that one last trip while I still could and, hopefully, unplug from work for just one day so that I could face what I knew was coming.  One of the most recommended places to eat in the area was Rising Creek Bakery.  Rising Creek Bakery…  Where had I heard that name before?

Glory be—it was the place I had found online that still makes salt-rising bread.

I took the trip.  It was utterly perfect, apart from the texts and calls from work that occasionally intruded.  AHC was, indeed, closing and there were questions to be answered and decisions to be made.

But I got my salt-rising bread, by golly.  And the first bite was everything I hoped it would be.  If I closed my eyes, I could see Dardy in her kitchen with the ever-present jar of guava jelly—a favorite of hers from their years living in Hawaii.  I got to view the microfilm, too—a gold mine of family history.

So now, as I work from home cataloguing our wonderful veterans’ oral history interviews, I get to listen to stories of resilience and community from those who experienced far more lasting horrors than even this deadly virus.  They survived.  And then they thrived.  And that is comforting.

And each morning I have those two thin slices of toast with guava jam and I can still see Dardy in her kitchen.  And I think of Colonel’s Appalachian heritage.  They endured war and hunger and fear and death and disease and heartbreak.  They survived.  And then they thrived.  And that is comforting too.

My stash of salt-rising bread won’t last much longer.  I worry that Rising Creek Bakery may not survive the COVID-19 plague.  It is, after all, a small business that many would consider “non-essential.”

But it is essential to me.  I click over to their website and am enormously relieved that although they are closed to the public, they are still shipping their products online.  I place my order—unsliced loaves are $5.85 each, and another $10.85 to ship. 

A bargain, for me at least, at twice the price.

Dardy and Colonel at their Fallston home, circa 1968

Dardy, in her favorite chair, circa 1968

Almost Heaven, West Virginia--actually, just a few miles over the border in Pennsylvania.  It's worth the trip.  Either online now, or in person post-plague:  

Rising Creek Bakery

I'm BAAAAAAACK.....

It's been a long time.  As in LOOOOOOOONG time.

And I can't say exactly *why* I'm back, other than the fact that I've felt impressed recently to begin again documenting the discoveries I come across while researching my lovely ancestors.  For a family historian with a fictitious maiden name and a father who just wouldn't talk about his ancestors, I'm constantly amazed at the information, connections, and experiences that have fallen in my lap over the years--particularly in the last 7 or 8 years.  I don't believe in coincidences--I know they are gifts from a loving Heavenly Father for which I am beyond grateful.

So this is a new beginning of sorts.  Especially since these newest discoveries pertain to Mother's family and not Daddy's.  I've been obsessed with my Dad's Hardy/Bower/Bridgarts for so long now and have shamefully neglected Mother's Shutt and Robbins folk.  I've just been assuming that those two lines are fairly well documented and that they wouldn't require a whole lot of work.

Yeah, some of them are well documented, all right, but geez-o-pete there are some doozies out there that I either forgot about or never knew about in the first place.

This week is a classic example.  First, it was finding Abraham Lincoln on the same burial register as some of my Shutts in Springfield, Illinois.  Tonight it's a little obituary I just randomly picked out of Colonel's papers about his mother.  It seems that Mary Duffield Moore Shutt was the grand-daughter of Thomas Rutherford, foreman of the grand jury that indicted abolitionist John Brown after his ill-fated raid on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry in 1859, one of the most important events that set the stage for the Civil War.  

Holy Cow......

Here is Mary Duffield Moore Shutt in an undated photograph.  

I cannot WAIT for the next "Holy Cow" moment.....

Beginning with the end in mind...

“Did you always know,” I asked, “that you were a descendant of the slaves at the Smith farm?”  “No,” he replied, leaning back in his chair.  “It wasn’t discussed.  You didn’t discuss those things.”  It took a moment for him to frame the sentence.  “We know where we end,” he said.  “We don’t know where we begin.”

I was sitting at a table in the library with my colleague, Kelly, and an elderly black gentleman whom we had recently discovered was the great-grandnephew of “Uncle Wilke,” one of the approximately two dozen enslaved men, women, and children owned through the years by the Smith family—original owners of the History Center’s Smith Family Farm.  He had walked into the library almost two years ago while I was working the reference desk and asked if the History Center would be interested in the information he was gathering about his ancestors.  I jumped at the chance to get his contact information, passed it on to one of the historic house managers, and promptly got overtaken by other events.  I only remembered that encounter when it was announced that the History Center was going to host an exhibit next month based on the enslaved families at Jefferson’s Monticello.  The exhibit included a massive genealogical project that traced the descendants of those slave families and conducted oral history interviews with them.  The project documented the lives of those descendants, providing the “rest of the story” about them.  Wouldn’t it be great if we could contact this man?  Kelly found him and arranged for the meeting.  His last name is Smith, too.

“So how did you find out?” I asked him.  He explained that his Aunt Grace knew a lot about the family history.  When he began to do his own research, he asked her for information and she told him.  He realized then that his father knew.  His aunts and uncles knew.  They all knew.  But they didn’t talk about it.  “Do you remember that conversation?” I asked.  With a faint smile he replied, “Oh, I remember some of it.”

WOW, I thought, I can’t ask him for more before I ask him if we might record it.  This is going to be too intense for note-taking.  That conversation had to have been life changing.  The archivist/genealogist in me began to mentally rub my hands together in anticipation of such a coup.  THIS is gonna be incredible!  “Mr. Smith,” I began, “please say no if this makes you uncomfortable…don’t hesitate to tell us no, but we have a camera here.  Would you be willing to let us let the camera run while you remember that conversation?” 

There was a long pause.  With a half smile he finally replied softly, “Maybe next time.”  There was a moment of hesitation, and then his face crumbled, his eyes welled up with tears, and he brought a weathered hand to his face and began to weep.  Stunned, all I could think to do was dash to the desk for the box of Kleenex we keep there, fervently praying along the way that I could find a way to repair the breach; to stop the flow of pain.

When I returned, he had managed to come to grips with his emotion, but it was a tenuous grip.  “I’m so sorry, Mr. Smith, I didn’t mean to upset you,” I heard myself stumble.  He  shook his head apologetically and I grabbed the moment to launch into a story of my own.  “Memories can be tough…” I offered, hoping to turn the tide of memory to happier shores—away from the rocks.  It worked.  He laughed as I described my experience all those years ago, frantically scribbling Daddy’s memories onto the backs of my checking account deposit slips after he’d had a few too many Budweisers.  “Yes,” Mr. Smith laughed, “sometimes that’s the best way to get at these memories!”

We continued our visit, bringing books and papers to the table that might shed more light on the Smith slaves.  We walked over to the 1893 Fulton County map and he and Kelly located the area where the farm stood.  I asked if he had ever seen the photograph we have of the family at the farm in the late 1800s.  He said he hadn’t.  I quickly brought it up from the stacks and laid it on the table before him.  “Oh my,” he said.  We explained that the photograph was taken in 1884.  We watched as he took it all in.  The white family standing at the front of the house.  The black man standing near the horses.  The black women off to the side.  The little girls standing next to them.  The children sprawled on the ground in the foreground, staring straight at the camera.  “Oh my.”  We came to the conclusion that based on the date of the photograph and the birthdates of his great-grandfather and siblings, there was every possibility that those children in the photograph were, indeed, his ancestors.

By the time he left us, he seemed to indicate that perhaps one day he could share that story with us—the start of his journey to find where he began.  He said we might be able to interview another of his aunts—Ethel—perhaps by phone.  “We can come to her,” I suggested quickly.  He shook his head and smiled, “Oh, she may not let you in!” “Well, maybe you can talk her into it,” we teased. 

He was smiling when he left. 

I am hopeful.

And I am changed.  In that split second before his face dissolved into tears, I glimpsed the pain in his eyes and I suddenly realized that everything I thought I knew about slavery was unimportant.  Dred Scott v. Sandford.  Anthony Burns.  Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

Harper’s Ferry.  I knew all those facts.  I’ve read the stories—even the first-hand accounts—and have been moved by them.

But nothing like this.

I know where I began, so I can never really know what it feels like to not know.  My great-grandfather appears in the census records by name.  I know exactly when and where he was born.  I know what he did for a living, who his parents were, from where they immigrated.  When I see “9” in the column labeled “mother of how many children” next to his wife’s name and “7” in the column marked “how many children living,” my heart aches for him and my great-grandmother and those babies they lost.  When I see his picture I see my father in him.  I see me in him.  I know him.

Mr. Smith’s great grandfather is a tick mark on a slave schedule. There are no names, only ages and gender.  In 1860, Robert Smith owned eleven slaves, six of whom were under the age of 12.  The youngest two were boys—one a year old, the other six months old.  Either could have been Mr. Smith’s great-grandfather.  Or neither.  Robert Smith gave his slaves to his children as gifts when they married.  Perhaps Mr. Smith’s great grandfather went with one of them.  Perhaps not.  He has not found a picture of him.  At least not yet.

We know where we end.  We don’t know where we begin.  I realized that this man’s story begins in pain.  I’m sure he thinks of his ancestors fondly, but he cannot think of them without thinking of the horror of slavery, the brutality of reconstruction, and the injustice of Jim Crow.  And now I understand why his father, aunts and uncles wouldn’t talk about it. 

Now it makes sense.  

Roses in December

I answered the phone at work the other day and was most pleasantly surprised to hear the voice of an old friend on the other line. Robynn Holland was calling to see if I'd be interested in providing a genealogy workshop for teachers under the auspices of the Georgia Humanities Council. I jumped at the chance, not only because I'm a total genealogy nerd, but because I'd do most anything for Robynn. She had worked with Randy at Pointe South Middle School while simultaneously dealing with a painful divorce and a cancer diagnosis. Randy thought very, very highly of her and not long after he passed away I got the opportunity to apply for a spot in a Teaching American History grant program that she was directing. She was instrumental in getting me the slot, largely--I think--because she knew I was Randy's widow. I loved working with her throughout the two year program. And it was that program that introduced me to the Atlanta History Center and, ultimately, my dream job. Funny how one opportunity leads to another as we move through life.

Anyway, as we chatted on the phone, catching up with one another's lives, she mentioned how often she still thinks of Randy. She told me that he was a gifted, even brilliant teacher. She said he was the consummate gentleman and what's more, a gentle man. She said he was a tremendous leader--that the administration at the school had been critically weak and that Randy's leadership was instrumental in the day to day workings of the school. She said, "Sue, you know, you lose people now and again in life and it's always sad, but there was something special about Randy. Losing him just rocked me to the core--I still think of him."

Listening to her soothed places in my soul that I didn't even know were raw. There is something about knowing that he lives in other people's memories that somehow makes him alive again in my own. It wasn't four days later that it happened again.

Andy Wood, a dear friend from our days in Spain, arrived for a visit just a few days after my conversation with Robynn. He wasn't in my living room for more than 30 minutes when he directed the conversation to Randy. He told me that he had attended a church leadership meeting many years ago in Cadiz with Randy and that the speaker said that a young man absolutely must serve a mission before even thinking of marriage. Andy was new to the church and was already engaged to his sweetheart, Jenny. This leader's counsel shook him. Andy told me that as he and Randy drove back to Rota together, Randy told him that it was going to be okay. That there were many ways to serve a mission and that if he felt that marriage was the right choice for him, that's what he should do. Then Andy's eyes got a little misty as he went on. He said, "Randy told me that before Jenny and I consummated our marriage, that we should have prayer together. We did. And that really got us started on the right foot." He told me they were small incidents, these two encounters with Randy, but that they had meant the world to him.

James M. Barrie once said, "God gave us memory so that we might have roses in December."

Or March.

Closing page of the 2002 Pointe South Middle School Yearbook:

Taken somewhere in the Black Sea, circa 1988

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.

Redneck radiology....

One day soon, I'm going to devote an entire post to what comedian Jeff Foxworthy refers to as a "glorious absence of sophistication." In other words: redneck. Whenever I think of that particular term, I'm taken back to our first Christmas in Georgia and the Christmas letter Randy penned that described our neighborhood as looking like it was populated by "the casting pool for the movie 'Deliverance.'"



But of all the stereotypes that "redneck" brings to mind, I suppose the most ubiquitous would be the trailer park. Now don't get me wrong, there are trailer parks and then there are trailer parks. My parents lived in a trailer park in Southern California that could only be described as elegant. It was a gated, quiet community composed entirely of retirees living in immaculate mobile homes tastefully landscaped and impeccably kept. There wasn't a bloodhound, a pink flamingo, a Skoal container, or a beer bottle within miles of the place. Trailer parks in Georgia are generally, shall we say, less refined.


So it was with some trepidation and not a little amusement that I found myself eyeing the trailer in which I was to have my very first MRI last week. It was a semi-trailer like the kind you see all over the interstate hauling everything from soup to nuts but this one was placed unceremoniously in a parking lot in Newnan, Georgia. The sign outside read "Newnan MRI."


It didn't take long for my imagination to start coming up with far more creative names for such a delightfully absurd business location given the fact that we are, after all, here in the South. It wasn't until AFTER the MRI while I was sharing the whole experience with my son BJ, though, that we really got the giggles. We decided "Earl's MRI, Taxidermy, and Bait Shop" would just about do it...I can hear the voice-over radio announcer now...."This week's special: 15% off your full body scan with the purchase of a dozen of our newest twister tail jigs GUARANTEED to land that crappie you've been after! Possums stuffed while u wait...."

Jaundiced January...

January sucks. Seriously. Sucks. It's not just the bitter, cold, cheerless, grayness of it or the fact that it follows on the heels of the (generally) Happy Holidays. January exists solely to remind me how little my current life resembles the comparatively blissful life I used to have.

Over the past few years I've noticed that as soon as the Christmas tree ends up Tango Uniform in the back yard, I am almost immediately possessed by an almost irresistible urge. Sometimes it's all I can do to resist the impulse to toss the essentials (toothbrush, drugs, and laptop) into the back of the car and point 'er West. Where? Doesn't matter--ANYwhere west of Kansas will do. Screw the house, screw the job, screw the sort of half-life that I live these days and just keep driving until I can actually see the sun dip below the horizon. I want to see sagebrush, cactus, dirt roads that are BROWN, not RED, ski racks, surfboards, and blue skies that are really blue, not so full of humidity that they look like nonfat milk.

So this got me to thinking about where I grew up and spent my "formative" years and why the West still has such a hold on me.

I was actually born a Yankee--in Lansing, Michigan, on April 1, 19... whatever. Anyway, we moved to Canoga Park, California, when I was a baby so SoCal is really all I ever knew. The picture above is of our house on Baltar Street and my Dad's beloved 1964 Impala. I lived in Beaver Cleaver's neighborhood--well, it might as well have been. I had a German Shepherd named Duchess, two big brothers I idolized (and annoyed the hell out of), and a street full of mulberry trees that I loved to climb. There was an empty house across the street from my elementary school that we all thought was haunted but it never stopped us from peering in the windows, hoping to see something awful. I LOVED horses and actually belonged to the "California Cavalry Command," which was sort of a quasi-western cavalry for little girls that taught me how to ride and take care of a horse. My brothers used to build forts, put me in them, and then throw rocks to see if the fort held up. Sometimes it did. When it didn't, they bribed me with army men to keep me from telling on them. I LOVED army men....but my most traumatic childhood event was when I was accused of pouring glue all over the school typewriter when I was in the 3rd grade. I didn't, of course--the girl who accused me was actually the culprit but they believed her for awhile and it was my teacher who stood by me and championed my innocence. We had all thought Mrs. Daneker was the meanest thing on the planet so it was a good lesson for me to learn in the 3rd grade that people are not always what they seem to be.

Mother and Daddy (well, especially Mother) had a passion for Native American culture, so we three kids were dragged to every single Native American historical site in the entire state of Arizona. Naturally, our trips took place most often during the summer when we were out of school so they travelled with three kids in the back of the Impala with no air conditioning and vinyl seats in 125 degree weather. Modern day moms and dads who travel in air conditioned minivans with built-in DVD players, coolers, Pampers and box drinks are just weenies. But I digress.....we also checked out other places...including Tijuana....I'm wonderin' if they painted that donkey to look like a zebra....

We moved to a bigger house further west in Canoga Park when I was in the 5th grade and my best friend there had her own horse. I thought I'd died & gone to Nirvana and was completely appalled when my folks announced that we'd be moving yet again when I was in the 9th grade. This time, though, it was to the desert near Palm Springs--where my Dad grew up. They promised me another German Shepherd (Duchess was long gone by then) and I agreed to make the move with only token sulking. This was my back yard--with my ADORABLE niece, Jennie, and my new German Shepherd, Mona.

Palm Desert turned out to be an excellent move for a million different reasons. Here are two of them with me in Laguna Beach, circa 1977. On the left is one of my oldest and dearest friends, Peggy Johnson (Wagner) who saw me through those gawd-awful high school years and introduced me to the faith that I follow to this day. On the right is my BYU London Semester Abroad room-mate, Melanie Mendenhall (Roundy) who saw me through my first "real" love, a hopelessly sexy Welshman I met in London, and who did not laugh at me when I thought I was suffering from appendicitis only to have the young, attractive English doctor who examined me reveal that it was gas.

But the biggest blessing of that move came when I came home from semester abroad in December of 1975. My old boyfriend, Jared Fenstermaker's brother Mark, introduced me to this obnoxious, sarcastic, wise-cracking jerk by the name of Randy VerHoef. I thought he was the biggest turd on the planet. Ten months later we were inseparable, hopelessly in love, and engaged to be married.

On January 22, 1977, I married my best friend and the love of my life in Santa Monica, California. Twenty-five years and six and a half hours later he left me alone on a bitter, cold, cheerless, gray January day in Atlanta, Georgia.

Which sort of explains why I hate January. But it also sort of explains why I want to head West every year at this time. There's something deeply comforting about those places I lived when the best of my life was still ahead of me. I am still blessed, to be sure, with perfect children and perfect grandchildren, meaningful work, and most of life's essentials. But there is also no doubt that my life is colder, grayer, sadder, and not a little bit scarier without that wise-cracking jerk.

Grandma offsides. Five yard penalty.

I LOVE the fall. I love the cool weather, the changing colors of the leaves, the Halloween decorations, the big fat harvest moons. It's always been my favorite season of the year and I confess that fall is especially fun in the South. Having grown up a Southern California city girl, I just can't resist driving by all the local farms with their corn mazes, pumpkin patches, and pick-your-own apple orchards. It's everything fall should be.


But there's another side to autumn in the South that I'm afraid I just don't get. Football. Now, for those of you west of the Mississippi or north of the Mason-Dixon line, you might be thinking, "What's to get about football? It's just football, right?" No, no, my young friends. Football in the South isn't just football. It isn't a sport. It isn't a multi-bazillion dollar industry. It's a RELIGION.

As Bryan pointed out in an old blog post of his, there is no football "season." True, from September through February corporate absenteeism and domestic violence reports spike on fall Mondays, and everything from the family car to the family dog is decked out in team colors. Heaven help the poor bride who schedules her wedding during this most sacred of times. Heaven help the poor baby who unwittingly makes his or her entrance during this most sacred of times. Heaven help the poor slob who dies during this most sacred of times. Folks attending weddings, funerals and birthings can often be seen surreptitously checking the score via text message and/or discreetly placed ear buds and I'm quite sure that an audible "GO DAWGS" has occasionally broken the reverent silence expected at such events. But as Bob Bell, a former NFL defensive lineman once said, "In the South there are three seasons: football season, recruiting season, and spring practice."


Now, as I've said, I don't get it. While I can appreciate a spectacular touchdown pass, a tight end's tight end, and some of the goofy end zone dances I've seen, the rest of it just leaves me cold. I wouldn't know a line of scrimmage if it bit me in the armpit and frankly, my dear, I really don't give a damn. Until one of my grandbabies gets involved.


While Bryan and Jacey and Cole were out West this past week, I had the wonderful privilege of caring for Hailey, Nathan, and Connor, including making sure that Nathan attended his football team's practice on Tuesday night. 5:30-7:00 at the local elementary school. I found it cute to watch him put on those funky pants with the laces in front. Hailey helped him get his shoulder pads and jersey on along with the helmet that looked impossibly big. There he stood, looking for all the world like a miniature Joe Namath. Too. Too. Cute! Off he went to join his team mates, all similarly dressed. They were just adorable!! Until the coaches got on the field.


Mind you, these boys are six years old--seven tops. Four years ago they were all still using sippy cups for crying out loud! All their lives they've been taught to be polite and play nice. Until now. I stood there, dumbstruck, and watched while three or four coaches circulated among these little guys SCREAMING at them. One little guy had somehow fumbled a tackle or a grab or whatever the hell he was supposed to do and the coach followed him around the field screaming "YOU CAN'T TACKLE SOMEBODY WHEN YER DOIN' THIS!!!" (wiggling his fingers in front of him) 'YOU LOOK LIKE YER GONNA TICKLE 'IM!!" "PUT THOSE SHOULDER PADS IN THERE--GIT HIM! GIT HIM!!! GIT HIM!!!!!!!!" This guy actually grabbed the boy's face mask and shoved him to the side, all the while bawling in the boy's face "GIT OVER THERE--IN LINE, BOY!!"


Well. He was lucky that he wasn't speaking to MY grandson. If he had been, I'm afraid I would have had no choice but to hobble onto the field and separate the man from his testicles. Luckily, the only time he screamed at Nathan was to tell him, "GOOD JOB, BOY!" while pounding him on top of his helmet. Even that made my skin crawl.


Well, Nathan was, of course, completely brilliant--what follows are several additional shots all taken by Hailey (EXCELLENT photographer that she is!) Nathan's the one in the white pants/black jersey. In the last shot, you can only see Nathan's fingers, though. They're wrapped around the waist of the boy in yellow--a spectacular end zone tackle if I do say so myself! I guess I don't really have to get football. It's enough for me to know that Nathan clearly has talent and clearly loves the game. The coaches, however, are a different story. Be nice to my baby, boys. Otherwise, I know exactly where to put MY shoulder pads.

When worlds collide...

I've blogged about my job before, but on the off chance that any of my three faithful readers didn't catch that particular post, I work in the archives of the Atlanta History Center. Generally speaking, I love my job--although lately I've been re-evaluating my career path. My particular position, Reference Manager, experiences an extremely high rate of burnout (I'm the third person to take this postion in as many years). The lion's share of the job requires working with the patrons who use our archives, but my boss is anxious to expand our outreach programs and, frankly, I'm barely keeping my head above water just keeping up with the patrons who come to us. The fact that the pay rate for my position sucks doesn't help. But I can't deny that helping people conduct research can be really rewarding. Our patrons generally fall into three major groups--those conducting family history research, those conducting research into their historic home or neighborhood, and faculty and students conducting academic research.

I was helping a couple research their historic home a week or so ago and I suggested they check out the subject files in our very large, very elderly card catalog. They were sure their home had been owned by a local business owner and I thought we might have a business file on this particular merchant. So I'm flipping through the cards, looking for this retailer, and suddenly a card pops out at me bearing the following legend: "Amoroso, Arnold D.--Personality Subject File." Completely forgetting about the two guys I was helping, I stammered out loud "....th th that's m m my great UNCLE!!!!! OMIGOSH, THAT'S MY GREAT UNCLE!!" It was all I could do to drag my attention back to the guys I was helping. It turned out we didn't have any files on the business they were looking for, so I managed to cough up another suggestion or two for them to work with on their own. As soon as I possibly could, I beat feet downstairs to the stacks and pulled the box that contained the file on Ami. There I sat, on the hard concrete floor, hands shaking, while I opened the folder. It was an amazing moment for me.

So let me back up just a tad and explain. My grandfather, Colonel Logan Osburn Shutt, was one of ten children. One of his sisters, Ellen, married a man by the name of Arnold Dante Amoroso in 1934. Colonel was close to all his siblings and I can remember as a child that our visits to Maryland almost always included time spent with the families of his brothers and sisters. I only vaguely remember Ellen and Ami (as Arnold was called), but he was legendary. I had always been told that he was a Bataan Death March survivor and the reverence with which he was discussed was palpable. He died in 1978, just 7 years after my grandmother, so I don't remember him well and I was, of course, too young and stupid to have asked enough questions of my grandfather while he was alive. That's the problem with family history--by the time you're old enough to care, all your sources of information are dead! I had done a little research on Ami and found that he may not have been on the Death March, but that he was, indeed, captured at Corregidor and spent a good deal of time in a couple of Japanese POW camps.

So I was completely stunned to find this file on him at work. I had no idea that he had any Atlanta connections so it was a total surprise to find a March 5, 1967 newspaper article all about him. I went from the newspaper article to our other reference sources and found his death record and obituary also in our collection. The newspaper article, though, was the real gold mine.

Colonel Amoroso had been chief of anti-aircraft defenses in Manila harbor when Japan began its conquest of the "Greater East Asia Co-Propserity Sphere" in early 1941. When General Wainwright surrended the island of Corregidor in May, the Japanese let the survivors have the run of the island--for awhile. When the Japanese began cracking down during their occupation, they sent Ami to Old Bilibid Prison, and later to Camp Cabanatuan. From there, he was sent to Davao, to Mindanao, back to Bilibid, back to Cabanatuan again and then once more to Bilibid before being taken to Japan. It appears that he was on the ship Oryoku Maru that was sunk by American bombers, killing 300 American prisoners. The survivors who made it ashore were rounded up and put on two other Japanese ships to complete their journey to Japan. The ship Ami was on was hit again by American bombers--this time Ami was one of only 88 men to survive.

Ami describes his treatment as sometimes good and sometimes bad, depending on the weather, food, water, and guards. When the camps were liberated in September of 1945, Ami was transported back to the States in a hospital ship, weighing just 88 pounds. He had been overseas for six years and, on his first trolley ride in San Francisco, on the way to the hospital he visited daily during his recuperation, he handed the driver what he thought was a dime. Turns out it was actually a penny. He didn't know the difference.

After the war, Ami served in Hawaii and Panama, and became an ROTC instructor at Georgia Tech in 1950. After his retirement from Tech and the Army, he worked in Atlanta in real estate. He died on March 13, 1978, and was buried at Arlington National Cemetery with full military honors.

My job can truly suck at times. I guess everybody's can. But how often can you stumble on a piece of unexpected treasure like this while you're working? Even if this is the only time my family history and working worlds collide, it'll be worth it.

Here are two photos of Ami taken in 1971...the first is Ami and Ellen, the second, Colonel and Ami....

My spool is beginning to unravel...again.

Okay, so I know I've posted about losing my grip before, but this is my blog and I'll whine if I wanna, right? I also apologize in advance for making my first post in two months a total bitchfest but I know my gentle readers (all three of them) will understand when they realize that I left this yesterday morning:



to come home yesterday afternoon to this:



Yes, it sucks, doesn't it?


I really did have an amazing time in Southern California--the trip was worth every penny and every "paid time off" day that it took. I flew in Thursday morning, had lunch in Laguna Beach, wandered around the Mission San Juan Capistrano for a few hours, and had dinner in Pacific Beach with Annike and Patrick. Friday, Saturday and Sunday were family reunion days and they couldn't have been more pleasant. Randy's sister Heidi did an amazing job of organizing everything and it was such a treat to spend time eating, visiting, hanging out at the beach and at home, reminiscing over old photographs and catching up with each others' lives. We need to do it more often.


Sunday evening, Annike, Patrick, Megan, and I headed down to Palm Springs and I spent the next couple of days leisurely driving down memory lane and hanging out in graveyards--another passion of mine that I've blogged about here.


I couldn't have asked for a better trip. Any thoughts of Georgia--and my white elephant house that I can't sell, my day job that pays too little and stresses too much, my night job (teaching freshman history) that sucks up every spare moment of my "free" time--were steadfastly squashed. It worked pretty well. Until I left my American Express card on the hood of the rental car and drove off without it. That should have been my warning. I called immediately and AmEx made arrangements to get me a temporary card so it wasn't a big deal, really, but it made it harder to shove the unpleasant things ahead of me into the back of my mind.


To be honest, none of the things that are pissing me off are big deals. The flight home, for instance. I didn't even flinch when the no-nonsense, middle aged, heavy-set African American stewardess responded to my request to take away my leftover Diet Coke with an immediate "I ain't got no place ta put dat!" I didn't groan when we circled Birmingham for over an hour while the thunderstorms in Atlanta cleared--I wouldn't voluntarily spend an hour in Birmingham on purpose EVEN AT 40,000 feet. Getting home almost two hours late and transferring luggage into the car in a driving rainstorm didn't bother me.


The property tax bill I got today that's more than last year's bill even though the county agreed the house is worth almost 40,000 LESS didn't faze me. When I tried to have a little retail therapy this afternoon and realized I was missing yet another credit card, I took it in stride. It torpedoed the rest of my afternoon since I had to drive all over creation to get it back, but I did get it.


My kids and grandkids are healthy, I am reasonably healthy and fully employed so what am I bitching about, right? Beats the snot out of me! I think I'm just tired of worrying about things over which I have no control, but that significantly impact my life. I'm tired of slogging my guts out at a job that doesn't bring in enough money to make ends meet and having to spend what precious little time off I do have working a second job. I busted my ass to get my master's degree and cannot understand why people in my field are forced to take the proverbial vow of poverty in order to work. I love my job--at least I think I still do--but I'm getting older with every passing minute and wish I could slow down just a little.
SO. I wish I could slow down, but I can't. I wish I could curl up with the In-N-Out burger and animal style fries pictured above, but I can't. I really wish my job paid me adequately given my education and abilities, but it doesn't. I wish Clayton County wasn't so screwed up, but it is. I wish I wasn't so weighed down with worries of every kind that I leave my credit cards lying all over two states, but I am. My mom used to say "if wishes were horses then beggars would ride." I think I like Burgess Meredith's quote even better--"you can wish in one hand and crap in the other and see which gets filled first!"


Well, enough of this blah blah blah--I think it's time for chocolate chip cookies and National Lampoon's Vacation, don't you?