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.