Category Archives: Family histories

Broad Street

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Leah and I hardly ever go downtown any more, but we arranged to meet Leah’s hairdresser Sheila for dinner and a drink Thursday night.

Downtown Rome is very different today from the way it was when I was growing up. Back then, the five blocks of downtown had multiple dime stores, locally-owned clothing and furniture stores, multiple chain department stores even in the same block, a theater, shoe repair shops, a newsstand (where one Baptist minister was caught buying a copy of Playboy. Scandal!), banks, and two restaurants. The Post Office was one block off Broad, and there were two mail deliveries a day. Today, the biggest draw is the many bars and restaurants. There are a couple of tattoo parlors (do they still call them that?), a few sad boutiques, the history museum and more restaurants. Oh, and one local jeweler who still manages to hang on.

If the city fathers had had the sense to realize what they had in the original buildings, downtown would look like Disneyland. This is an example of the architecture.

This is the Masonic Temple, whose upper stories remain pretty much the same as they were when the building was constructed in 1877. The street front has changed. The tan building behind it is the old, old Post Office, where my father worked. I spent many a long afternoon parked in front of that building, waiting for my father to get off.

I have updated this post to show this image that was on display on the wall of our local mall along with a lot of other shots of Rome from years ago. If you compare this to the current building, it’s clear that the ground level of the Masonic Temple has suffered the same fate as most buildings in downtown Rome — “modernization.”

When we walked into the restaurant, I recognized the long, white hair belonging to Bob, one of a pair of twins who went to Darlington School one year ahead of me and two years behind my brother Henry. He’s now Leah’s eye doctor.

We sat right behind him, but none of us bothered him. When we were almost finished, Bob got up and Sheila patted him on the back and said, “You don’t remember me, but I used to cut your hair all the time.” Bob insisted that he did remember her. They spoke for a  minute and then Bob turned to us. Leah introduced herself, and Bob seemed to kind of remember her, but probably mainly her brother.

I told him my name, and after a short pause, he threw his hands into the air and said, “Soccer!” I said, “No, you’re thinking of my brother,” who played soccer. In my freshman year I spent a lot of time in our car waiting for Henry to finish soccer practice. Henry played soccer  and ran track and cross country. I never played soccer, or any other sport.

After we left, Leah and I meandered up Broad, where I took the previous picture, and then this one.

“Psycho kitty” has been in this blog before. He’s a book store mascot.

When we got to the car, I thought about Bob mistaking me for Henry, and remembering that Henry had played soccer 53 years ago.

I thought, “I need to tell Henry about that.”

Branches

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It has been cloudy, warm, and wet for a while here in northwest Georgia. We have had very little in the way of actual rain, but sprinkles many days and high humidity every day. I don’t mind this kind of weather. I like the look of the bare, winter trees’ branches in the fog we often have up on the mountain – low clouds, actually, but it seems to us that we are in a fog.

My brother’s potential pancreatic cancer treatment course has branched again. His first chemotherapy had no evident effect. He and his doctor intended to enroll him in one of several clinical trials in his area. However, he had a blood test Tuesday morning, and the results disqualified him from the trial he was aiming for, as well as the other trials. He said his blood showed some anticlotting factors that ruled him out.

The next possibility is targeted therapy. Targeted therapy is aimed at cancer cell metabolism, like typical chemotherapy, but while typical chemotherapy targets characteristics of cancer cells that are shared by other, normal cells in the body, targeted therapy is intended to target characteristics that are specific to certain cancer cells’ metabolisms. Henry said that the targeted therapy he hopes to try is actually for colorectal cancer, but the treatment attacks a gene that colorectal cancer has in common with his particular cancer.

He said this treatment is given orally, which I’m sure he was relieved to hear; he still has problems with his right hand because of extremely sloppy and incompetent attempts to insert an IV into his right arm weeks ago. The American Cancer Society describes a couple of therapies that are given by IV, and one that is given orally. The ACS Web site says, “This drug is used to treat advanced colorectal cancer, typically when other drugs are no longer helpful.” That sounds about right.

Side effects can include fatigue, loss of appetite, irritation of the hands and feet, diarrhea, high blood pressure, weight loss, and abdominal pain.

Some targeted therapies have had decent results in life extension. None are cures.

There is still a possibility that something in Henry’s blood test will exclude him from this treatment. If not, he expects to start the treatment on the first of March.

In which a question is not answered

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One day in May 1950, my father and my brother Henry drove to McCall Hospital a few blocks from downtown Rome to pick up my mother and me. McCall Hospital was where I had made my first appearance on Planet Earth on the 18th. I don’t remember that day, but Henry does.

Henry was not quite three years old on that day. He says he remembers an image of the hospital, like a snapshot. Kind of like this:

Image from the Georgia Archives at the University of Georgia

This was McCall Hospital near that far, distant point in the past, probably a few years before my debut. My family took me home to a house on Redmond Road on that day. Maybe they stopped by my grandmother’s house on the way home.

McCall hospital was founded about a hundred years ago. I was born there. So was Leah. It operated as a hospital until around 1977, when the Hospital Corporation of America bought it, and then closed it the next year. The building was sold and operated as a boys’ home until 1986. It was sold again and operated as apartments, changing ownership several times until around 2010. It was then sold to the city (purchase price: $69,300, demolition cost bringing total expenditure to $290,000). This is what it looks like now.

Now it’s apartments

It’s a nice building, but it’s not McCall Hospital. That building was demolished. The hospital where I was born is gone now. So is the house my family took me home to, and my grandmother’s house. So are my mother and father. And now, the only person I know who actually remembers all of those places is making a slow goodbye to all that, and to all of us, too.

As I mentioned when I first mentioned my brother’s pancreatic cancer, I feel that I am betraying my brother when I say something like that. But those are the facts, and, as that great philosopher Joe Friday said, all we want are the facts, ma’am.

I went up to Chattanooga where Henry and his wife live on Monday of last week to help him prune some crepe myrtles growing up into the utility lines in front of their house. Henry wasn’t sure at first he would need my help, but after a few minutes of trying to hold an extension pruning saw up over his head, he said maybe he could point and I could cut.

So we worked for a while, and then Henry told me he was going to see his wife’s son Keith at Keith’s studio. Keith is a videographer. Keith and I had essentially the same thought at the same time. When Henry told me of his diagnosis, I said he should start writing his biography. I said that his two sons would appreciate it, just like we would have appreciated it if our father had written about his life. And, I said, if his sons ever have children, they will never know their grandfather, except through something like that. Keith said essentially the same thing, but since he’s a videographer, he wanted to video Henry talking about his life.

And so that’s what Henry did that afternoon, after we drove by McDonald’s so Henry could get a Big Mac. He said that one effect of his chemotherapy was that things that he used to like don’t taste good any more, but a Big Mac was OK.

Keith set up a stool in his studio and trained his video camera on Henry, and let Henry talk, prompting him every once in a while. I watched on a monitor in an adjoining room, only a few feet from Henry and Keith.

Watching and listening to Henry talk, about himself some, but mostly about the people in his life, was moving. We shared a lot of experiences, of course, and I knew most of what had happened to him after he left home for Georgia Tech, but these were Henry’s perceptions of the events, and they were just different enough from mine.

Henry and I were often confused for twins when we were kids, although we never thought we looked that much alike. I have heard of twins who were separated at birth but who did things and made choices that were almost identical over the years. Henry and I were a little bit like that. We have both had facial hair almost since we were able to grow it. Over the years we went from full beards to shaved faces, back to beards, then to goatee and moustache. It seemed like every time I changed my facial hair, I found out that Henry had done much the same at close to the same time. We also seem to think a lot alike, and of the same things at close to the same times. Henry’s older son Thomas had to put his dog Cooper down last week. I texted Henry to get an email address so Leah and I could send our condolences to him. He texted it to me. The next day when I was walking our dogs, I started thinking about Thomas and Cooper and almost immediately Henry texted me to make sure I had Thomas’s email.

I have followed in Henry’s footsteps almost my entire life, never quite making it like he did. He went to Georgia Tech the summer after he graduated from high school. Ten years later he had a PhD. Three years after him, I graduated from high school and followed him to Tech, but within a week I knew it was not for me. Not until 12 years later did I finally go back to grad school at Tech and fool enough people to get my own PhD.

Henry ended up working in the defense industry. Even with a degree in a much different field from Henry, I ended up in the defense industry, too.

Henry went down to the Gulf Coast on his vacation to help people whose homes were damaged or destroyed by Hurricane Katrina. The experiences he had down there convinced him to quit his job and go to work full-time with Presbyterian Disaster Assistance. He told Keith and me he found that the people he went down to help were actually helping him, too. And that experience convinced him to enter seminary school. He said it was the first time he had ever simply jumped without knowing exactly where he would land.

I with I could have been there at the seminary to see his instructors dealing with a PhD scientist older than most of them and probably knowing a hell of a lot more than they did. And Henry can be kind of prickly on occasion. I suppose that’s another trait we share.

After seminary school, Henry ended up at a very small church in Spring City, Tn, with a group of parishioners who had split from their old church over admission of gay people to the ministry. They, like Henry, were on the right side of that issue. Henry helped the congregation grow, and grow close to each other. He said they are like family.

Henry texted us Thursday to let us know the results of his latest CT scan, the one that we hoped would show shrinkage of the tumors in his liver due to the chemo. It did not. He said he has felt some minor, infrequent pain and is more fatigued than normal. He and his doctor have identified three clinical trials in the Chattanooga area that he would probably qualify for.

It’s possible that one of the new treatments being tested will give Henry some additional time. We look for something to hope for, so we hope for that.

It’s human nature to ask why something like this happens to someone like Henry. We ask the question, but I’m afraid there is no answer. Maybe Henry thinks there is an answer, possibly unknowable to us. He does, after all, still have his faith.

Unfortunately for me, I suppose, that’s one place I could never follow him.

Oh Brother!

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My brother Henry turns 70 today.

I’m suffering from a fairly strong case of cognitive dissonance. On one hand, I know we have been around for a fairly long time, but, on the other hand, 70-year-olds are old, and we aren’t old.

For many years I followed in my bother’s footsteps.

I wanted to do everything he did. After he graduated from high school, he left almost immediately to start the summer quarter at Georgia Tech, and he basically never came home again. He went into the co-op program, which meant that he alternated quarters going to school and working. There were no summers off. During that time he worked at Union Carbide in Oak Ridge, Tennessee.

He continued at Georgia Tech right through his PhD in materials science. After that, he moved to Pittsburgh, PA, where he did a post-doc at Carnegie Mellon. When he finished that, he moved a little outside of Pittsburgh to New Kensington and went to work at Alcoa.

He lived in a house across the street from a church that had Revolutionary War-era graves.

Eventually Alcoa bought a company in San Diego that did government-sponsored, classified research, and Henry moved out there.

Henry had always liked Atlanta, so after a few years he took the opportunity to move back there to work at the Georgia Tech Research Institute. He worked there for several years and then moved to Chattanooga, Tn, where he worked for a company that could use his materials-science experience. Here he is at about that time.

In a way I continued to follow Henry, but I never managed to pull it off quite the way he did. It took a long time, but I eventually ended up in graduate school at Georgia Tech, and, strangely enough, I ended up working in a field not too different from the one my brother worked in.

Our paths diverged pretty radically when he quit his job in Chattanooga and moved to lower Mississippi to work with a Presbyterian disaster relief organization helping people who lost everything, or almost everything, in Hurricane Katrina.

When he came back home, he decided to attend Presbyterian seminary school in Virginia. Once he was a bona-fide preacher, he returned to Chattanooga, where he remains today. Somehow, I think this is what he was meant for. I’ve never heard him preach, but I remember how he used to practice, even at a young age. Here he is preaching to a neighbor.

 

Back in the day

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I found several old photographs that I wanted to include in the post I did for my father’s 100th birthday on August 2, but sometime in the move from our old house last year I lost the power cord for my scanner. I ordered a new cord, and I have finally uploaded the scans.

This is my father (he thought) and his mother, in a photo that must have been taken in 1917 or early 1918, not long after his birth. Based on the plants behind them, it must have been warm weather, so probably late summer or early fall of 1917. He was wearing a dress at the time.

The photo was not taken at the house in Rome where my father grew up, so it might be where my grandmother and grandfather lived in the little town of Cave Spring, not far from Rome.

This is a photo of my father’s biological father, who died when my father was so young that he had essentially no memory of him. I can’t remember how he died, but it was from something that does not kill people today.

I don’t see any facial resemblance to my father, except maybe the hairline. Leah thinks he does resemble my father. I can say, though, that I must come from a long line of dog lovers.

This is my father in his uniform wearing a garrison cap.

I’m not sure where this was taken. It might be in the back yard of his home; there was an alley that ran beside the house from 5th Avenue up to what was then Avenue C. I don’t think it was in the front yard on 5th Avenue, because the houses don’t seem to be right. It’s probably just me, but I think the 1940’s Army uniforms look better than the current ones. I think they have more in common with 19th Century uniforms than the later 20th Century uniforms. The boots and trousers look like a horse-back riding uniform. In fact, my father trained in horse-drawn artillery units before the Tiimberwolf Division deployed overseas; of course by the time they reached Europe, the US Army was’t using horses for combat transportation.

This is my father and mother in front of another unknown house. Since both are now gone, there really isn’t anyone to ask where it was taken. He’s wearing a service cap in this photo. He was also wearing a Sam Browne belt, as you can tell by the small buckle in the center of his chest.

This is the “old home place” where my father grew up.

I don’t know when this house was originally constructed, but I believe it was prior to the widespread use of indoor plumbing in Rome, probably in the late 1800’s. The house consists of four rooms, two on each side of a central hall that ran from the front porch to the back porch. I think the house originally had a porch on all four sides. As you can see, the windows were taller than the front door. I think even when this house was built doors were usually the same height as modern doors, which is six feet, eight inches. In modern architecture, the tops of windows and the tops of doors are at the same height. In this house, the windows are higher than the door top and reach all the way to the floor. This was a typical Southern construction method which was intended to help ventilate rooms in the hot, humid summers.

The room layout was probably a living room or parlor and a dining room at the front, and two bedrooms at the rear. I think the house had several significant modifications by the time I came along. A separate apartment was added on the back left side room by enclosing part of the porch. What my father called the sleeping porch was a room that was enclosed on the porch off the back right bedroom. I think it was used as a bedroom during hot weather.

There was a small sitting room on the back rear that was under the porch roof, and a kitchen that I think was at least mostly under the porch roof at the back corner of the house. My grandparents basically lived in the kitchen, sitting room and the back right bedroom. The other rooms were seldom if ever used.

There was a bathroom on the extreme left corner of the house, also under the porch roof, that could be reached only by going out of the sitting room and walking across the porch. It was necessary to go outside to reach this bathroom, although my grandparents put some kind of plastic sheeting on the porch to kind of enclose it.

The structure on the left of the house is an old greenhouse, which I vaguely remember.

This kind of architectural history is interesting to me and probably a few people in the world, but probably not to many others.

My father and at least one of his male relatives weatherproofed an old chicken coop in the back yard and moved their beds out there. One was Uncle Charlie, my father’s maternal uncle, who looked so much like my father that some people occasionally confused the two. The biggest clue to which was which was the fact that Uncle Charlie lost his right arm in an accident.

I also scanned a photo that my father took in Europe when he was there during WW II.

This is actually a contact print. There is some writing on the back that identifies it as a German gun emplacement on Utah Beach in September 1944. Not as busy as it was three months earlier. I wondered where or when my father got this photo processed. I discovered something on the back when I scanned it.

There is a very faint stamp on the back. I can read part of it: “NOT FOR PUBLICATION”, and 5 MAR. I can’t read the year, but it’s probably 1945. I assume from this that it was printed at some Army darkroom in Europe.

After looking at this photo and the photos of my father in uniform, I looked at the Wikipedia entry on the 104th Infantry Division. It’s basically a shortened history of the division, a little easier to follow than the much more highly detailed account in Timberwolf Tracks, the history of the division. I saw place names that my father mentioned in the stories he told us: Camp Adair, Aachen, the Ruhr and the Rhine. For some reason, seeing those names had a stronger emotional impact on me than just looking at the old photos. I can still hear him saying those names.