The Virginians: Visiting the relatives Part 3

 My father, Carroll Greer, was born early in the second decade of the 20th century, he was the fifth child, second boy of the family with three older sisters and one older brother (11 years later the sixth sibling, a sister was born). He was born in a bustling commerce town, Troutdale, in the Appalachian mountains of Virginia, born of the timber boom at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century. 

His father Charlie Parks Greer was a businessman, an entrepreneur and also the first mayor of the Town of Troutdale, his mother Emma Sue Weatherly Greer, the daughter of a minister. His siblings from oldest to youngest were Mary born of the fourth of July in the first decade of the 19th century, Charlie, Edith, Mildred, then a decade after Carroll came Sue in the 1920's. 

My grandfather Charlie built two houses in Troutdale on top of a big hill overlooking the town. The larger of the two houses a Victorian with lots of detail was the house that he, his wife and children lived in, always referred to as "the big house". He also build a smaller, one story cottage for his mother-in-law great grandmother Weatherly which was usually referred to as the "little house." During most of my life time it was the little house that was maintained and used by the family for visits to Troutdale. I didn't even see the outside of the big house until my Aunt Mary moved into it in the mid-1960's. 

In posts to come I will write a lot more about my father's family and about the town of Troutdale, Virginia, because in the 1970's I made Troutdale the focus of my master's thesis in sociology, and the entire southwestern Virginia region the focus of my dissertation research in the early 1980's. Today, however, I will be focusing on the experience of visiting my father's family in Virginia while I was a child and a teenager. 

My parents, Carroll and Jo, were both Virginians and although I grew up in California (and was born in Florida), I always thought of Virginia as "home," and the place I was "from." The fact that my father, a blue collar machinist, worked for an airline meant that our family got to "go home" regularly during a time when air travel was not really an option for working class people, or even many middle class people. 

Only two of my father's siblings, uncle Charlie (with his wife Jerrie) and aunt Mildred (and her husband Chap French) lived in Virginia throughout my entire childhood. Neither Charlie nor Mildred had any children, which meant that they indulged us niece and nephews greatly when we visited. They both lived in Roanoke, VA which is where we would visit them every time we came to visit my mother's family. Visits to Roanoke also resulted in visits "home" to Troutdale which was further southwest, deeper into the mountains and rural. My Aunt Mildred owned the two family homes in Troutdale, her husband Chap had purchased them for her and she welcomed any family members who wanted to visit to stay there. However, Mildred primarily maintained the little house and that was where many of my childhood memories are centered. 

Carroll's youngest sister Sue left Virginia as a young Navy nurse during World War II and never returned, instead having a farm in Washington state not far from Seattle with her husband Frank  Schiller a Navy man she met during the war, so we visited them separately and less often. Sue and Frank had two children, Milton (whose first name was actually Frank) who was about six or seven years older than me and Susan who was exactly the same age (only 2 days difference). Milton (or Frank as the army called him) enlisted in the Army after high school and was sent to Vietnam in the early 1960's when Americans were primarily described as "advisors." He received technical training and his primary job was building and maintaining radio transmission towers. He got to spend a lot of time traveling around the Vietnamese countryside and did not experience much military "action." I can remember him visiting us while in uniform in San Mateo, since we were near the San Francisco airport that was the port through which most military came and went to Vietnam. 

His oldest sister Mary, who never married was a career woman, a nurse. Mary did nursing on horseback in the Appalachian mountains in the 1930's and became an Army nurse during World War II. After World War II she worked at an Army hospital in Hawaii for some years before leaving the military and moving to Washington state to live on Sue and Frank's farm in Washington. She stayed there until the mid-1950's. When I was four we drove north from San Mateo, through the redwood forests of California, through Oregon to Washington and visited both Aunt Sue, Uncle Frank, our cousins, and Aunt Mary there. By 1960, Aunt Mary moved to Roanoke, VA and we would see her when we came to Roanoke. Later in the 1960's Aunt Mary moved to Troutdale and lived in the big house. She stayed there through the early 1970's as well. It is in fact largely due to my Aunt Mary that I got involved in the research that I did in graduate school. 

Aunt Edith, who had also worked as a nurse for many years (including doing horseback nursing during the 1930's) was married to Frank Merker who was a psychiatrist who served as the head of VA mental hospitals and they moved around the country depending on Frank's postings. They had one daughter, Matilda, who was eight years older than me. Aunt Edith and Uncle Frank were at a VA hospital in southwestern Virginia (probably Western State Hospital in Staunton, VA) when I was really young, then they were at a VA hospital in Roseburg, Oregon. After that they were at the Coatesville VA Medical Center outside Philadelphia. When I was in graduate school my Uncle Frank retired from the VA, but went to work as the administrator for the Virginia State Mental Hospital in Marion, VA and he and Aunt Edith renovated the "little house" or "Mildred's House" where they ultimately settled. We visited Aunt Edith and Uncle Frank in all those locations while I was growing up. 

So I only had three cousins on the Greer side, two of them substantially older than myself, compared to the dozen first cousins on my mother's side of the family, not to mention the first cousin's once removed and all the second cousins. Moreover, given the age differences it wasn't until I was an adult that I really got to know two of them. I also didn't really appreciate most of my Greer aunts when I was young either. My Greer relatives were loud and querulous. They had strong opinions and liked to argue about things. I often felt that my aunts were critical of me as a child. A lot of those feelings were inforced or encouraged by my mother who had her own serious insecurities about my father's sisters. My aunts were more worldly and more cosmopolitan than my mother, they had spent more time working, three of them as nurses all working and traveling the world (Africa, China, Europe). They were also, all but Aunt Sue, older than my mother by more than a decade, as was my father. They were more outspoken, more open in their opinions, more blunt, more direct, all things that made my mother and her family uncomfortable.  

When we made our family vacations to Virginia, the trip to Roanoke was more of an adventure. It was a long enough distance that we had to find our own transportation from the Washington, DC area (or from Jo's family's home in the Tidewater) to southeastern Virginia. Several of those trips made substantial, long lasting impressions on me. Before the late 1960's when United Airlines and others started buying up commuter airlines to use for short trips, flying into Roanoke was not an option. The earliest trip I remember was by train. It was an overnight trip and we had a sleeping compartment. It was my first real train ride, and made a huge impression on me. Mostly though I remember being sleepy and how snug the sleeping compartments were, with their tiny washrooms. I was so young that the memories are mostly a pleasant, slightly incoherent jumble of motion, noise, lights, warm sheets, and sleepiness. My mother was softer, quieter, more "polite" in interaction, but when there was no one around but her children, especially just me, she had lots of negative things to say about people, including my aunts. I was an adult before I realized how sly, cunning, and sometimes outright nasty my mother could be about people behind their backs. 

A couple of years later when I would have been about six, we made the trip by bus, Greyhound Bus to be precise. This was not a very pleasant trip because I was suffering from some stomach "bug" and felt nauseous much of the time, but the memories are very vivid. This was 1957, in Virginia, when bus transportation was still segregated, waiting rooms, bathrooms, and drinking fountains were segregated as well. This was the first time I was old enough to notice this and question it. It was summer probably late July or early August and very hot and humid, since I was sick my parents were very anxious to get to our destination. The buses were very crowded and there was only two seats left in the "white" section of the bus. My father and mother wrangled with the ticket agent and then with the driver. I'm not sure how they managed it, but they allowed my dad and my brother Charlie to take the two seats left in the white section and my mother, myself and my baby brother Frank sat on the very back row of the bus with the Black women.   

One of the things that I remember clearly was that the seats at the back of the bus did not have cushioning like the seats in the front of the bus did. The seat was hard and uncomfortable. I remember the woman we sat next to, she was a little older than my mother, and so nice. She fussed and made over me because I was not well. She held my baby brother for a little while to give my mother a respite. When we came to the first stop on the trip, she recommended that my parents buy a cold soda, that the fizzies would help settle my stomach (she was right). Only my father got out at that first rest stop (and got the soda for me). 

Sitting in the bus waiting for it to start up again, I pressed my face to the window and looked at the station. One of the things I saw that I did not understand was that there were two drinking fountains, one said "whites only" and the other said "coloreds."  I did not know what a "colored" was at that time, so I asked my mother. Her response was to "shush" me and tell me to keep quiet, and she'd explain later. Which she did. She also later said that she thought me asking questions would offend the nice people around me who had been very kind. Thinking about it over the years I think she was wrong. But that was how my mother and her people did things, anything "unpleasant" was shushed and pushed down in public. That left me with the impression that "colored" was something very dirty and nasty and not for polite conversation. "Nice" people did not talk about such things. 

Later she (and my father) did explain, and did make it clear that she thought such segregation was wrong - which was why she was not just willing, but happy to ride in the back of the bus. My mother did not approve of the Jim Crow laws, believing them morally wrong, but she also didn't believe in "making trouble" in public.  My father's approach that this was not only something to talk about, it was something to oppose publicly, to make noise, to march and protest against and to vote for people who would change it. My parents agreed on values, but disagreed on tactics. I have struggled between those two different approaches my whole life. 

When we went to Virginia in 1963, June to be precise, my father rented a car. That was the first and but by no means the only time we did that. 1963 was the first time we visited after my mother's father had died, and we went to visit the Greer relatives first. The trip was memorable because the rental car, unlike our car at home, had a radio, and we were allowed to listen to music in the car. The station we listened to must have been an "oldies" station since the two songs I can remember that were Elvis's "Blue Suede Shoes" (from 1957) and "If I Had a Hammer" (from 1962) by Peter, Paul and Mary and my brothers (10 and 6) and I (12) sang along, and then continued to sing those two songs even when the radio was turned off. 

We had taken many family trips from home in California by car. We'd been camping up the entire west coast of the US from San Francisco to Vancouver, Canda, and we'd taken many shorter trips all around California. But we'd never been on a family car trip before where we had a radio and it was magical. Instead of singing all the old songs (like "Bicycle Built for Two" and "The Old Gray Mare" that we always sang) with my parents on road trips we got to listen to and sing new songs from the radio. 

Our destination was Roanoke, where we would stay with Aunt Mildred and Uncle Chap French in their brick home on Maiden Lane, but spend time and often eat meals out with Uncle Charlie and Aunt Jerry who lived a few blocks away. I loved Aunt Mildred and Uncle Chap's house, it was probably built in the 1920's and may have been bought new by Chap who was a generation older than Mildred and her siblings. When I was a child I knew that Uncle Chap was not only my "uncle" but by marriage but also my "great uncle" by marriage as before he'd been married to Mildred, he had been married to my great Aunt Lila Weatherly French, one of my grandmother's sisters. Chap was quite elderly, smoked cigars and had long been retired from his successful business career. We children were to keep out of his way and not bother him. However, Aunt Mildred loved children, loved adventures and projects so it was always a pleasure to be around her. Aunt Mildred was the kind of person who loved hardware stores because she was always building things and fixing things. 

That particular visit in June 1963 was especially memorable because of the news. At that time (between about 1962 and 1967) our family at home did not have television. The television we had was broken, and my parents decided not to fix it, or get a new one, preferring to spend money on travel and experiences, etc. So having a television on was notable in itself. But the big international news of that month was the death of Pope John XXIII, and I can remember being interested in the extended discussion of how a pope was chosen. All things Catholic were of particular interest to Americans at that time because our President John F. Kennedy was Catholic. 

Roanoke was urban, but it was a very different urban from California. The neighborhood of Maiden Lane, had many characteristics that I would see years later in Oberlin, Ohio, Lexington, Kentucky and Johnstown, Pennsylvania, that were holdovers from times when people had horses instead of cars, and when land values were much lower. Houses sat close to the sidewalk or street with little or no front "yard" and all had wide and deep front porches to sit on hot summer days and nights. They also had long backyards that ended at an unnamed alley. By the 1960's most of those alleys were paved, and they were used by the garbage or sanitation crews to pick up bags left in cans at the very back of the yard. Trees or bushes often marked the end of the backyard rather than a fence. This kind of arrangement is normal to anyone who grew up in cities or towns east of the Mississippi, but was quite exotic to those of us who grew up in the planned suburbs of California built in the 1940's and 1950's.  

Since the house was built in the 1920's in a city, it was built with electricity and indoor plumbing as integral. But the light switches were "funny", little push  buttons rather than the mercury flip switches with which we were familiar. The doors that locked all had keyholes on both sides, and in the morning one had to unlock the front door with a key rather than turn a latch. Aunt Mildred had a funny system of keeping the key to the front door (and backdoor as well) on little leather leash that attached to the door handle, so that if there was an emergency no one would have to go around searching for the key. 

Aunt Mildred and Uncle Chap lived in the very first block of Maiden Lane, the same block as a church (these days called The City Lights) that had a huge neon sign "Jesus Saves" that was on the corner of Maiden Lane and Wasena Drive, where Uncle Charlie and Aunt Gerry lived. One could easily walk from one house to the other, but we generally piled in all piled in a car to make the visit. Charlie and Gerry lived on a short stretch of Wasena where the opposite side of the road Ghent Park and the Roanoke River. 

Uncle Charlie had gone to college and studied engineering and surveying. I don't know if he got a degree or not. He had a long career doing surveying for Norfolk and Western Railway (N&W) which was headquartered in Roanoke. Charlie had lots of funny stories to tell about surveying railroads in West Virginia in the late 1920's and 1930's including one tale about having dinner with a large Hatfield family, during which he was proffered a huge plate of fluffy biscuits and told "take one, take two, take durn near all of them." Aunt Jerry was unusual of all my aunts, the only close female relative I knew who continued to work full-time throughout her marriage. Jerry was a librarian, with a degree in library science. She was at one time a head librarian. 

As I mentioned before, Charlie and Jerry, like Mildred and Chap did not have children. Jerry also wasn't particularly fond of cooking, so she and Uncle Charlie ate out a lot, mostly at cafeteria style restaurants. While I'm sure those existed all over the country including in San Mateo, I always associated going to a cafeteria style restaurant with Roanoke, as that was the only place I'd ever been to one until I was an adult. There were two very nice one's within easy driving distance and I can remember quite a few meals eaten with Charlie and Jerry at cafeterias. It was delightful as a child not to have to eat what everyone else was eating, but to be able to pick exactly what you wanted. 

Occasionally, Charlie and Jerry would take us out for breakfast at a sit-down restaurant. I can still remember the steaming, fragrant pancakes and the multiple kinds of syrup. Those experiences convinced me that breakfast was the very best meal to eat out, and I still believe that to this day. Which is why every week, my husband and I go out to eat for breakfast at our local, independently owned, family style restaurant, the Pine Mountain Grill. 

There's more to tell. But it will be another post. 

The Virginians: Visiting the relatives part 2

 When I was a child visiting my mother's people in the Tidewater was something I enjoyed very much, more than I enjoyed visiting my father's people in the Virginia mountains. My mother was the only girl and much doted on by all her brothers. I didn't really understand as a child how much of a special occasion our visits were, and how many of the things that I loved - like the huge multi-family outdoor feasts - were not typical, but held just because we were there. 

There were so many special little moments that I remember from our visits. I mentioned above the feasts. Every time we visited there was at least one, and often more than one large gathering that might include several of her brothers and their children, and several of the great Aunts (Sue) or great Uncles (Wallace, Tom) and some of their grown children. The food was always amazing. My favorite was the fried chicken. My great Uncle Wallace once asked me how much fried chicken I thought I could eat (I was about 5 or 6 at the time) and I told him "a hundred pieces."  He laughed and laughed. I've never really tasted fried chicken like that since I was a child, it was so crisp on the outside and so juicy on the inside. There was also ham, fresh corn on the cob from the field, potato salad, lots of fresh vegetables, beans, tomatoes plucked from the fields, biscuits that would melt in your mouth, and mounds of fresh butter on everything. The tables would be overflowing with food and we'd be outdoors under huge tall trees on a warm summer day. 

There were the times that we would play hide and seek in the cornfields with other cousins who were visiting. We weren't really suppose to do that, because we might damage the crop, but no one ever punished us for the games. When I was about six or seven, I had a fear of dogs, and my great Uncle Tom decided to help me with that by having me help him feed his beagles. He had so many of them (he kept them for hunting), and they were so soft and cute and friendly, and eager of course to be fed. I pretty much got over my fear of dogs that summer. 

The summer before my grandfather died (when I was eight), my mother and us three children stayed on for a long time after my father had to fly back home to go back to work. That was the first time we got more of a taste of the everyday rhythms of life there. Just before my father left we had gone to the beach, at the tip of the peninsula, so the body of water would have been the Chesapeake Bay. We had gone wading and I stepped on a broken beer bottle someone had thrown in the water and got two deep cuts on my right foot. So much of the rest of the time that I was there I had to stay still with my foot up while it healed. I learned how to go up and down the steep stairs of grandfathers house sitting on my butt, using my hands and one leg to push myself up, or lower myself down while my right leg stuck out straight. My grandfather had a big trunk full of old books brought down stairs for me to dig through and I spent much of my time reading. The best place to read was on the front porch in one of the many white wicker chairs, with their chintz pillow covers. From the front porch one could watch cloud shadows race across the fields of grain, or watch the slow approach of a curtain of rain. It was that summer that made me truly a reader and lover of books. 

As a child I preferred my mom's kin to my father's because with my mother's kin everyone was amiable, no one argued, no one talked politics or sounded angry, no one talked too loudly, everyone took care of us, and treated us as special.  It was not until I was an adult that I realized how much that was just a pleasant façade that glossed over a great deal of discord and disagreement, that tended to come out in underhanded ways. As an adult I also realized how much of southern gentility also was cover for a great deal of racism and fear of otherness.

These days I have only tenuous ties to my maternal cousins, as many of them, especially the one's that stayed down on the farm, have political and religious views starkly opposite my own. All but one of my mother's brothers has passed away, the only one left, uncle Tommy, is a great guy, but he is in his 90's now and probably will not be with us much longer. 

The next installment (when I get to it) will deal with my Dad's side of the family, also Virginians. 

The Virginians: Visiting the relatives Part 1

 My parents, Jo (mom) and Carroll (dad)*, were Virginians by birth and upbringing. The first time Jo left the state of Virginia was when she married Carroll and went to live in Florida with him. Carroll had spent much of his adulthood traveling and working around the country, first in nearby states like West Virginia and North Carolina, but then to California, Arizona, Washington and Oregon. But for both of them Virginia was home. It was where their parents and most of their siblings resided. So as a child, when we flew we flew to visit family in Virginia.

We always split our visits between Jo's people who lived mostly on farms in the Tidewater along the Rappahannock River, and Carroll's people who lived in the Appalachian mountains of southwest Virginia.  Carroll's father Charlie Parks died when I was too small to remember him. Jo's father James Tyler (called Tyler) was still alive for the first eight years of my childhood. The photo above is me with Grandfather Tyler in his home. So I remember mostly going to visit Jo's folks first. The Tidewater was also much closer to Washington, DC and it was easier for her family to come to the airport to gather us up.  

Jo was the only girl in her family. She had five brothers. There had been another girl, the first child born to Tyler and Lillian, but she had died within days of birth. The picture above is her with her brothers probably in the 1970's at my cousin Lucy's wedding (from left to right is Howard, Jo, Tommy in the back, John next to Jo, Charles, and James). Three were older than her, two were younger. James Tyler II (called James) the eldest was already married when she was a young girl. James was a farmer and lived a few miles from his father. James' children Franklin and Turk ( James Tyler III) were just a few years younger than Jo and felt more like brothers than nephews. Next in line was John, then Howard just a couple of years younger than Jo, and the brother with which she was closest. Then there was Tommy, who was eight years younger. Their mother Lillian died within days of Tommy's birth. 

Jo's father, my grandfather Tyler, could not see himself raising an infant or a young girl (she was 8), so Jo was sent to live with her Aunt Sue on the farm adjacent to her father's property. Aunt Sue already had two daughters one a little older than Jo and one the same age. Jo spent the years from age 8 to age 18 living with her Aunt Sue, and her cousins Mary Edna and Florence. Tommy was formally adopted by an uncle John and his wife, who had been unable to have children. John's farm was several miles away from Tyler.  The photo probably taken in 1949 around the time of my parents' marriage, shows Herb, Florence, great Aunt Sue, Mary Edna and Hub, the family in which my mother grew up. 

Jo had two other uncles (great uncles to me), who also lived within a few miles of Tyler, they were Tom and his wife Wade and Wallace and his daughter Nanny Florence who was Jo's best friend growing up. The photo below is great uncle Tom, great uncle John, grandfather Tyler, and great uncle Wallace, probably from the 1920's. 

When I was a child visiting mama's (Jo) family included seeing her brother Howard and his wife Mickie first. Howard was in law enforcement and they lived in Rockville, Maryland. Howard was usually the one to pick us up at the airport. Howard and Mickie had two boys, Randy was the same age as me, and Ronnie (who as an adult goes by Scott) was the same age as my brother Charlie. We would often spend a day with them in suburban Maryland, which was not much different from the California suburbs where we lived. Then we would drive down to grandfather's house in the Tidewater.  

For most of my childhood, in addition to my grandfather Tyler, we would also see my Aunt Sue and her husband Hub, her son Herb and her grown up daughters Mary Edna and Florence, my uncle James and his wife Wade, at least one of his sons Turk and his wife.  Sometimes Franklin would bring his wife and children, Stuart and Becky, in to visit at the same time. We would also see Uncle John and Aunt Alene and their children Johnny and Lucy, great uncle Tom and his wife Wade, great uncle Wallace and Nanny Florence, and great uncle John and his wife. Sometimes Jo's brother Tommy would come from Newport News while we were there and bring his wife Gayebrook and their three children who were the same ages as my brothers and I. 

This collection of dozens of relatives mostly living on farms all within a few miles of each other, seemed exotic to me as a child. I was growing up in a brand new suburb of San Francisco where all the houses were identical, and all the people in the houses were from somewhere else originally.  I did not realize at the time that it was my experience in the California suburb that was unusual, and not the reverse. Everyone I grew up with had parents who had migrated to California for work from somewhere else. Many of them had come from crowded cities in the east, a few from mid-western farms or towns, but we were all from somewhere else, and no one had aunts or uncles or grandparents living within easy driving distance. I began to understand how unusual my childhood neighborhood was when as a sociology graduate student I began to read studies of urban communities like Herbert J. Gans Urban Villagers.  I really understood it when I went to live in Johnstown, Pennsylvania where I had my first position as a college professor. But as a child, a world where dozens of one's relatives were close by and got together on a regular basis, where people lived in 200 year old farm houses, which did not all have running water, was very unusual and exciting. 

While my grandfather was still alive we stayed with him while we were visiting. His house had been built in the 1700's. It was a wooden house that sat on piers rather than a foundation. A less than stellar drawing of this house, based solely on my memory at 74 (I did it today) is above.  It was a two story rectangle, wider than it was deep. At some point, later than its original construction, a wide porch had been added across the entire first floor, and then even later had been screened in to block flies and mosquitos. It had a simple, but steeply pitched roof, the ridge ran horizontal to the front and back of the house, with a gable at each end. There were redbrick chimneys at each end of the house.  It had been painting white at one time, and the functional shutters on the windows had been painted green, but it was all faded during my childhood. My father was an avid photographer and there are many, many pictures from my childhood, but for some reason, not one single picture of my grandfather Tyler's house. 

The downstairs had two large rooms separated in the middle by a wide hallway that contained the steep stairs to the second floor. The hallway also held one of those gorgeous old carved wooden hall benches that had a large tall mirror, a seat to sit to remove boots, and many hooks for hats and coats. The hallway also had a single light bulb dangling and a refrigerator (probably circa 1948). Grandfather Tyler had the house wired for electricity in the 1940's but only downstairs, and only very minimally. There were dangling lightbulbs in the main living room which lay to the left of the entrance hall, and in my grandfather's bedroom which lay to the right of the hallway, as well as in the hallway itself. The electricity was used for the lights, for the refrigerator and for a large radio. The lack of electricity was quite the novelty for a child raised in the California suburbs. So was the complete lack of indoor plumbing. The house had no running water, no bathrooms, no sinks. 

My grandfather's bedroom was strictly off limits and I have no memories of ever seeing past the doorway. But the living room was the center of all activity and most of our time was spent there. It was quite large. On the front side near the windows were a couch and comfortable chairs. There was also a piano, out of tune and very tinkley that I was allowed to bang on whenever I wanted. My grandfather also had his desk and his easy chair and multiple bookcases on the rear side of the living room. In between was a large table and chairs for at least six people, where most meals were eaten. Also standing a couple of feet in front of the fireplace at the far side of the room, was a metal stove for heating with coal, with a pipe for smoke that went into the fireplace and up the chimney. We were only ever there in the summertime, so the stove was simply an object in the way of running and play. In describing all the things in the living room, it makes it sound quite cluttered, but it was a large room and there was plenty of space for small children to run around  and play. 

At the far end of the living room, opposite from the hall entryway, was a door next to the fireplace. That door opened into a small, ramshackle, wooden passageway that had a solid wall on its back side and open screening on its front side. It was narrow and often full of spiders - which I hated with a passion as a child. In the middle of this covered passageway were two doors, one a screen door opening to the front of the house, and opposite it in the solid wall, a wooden door that opened to the back. There was a small wooden deck on the backside where work like washing clothes  was done. That back door was also the access to the well in the back of the house from which all the water came, and to the outhouse, which was in ill repair and only used to dump the contents of chamber pots. No one wanted to sit in that outhouse unless you relished the idea of getting bit by a black widow spider. 

Every day a fresh buckets of water were drawn from the well by the adults (they didn't trust small children not to fall in!), and one bucket with a metal dipper was left in the passageway for drinking water. If one got thirsty while playing outside, one could just step through one of the outside doors into the passageway and grab a dipper of cold water from the pail. 

The passage connected the main house to a smaller building that was the kitchen. This is something that one can see in famous southern colonial times homes such as Monticello, a kitchen separated by some distance from the main house. As a child it was explained to me as being a fire precaution, and a way to keep the heat out of the house during the summer. Years later I also realized that it was a common arrangement in houses that were built during slavery to keep the slaves that brought in the produce, meat, etc. and did the cooking out of the main house.

The original owners of the house, built in the 1700's, had definitely been slave holders, not something I thought about as a child. I did know, probably more than most white working class children in the 1950's about slavery, and about Jim Crow laws. Jo and Carroll were very outspoken about how wrong the Jim Crow laws were, about how important voting rights and economic rights were and said on more than one occasion that one of the reasons that we did not live in Virginia near our relatives was because they did not want their children to be brought up with those prejudices. All the members of Jo's family referred to those of African American heritage as "coloreds" or used an even more distasteful word. We were quietly warned not to make an issue of it with relatives, but that we must never use those words and always use the "more respectful term of Negro." 

[Unfortunately, my parents did not realize that the absence of Jim Crow laws and formal, legal forms of discrimination, did not mean that there was an absence of racism in California. The racism was just more hidden, swept under the rug. In Virginia as in much of the south, Blacks and whites lived alongside each other, in the same communities, with laws like Jim Crow and other forms of custom regulating their interactions to keep them socially separate even though they used the same streets. In California, real estate practices, some legal, some just customary, isolated Blacks, and other races into separate neighborhoods from whites. Our California neighborhood, was in the 1950's almost 100 percent white. Only when I went to high school did I learn about the other neighborhoods in the city where the Blacks, Hispanics and the very large Chinese- and Japanese-American communities lived.]

The kitchen was a very simple box of a room, probably not much more than 12' x 12'. A huge black cast iron woodburning cookstove dominated the room. Wood had to be chopped to fill it, and bringing in wood from the woodpile was a daily task. My mother was a good cook, she made really tasty but fairly simple foods, and was adept  at using the wood stove for just about any type of food prep, including baking bread. The kitchen also had a good sized prep table and lots of cupboards and storage for dry goods and pots and pans. The big, galvanized steel wash tub, big enough for an adult man to sit down in was also stored in the kitchen. Bath time involved hauling multiple buckets of water from the well, heating them in huge stock pots on the wooden stove and filling the wash tub with hot water. 

The same tub, placed on the back deck behind the passageway was used for washing laundry. Laundry washing also involved heating water on the stove. Also we used a large corrugated  metal washboard, that one scrub clothes against to get out the dirt. Children could be give the task of "agitating" the laundry in both the wash and the rinse "cycle", with a large wooden paddle. We would pretend to be captains of boats paddling towards  adventure while we stirred the clothes round and round. 

The stairs to the second floor started several feet from the front door of the house and rose steeply across its depth. At the top the stairs opened on a narrow hallway, running to two large rooms at either end, one over the part of the living room and one over grandfathers bedroom. In addition there was a very small bedroom on the living room side between the stairs and the large bedroom. When we visited my parents, Jo and Carroll, slept in the room above grandfather Tyler, and my brother Charlie and I slept in the large room over the living room. When Frank came along he slept in a cot in the room with my parents. 

Both bedrooms had very large, ornate metal bed frames with soft, squishy mattresses, and actual linen sheets. There were wardrobes rather than closets, and bureaus where linens and clothing were stored. One of the most important features of the bedrooms was the multiple chamber pots under the bed. All bodily elimination had to be done in a chamber pot. The pots were cast iron, but covered with white ceramic. They each had a fitted lid to keep the odors under control until they could be emptied. I did not like chamber pots. They hurt my butt! But at least as a small child, I was not responsible for the emptying and rinsing of the pots. If one needed to go during the day time, one had to climb up stairs to use a chamber pot. My grandfather had two in his bedroom, but we were not allowed in there. 

My brother Charlie and I always had to share the bed at grandfather Tyler's house. We did not like this. We would fight and fuss, and someone would be yelling for my mother "he's touching me" or "she's touching me". Often my parents would lay a long bolster pillow down the center of the bed and tell us to stay on our side. This did not always help. 

The last summer my grandfather Tyler was alive, I was 8 and Charlie was 6 1/2. Charlie convinced our parents to let him sleep in the little bedroom in between. That bedroom was full of things, trunks with old clothes, trunks full of books, all kinds of amazing treasures. The little bedroom also had the trap door that opened to the attic crawl space where other wonderful things were stored.    

Summer 1959: My brother Charlie (7), Frank (not quite 3), grandfather Tyler, me (Sue 8 1/2), Jo (mom) behind, cousin Lucy (9 or 10 despite being smaller), and Aunt Alene wife of Uncle John, Jo's second oldest brother. We are standing in front of grandfather Tyler's house, you can see the sagging gate and the country road beyond the gate. 

There will be more memories tomorrow. 

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*When people were introduced verbally to Jo and Carroll, they almost always misunderstood which name went with which person. This amused my mother and made my father angry. It was one of the many things about which he was very touchy.