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.
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 one seat 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 only time we did that, and that year (which was after my mother's father had died) 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 tail 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.
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