Family Ties

By Jim Doyle

I am a history buff. Lately, I’ve been studying my personal history – actually, my family history – and it will be no surprise to you, Dear Readers, that there are some real characters locked away in that treasure trove.

Who knows if it’s accurate. But if it is, here are some of my relatives:

Lots of writers: John Milton, William Faulkner, Edgar Allen Poe, Henry David Thoreau, George Orwell, Truman Capote.

Several presidents: Eisenhower, Kennedy, Bush and LBJ.

One preacher burned at the stake for being a witch.

Some great actors:  Spencer Tracy, Humphrey Bogart, Bette Davis, Cary Grant.

And several famous African-Americans: Booker T. Washington, Langston Hughes, and P.B.S. Pinchback, Governor of Louisiana.

I have to admit it left a peculiar taste in my mouth to confirm my ancestors (at least one of them) owned slaves, having thought (and been taught) all my life that our Methodist religion, dating back to the 1840’s, sided us with the abolitionists. But with a huge family tree rooted firmly in the South, I suppose it was inevitable.

My branches are laden with the Doyle, Webb, Duncan, Watson, McKinnie, and Nuckolls families, and those are among the most common of the Scot-Irish stock that drifted down through Virginia and the upper South like a wave about 150 years ago.

If you’re searching for good stories and interesting people, look no further than the Watson clan. My mother was one of 10 children, and the oldest girl, in a farm family that survived the Depression (maybe some of those skills will come in handy).

Her twin brother Leva was famous among my friends because he drove a Rolls Royce (actually it was a 1938 Plymouth he bought new, but nobody knew the difference) and worked at Fort Knox (he was an x-ray technician at the base hospital).

Uncle Julius owned a piece of history. The Battle of Middleburg was fought on his front yard. Leonard, father of my two closest cousins Carl and Roy, was a paratrooper who drove a general around Hiroshima right after World War II and died much too young of lung cancer. Five aunts raised exceptional children.

And that brings us to Lewis, who will soon celebrate his 50th wedding anniversary and is my only surviving uncle.

Like his oldest brother, Lewis was famous among my friends for his car and for his job. He drove an original Edsel, which he kept until about 15 years ago, and he worked as a welder at the nuclear plant at Oak Ridge. He is, in every sense, keeper of the family flame.

Every two years he hosts the Watson reunion at his home in Fairfield Glade, Tennessee, on the Cumberland Plateau. I’ve spent the July 4th holiday there in a jacket watching fireworks and keeping score as the kids captured fireflies. Some of my best memories are on his back deck, counting my cousins and soaking in the remarkable, enveloping feeling of a family whose numbers do not diminish the ties and love that bind us all together, today and back up the tree to those many, many limbs.

Geraldine, Lewis’ wife, is my “favorite aunt” in much the same way I am her “favorite nephew,” in other words, it’s our little secret. I still remember the first time I met her, probably when I was about 8. She and Lewis had two children and the oldest, Julia, is our family hero. She was the national poster child for juvenile arthritis before she was ten.

I remember her about that age, sitting quietly in the den at my house sobbing softly to herself in the pain she has carried all her life. And in marrying her husband Steve she added yet another interesting occupation to our mix: Steve is a nuclear engineer who works at the bomb plant in Oak Ridge. He’s in charge of “packaging.” I don’t even want to think about what that means.

Steve gave me one of my prized possessions one reunion, which hit at a particularly bad patch for me, about a week after my lifelong friend Gary Cole died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. Other circumstances added to the frazzling effect of that blow. As I got ready to leave, Steve handed me a hat and said, “Here. You need this more than me.” The hat bore the logo: “S**t Creek Survivor.” I don’t even want to think about why a guy with his job had it. But there are days, less lately thank God, when I wear it proudly and defiantly.

This week’s ruminations may not be worthy of my cousin William Faulkner or even the Ravenmonger of Baltimore. But the point is worth considering. If home is the place where when you go there, they have to take you in (Robert Frost), I think it’s a metaphysical place rather than a physical location.

For me, it’s the bosom of my family, from slave owner to freed slave, uncles and aunts to cousins and grand cousins, once-in-a-while reunions to sporadic e-mails from some of my more loyal blood. In this hectic modern world spinning further from its comfortable and known center towards exciting and new possibilities, tempered by fear, may we all be Survivors.