It is that Sunday in June when we celebrate fathers. There are a bunch of special fathers in my life. Here are five of them.
Daddy
My own Daddy, of course.
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In "Botush Creek) Milstead, Georgia, c. 1923. What a zest for life from the very beginning.
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| On Ulithi atoll in 1944. The US secretly established there, in the mid-Pacific and in just a few weeks, the largest naval base in the history of the world, to prepare for the invasion of Japan. The atomic bomb made that invasion unnecessary. |
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| Daddy left his young wife and two beloved daughters to risk his life in the fight to defeat the authoritarians of the 1940s. |
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| I must not have wanted my picture made in this c. 1951 family picture. L-R: Joan, Me, Daddy, Carol, Debbie, Mother, Janice. |
This is Daddy at Junction City Methodist Church, one of his stuadent appointments while he attended Asbury College. I suppose it's possible that little "Terry" shirtless in the background?
With Daddy and my brother David, Christmas about 1959.
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| In 1979 Daddy visited my sixth-grade classroom at Pepperell Elementary School, to talk about his recent trip to the Middle East. |
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Granshaw and Granmop with seven of their (eventually) 18 grandchildren
L-R: Josh Hearn, Matthew Lewis, Ruth Baird Shaw, Jessica Rogers, Amanda Sims, Lisette Lewis, Brannon Shaw Carlin, Charles Columbus Shaw, Andrew Lewis
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Daddy Shaw
I wrote about my paternal grandfather in a previous post:
But even better than Jack’s comics was slipping out the front and walking down Milstead’s lovely divided and shaded Main Street, just a few doors down, to the Callaway Mills Community Center. I’d jump off the rockwall next to the sidewalk into the sandy yard of the community center climb the steps onto that huge full length front porch, turn right and walk all the way to the end and the last door with its barber pole and the full width sign above it with big Coca-Cola emblems on both ends and Grady’s Barber Shop in black block letters in between. Inside was a wooden chair with turned spindle back and legs bolted atop a cabinet with cast-iron foot rests and a couple of drawers filled with shoe polish, brushes, blacking for the sole edges, and polishing rags. Around the walls on both sides were chairs. At the back was a wall of black and white glass front shelves with lots of big mirrors. A just in front of the mirrors two Black leather, white enamel, and shiny chrome barber chairs with strops hanging from one side and a white enameled lever for hiking the chair up and down on the other.
Daddy Shaw in front of his barber shop in the community center at Milstead, Georgia.
Against the wall beside the chair on the left was a chest-type red Coke machine. To the right of the door was a big heavy cast-iron hat rack with a hat or two and a couple of jackets hanging on it. To the left was the Tom’s peanut machine and the door to the stairs that led to the showers in the basement.
There had been a second barber for that chair on the left at one time, but during all of my childhood, Daddy Shaw stood behind the one on the right, and the left one was usually my perch. I loved that chair. It was a beautiful mechanical wonder. It could be modified --- pushed, pulled, or cranked to various heights and degrees of leisurely reclining. In it I was close to the storytelling that my grandfather and his customers emitted so endlessly. With luck one of the guys would need a shine while he waited. It was an easy dime for me and I became fairly expert at whisking the shoes with a brush and whipping them with the polishing cloths.
And with that dime... or maybe two, the possibilities we’re inspiring. I could swap that dime after a two-minute walk to the drug store lunch counter for two scoops of ice cream on a cone, I usually chose cherry. If I had that second dime it’d get me a new comic book to take back to the shop. On the other hand I could just ask Daddy Shaw to change the dime for two nickels. One would go into the Coke machine. I’d grab a six-ounce bottle by its cap and pull and push it this way and that to get it around the maze inside the chest and pull it out. I’d hold it up to the light to see if it had those much prized ice flecks floating about. I'd remove the cap with the built-in bottle opener on the side, then take the other nickel over to the Tom’s peanut machine. Opening the little cellophane envelope of peanuts I’d carefully empty them into the Coke bottle.
Back in the spare barber chair I’d listen as Daddy Shaw told stories on himself.
Like the time he’d been working in Atlanta all day, probably selling Knapp Shoes door-to door, or Kirby vacuum cleaners. When it came time to catch the train home he was so tired he went to sleep about the time the train started pulling out of Terminal Staion. Jerking of the car woke him a some point later and as he glanced out the window, he decided suddenly that he’d slept through the whole trip and the kudzu outside the window was beside the tracks in Conyers. He grabbed his belongings and ran toward the rear of the car and jumped off as the train was picking up steam leaving the station.
Looking around from beside the tracks he looked up at the sign hanging from the station platform: Decatur! He’d only slept a few minutes. He was sixteen miles from home with only his two tired legs for transport.
Or out of Mama Shaw’s hearing, he might tell of the time he tried to teach “Li’yun” to drive, but thought better of it when she reacted to an approaching vehicle in an intersection by throwing up her hands from the steering wheel and screaming.
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Papa
In that same post I also wrote about my maternal grandfather:
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My maternal grandfather was just called Papa by most of my relatives. He too influenced my life and his stories bring me encouragement and wisdom. Benjamin Wilson Baird’s name has come down through several cousins and a nephew, Benjamin. He was a farmer and a very devout Christian. Every day ended in the farmhouse in Newton County with the family gathered around for “family devotions” which included Bible reading, and Bible stories, and prayer. More than once the family was interrupted by a neighbor riding up: “Mr. Baird can you come over and preach over our father. He died today." B.W. Baird was not an ordained exhorter like his wife’s granddaddy, but he was a lay preacher, and he sometimes filled in when the circuit preacher wasn’t around.
My much older cousin, Aubry, told about the day my grandfather sat at the neighboring farm of his cousin, Aubry’s father, Jason. “Jay,” my grandfather said, “I believe I’m going to go over to Porterdale and get a job at Bibb Manufacturing.” The boll weevil had about done in cotton farming and times were tough. Jay shook his head and sighed and replied, “Wilse, I believe I’d go to sharecropping before I’d raise my children in a mill town."
Well, both my parents can trace their ancestry back to some pretty well-connected folks on both sides of the Atlantic, but they are also "lintheads" from milltowns, and they both did OK. Wilson Baird moved his nine living children into a mill house in Porterdale and began working there. When another of Jason’s boys, Howard, decided to answer the call to preach, he came to Porterdale to talk with his Uncle Wilson. My Grandfather gave him this advice, that I think maybe influenced several preachers I know. He said, “Howard, you cant scare folks into the Kingdom, you’ve got to love them into it."
Soon his eleventh child, my mother, was born. And then disaster struck as the baby and little Leon, only four, came down with the measles. Ruth recovered, but Leon's infection moved into his lungs and he died.
On his own death bed Papa told my Uncle Tom that he hoped one of his sons would be called into the ministry. Well, that wish didn’t come true but his youngest child, my mother, married a minister, and later answered the call to become a pastor herself. She still occasionally preaches at 95.
And now, as Paul Harvey might say, the rest of the story. Please don’t murder the Papas who have been important in your life. I think my family is a good object lesson in that. I was influenced by all four of my grandparents, three of them directly, but one, Papa, only through the stories! The stories passed down through Aubrey and Howard and Uncle Tom and my mother and others have given me my maternal grandfather.
Benjamin Wilson Baird is on the 1860 United States census of Georgia at three-twelfths of a year old. And even though he has been very influential in my life, I never met him in person. He died when my mother was nine and fifteen years before I was born.
As far as I know this is the only picture of Benjamin Wilson Baird.
Jay Matthews
In 1971, I married into the Matthews/Snell family. It took a while to get comfortable with Jay Matthews. He was not a talkative man. If he had sat in Daddy Shaw's barber shop he would have chuckled along with my Daddy's stories or those of my Daddy Shaw, but he wouldn't likely have added a story of his own. In the end I learned to love and admire the quiet strength and integrity of my father-in-law.
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| Another member of the Greatest Generation, James Clarence Matthews spent World War Two escorting war materials from the east coast of North America to Europe and North Africa. He married Mavis Snell just a month after Pearl Harbor and like many other men left his new wife to defend republicanism from the authoritarians. |
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I wonder what he thought in the early seventies of the long-haired Baby Boomer who married his daughter and moved her into a remote one room log cabin. Here he sits in that cabin in Chubbtown, Ga.
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| Sheila grew up with dogs and horses on the Matthews' four acres outside Tallahassee. |
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| He was quiet but loving grandfather to my daughters and their cousin Nora. |
John
Having watched my father accept Gilbert Crouse and Jim Turrentine (and later others) as his sons when they married his daughters, and having felt my own acceptance into the Matthews family, I am committed to love the guys who win the hearts of my daughters. In October of 2016 Brannon married John Carlin. What I didn't expect was to come to love a whole 'nother family, but we found that John's parents and siblings accepted Barnnon with an open heart and us right along with her. Then I saw the love and commitment of John as he and Brannon endured the mixture of unbounded love and terror that came with the precarious first weeks of Clementine's life and then his love for Ruth. I have gained a son and get to watch another young father as he negotiates the straits of young fatherhood and now a third pregnancy.
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