Let’s talk about those folks who, for better or worse, leave their indelible marks on our behavior…Relatives. I’m not talking about spouses or in-laws here. God knows I could, but those delights and miseries are self-inflicted. With family we are stuck like ducks in the mud of a dried-up lake. I am talking about the genetic donors, advice givers, example setters and guilt droppers who made us what we are despite our best attempts to break the mold.
Families today are smaller. They don’t tend to be as big as they were in my grandparents’ generation. I am pretty sure grandma and grandpa knew what was causing all those pregnancies and I don’t think all those children are the result of boredom. Oh, sure…In days of old the nights were cold and birth control was…let’s say… hit and miss but the heat of passion is short lived and opportunities for privacy must have been sporadic at best. My mother had five siblings, four brothers and one sister, as I remember her, my grandmother was not all that charming.
Lots of children made sense in an agricultural society when every hand was needed on the farm. More children meant more help with the crops. In the late eighteen-hundreds, when families moved into town for work in the mills and factories, there was no need for so much free labor. Our modern enlightened sensibilities are shocked by the stories about children of six or seven working in cotton mills but remember that back on the farm, the same children would have been tying tobacco stems for hanging or picking cotton or digging up potatoes in the household garden. It was what families were conditioned to do.
We got smarter about children working but it took a while longer to translate that into smarter birth control. By the time my mother and her siblings came along, the era of big families was on the wane. It is rare today for a child to have more than one or two siblings. The change comes at a cost. Fewer children mean a more sustainable planet and make family reunions much less confusing. We pay the price, however, in the loss of free advice and genetic diversity. Nobody gives free advice like cheek-pinching, head rubbing aunts and uncles.
What I have to offer today is a look at a family; my mother’s family to be precise, and the many and wondrous ways they enriched my life.
Elwyn Lloyd Case, my maternal grandfather, was born in Patchogue, Long Island, New York, and left home with his brother to find their fortunes in the warm Florida sunshine. Both were in their early twenties and handy with machinery. They had scraped enough money together to buy and fix-up an early model T Ford and set off for the South with lots of enthusiasm and a little cash. Fate or dumb luck caused them to break down in the tiny burg of Fort Mill in South Carolina. While they worked to get the car road-worthy again, Elwyn, forever after just called “Case”, found that the town needed a good mechanic and that there was at least one local girl worth hanging around to meet. His brother still had sunny beaches and palm trees in his dreams and so the two parted company.
Cornelia Dovey Harris, called Connie, was as local as red clay and was taken with this travelling man even if he was from “up North”. Connie’s parents and a few of her siblings felt that she was marrying “beneath her station in life.” The Harris family was among the first families to settle the Fort Mill area. They followed the Great Wagon Road south in the mid 1700’s before the Revolution as did many of their Scotch-Irish neighbors.
Connie’s father was the local magistrate and owned some of the best land along the Catawba River. Connie’s unmarried uncle, Lon Harris, had been mayor and a state representative and owned a successful furniture store but they were a family on the edge of decline. Tragedy, (we will wait for another time to deal with that topic) and a tendency toward alcoholism saw the family fortune dwindle until Connie’s inheritance was less than a thousand dollars, two 2 ½ dollar gold pieces and Lon’s gold-filled pocket watch.
My mother’s oldest sibling was Lloyd Harris Case. He and the other five kids were born after the “War to End All Wars” and before the war that negated that title. Harris was tough from the start. He didn’t mind a fight and when World War II came along, he volunteered for the Marines. When he returned home, he joined his father who owned and ran the service station at the top of Main Street. For my mother, and I think the brothers and sister as well, Harris was the rock of the family. Despite his temper he was solid, steady and tough.
Nicknames were common for my mother’s family and at some point during his childhood, Harris had a pet monkey. From those days forward, he was stuck with the nickname “Monk”. While marriage and family calmed his temper, it could still flair at times. Harris and his dad eventually left the station and formed Case Plumbing, Heating and Electrical. Once when I was landscaping a yard in the Foxwood Development,* Monk was finishing the wiring under the house next door. A small panel truck stopped out front and the pest control guy got out and began spraying around the house Monk was wiring. After a few minutes, I heard words that only a Marine could know and Monk came charging out the access door. The startled pest control guy threw down his spraying equipment and made a panicked dash for safety. While he drove away, Monk ran half-way up the street chasing the truck and still using those unprintable invectives.
Robert Edmund Case was the second born and was always the “good looking” one. Nicknamed for all time, “Bubber” by my mother, he was always perfectly groomed and a master of the wry smile. A decorated soldier in the African and European Theaters during World War II, he was the first of the family to finish college and except for a brief stint as principal at Riverview School, taught middle school math for years. Bubber was an excellent diver, golfer and water skier and, because he was unmarried and could indulge himself, he did. He bought himself a burgundy Willis Jeepster and used it to pull a shining mahogany Chris Craft ski boat. In the pantheon of my aunts and uncles, Bubber was the trickster. In a family that was noted for not joking around, Bubber lived outside the curve.
I have, to this day, a reluctance to look out a window after dark. I was about twelve when my family moved next door to Bubber on Leroy Street. My room was at the front of the house and had chest-high rectangular windows. Several times I would be sitting in my room at night pretending to study and hearing a tapping sound, I would look up to see a distorted face pressed against my window. I would jump in fright and could hear Bubber cackle all the way home. My sister, Connie, attributes her fear of snakes to Bubber, who playfully threatened her with a hog-nose snake he caught in his yard.
Lillian Case, the older girl, was never happy with her given name and, like Bubber, was renamed by my mother. She was called Sister or Sis all her life and was the most adventurous of all the family. Sister was a high school athlete who joined the Women’s Marine Corps when the U.S. entered World War II. She was trained at Camp Lejune where she served as mechanic and starred on the post swimming team as a diver. On returning home after the war, she worked a couple of jobs before deciding to become a nurse. She lived most of her life in Richmond, Va. returning to live in the family home on Leroy Street after she retired. Only after her death did I find out she had qualified as a private pilot. I have a photograph of her in her Marine uniform. I wish I had her bravado.
I will hurry past my mother’s life because I have already given you loving details of some of her most memorable moments and will, every chance I get, give you more.
Elwyn Case Jr. was seldom called by name. Sometimes he was called “Little Monk” by the family and sometimes just “Monk”…confusing for all the kids of my generation. The nickname I heard most of my life was “Junior”. Of all the brothers, he was the most easy-going and was the most patient with me. He served in the Navy during the Korean War but I remember him, in my earliest years working at Okey Lumber Company, first at the top of Main Street, then on the turn where Spratt Street becomes White Street. Later he was a general contractor and built his home on Lake Wylie. He let me work with him during part of the time and when the day’s work was done, let me dive in from his dock, usually still in the shorts I was working in. He too had a boat and was a leader in the boating community at Lake Wylie.
James Wallace Case, called Jimmy, was the youngest and I believe, the perpetual boy. I don’t mean he wasn’t a responsible adult. He had great fine-motor coordination and loved to tinker with watches. As a result he took a job in Kansas City with Honeywell and worked on some very technical projects for early space craft, I believe. He was only back in Fort Mill from time-to time but would always take me on a search for the perfect Dogwood tree with just the right fork in the branches to make his signature sling-shot. He was a master at the craft of baking the wood and using surgical tubing to make a formidable weapon. Using ball bearings as ammunition, Jimmy struck fear in rodents for miles around.
Families today are much more mobile and follow their dreams much farther afield. Children rarely grow up with so many relatives to oversee their behavior. My theory of relativity is that the more relatives you have living in an area the faster bad news travels until it approaches the speed of light. Many times, an infraction of mine (always minor, of course) would reach home before I did. Sometimes I think my parents found out while my misdemeanor was still in the planning stage.
All of those family members are gone now…their stories told by their children and their children’s children. You probably didn’t know any of them but you have your own stories. For good or bad, those are our people and marked us forever. My blood runs rich with the influence that each of them left behind…and I write to preserve their stories and to acknowledge their influence on my life.
*for more about my landscaping days and misadventures listen to my podcast “Red Clay, Spreading the Hay and the Dumptruck Blues”
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