My hometown lost two heroes this week, Louise Pettus, a well-known historian and Ann Close, a philanthropist and adventurer. Their deaths are too close and too important to write about yet. I was, however, moved to share my thoughts about:
The Nature of Heroes
My generation believed heroes were folks who got it all right…men and women who had found the keys to fame and fortune and health and happiness. People who were braver or stronger or smarter. When I was young, Hollywood and sports and politics kept the lid on their Pandora’s Box of flaws. From time to time, we would catch a glimpse behind the curtain and see, however, that there was no “Great and Powerful Oz”. There are only people like you and me with faults a plenty and lives full of all the delight and dejection human beings are heir to.
It is the current fashion to publish the worst about anyone, past or present, who we once venerated. We should not be surprised when those we idolized do not live up to our expectations. The fact that there are toads in every garden should not keep us from admiring the flowers. There are always faults if we look too closely at anyone’s life and it seems the bigger the life, the more glaring the fault.
At six-two, my uncle, William Elmo Hill was a big man with a boy’s heart. My first memories of him begin when I was in grade school. He would arrive at my grandparent’s house in Union, SC in his two-tone red and white 1955 Chevrolet Bel Air convertible. Looking altogether imposing in his blue Air Force uniform he would stride up the walk full of raucous humor and as boisterous as Babe Ruth. Any eight-year-old would have been in awe and I was. The house would ring with his booming voice and even my father, who was rarely overshadowed, seemed a little smaller. Elmo would always slip me a dollar as he walked past. With him was his wife, Joan, who he met and married while deployed in England during World War II.
Uncle Elmo was my father’s older brother by 16 years. He was never completely happy with the name. His father, Robbs Hill had named him after a favorite book, St. Elmo’s Fire and it was just the kind of name that would make a boy a fighter.
There is a genetic trait in almost every family that I will call the character gene. Nothing scientific here…just anecdotal observation. The character gene is not about having good or bad character, it is about being a character. Every family has someone who is simply bigger than life. In some families, the gene doesn’t run, it stampedes.
Don’t squint…you know who it is. You knew immediately. That uncle or aunt or brother or sister who kept the family on high alert just waiting to see what would happen next.
Bill Ware, my son Case’s father-in-law looked at Dad, me, my sons Case and Michael and Case’s son Nicholas and said that the Hill gene runs strong. He was mistaken. The Lackey family genes, infused by my grandmother, are the ones that contribute size and, I believe, a tendency to be a little off center, a little artsy. Never blending into the woodwork were the Lackeys. Their light could not be hidden. Elmo was the embodiment of the Lackey character gene.
Elmo Hill never quite grew up. He was a good high school athlete who went on to play Cotton League baseball. During the first part of the twentieth century, cotton mills throughout the South sponsored teams that competed on the level of minor leagues today. Major league players were often recruited from these teams. Elmo was a third baseman and a slugger and played in the same league as “Shoeless Joe” Jackson. He claimed to have played against Joe and, odds are, he did.
Coming of age between WWI and WWII, Elmo was part of what Gertrude Stein called “The Lost Generation.” He was too young to fight in WWI but old enough to see the battle scars and haunted faces of the returning soldiers. He was in his late teens as the 1920’s roared through the country and Elmo roared with them. By the time Prohibition became the law, Elmo was old enough to be against it. Speakeasies were not common in the rural South, but moonshine stills were. Illegal liquor was nothing new in the Bible Belt and Prohibition barely slowed it down. Elmo developed an early taste for alcohol that would haunt him throughout his life.
When jobs disappeared during the Depression, Elmo worked a few days here and there, mostly in the unskilled labor force. When FDR created the Works Progress Administration in 1935 to put people back to work during hard times, Elmo joined up. Millions of workers were employed by the government to build public projects such as armories, schools and court houses.
When America entered World War II, Elmo, who was 34 at the time, answered the call. Probably because he was a big man and older than most of the recruits, he was trained as an MP. The Military Police were given the unenviable task of keeping thousands of 18- and 19-year-old soldiers out of trouble. The military traditionally called soldiers by their first name and Elmo was glad to become “Bill”. When not dragging unruly soldiers out of English pubs, Elmo, now Bill, was spending his free time in one.
Elmo’s military service, like his life, was full of ups and downs. According to my father, Elmo once held three different ranks in twenty-four hours. The story goes that while stationed in England, he was a corporal and was promoted to the rank of Sergeant. To celebrate the promotion, Elmo and some friends spent the evening in a nearby pub. Too much ale and too much talk led to a rumble with some of the locals and Elmo spent the night in the brig before being busted to private the next morning.
While stationed in the midlands of England, he met and married Joan Williams, a red-haired English beauty. Joan kept him on a more even keel and he managed to keep out of trouble and regain his military rank.
Toward the end of the war, Bill was posted inside the border of Germany as a road guard to direct troop movements toward the front. He was directing a convoy one day when he felt a tap on his shoulder. When he turned, an armed German soldier stood there. Bill immediately reached for his .45 pistol but before he could draw it, the German handed him his rifle. Glad to be out of the fighting, the German soldier surrendered to him.
Bill returned to America after the war and continued his military career in the Air Force reserve retiring after 22 years. While he was great with people, Elmo could never find his calling. He moved from job to job and would periodically fall back into his habit of drinking. As he grew older, the drinking took over more and more of his life. His drinking cost him his family and his life went downhill until his death at age sixty-five.
My father idolized his oldest brother and while he tried over and again to help him regain his life, he was devastated when Elmo died alone in a single rented room.
My Dad loved to travel and one summer, years after Elmo’s death, he and I spent two weeks traveling to England. We looked forward to a visit with Pete Williams, the younger brother of Elmo’s wife, Joan. Pete remembered Elmo, who he always called “Bill”, at his most convivial and idolized his sister’s dashing husband. Pete and my father had much in common and he became a lifelong friend of our family.
Dad and Pete shared stories of a younger Elmo and I could tell that it helped my father remember better times. Pete told Dad he had a surprise for him and was excitedly hush-hush about where he was taking us. We arrived at a narrow pub squeezed between a butcher shop and a tobacconist on a back street near Pete’s home in Evesham. I was told to go inside first while Pete held Dad back a moment. At first I thought the pub was empty until a woman with a shock of gray hair caught my attention. She was barely taller than the bar she stood behind and was in the middle of asking me what I would have to drink when Pete sent Dad in.
The lady turned, looked at Dad and gasped, “My god! It’s Bill!”
She choked back tears, put a hand over her heart and I was afraid she would faint or worse. Pete then came in with a broad smile and introduced Dad to Dorothy. Through tears and hugs, Dad and I learned that this had been Bill’s favorite pub and that Bill was a favorite of Dorothy. The drama did not end there. Pete whispered to Dad to ask Dorothy to open a magnum of champagne that sat prominently on a shelf behind the bar.
“I’ll never open that one,” she told Dad. “Bill gave it to me.”
For an hour that afternoon, we sat and listened to stories. Dorothy, somewhere north of eighty and standing under five feet tall, joined us at the table and recounted times that Bill had teased her or entertained her customers with his infectious good humor. Dad, a teller of stories himself, was unusually quiet, content to take in a past that had been clouded over by his brother’s humble ending.
I am sure that Pete Williams thought meeting Dorothy would be a nice surprise for my father. It was not…it was a renewal of hope. The dashing brother whose decline had haunted my father, once again stood tall and charming and brave in that dark little pub on that narrow back street in the midlands of England.
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