bgw57

[bgw57]

The Other Williamses

One of my favorite things.

On Mothers' Day 1944 Dean Ellis Williams, who was really James Grant Williams, was married to Ruth Elinor Williams by her father, the Reverend William Clark Williams. How often does this happen? And how often are the bride and bride, groom and groom or bride and groom's identical last names a factor in how they meet?

You can blame high school chemistry class, and alphabetical seating in my parents' case. Dean Williams and Ruth Williams were lab partners because their high school teacher needed a little help remembering names. I believe this all started sometime in 1939. The dark Newtonian is Ruth's, her sophomore year. Dean is a class ahead, as you can see by what he wrote in his red 1940 yearbook.

Do you think they were advised to put their names in this spot? These were the days of penmanship, that's for sure.

Poor Dad, a year or so away from discovering he's Jim - but that name weirdness is another post.

Dad's class ring.

Looking an Ruth's 1939 Newtonian I notice that every photo with Dean in it is crudely marked. Something tells me Dad did it himself, being flirtatious and cheeky at the same time, grabbing it when Mom was not looking.

OR, in a rapture of adolescent lust and mark-up, Ruth's pen practically moved itself.

In Dad's 1940 yearbook, his senior year, the mad underliner is at work again, although in this book more arrows point to a certain junior with the same last name. Did Ruth write in Dean's book, tit for tat?

Miss Brom was a friend of Dean's youth who was part of a gang of girls who chased him across a street, like after he'd committed shenanigans against them, into the path of an oncoming car. He broke a leg. But she's better known to me as Aunt Esther my Uncle Paul's wife and sister-in-law to Ruth. When Aunt Esther Brom Williams passed my cousins generously gave me her stand mixer.

These graduation announcements were given to Mom by friends. High school and college related stuff she kept in this special box for patriots to save letters in.

Ruth Elinor Williams Williams, when explaining this surname snarl often added, "I didn't even have to change my name on my driver's license." But she didn't learn to drive until after they were married. Dean tried to teach her but this ended in a bickering newlywed disaster. She went to a driving school instead.

As a kid it was confusing, didn't all your relatives have the same last name? Ruth had mostly brothers (one being the aforementioned husband to Aunt Esther) and on Dean's side the sister we visited most, as luck with have it, married uncle D. Warden. "The Wardens this, the Wardens that," says Ruth in the car as we make the twice (at least) monthly drive to see Grandma (Dad's mom) in Newton, ninety minutes west of Cedar Rapids. My six year old ears heard "wardens," small w,. and I just assumed the Brunners and the Davises (Dad's sisters' families) were occupations I hadn't heard of yet. Adding to this clusterfuck of nomeclature was the fact that there remained in my day my dad's mom, my mom's dad, and his second wife, after being widowed much too early, who we just called Mayme. No need to differentiate between Granpa Williams and Grandpa Williams for me.

And it must have been habit, Dean being the last of her five children to marry, that Besse didn't give a second thought to address herself, in her letters to Ruth, as Mother W. or Mother Williams.

Ruth Williams and Dean Williams met in high school and continued to see each other as Ruth went to teachers college and Dean went to war. And on May 14, 1944 they got married. And were together for the rest of their lives. And saved a lot of stuff.

Next time at All My Stuff, the WCW papers...

[bgw57]

bgw57

All Their Stuff

It didn't start with me - saving and hanging on to things. In fact I'd say I was at least a third generation pack rat on both sides of my family. And for this I am very grateful. I mean, it's fun having this stuff. And I think you can see by the volume and variety of it that a sort of family tradition developed, a way of looking at objects and especially documents of our daily lives, wherein collecting and saving them was just the normal thing to do. Ticket stubs, newspaper clippings, aka scrapbook items. Photos of course everyone saves, that is until the generation that doesn't comes along and donates them by the album full to their local thrift store. I volunteer at one, and have adopted a couple of those families, saving them from the dumpster. And we save documents, right? Tax returns, insurance documents, wills, deeds. And salt and pepper shakers.

These are some of the oldest things I have:

My father's mother's baby photo. Besse Grace Moore was born in 1883. There are not a lot of snapshots from the 19th century, which is when all my grandparents were born, although some of my grandmother's studio portraits were pretty candid seeming and casual.

Here she is in 1893, looking very calm and collected at 10. The hat. The ribbon everywhere. The Moores lived in and around Panora, and Guthrie Center, Iowa. I like this next one, which shows more personality that usual for photos of the time, or is that a misconception? Perhaps this is a holdover from the early days of photography - long exposures due to slower film, or plates.

Ah ha! It's from her I inherited my droopy left upper eye lid.

If I had to guess, I'd say the genetic aspect of my struggles with depression was something she and I shared. There's a sadness or loneliness in her expression here that she also hints at in her correspondence (yes, I have a lot of the letters she wrote to my parents). She's often on the verge of throwing a pity party. Ruth, her daughter-in-law, my mom, used to poke fun of Grandma's sadsack-ery, quoting a line supposedly common to her letters, "Thought surely I would hear from you today." I just now realized - I have those letters. I can find out, was my mom just doing Besse schtick?

I would love to hear the conversation around these outfits. Who's idea was it? Was it a local fashion? Did they make them themselves or have them made? I never knew my grandmother to be a seamstress but she died when I was 11, in 1968, so she may have given it up long before. Although again, in her letters and diaries I don't remember her talking about sewing, but there's much I have yet to read. She does go on and on about the gardening, canning, washing, ironing and all the other daily chores of an Iowa farm wife in the first half of the 20th century. Chores and the weather in fact are two of her favorite subjects.

Speaking of farms and farming - though now an old goat, I was once and briefly a goat hill. The buffalo plaid jacket became a thing thanks to the Grumpy Old Men movies. Ugh. As if Minnesota and Minnesotans needed anything more to be cute and smug about - they've now co-opted my grandfather's hunting jacket. That would be Grant Williams, husband to Besse above. I don't remember him as he died when I was just 2.5 but I love having his jacket, complete with a game pocket where you can put your dead animals. Don't worry, the pocket's interior is (or rather was) rubberized so the blood and guts rinse right off. I wish I could find a date and manufacturer but the labels are long gone. When I was a kid, at our house on E-as-in-easy-avenue, this jacket hung by the kitchen door. Someone had painted while wearing it and it was the coat your threw on in cold weather to take out the garbage, or better yet, burn the trash! Outside the picket fence, between it and the alley, was the 50 gallon drum with the to top cut out. It sat on cinder blocks and taking out the trash was definitely not a chore for this young pyromaniac.

One hot dry summer afternoon before I was old enough and Ruth did this chore, a burning phone bill or cast off mailing from RCA Record Club was sent aloft by the hot air above the burning barrel and, landing on a pine shrub, set it ablaze. Luckily, Mrs. A. of the perfect lawn next door, who often surveilled the Williams backyard from her kitchen window as she did the dishes, rushed to Ruth's aid brandishing one of her several garden hoses. That was a summer, for sure.

Compare this to the dark of an Iowa January evening - dark even before dinner, which is saying something when dinner is at 5:30 during Walter Cronkite. Ruth is watching me from our kitchen window. I'm 13 and lighting a fire so I guess it made sense. The barrel by this time is rusted and the bottom is mostly hole. Sometimes you have to tend the fire a bit, it's snowed and that doesn't help. I have a special stick to stir the flames. This trash load includes the contents of the bathroom wastebasket.

Now, I'm not athletic. I'm the last kid picked for every gym class team ever formed. But as I stand there in the snow in Grandpa's hunting jacket, watching the trash burn, I discover a flaming Kotex pad, now ball of fire and fallen through the hole at the bottom, makes the perfect puck to my suddenly hockey stick. It's almost meditative, batting the burning pad around, all sparkled over with red embers and flame on the snowy ground.

When come in for dinner, flushed with cold and pride at doing my chore, I don't know what to say to Mom when, embarrassed and cross, she attempts to scold me for doing something she's too prudish to describe. "That burning paper you were playing with," is as close as she can get. The quickest way out of this unpleasant moment is to deny everything and go wash my hands for supper.

To stretch this cooling off moment just a little further, I weigh myself. 110 pounds. Standing on that very same scale today, dressed, I weigh 159, including the hemp Adidas. Jim and Ruth bought the scale with King Korn stamps, and there is probably a partially filled book of those somewhere in all my stuff, too.

next time on All My Stuff - The Other Williamses

[bgw57]

This is me. Yes, I was born when baby lotion came in glass bottles. Sixty-six years ago on August 3rd, before the Space Age, even, although just two months and one day before. This is also the start of all my stuff. Beside my flat-on-top ears there are a couple of other things in this photo that I still have today.

This is me posing with my hospital bracelet in 2017 when I was working on an earlier version of this blog, called The Packrat Project. I'm told I have a lot of stuff from my childhood, and unusual amount. I not so sure. It all seems perfectly normal to me. Doesn't everyone have their hospital baby bracelet? Maybe Mom or Dad tuck it away in your baby book, which at some point they hand to you as a gift. Or it's discovered in the back of some drawer as you clean out their house, moving one of both of them to Senior Living or the grave.

I don't remember now what the specific motivation was for my mom to one day hand me a couple of small boxes, a stationery box and a box from Johnson & Johnson, maybe that's where the bottle came from, a promotional product. Like this, my very first piece of wall art.

I'm not sure what the tie in was with Carnation evaporated milk, other than milk being one of the chief topics of conversation around this time. I'm not sure, did I lose half a pound just after weighing in at 7 lbs 11 oz? Hmmmm

Siri says that it's normal for babies to lose weight, initially (who wouldn't, after that trauma?) but they gain it back by three weeks. I had surpassed my birth weight at 2 weeks as you can see by these after-visit summaries for a six day exam when I was still Baby Boy Williams (above) and the two week visit, seven pounds thirteen ounces, after which I evidently become quite the little eater - 19 pounds at six months.

And so here I go. This is an experiment. A vanity project. Something to do in my all but formal retirement (official start Feb 2024). In my next entry - a bit of the tree this nut falls so near to.