This is my third try at this. They’ve all lead me around the block and back to this point, with a single conclusion.
I’ve got nothing today.
Zip. Nada.
Zero. Zilch.
Try back again tomorrow. Tomorrow I’ll certainly have something.
24
Jul 24
Jul 24
That suitcase was heavy
We had breakfast at a big round table this morning. My wife, my mother, my step-father, my grandfather, my great-aunt and uncle. After that we got on the road for the airport. We made it just in time and breezed through TSA.
At the airport you have to take a shuttle to the plane. On the shuttle we heard a message, something about building a world class airport for a world class city. I don’t know if Nashville is a world class city, but it seems to want to be. And the airport isn’t bad. But we did have to take a shuttle to get to gate C9.
That’s the gate from which Spirit flies. We’re flying a yellow bus out of a world class airport. It’s a two-hour trip and for our purposes it worked well this time. Small seats, though.
Leave the plane, get the bag, find the car, drive to the house. We got off the highway just in time to see the sunset.
After which it was cats and plants and unpacking and the dozen or so things you do to get your house back on track after a few hasty days away. Tomorrow, I imagine, I’ll be tired.
23
Jul 24
Circa 2007 If he wasn’t leading the singing, you could stand in the back of a full church and find where he was sitting just from listening for his voice. Tony’s voice was strong and sure. It was pure. I was delighted when I learned how to single out his sound. A tenor, for a few years he led a talented a capella quartet. I remember helping him set up amps and microphones and him patiently waiting for me to get it right.
Jul 24
A life well lived
He was three years older than my mother. Shaggy haired as a youth. Tall as the trees. He was 6-foot-4 and stood with a deliberate hitch in his leg and hip. It gave him a coolness where he could lean against things or loop a thumb in his belt. He got married a few hours before I was born, a full generation apart, miles apart, not that far apart. For as long as I can remember he called me to wish me a happy birthday and I would wish him a happy anniversary. As a younger man, he was aggressive without being risky. Loud without being obnoxious. Rowdy, but never in trouble. It was a vestigial part of youth that he aged out of, as most of us do, but since he was young, and I was young, and his family was young, it all felt a little adventurous. He was mischievous, with a wicked, good-spirited glimmer in his eye. He was fast and careful. He knew when to be which. He knew a lot.
My uncle was a father, a father-figure to many, a friend of everyone he encountered. He had a lot of friends. Everyone became his friend, because for as tall as he was, his personality could be bigger, and it was full of good cheer, laced with being a merry prankster. His was a personality full of love.
Tony worked at GE, running the software that kept the factory working. Odds are he had a small hand in your kitchen. He was a shortwave radio guy. His license plate, for all my life, was his call letters. He was a volunteer firefighter. He was a handyman. He was a fisherman. He was a Godly man. He was a deacon in his church. I have a dim memory of seeing him preach once or twice. But what he really was was a song leader.
He wasn’t a teacher, but he could have been. There was always some lesson or practical explanation he could share. He knew a lot of things and he was generous with what he knew. He wasn’t a comedian, but he might have been. He delighted in making people laugh.
All of it, his good nature, his size, his generous spirit, made him the center of a room, even though he wasn’t the sort who needed that, ever.
Even in his struggles, he would steer himself to a joke. Twenty years ago, or so he got a bad diagnosis. A tremor turned into Parkinson’s. The prognosis wasn’t great, but it came at a time when those prognoses were changing. Medicines were improving, science was making leaps, and activity and the physical therapy helped him continue to enjoy life far beyond that first doctor’s projections. There were always jokes and puns and stories. They got a little slower. A bit more halting. It made us all patient, and even in that he was giving us an example, an opportunity to learn from him. It’s one of those things you might wonder if a person is aware of doing it, or if it was purely instinctive and genuine personality. Either way, it was important. There were always some of the tiniest members of his family around. There was always a trip, or a cookout, or something. This horrible thing was going on, and he was rising to meet it. While he wouldn’t deny it, he wouldn’t let it define him. At the same time, it was rough. As his body fought against him, he lost the abilities to do the sort of finer work he really enjoyed. Even then, on balance, he kept his spirits up, and that meant a lot for the people around him, and maybe for him, too.
He was always an example, whether he intended to be or not, the rest was up to us. That’s how I always saw him: he did his best for you, and around you; the rest was up to you.
At the core of his varied interests, he was a real family man. Tony had a daughter and son, a flock of grandchildren and a mess of noisy, beautiful great-grandchildren. He loved them all. The man loved everyone, and he made it obvious, and he was easy to respect and love in return.
We buried him today, the singer, the programmer, the tinkerer, teacher, prankster. The patient and enduring man. Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people came to the visitation last night. Strangers from his regular breakfast haunt came. Today, more people came in, including the entirety of the people from his boxing therapy group. They, with their own troubles and struggles, all came and filled three pews. My mom always said that she thought her brother liked going to that group because there were people who understood what exactly he was facing. That may well be. They came today because of how he made them feel through what they were facing.
People from all the churches he visited, all the churches where he would go to their singings, came too. And, so, when it came time to sing the room was filled and the air beyond it, too. The songs were chosen specifically and everyone who raised their voices did so with verve. It was terribly sad, and joyful. For all of this, a good man’s suffering has ended. I hope that, where he’s gone, he can walk and run and be loud and tinker with things and be young again if he wants, even though he’d matured so well into a quiet, gentle man, a gentleman. However it works, that choir sounds better today than it did last week.
He is at rest at his church, a place I know well. I visited it a lot as a child. As kids, his children, my cousins and I, were all pretty close. I’ve always just been so grateful they would share their dad with me a little. It always meant a lot. But there was always plenty of his enthusiasm to share.
His examples and his joy and his curiosity and his enthusiasm go with us. The rest is up to us.
22
Jul 24
Jul 24
Visitation
We spent yesterday evening traveling. A car, a plane, another car. Dinner on the road from a generous burger place that fed us even as they closed. This evening, we stood on a cement floor for hours and hours. Five hours. Seeing faces old and new. Mostly old. Recollecting good times, trying to recollect some of those old faces. A lot of that is hard. I don’t mean the floor.
19
Jul 24
Jul 24
The 1944 Glomerata, part three
It is Friday, and, around here, we get in our time machine and we go home on Fridays. We return once more to a time now 80 years behind us. These are a few of the photos that I found interesting in the 1944 Glomerata, the yearbook of my alma mater.
In 1944, the war loomed over everything, and we’re seeing that in this yearbook. As we saw in the last installment, the local barbers had put an advertisement in the paper urging civilians to get their hair cuts during the week, allowing the service men in town to get in and out in their limited weekend free time. The war was everywhere, even in what we often think of as the carefree days of college.
Which isn’t to say that there was no fun. This guy was having fun. The girls seemed to be enjoying the conversation. It’s a filler photo, sitting around the class headshots. There’s no caption here, so we don’t know what they were discussing, or where this was or how uncomfortable he might have been. But, whatever it was, he didn’t mind.
This, we would say today, is so meta.
“The Rains Came” was a 1939 movie — it took a while for film canisters to move around back then. The summary, via IMDb, “In India, a married British aristocrat is reunited with an old flame, but she truly has her sights set on a handsome surgeon.” Starring Myrna Loy, Tyrone Power and George Brent, it was nominated for six Academy Awards, winning Best Special Effects. The movie features an earthquake and massive rains and floods. They used 33 million gallons of water to make the movie, roughly the same amount of rain you could see in a good spring rain just down the street from where this photo was taken.
Another no caption photo. Which is a shame, I want to know more about those socks and shoes.
One of the rules is that we have to feature every bicycle. This is a terrific composition. And if you look closely inside the background of the rear wheel you’ll see what I believe is the top of Hargis Hall. It’d be difficult to recreate this photo today because of newer buildings and tree growth.
In a just world, one of these women kept her book and dogeared the pages where she appeared. Some years later one of her granddaughters pulled that book off the shelf, where it had sat quietly down the hall for a good long while. She leafed through the book and then stopped when she got to page 101 and saw a familiar face.
Many giggles were had as the grandmother tried to remember the moment and told stories about her friend. Maybe they stayed in touch. Maybe she called over and they had a laugh they’d waited a few decades to share.
This isn’t a generational thing, but if we today say the youth have it rough, it’s worth pointing out that these people were surrounded by propaganda posters like this. That little bit of masonry on the right side tells us this was a blood drive sign up, or some such, right at the gates to campus.
Also on campus, as we’ve previously learned, was the ASTP. (Not to be confused with the ROTC.) The Army’s Specialized Training Program came about when General George C. Marshall realized that there were shortages throughout his army. Universities became part of the service chain for service men. In ASTP, men already in uniform, or people headed that way, were enrolled in professional and technical classes. ASTP students took up to two years of classes in foreign languages, engineering, medicine and more. More than 800 headshots filled this section of the yearbook, which was 20 pages in the Glomerata.
So it wasn’t just the posters or the news, but all of these men marching from building to building in formation.
The war was everywhere, even right outside the dorms. This is Broun Hall, which was built in 1938. Today it’s a co-ed dorm that houses 96 students. Back then … it probably wasn’t a co-ed dorm.
Not all of those ASTP guys were in the Army. Some just drifted up from the Gulf and marched around in their Navy dungarees until someone told them what to do.
I saved this one for last. The face jumped right out at me. The look is just about right, too, though here he is so obviously looking into the future. And the future was an impressive one. This is Pete Turnham, a senior from Abanda (which was just a place that a rail line ran to and little more). He was studying agriculture. His Wikipedia page says he was born in an equally small nowhere, nine miles south.
Turnham was in the ROTC and went into the Army right after graduation. He became a lieutenant and then a company commander in George Patton’s Third Army. After the fighting was over, he found himself in charge of protecting a castle with a lot of stolen art. If you read the book, or see the movie, “The Monuments Men,” you would see where Turnham found himself.
I’m not sure when Turnham came home, the Third Army stayed in Europe until 1947. When he did, he worked for a decade at Extension, and started his own business. He served on the local school board, and then ran for the state house in 1958, where he served for 40 years — longer than anyone. He served alongside nine governors. He kept his business up for the rest of his days. He called himself a workaholic. But he was a family man, too. He met his wife in college, in 1940. They had four children and were married for an amazing 73 years until she died in 2016. Together, they had four children, seven grandchildren and six great-grandchildren when he passed away. He was widely celebrated in the news obituaries that announced his death in 2019. He was remembered as a man of true service, the kind of politician you wanted to have representing you.
That’s enough for now. All of these photos from 1944 photos live in the Glomerata section, of course. You can see others, here. Or, to just see the beautiful covers, go here. The university stores their complete collection here.
