found out that he'd rented a storage building in which he kept 40 years of daily newspapers, just in case he needed to do some research when he moved into the White House.
As suspicious as our Uncle Tillman was of the Russians, our Uncle Tim might have gone him one better. He never combed his hair, and spent most days in his basement, hard at work on a universal language based on numbers. He wanted to have an alternative ready when the Ruskies took over. In his spare time, he invented toys.
In 1955, some 11 years after he came back home from the war, one of his inventions – a battery powered 12-inch toy bus that, amazingly, turned right or left in response to a little whistle that came with it – was marketed in the Sears Catalog.
Thousands of the buses were sold, but Uncle Tim didn't share in the profits. Sears kept it all, explaining that it cost a lot of money to print the catalog they were ordered from.
He was laid to rest in a plaid shirt with his hair left uncombed, and everyone talked about how he looked so natural.
The family's big success story was Uncle Chet, who owned a home-building company on Long Island in New York. On his only visit that I remember, he rolled up in a Cadillac and got out puffing a big cigar and boasting about this and that.
He married a Russian woman, and they had three daughters, one of whom moved to Alaska, the Last Frontier. (If she was seeking peace and isolation, she should have waited for outer space to open up as the Final Frontier, because Aunt Gladys found her in Alaska and moved in with her for a while.)
One time at a family reunion, Earl (who, you recall, married Aunt Sissy), was called upon to say grace. "Dear Lord," he said, "We're thankful today that we ain't got no convicted felons in the family -- at least none that I know about."
We still don't have any, at least none that I know about, and I still have a lot of fond memories of all those aunts and uncles.
Since there were so many, I lost track of some of them. But I believe they were fairly normal working-class folks with Southern accents and a shared affinity for fried chicken and sweet iced tea.
If you've ever sat down at a Cracker Barrel restaurant on Sunday after church, you might have seen some of them at the next table over, maybe talking and laughing about the rest of us.
We Don't Have a Sputnik
Recalling the 1950's, most folks who lived through them reminisce fondly about the good ol' days of a peaceful and prosperous decade. That's not exactly how I remember them.
Way down in Waycross, our entire way of life was changing, under attack by forces far and near. All the news was about racial integration sweeping throughout the Deep South, and about Russia threatening us.
On the home front, some black people wanted to send their kids to the white schools, which we were told would surely lead us to ruin. Meanwhile, my older brother, Wiz, told me that the communists over in Russia were seeking world domination.
About half the people in our town were black, and since I was only a kid, I didn't understand why they had their own schools, churches, and neighborhoods, even if their houses were mostly rundown. It seemed they had their own world and that white people had to stay away. None of that made any sense to me since all men were created equally, according to what we learned in grade school.
Since our parents had told us more than once not to be too friendly with any black people, they were a mystery and we were more afraid of them than we were of the Russians; after all, the black folks lived just across the railroad tracks from us.
During a lull in Dad's home building business, he took over the train depot restaurant, which had gone under when the passenger traffic died out. When my brother Wiz asked him why he had all black employees, he said they were good workers.
The first black person I remember was Lizzie, who worked the counter at my Dad’s restaurant. She got along with everyone and was always really nice to me. Whenever I came in, she'd treat me to a special hot dog.
I was in second grade, and wanted to touch her to see if her color would rub off. One day, she hugged me and I was amazed that her skin was soft and that I didn’t turn black from her embrace. I then realized that she was a nice person with different colored skin, a person just like any of us.
After a few months, Dad gave up on the restaurant business and I went back to eating Mom's cooking, which none of us was too thrilled about. But we began to fare a little better when Dad came home one day and announced that he'd landed a commercial project: He was building a community room onto a church -- and not just any church, but a black one.
“I thought they were poor and couldn’t afford new things,” I said. “Don’t worry," he told me. "I got paid in advance.”
Several months later, Dad announced that the church addition was finished and that all of us were going to the dedication ceremony. This seemed strange to me, as he didn’t believe in religion and never went to our all white church.
On the Sunday of the dedication, the whole family, dressed up for the occasion, nervously entered the Tabernacle of Praise. To our surprise, they prayed pretty much the same prayers and used the same hymn books as ours, but they sang a lot better from them than we did. They also seemed to have a good time, in contrast to our church, where the preacher said that everyone was bad and going straight to Hell.
Some of them were dressed nicer than us, and the preacher drove a big Cadillac, while we had a Ford. They called my Dad "Mister Charlie" and said a special prayer for him, but I didn't think even a special one could have done him much good.
In the new community room, we six white people had dinner with more than 100 members of the black congregation. Since they were all so friendly to us and the food was really good, I asked if we could come back next week instead of going to the Church of Christ we attended. The answer was no.
The black children had been nice to us, too, and I wondered what would happen if we all went to the same school. Maybe that would be good for everyone. I was already having a problem at my school, where I was not good in English.
Sure, I could speak our Southern dialect with ease, but written English was different. For one thing, a lot words that were spelled the same way had more than one meaning. For example, fair could be used to describe the weather or it could mean the county fair, with rides and cotton candy. Then there were words that sounded the same but were spelled differently, such as the steel wheels on boxcars, which didn't have hubcaps you could steal.
And then, some perfectly fine typical Southern sentences would turn out to be wrong. For example, “I'm fixin' to fix the fixin's” had to be translated into “I'm about to prepare the turkey dressing” for it to be proper English. I found it all too confusing, and wondered if English at a black school would make more sense and be easier to learn.
On top of that, I was worried that I might have to learn a whole new alphabet. Wiz was already studying Russian, just in case the communists took over the United States. He told me that they had 15 strange looking letters, and another 18 that could be English, but that they didn’t have an N or an L, and that one letter was like our R but turned backward.
I didn't have such trouble with history and geography. I learned that Russia was a backwater country that became important only after it helped defeat Nazi Germany in WWII. Then the Russians took over all of Eastern Europe and kept half of Germany, and
