VISITING THE WILLIAMS GENE POOL

Like most families, my mother’s family has only seen group gatherings over the past years at funerals. It’s always a treat, even under those circumstances, to see the whole family together. So why did we wait so long to have a reunion?

Except for my mom and Aunt Nell, the anchors of the family have all gone. Their children, the “first cousins” have always played well with each other and savored the little time they’ve spent with each other. We’ve all grown up and had families and missed out on each other’s lives and children. It’s now up to us to keep the family unity going and try and pass on family heritage and stories we lived and have heard. Hopefully, our kids will build enough of a relationship that they will want to continue meeting and telling the stories.

For years it was important for my mom and dad to “go home” and visit everyone they could in the two day trip. That was impossible since mom had 7 siblings, and dad had 8. All those aunts and uncles and cousins were best visited at the grandparents’ home. Those gatherings were filled with the laughter of numerous children chasing through the house and yard, and with the best “country” grub ever served!

For the Williams extended family, Grandmother Williams’ house was always the focal point.

Those weekend gatherings are etched in my memory, although most have merged into one or two events. There are a few black and white photos of us kids, here and there, that were immortalized by Brownie Hawkeye cameras.

When grandmother was gone the focal point, for my family at least, sort of went to my Aunt Melinea’s house, where my cousins Ann and Brenda often gathered, making it seem like “home” to me. Other family members would drop by some visits, but for the most part the rest of the aunts and uncles and cousins were seen less frequently. I lost touch with them, having gone off to war, getting married, and college, and even though they were marrying and having babies, they remained little 10-year old kids in my mind.

Later, and I’m not sure why, the focal point shifted to Uncle Tom’s. He loved to have fun and his lakeside home made a perfect place for family to gather. The most fun for me were the November University of Tennessee vs. Alabama football gatherings, complete with his hot chili and warm welcoming manner. Tom would slap his elephant with each touchdown (Roll Tide) and I would slap Smokey (Rocky Top)! Back and forth the dueling mascots would sing out until someone lost, and, in those days, it was usually him! Unfortunately, that has changed and...and I miss him so much.

Now, with Uncle Tom gone, there is no longer a focal point for Williams gathering. The gatherings from now on will probably be church social rooms, community centers, or, in the case of the most recent gathering, a senior center. The only problem with that is that these events will, at most, be annual events. An era has passed that could only be brought back by someone, like Uncle Tom, stepping up and making it a point to allow family to mess up their house more than once a year. Alas, it seems, me included, that we’re all just too busy these days.

One shining light for us though, seems to be email and Facebook. These modern, impersonal tools, are beginning to help us stay in touch. I suppose if there is anything redeeming in the modern technological age, these tools are it.

I’ve posted some family shots on Facebook, and sent numerous others via email, so the event was well documented. Other photos will dwindle in as pocket camera and cellphone shots are distributed.

My son Corey accompanied me on the 300+ mile trip to the 2010 Williams Reunion. As a small boy, he made a few friends with “second cousins”, but from about the age of 10 on he has had no contact. So, it was rewarding to him to go back to our “home” and see family. Maybe one day his girls will also come and make some new family ties.

I took Corey on the “Tri-cities” tour of Florence, Sheffield, and Tuscumbia, Alabama, which has to include TVA’s Wilson and Wheeler Dams, and the all important feast at Walton’s! Walton's Restaurant, in the big city of Elgin’s Crossroads (Hwy 101), has the best fried catfish and hush puppies I’ve ever tasted. Corey wasn’t quite sure that was true until he actually sat down and tasted it. After that, I think he was finished before I downed my first piece!

They also have, what is described as the best BBQ in the Shoals area, but I have yet to try it. The fish being so good, and I only get down there once or twice a year, always wins out!

On Friday afternoon, after checking into the Hampton in Florence, we drove the loop from Florence to Wilson and Wheeler Dams and on to Walton's. From atop the Renaissance Tower, at the Shoals Hotel, we looked out over the “Tri-cities” area and down at Wilson Dam. We had to pay for the photos from the Tower by buying an $8 drink, but the view from the revolving restaurant was spectacular! The skies were so blue last weekend and the company couldn’t be beat!

Corey reminisced about our camping and motel trips back in the days we deer hunted. Those memories must be as special to him as they are me.

We left Florence on Sunday morning and traveled the “old road” up through Lexington, where I was born. I showed him Great Grandfather Johnston’s old home place, and reminded him that I was born upstairs in Grandpa’s bed. The old place looked pretty good with the addition of modern siding. However, it will always be the old shot-gun southern home sitting on rock supports, surrounded by Alabama red dirt, with its lightning rods gleaming in the sun. My mind didn’t even register the satellite dish hanging off the side...I only noticed it after examining my photos when I got home!

We made the short trek down Williams Road, crossed into Tennessee, and stopped at the Second Creek Church where there are both Williams and Mashburn kinfolk buried. Corey was so moved that he had to find a big tree behind the meeting shed! He felt much better after that relieving moment! ‘Nuff said!

On up the road we stopped at the old Mashburn farm, where I spent boyhood summers working the farm with Pa Mashburn. I rang the doorbell, but Aunt Louise, who still lives there, was gone to church. So, we walked around the home place and took some photos of the old barn, where I spent rainy days as a boy, and the house. It was so strange how small the front porch seemed to me. In my memory, that porch was a large as an airport runway! Strange how everything was so much bigger back then...’course I was so much smaller then!

In the big city of Five Points, just two miles up the road, I photographed the old Mashburn store my uncle owned. It sits across the five-point intersection from the new Mashburn General Store where Aunt Louise still works. However, she was at church, like I said, and we missed her.

I told Corey stories of my summers working in the store and about the old men that sat around on drink crates whittling and swapping knives. Across the street, in front of the new store, were old men sitting around doing the same thing. Nothing seems to have changed in Five Points, Tennessee.

The old cotton gin is all gone and only two of the old warehouses remain. It’s sad that Corey missed those days. He would have loved to have ridden a wagon with Pa Mashburn up the dirt road to the gin to sell his cotton, or to play on the bales stacked in warehouses. He would have loved crawling through the tunnels in the bales of straw in the barn, or listening to the Grand Ole Opry on a battery powered radio, while sitting next to a flickering “coal oil” lamp.

He would have loved sinking into a “feather mattress”, up over his ears, under 3 quilts listening to the rain hitting the tin roof at Grandmother Williams’ house. He wouldn’t have enjoyed the trip to the outhouse in the dark, ‘cause I know I didn’t!

On the way home we passed through Lawrenceburg, Tennessee. It was Lawrenceburg where the old Mashburn family did their “trading”, and in the old days it was an all day, if not 2 day, wagon trip. I remember Ma Mashburn excitedly exclaiming once when we brought her back home in dad’s car, “Lordy be, we got back the same day we left!”

Corey enjoyed that story, and the look around town. I showed him the statue of Davey Crockett in the town square. I remember a News Sentinel reporter once stated that there was no statue to David Crockett, so dad sent him a photo of this one in Lawrenceburg. The reporter corrected his story!

Yes, they are all gone...turned to vague memories. However, these memories, as trivial as they may be to others, need to be told and retold. They are a record of what we were and are, what we thought and think. They make up a history of the family...our roots. We must not let them slip away like we have allowed the memories of those that came before us to do.

What I wouldn’t give for a file full of jpeg photos of Williams, Johnston, Morrison, Hammonds, and Mashburn folk running around at family gatherings back through the 18, 19, and 20th centuries. They didn’t have what we have, so it can’t be - the memories lost brings a tear to my eye.

Families don’t just exist in their genes, they exist in memories. The stories must be told or we, or they, have not lived at all.

May God bless and keep the Williams family until we meet again.

To see photos of my "down home" visit, CLICK HERE!

ALL GOOD THINGS MUST END

A little piece of my past has been torn down. This old 40,000 gallon water tank, erected sometime around the mid-thirties, was the most recognizable landmark in Five Points, Tennessee. The pictures show a very old structure that had the town name, and few girlfriends names painted across it many times.

Besides the tank, there was a cotton gin, and my uncle’s general store, where I worked many a summer as a kid.

Rust has just about taken over this little farming community center, but the memories in my mind are as fresh as the day they were born.

These great shots were sent to me by my cousin Mark, whose mother still operates the new general store there. Mark works in the Tennessee Department of Environment and Conservation’s Division of Underground Storage Tanks, as an environmental specialist. He assured me he had nothing to do with the destruction of this old landmark!

Mark said except for the rust that fell out of it and a few bullet holes, the structure appeared very sound.

Apparently the property, including the tank and cotton gin, were recently auctioned. He fears the gin will also meet the same demise soon.

Five Points is where my grandparents settled, and began farming, after coming by covered wagon from Boaz, Alabama, sometime in the early twenties, or just a short time after my dad was born in 1919. Five Points is at the intersection of Five Points-Liberty, Mockerson, Evans, and Legg Roads, some twenty miles south of Lawrenceburg, Tennessee. Lawrenceburg is the hometown of Fred Thompson, and where I started the first grade!

Maybe soon, we will have a family reunion and we can again refresh our rusted memories!

GRANDPA TWIDDLED HIS THUMBS

Great-grandpa Johnston remains one of the most memorable characters I ever met. He was in his nineties, wore a black wide-brimmed felt hat - adjusted evenly over each ear, black wool trousers – held up with black suspenders, and a white dress shirt most days; all of which contrasted with his snow-white handlebar mustache.

To me, he was a legendary artifact out of the old west and could have easily been since he was born in 1866. I suppose it was the black hat he customarily wore that first put the cowboy ideas in my imagination. I have since discovered, besides running a large farm, he supplemented his income by driving freight and supplies between Lexington, AL and Lawrenceburg, TN by wagon. Therefore, this just seems to cement my idea of him as being from the old west days – I can see him now, black hat and all, hollering “Gid’up there!” as he traveled a dusty road through the badlands of northern Alabama!

I also heard tales that he took no crap from anyone in his youth, so he could have easily lived up to my expectations. I do not think they actually carried sidearms in little Alabama towns as they did out west, but with his usual attire, all he needed in my imagination was a silver star over his heart, and a Colt 44.40 strapped to his side.

It is purported that Jesse James rode through Lexington once; some say he actually robbed the bank there, but a holdup in Muscle Shoals is all that is documented.

I was born in his bed, quite an honor for me, on his farm near the Alabama/Tennessee state line, and we must have stayed with great-grandpa and my grandmother (his daughter) for several weeks after my birth. My mother was raised on this farm and, as the story goes, my dad walked fourteen miles (round trip) from his home in Tennessee to see my mom several times a week while they were “courting.”

At meals was the only time I saw great-grandpa take that black hat off. I remember the red ring it left behind on his skin just below the snow-white hair that matched his mustache.

He loved his coffee, biscuits, and gravy, both of which caused him considerable trouble with this “tache!” He always “saucered and blowed” his coffee, never using the cup, and then he ritually wiped each side of the handlebar with his napkin, tweaking each end before returning to eating. The gravy, of course, cost him much more effort, but he only slowed briefly to wipe and twist it clean.

I can remember his slow bites, how he chewed long, savoring each morsel, and a little skin tag on one of this eyelids that I watched go up and down when he blinked. Strange the things we remember sometimes about those we love.

Great-grandpa was also a thumb twiddler, he would sit for hours on the front porch, with his fingers interlocked - the thumbs circling around and around, only touching at the last joints, as he watched grandchildren, the traffic, and the day go by. Mostly, he twiddled his thumbs toward his fingers, but sometimes he would reverse them, and on special occasion, when he knew I was watching ask, “Can you do each in opposite directions?” It can be done, but that causes stress instead of relieving it!

If you never tried thumb twiddling, then you are missing a very therapeutic activity. Those that used to know me when I worked know that I often sat and listened to their ideas, rantings, and circumlocutions as I slowly twiddled my way through the BS meetings. What they did not know was that my great-grandpa Johnston saved them from many an emotional tongue-lashing!