The Annals of Newberry IV

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In this vale of tears, life is full of disappointments. The inconsiderate governor of South Carolina inflicted a severe one upon the good citizens of Newberry.

A man named Graham once stole a negro, at that time a capital offence, from Joseph Caldwell, but he was soon caught and lodged in jail. A crazy negro man by the name of Rob, belonging to Patrick Caldwell, had been in jail some time for safe keeping before Graham was put in.

After Graham had been in jail awhile, Rob asked him one day why he did not get out. His reply was that he did not know how.

Rob then told him that when Coates came in with his supper he must have both hands full of sand and stand behind the door, watch his chance and, after Coates had opened the door and entered the room, just as he turns around to close it, to throw the sand into his eyes.

Graham did so. Coates dropped the candle and supper to get the sand out of his eyes, and Graham passed around him and made his escape.

Rob was so glad that he got out and made his escape that he yelled as loud as he could for Graham to go it! And kept it up until quite a crowd of men collected at the jail to see what was the matter.

After his escape Graham went to a little island in Broad River, where he was soon discovered, and Mr. Joseph Campbell sent a negro man to the island to bring him out. He was taken back to jail, tried at the next term of court, pleaded guilty, and sentenced by the judge to be hanged on a certain day,

When the day came around a great many people went to see him hang. H. H. Kinnard, the Sheriff, took him to the gallows, put the cap on him. The spectators looking to see him swing in a few minutes, to their great surprise his pardon, or rather commutation of sentence, was read by the Sheriff under the gallows with his cap on.

Then the cap and rope were removed and the Sheriff gave him a very severe whipping and told him he had to leave the State.

After it was all over and Graham was discharged, men came galloping into town cursing, and swearing that they had ridden twenty miles to see him hang and the Sheriff would not hang him.

(I wonder how you “steal a negro,” unless he wants to be stolen. And what do you do with him after you have stolen him? And why was it a capital offense?)

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I say it’s spinach, and I say to hell with it!

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Spinach

 

As we all know,  a classist-racist-corporate-Republican conspiracy has created food deserts in inner cities so that it is impossible for the poor to buy the Brussels sprouts, broccoli, and kale that they so ardently desire. Instead they are forced to buy Cheetos and french fries to fatten corporate profits, as the poor themselves grow fatter and fatter.

The NYT finally admits that you can lead the poor to a salad bar, but you can’t make them eat. They want pop tarts.

(Digression: I have had problems with kidney stone, and my urologist gave me an old diet plan [no doubt from his medical school days] which advised giving up whole grain cereals and green vegetables and substituting pop tarts. I told him I couldn’t believe he was giving this suggested diet to his patients. You might not get kidney stones; but you would become obese and diabetic.)

Margaret Sanger-Katz admits: “Giving the Poor Easy Access to Healthy Food Doesn’t Mean They’ll Buy It.”  (See also this and this)

The Federal government has spent $500,000,000  to encourage grocery stores to locate in poor areas; but the availability of fresh foods makes no difference in the diets of the poor. They don’t like spinach, and they aren’t going to eat it.

The article claims fresh food is more expensive. Is healthy food always more expensive than junk food? It is true that the Federal government heavily subsides sugar. Cheap sugar helps make people diabetic and obese which in turn creates health problems which the Federal government spends vast amounts of money to deal with. But even with the Federal government helping to make junk food cheap, it is still possible to eat well: beans, corn, brown rice and such cost little. Vegetables, spices, and a little meat or fish make things palatable. In many parts of the world (like Mexico) the diets of the poor have worsened and they have become obese as they become more prosperous and buy expensive processed food.

When the researchers looked at shoppers with lower levels of income and education living in rich neighborhoods with accessible healthy food, they found that their shopping mimicked that of low-education, less educated people in poorer neighborhoods. (The reverse was true, too:  Richer,  more educated shoppers in poor neighborhoods looked more like rich shoppers in poor neighborhoods)

Education correlates with food preferences more strongly than income does.

Poorer families bought less healthy food than richer ones. But a bigger gap was found by families with and without a college education.

Educated people are educated because they have enough self-discipline to put up with schools, and they also take the long view. Even if they don’t have much money, they will buy healthier food.

People who should know better have long been making excuses for the harmful eating habits of the poor. George Orwell wrote:

“Would it not be better if they spent more money on wholesome things like oranges and wholemeal bread or if they even, like the writer of the letter to the New Statesman, saved on fuel and ate their carrots raw? Yes, it would, but the point is that no ordinary human being is ever going to do such a thing. The ordinary human being would sooner starve than live on brown bread and raw carrots. And the peculiar evil is this, that the less money you have, the less inclined you feel to spend it on wholesome food. A millionaire may enjoy breakfasting off orange juice and Ryvita biscuits; an unemployed man doesn’t. Here the tendency of which I spoke at the end of the last chapter comes into play. When you are unemployed, which is to say when you are underfed, harassed, bored, and miserable, you don’t want to eat dull wholesome food. You want something a little bit ‘tasty’. There is always some cheaply pleasant thing to tempt you.”

British food of any sort does not tempt me, but even the poor should take some responsibility for their lives and what they eat.

As most commenters on the NYT article pointed out, the poor don’t eat vegetables because they don’t like them. Stores in poor neighborhoods don’t sell fresh food because shoppers won’t buy it.

Many commentators suggest education. Schools used to teach home economics. It should (under a new name: Health in the Home? ) be a required subject for both boys and girls. But see my blog on Brain Development: the poor have a problem with brain development because, in part, of their child raising styles.

It is hard to change eating habits. People grow up liking to food they had as children; if they grow up on junk food, they will continue eating junk food, they will feed it to their children, etc.

Why do Asians prefer white rice? Because it has a higher status, because it (like white bread) is easier to chew and digest, and mostly it is what they have always eaten. Pregnant women, who desperately need the thiamine in brown rice, look forward to eating high-status white rice, rather than the brown rice that is the food of the poor. Thiamine deficiency also causes beriberi.

The American diet seems to be especially pernicious for people of African descent.

Researchers asked 20 African-Americans in Pittsburgh and 20 rural South Africans to switch diet for two week. The Americans ate a traditional African diet, high in fiber and low in fat, with plenty of fruits, vegetables, beans and cornmeal, and very little meat.

The Africans ate the equivalent of American fast food – a diet high in fat with generous quantities of meat and cheese.

“We made them eat fried chicken, burgers, and fries…They loved it.”

The researchers discovered that

A change in diet for just two weeks alters gut bacteria in ways that may reduce risk of colon cancer.

This type of cancer is extremely serious:

In the United States, the second-highest number of cancer deaths is from colon cancer, a malignant tumor in the colon or rectum, the lower part of the human digestive system.  African-Americans are at especially high risk for the disease, which experts say is diet-related in more than 90 percent of cases.

Why do people want to eat things that cause that hurt their health? Why do people drink too much, or take drugs?

Our desires are disordered – all of them, to some extent or another, and need to be subject to reason. But the common human tendency to give in to desires  has been exacerbated by the “if it feels good, do it” attitude that has become the pop culture of the US. Sexual desires are self-validating: homosexual acts or premarital sex can’t be wrong because people feel like doing it. Desire is self-validating, and cannot be subject to the scrutiny of reason. Would you like another helping of French fries to go with the three cheeseburgers: go ahead, if you tastes good, is must be OK.

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The Annals of Newberry III

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The inhabitants of “the mirth-loving village of Newberry” always loved a good joke. They also loved a good fight. Sometimes they combined the two.

Newberry had a store with a piazza in front; it also had a hotel with a piazza in front.

After supper, when there was a large crowd collected in the long piazza of the hotel, some mischievous boys quietly toed a rope extending from one piazza to the other, suspending it about one foot above the ground. They then went down where Ed Scott’s now is and made a loud noise and uproar as if there was a tremendous fight going on. About fifteen or twenty men, anxious to see the fight, ran as fast as they could to get there before it ended. The rope piled them all, and suddenly the noise ceased and all was still. And as suddenly it flashed through the minds of all the fallen that they had been made the victims of a practical joke, and there was no fight.

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Poverty and Brain Development

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Billions of dollars have been spent on the war on poverty; in Sandtown, the Baltimore neighborhood that was damaged by the riots, twenty years ago Jim Rouse of the Rouse Company spearheaded an investment of $130,00,000 in public and private finds, so the neighborhood has hardly suffered from neglect. Baltimore is in the top tier of cities in the amount of money it spends on public education.  But generations of poor people are growing up uneducated and unemployable – and it is not a question of race, because poor counties in Kentucky are as bad off or worse than city slums (although it is hard to get a riot going in the Kentucky hollows).

Psychologists and sociologists have tried to identify the root of the problem. It seems to be in the earliest upbringing of children.

The brain is most plastic in the first three years of life, and these years are therefore crucial for the future life of the child in education and employment. Researchers have discovered major differences in the way that different socio-economic classes raise their children in during the first years of life.

Betty Hart and Todd R. Risley at the University of Kansas selected a cross section of families and recorded their verbal interactions with their children.

Hart and Risley recruited 42 families to participate in the study including 13 high-income families, 10 families of middle socio-economic status, 13 of low socio-economic status, and 6 families who were on welfare. Monthly hour-long observations of each family were conducted from the time the child was seven months until age three. Gender and race were also balanced within the sample.

They then extrapolated what the differences amounted to in the first three years of life and published their findings in The Early Catastrophe: the Thirty Million Word Gap by Age 3 (analyzed at a Rice University site).

Children from families on welfare heard about 616 words per hour, while those from working class families heard around 1,251 words per hour, and those from professional families heard roughly 2,153 words per hour.

Words in four yaers

This means by age four a child in a middle-class family had heard 30,000,000 more words than a child from a welfare family.

Words per child

What that means is that there is a gap, extremely difficult to surmount, in the educability of the child.

Within a child’s early life the caregiver is responsible for most, if not all, social simulation and consequently language and communication development. As a result, how parents interact with their children is of great consequence given it lays a critical foundation impacting the way the children process future information many years down the road. This study displays a clear correlation between the conversation styles of parents and the resulting speech of their children.

Not only does the number of word differ, the type of words differs:

What they found was that higher-income families provided their children with far more words of praise compared to children from low-income families. Children’s vocabulary differs greatly across income groups. Conversely, children from low-income families were found to endure far more instances of negative reinforcement compared to their peers from higher-income families. Children from families with professional backgrounds experienced a ratio of six encouragements for every discouragement. For children from working-class families this ratio was two encouragements to one discouragement. Finally, children from families on welfare received on average two discouragements for every encouragement.

The cumulative effect is huge:

by age four, the average child from a family on welfare will hear 125,000 more words of discouragement than encouragement. When compared to the 560,000 more words of praise as opposed to discouragement that a child from a high-income family will receive, this disparity is extraordinarily vast.

The effect of this disparity in early education is also highly significant:

To ensure that these findings had long-term implications, 29 of the 42 families were recruited for a follow-up study when the children were in third grade. Researchers found that measures of accomplishment at age three were highly indicative of performance at the ages of nine and ten on various vocabulary, language development, and reading comprehension measures. Thus, the foundation built at age three had a great bearing on their progress many years to come.

When these children have their own children, they will raise them in the way they were raised:

Even patterns of parenting were already observable among the children. When we listened to the children, we seemed to hear their parents speaking; when we watched the children play at parenting their dolls, we seemed to see the future of their own children.

Nor are differences simply psychological. Early stimulation in life has been shown to help the brains of animals develop, and the differences in the amount and type of words that children hear may at least in part  explain the brain differences that have been observed between poor children and better-off children. (see here and here and here),

“We know from nonhuman animal studies that being left in cages without toys and exercise, without stimulation and opportunities to explore, can cause a decrease in the generation of neurons and synapses in the brain,”

If the mother refrains from use of alcohol, tobacco, and drugs, the brains of poor children and better-off children are the same at birth. But then they start to diverge, as MRI studies have shown:

By age 4, children in families living with incomes under 200 percent of the federal poverty line have less gray matter — brain tissue critical for processing of information and execution of actions — than kids growing up in families with higher incomes.

The differences among children of the poor became apparent through analysis of hundreds of brain scans from children beginning soon after birth and repeated every few months until 4 years of age. Children in poor families lagged behind in the development of the parietal and frontal regions of the brain — deficits that help explain behavioral, learning and attention problems more common among disadvantaged children.

Poorer children have already had far less development through praise and verbal interactions. They are then put into an environment in which they do not fare well, and they have also not developed the brain centers for self-control.

The difference in brain growth increases with age:

“You start seeing the separation in brain growth between the children living in poverty and the more affluent children increase over time, which really implicates the postnatal environment.”

Children whose brains have fared to develop do not do well in school. They then become unemployable. Boys especially go down this path. They become violent, end up in prison, and are made even less employable.

90% of brain development occurs by age four. The brain is still plastic after age four, but its plasticity decreases with age, as any adult who has tried to learn a foreign language can testify.

To some extent, simple stimulation, talking, reading, can help overcome this lack of early brain development, but the older the child the harder it is to overcome the gap.

The key period in a child’s life is from conception to age four. How can children from poor backgrounds be given a brain development that will enable them to benefit from education and eventually be employed?

First of all, pregnant women have to be convinced or cajoled not to hurt their unborn child by using drugs, alcohol, or tobacco. This is not easy.

Secondly, they have to learn good parenting styles: talking to the child, praising the child, reading to the child.

What this means is that anti-poverty efforts should concentrate on the first years of life. Donna Housman, a psychologist and head of the Beginnings School in Weston, Massachusetts wrote to the New York Times:

Scientific research supports a fundamental approach that is narrowly tailored to the most critical period of life

Indeed, the case studies for early childhood education are remarkable, but most proposals target four-year-olds. Four years is too late when it comes to child development; we can start the learning process much earlier because children are born ready to learn.

How can this be accomplished? There are many obstacles.

Some parents care more about their drugs than their children. The studies by necessity focus on children who live in stable environments and can be tracked, and the verbal interaction study explicitly excluded children whose mothers used drug or had psychological problems. The studies looked at the better-off of the children of the poor, not the children of the lowest underclass.

Either children have to be taken away from the worst parents, or they have to be written off. The parents won’t change.

Many parents will see no reason to change. They were raised in a certain way, and will raise their children that way. It will be difficult to convince such parents that it is in the long-range interest of the children to raise them in a different way. Such parents may love their children, but they discipline them harshly and do not talk to them. Can such parents be persuaded to change?

Churches are the most likely agents for such a change. Parents can be offered help by church members, who can model how to interact with children in a loving, affectionate way. Obviously religions based on the Bible provide a solid basis for reading and story-telling to children.

Other parents want help, and they can be reached through such institutions as Harlem Baby College. Its site explains:

The Baby College gives expectant parents and parents of children ages 0-3 a strong understanding of child development and the skills to raise happy, healthy babies. Through workshops and home visits over the course of a 9-week term, parents gain expertise in a number of areas, including child behavior and safety; communication and intellectual stimulation; linguistic and brain development; and health and nutrition.  The curriculum is also designed to promote a sense of community.  Time is devoted in each class to sharing and discussing personal experiences, thus giving participants an important outlet, a crucial source of support, and an opportunity to learn from their peers.

Every city should have several of these in poor and immigrant neighborhoods.

Although a good portion of the American population dislikes anti-poverty programs, mostly because they do not seem to work or do nothing to prevent anti-social behavior like the Baltimore riots, everyone  (well, almost everyone) loves babies, and would not oppose funding such programs, especially if they head off later and far more expensive problems.

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The Annals of Newberry II

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Newberry Map 1

Everyone likes a good fight, and the family that fights together stays together. Judge O’Neall recounts the story of one such family in Newberry.

A warlike family of many years back, perhaps the Jess Dorvis one, of which I’ve heard my father tell, often had family battles, the father leading one side, the mother on the other and the children dividing. One day, after a set-to in which, as usual, they were only bruised and blood-stained, the chivalrous husband proposed that they finish after the manner of ‘the honorable code.’ ‘You take this gun,’ said he, ‘and I’ll take that; you get behind this post; I will get behind that yonder, and wo will shoot whenever one of us can see enough of the other.’ The wife agreed; they took their places, and when she peeped around the post her husband fired and she fell. He and the boys promptly dug a grave, but when they went to take her to it they found she had risen and gone into the house. To ease their disappointment the father said, ‘Never mind, boys; I’ll fetch her sure next time.’ She was wounded near the eye, but not fatally.

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Freddie Gray, Robert Tucker, and Street Theater in Baltimore

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News articles reported that the police officers who arrested Freddie Gray ignored his claim that he was injured.

Why would they do such a thing?

Perhaps this story helps explain the failure of the police to pay attention to Gray:

A 23-year-old man who dropped a gun that went off and caused uproar at Pennsylvania and W. North avenues Monday was charged with a gun violation, police said.

Robert Edward “Meech” Tucker, was taken to a hospital but was uninjured in the incident, which happened one week after violent rioters looted and torched the CVS Pharmacy store on the same corner.

Police said they received a report that Tucker was carrying a gun at the corner at about 3:20 p.m., and saw him on a CityWatch camera “displaying characteristics of an armed person.” They called the police Foxtrot helicopter in case he tried to flee, then approached him, police said. He ran west on W. North Ave and “kept reaching and holding his dip area [front waistband],” police said.

He tossed the Ruger Blackhawk .357 handgun to the ground and it went off, police said. Tucker fell to the ground, where he was arrested as he “began to scream and carry on as if he was injured and/or shot,” police said.

Assuming Tucker had been shot by police, the crowd began to throw objects including bricks and water bottles at the officers. The officers called for backup and a medic, who determined Tucker had not been injured but took him to the hospital “anyway to ensure he had absolutely no injuries,” police said.

Tucker was discharged from the hospital and booked, police said.

Fox News helpfully reported that another black man had been shot. Not exactly.

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The Annals of Newberry I

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Newberry Downtown

The Boyces stem from up-country South Carolina, specifically Newberry. The Boyces were a merry lot and fond of jokes.

Newberry Map

Scots-Irish have an undeserved reputation for being dour. (“Smile for the camera, Uncle Angus.”  “I am smiling.”) The Annals of Newberry contain many anecdotes which convey the atmosphere of semi-frontier America; one can see where Mark Twain got his material.

Annals of Newberry

The courts tried without much success to maintain their dignity.

A Case of Teddiration

I have heard some other instances of summary punishment, one of which shows the rude manners of the day. In ’87 or ’87, or thereabouts, a cake baker, known better by the nickname of Billy Behold, than his real name, William English, was engaged in an affray, in front of Coate’s house, where the court was in session. The Sheriff and his posse of constables were sent out to suppress it. They seized Billy Behold, and dragged him in. Unable to get him through the crowd, thronging around the temporary bar, they lifted him up over the heads of the people, and threw him down among the lawyers. He was ordered to gaol. Next morning he made his peace by telling their worships, “behold, behold,” he said, “may it please your worships, I was a little teddirated.” A   strange word, but perhaps a pretty good one to describe drunkenness.

The Button War

Carnes and Shaw were rival lawyers, at the county court bar of Newberry— Carnes was a very large man — Shaw a very small one. Carnes was remarkable tor his wit and good humor — Shaw for his pride and petulance. The latter when irritated could make no argument. On one occasion, in a case of some consequence. Carnes had made the opening speech, and sat down. Shaw arose and commenced his argument alongside of Carnes. When standing, the lapel of the coat of the former was just even with that of the latter. Large buttons, and straight-breasted coats were then the rage. Carnes buttoned a button or two of Shaw’s coat into his, snatched up his hat, jumped up in a great hurry, and walked to the door, dragging, apparently without noticing it, poor Shaw after him. At the door, he affected to have discovered it, for the first time, and looking down at him with apparent surprise, he exclaimed, “Brother popcorn, what mischievous rascal hitched you to me?” The ruse had the effect intended. Shaw, when released, was so enraged he could not make his speech.

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James Petigru Boyce, Baptist Founder

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James Petigru Boyce

James Petigru Boyce

James Petigru Boyce (1827-1888) was the son of Ker Boyce and of Ker’s second wife, Amanda Jane Caroline Johnston. James was named after a political friend of Ker’s, James Petigru, a Unionist Democrat. James’s sister, Mary Miller Boyce, is my wife’s second great grandmother, and James is therefore my wife’s second great grand uncle.

Ker and Amanda were from a Presbyterian background. But Ker’s first wife, Nancy Johnston, was Amanda’s sister, and the Presbyterians therefore refused to witness the marriage. The Baptists however saw no problem and witnessed the marriage. Ker never joined the Baptist church but was sympathetic to it. After hearing a sermon by Basil Manly Sr. on the death of his child, Amanda was converted and became a devout Baptist.

Ker Boyce was the wealthiest man in South Carolina; James had an excellent education and developed cultivated tastes in the arts. As a boy James was heavy set, which limited his participation in sports, although he loved archery, chess, and billiards. James was fond of jokes, especially practical jokes. The upcountry Scots-Irish culture of Newberry, which he inherited, will be the subject of other blogs.

He worked in his father’s dry goods store as a teenager and learned the practicalities of commerce. In May 1845 James, although not yet a church member, was present at the convention in Augusta, Georgia, which formed the Southern Baptist Convention. The break was occasioned by the differences over the liceity of slavery. Some Southerners, stung by the reproaches of their Northern co-religionists, started to defend slavery as a positive good, and North and South parted ways.

James was a voracious reader. He attended Charleston College 1843 to 1845 and then entered Brown University. Brown was a Baptist foundation, and under President Wayland was deeply interested in the spiritual welfare of its students. The college held a fast and students prayed for one another. Wayland was also an abolitionist.

During the spring vacation of 1846 James returned to Charleston by coastal steamer. On the way, he stayed in his stateroom reading the Bible and came under conviction of sin. On April 22, 1846 he was baptized in Charleston. He returned to Brown and worked for revival among the students by means of prayer and argument. In 1847 he graduated from Brown, and determined to be a minister. He edited the Southern Baptist 1848-1849; an edition early in his editorship contained an important announcement: on December 20, 1848 James married Lizzie Llewellyn Ficklen, whom he had met at a wedding in Washington, Georgia, the previous year.

James attended the Presbyterian Theological Seminary at Princeton from 1849 to 1851. There he studied under the Calvinist Charles Hodges. He was called to the ministry and ordained in 1851. Spurgeon called Boyce “the greatest living preacher.” James became pastor of the Baptist Church of Colombia in 1851. Both the building and the congregation were small. In 1853 he persuaded the congregation to allow a melodeon, and then hired a choir leader. In 1854. James’s father Ker died while visiting James in Columbia, and James became the executor of the estate. James resigned his ministry to become a professor at Furman University, where he taught 1855-7, but maintained his connection to the Columbia church and pledged $10,000 to the construction of a new building.

At its dedication, James alluded to the Baptist habit using their buildings for unspecified “sacrilegious” (i.e. profane} purposes.

“It is time for the sake of religious taste and the sacredness of Christian worship, that the voices of the Churches should be raised against the desecration of the objects for which their houses of worship have been built, and of the religious associations with which they are connected.” James maintained that the building should reflect the people, who were the new temple, the dwelling place of the Spirit. He concluded: Let us dedicate it indeed, to the worship of God, to the promulgation of His word, to the administration of His ordinances. Let it be sacred as His chosen dwelling place among his people. Let it tell of Him who was made flesh, and dwelt among us. Let it remind you of the sacred presence of the Spirit in the individual believer. Let it ever bring to view that glorious temple which shall be truly fitted to speak forth the praises of God.”

Columbia First Baptist

This building would soon host an important political event.

The First Baptist Church in Columbia, South Carolina is a Greek Revival building built in 1856.A convention met here on December 17, 1860 which voted unanimously for South Carolina to secede from the United States, leading to the American Civil War.

The Boyce family also helped found and pay for the construction of the Baptist Church on Citadel Square in Charleston.

This new congregation emerged in the mid-nineteenth century as the result of an “interesting revival” which took place in the life of First Baptist in the Spring of 1854. While First Baptist witnessed the conversion of many persons to Christ, a few of its members (twelve in number) were also stirred with evangelistic concern for the unreached persons living in the growing “Upper Wards” of the city. This burden gave birth to a vision for a new church. On the 27th of May, 1854, five couples along with two other men from First Baptist requested letters of dismission from First Baptist so that they might establish a new fellowship in the upper part of the city north of what was once called “Boundary Street” but is better known today as “Calhoun.” On the 29th of May, 1854, this small group along with one additional couple from the Wentworth Street Baptist Church organized themselves into a church. Two days later, the new fellowship was publicly recognized in the lecture room of the First Baptist Church. The young Rev. James P. Boyce, son of the prominent and wealthy Ker Boyce of Charleston and future founder and preached the dedication sermon.

Citadel Square Baptist

Citadel Square Baptist, Charleston

This beautiful edifice, built to seat 1,000 persons, belonged to a congregation which just two years earlier was fourteen in number and, at the time of dedication, had a mere membership of two hundred and seventeen, one hundred and nineteen of whom were slaves!

The Principles

Boyce and his friend Basil Manly inherited the “Charleston tradition,” that prized theological orthodoxy and an educated ministry.

In 1858, one year before Southern Seminary opened for classes, a committee comprised of James P. Boyce, Basil Manly Sr., Basil Manly Jr., and John Broadus completed the Abstract of Principles. This confessional statement– the first crafted by a group that was specifically Southern Baptist– would serve as the theological foundation for all faculty members of Southern Seminary. These principles would not bind upon the students, but the seminary would assure that all professors at the seminary taught in accord with the principles, which were a confession of the beliefs that Baptists held.

The first principle was the centrality and authority of Scripture.

I. The Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments were given by inspiration of God, and are the only sufficient, certain and authoritative rule of all saving knowledge, faith and obedience.

All the principles were in the tradition of Christian orthodoxy, with a Calvinist tinge.

It looks to me as if the principle on Election was carefully crafted:

V. Election: Election is God’s eternal choice of some persons unto everlasting life-not because of foreseen merit in them, but of His mere mercy in Christ-in consequence of which choice they are called, justified and glorified.

Election has been a matter of disagreement among Baptists:

It should be noted that from the earliest years of Baptist history there have been two schools of thought pertaining to the theological issue of election. Some Baptists, frequently called “Particular Baptists”, felt strongly that the Bible teaches election – i.e. that only those “particular” individuals whom God chooses can be saved. Strongly influenced by the Reformed theology of John Calvin – as well as English Puritanism – Particular Baptists believed that if you were of God’s elect, then nothing could prohibit your salvation. And if you were not of God’s elect, then nothing that you could do would bring you salvation.

On the other side of the issue were the General Baptists.

General Baptists were influenced by the Armenians and many Anglicans. They believed that all people had the freedom to choose or refuse salvation. God’s salvation was offered “generally” to all men and women.

Boyce felt the after-shock of the “election” debate and was molded by the Particular Baptist leanings of his church. Later, while studying at a Presbyterian school, Princeton University, Boyce was profoundly influenced by a professor, Charles Hodge, who strongly espoused the Reformed theology of election. Consequently, Boyce became a strong advocate of the doctrine of election. Evidence of this is seen in his book Abstract Of Christian Theology (1877). And, as rofessor and President of Southern Seminary, Boyce’s Reform views weighed heavily in the authorship of the Abstract of Principles.

But it seems to me that the Principle avoids taking sides on the question of Double Election. That is, does God choose some to be saved and some to be damned.

The Calvinist doctrine of election and vigorous evangelization seem to be in tension. But Boyce accepted both. 

Like Charles Spurgeon, Boyce often lamented the inroads that Arminianism was making on Baptist life. He saw the fate that awaits the Church when it trades the sovereignty of God for the sovereignty of man. Boyce also warned against the dangers of hyper-Calvinism that had taken root among Baptists in the south in the form of Primitive or Hard-Shell Baptists. He was a Calvinist who was so committed to evangelism that he offered the Seminary grounds to D.L. Moody when he brought his tent to Louisville.

The Principles also restated the Baptist rejection of government interference in religion:

XVIII. Liberty of Conscience God alone is Lord of the conscience; and He hath left it free from the doctrines and commandments of men, which are in anything contrary to His word, or not contained in it. Civil magistrates being ordained of God, subjection in all lawful things commanded by them ought to be yielded by us in the Lord, not only for wrath, but also for conscience sake.

The persecution of Baptists by Anglicans in pre-Revolutionary Virginia strongly influenced Jefferson’s ideas on religious liberty.

The Abstract of Principles remains in force among Southern Baptists and therefore enabled a major change in the nature of the Seminary in in 1990s, as we shall see.

The Southern Baptist Seminary before the War

The great work of James’s life was the foundation of the Southern Baptist Seminary in  1859 in Geenville, South Carolina.He proposed that a rigorous education in classical languages was not necessary for all members of the ministry, that the English Bible could serve as a sufficient basis for theological study for many. Those who had the ability could go on to graduate studies. Boyce was especially concerned about developing an orthodox, learned cadre who could conduct theology independent of the corrosive Higher Criticism of Tübingen:

We have been dependent in great part upon the criticism of Germany for all the more learned investigations in Biblical Criticism and Exegesis, and that in the study of the development of the doctrine of the Church, as well as of its outward progress, we have been compelled to depend upon works in which much of error has been mingled with truth, owing to the defective standpoint occupied by their authors.

Scholarship would also vindicate the Baptist understanding of Christianity:

The history of religious literature, and of Christian scholarship, has been a history of Baptist wrongs. We have been overlooked, ridiculed and defamed . . . Historians who have professed to write the history of the Church, have either utterly ignored the presence of those of our faith, or classed them among fanatics and heretics.

Souther Baptist Greenville

The first building of the Southern Baptist Seminary in Greenville

But the new seminary had to close in 1862, as its students were not exempted from the Confederate draft.

The War 

James was a slave owner. In 1860 he owned twenty-three slaves. James joined the Confederate Army as a chaplain for six months.

James Boyce as Confedeate chaplain

Boyce in Confederate uniform 

In 1862 and again in 1864 he served in the South Carolina legislature. He wrote to his brother-in-law Henry Allen Tupper that God was punishing the South for the mistreatment of Negro slaves:

I believe I see in all this the end of slavery. I believe we are cutting its throat, curtailing its domain. And I have been, and am, an ultra pro-slavery man. Yet I bow to what God will do. I feel that our sins as to this institution have cursed us, – that the Negroes have not been cared for in their marital and religious relations as they should be; and I fear God is going to sweep it away, after having left it thus long to show us how great we might be, were we to act as we ought in this matter.

His personal relations to slaves and former slave were courteous. Before the war a family “maid” fell in love with a master-builder “servant” (notice the language that the Boyces used) but the marriage could come about only if James bought the servant, which he did, and enabled the marriage. James remained on good terms with this couple after Emancipation and was hosted by them at their house in Memphis.

James was appointed by President Johnson to South Carolina constitutional convention during Reconstruction. As required by the North for readmission to the Union, South Carolina passed a law outlawing slavery.

A Digression: The Bible and Slavery

As historians have remarked, the Southerners who defended slavery on Biblical grounds had stronger arguments than Northern abolitionists. It is clear, as the Southerners claimed, that in the Bible slavery is simply accepted as a fact. There is no indication that it is innately immoral. However, nor does the Bible require slavery. The Quakers developed a strong aversion to slavery. Orthodox Quakers had difficulty responding to Southern slavery defenders in biblical grounds. Some Quakers were therefore attracted to Hicks and his doctrine of the Inner Light, which relied for the proper interpretation of Scripture on the Inner light of the Holy Spirit. By this Inner light Quakers could see the evil of slavery.

It is true, as Southerners claimed, that slavery is simply accepted as a fact in both the Old and New Testaments. It is also true that polygamy was also simply accepted as a fact in the Old Testament, and there in nowhere in the New Testament an absolute condemnation of polygamy. It is doubtful if southerners would have accepted polygamy. But why not? It could be justified and in fact held-up as God-ordained by using the same hermeneutics that justified slavery.

Over the course of centuries Jews had come to see polygamy as not innately immoral but as an institution which distorted the relationship of man and woman. A man was supposed to have one wife, just as The LORD had one spouse, Israel. Paul would take this analogy up and apply it to Christ and the Church. Acceptance of polygamy would therefore be a regression and a dimming of the light that God had given to the Church.

Similarly, slavery died out in the supposedly Dark Ages. Slavery had died out as societies became Christians had slowly come to see that slavery compromised the dignity of a human being, that it tended to make the owner forget the humanity of his slave. It was not fitting that a Christian should own a fellow Christian.The Popes later allowed it to Christians as an emergency response to Moslem enslavement of Christians.

In the South slave owners who underwent a conversion and joined a church that forbade the ownership of slaves sometimes faced a dilemma. In some cases, as in New York, the State had to approve manumission and would not approve it unless  the slave was old enough and well trained enough to support himself.

In the South, freed slaves often had to leave the state. If a slave had a wife and children on a neighboring plantation, and he was freed, he had to leave the state. So some slaves asked their owners not to free them, and the owners were in a quandary. Their church forbade them to own slaves, they did not want to own slaves, but the slave did not want to be freed, for excellent reasons.

James thought slavery an acceptable institution, provided that slaves were given Christian instruction and their families were respected. He did not describe slavery as “owning” another human being – an expression and concept repellent in itself, but in having the right to the involuntary labor of another human being – and that human being’s descendants in perpetuity. Many white colonists came to the colonies as indentured servants, and such a state could be inherited but it was not perpetual.

Moreover, the two main motives to overcome the human reluctance to work are financial hardship or corporal punishment. Slaves could usually be motivated only by the second, which led to many horrors. As bad as the situation of the wage slaves of the industrial North, was, the situation of black slaves in the South was worse. Freemen were not subject to corporal punishment not of having their families broken up at someone else’s whim. Emancipation was greeted with joy by slaves, and there was no nostalgia for the days of slavery.

Here endeth the digression.

The Southern Baptist Seminary after the War

James was at his house in Greenville at the end of the war. Federal troops looted the city. His elegant house attracted attention, and it was ransacked by the Yankees.

Looking for jewelry and silver that they had been told were there, and unable to find any, they held a gun to Boyce’s head and demanded under threat of death, the location of the treasures. Boyce replied that he had sent them all away the day before with his brother and could not tell them where they were because he did not know, He instructed his brother simple to leave with the reassures and not tell him where he went. After many threats, they were finally convinced. The left, taking everything they could.

After the war James devoted himself to the seminary. The South was impoverished, and it was difficult to raise money for charitable purposes. James’s personal fortune had been badly hurt by the war. The New York business had failed at the start of the war, and he had put money into Confederate and State bonds, which were worthless. With great difficulty he moved the Seminary to its current location in Louisville and assured its survival.

Boyce had to deal with the ripples of the Higher Criticism that reached the seminary. He hired his friend C. H. Toy to teach at the seminary.

Dr. Toy had been influenced by German higher critical methods. In his classroom, Toy began to undermine the biblical account of creation, teaching Darwinism and higher criticism. Boyce realized the danger of this teaching and insisted that Toy teach the Old Testament history as it is written in Scripture, which Toy agreed to do. Nevertheless, convinced of the validity and usefulness of his position, Toy submitted a defense of his beliefs, along with his resignation, to the trustees of Southern Seminary at the 1879 Southern Baptist Convention annual meeting in Atlanta. The trustees accepted his resignation. Boyce did not oppose Toy’s resignation, but suffered great personal grief at being distanced from a treasured friend that had seemed so intellectually promising.

He maintained cordial and affectionate relationships with those with whom he disagreed in theology.

His work for the Seminary took its toll on James. In 1886 James and his family went to Europe for his health. But he continued to fail. He was dying in Paris, and his doctor advised removal to the countryside. This did not help. James died in Pau, France, on December 28, 1888.

The Theology of James Boyce

James wrote a textbook of theology, The Abstract of Systematic Theology, which is still in print.

James Boyce book

Boyce explains theology through a Calvinist lens, which in turn was influenced by mediaeval voluntarism and St. Augustine.

Aquinas in the Summa treats of many attributes of God before discussing omnipotence. Boyce treats of omnipotence near the beginning, before he treats of God’s reason and love. Boyce softens his treatment of God’s omnipotence. He lists the things that God cannot do, among them

He cannot create a being whose nature is sinful….

He cannot impose laws which are not accordant with righteousness and holiness

He cannot deal with any of his creatures unjustly

And explains

If it be asked why he can do none of these things, the answer is, because his own nature is to him the law of what he does, as well as what he wills and what he is. He is not just and holy because he wills to be so, but he wills to be just and holy because he is so. His will does not make his nature, but his nature controls his will.

Therefore Boyce rejects extreme voluntarism, but 1. His placing of God’s omnipotence before God’s reason and love introduces a distortion. 2. He omits the only definition of God that Scripture contains: God is love. To say that God is love (which is another way of saying that He is Trinitarian and the inner life of God is friendship among the Persons), as well as just and holy, before treating of his power changes the focus of theology. It changes the tone and focus to say that God is just and holy and above all loving not because he wills to be so, but because such is his nature: God is Love.

The Continuing Influence of James Boyce

James sketched the twofold path to seminary training : one for ministers who sought the fundamentals of Christian doctrine and another for those who sought advanced studies to defend and explain the Christian faith, This seems to have continued to be the pattern among Southern Baptists.

James’s insistence on the confessional nature of the seminary also has continued. The Principles remained in legal effect at Southern Baptist Seminary, and enabled the conservatives to recover control of the seminary in the 1990s, although they had to add to teh Principle to deal with modern problems.

In 1993, the seminary’s current president R. Albert Mohler, Jr. came into office re-affirming the Seminary’s historic “Abstract of Principles,” part of the original charter of Southern created in 1858. The charter stated that every Professor must agree to “teach in accordance with, and not contrary to, the Abstract of Principles hereinafter laid down” and that “a departure” from the principles in the Abstract of Principles would be grounds for resignation or removal by the Trustees. Dr. Mohler…required that current professors affirm, without any spoken or unspoken reservations, the Abstract of Principles. Professors were also asked to affirm the “Baptist Faith and Message” of the Southern Baptist Convention, since Southern is an agency of the SBC. An overwhelming majority of faculty affirmed the Abstract of Principles, but declined to affirm some of the doctrines stated in the “Baptist Faith and Message,” which had recently been amended to bring it in line with more conservative positions held by the current leadership of the SBC.

In the wake of the subsequent dismissal or resignation of a large percentage of the faculty, Southern has replaced them with new professors who agree to adhere to the “Baptist Faith and Message” in addition to the seminary’s Abstract of Principles.

James’s suspicions of the Tubingen school, coupled with a appreciation that the Scriptures taught using popular, non-scientific language and concepts, seems to have become the norm among Southern Baptists and largely preserved them from the inroads of Modernism while rejecting extreme fundamentalism. The Catholic Church has not been so fortunate: Cardinal Kaspar sees the nature miracles in the New Testament a simply stories concocted by later Christians to make theological points.

James Boyce, a wealthy and cultivated man, also helped raise the aesthetic standards of Baptist worship in architecture and music. This was also one of the goals of the descendants of his brother-in-law, Henry Allen Tuttle, who had noteworthy and cultures ministers among his descendants.

Southern Baptist today

Southern Baptist Seminary, Louisville

Acknowledgements to Thomas J. Nettles, James Petugru Boyce: A Southern Baptist Statesman (2009)

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Baltimore and Black Male Unemployability

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I am a native Baltimorean and my family has been here since the 1790s.

Baltimore was segregated, but in an odd way. There was a prejudice against living next door to blacks, but it was ok if they lived on the other side of the block. Around 1910 the city considered an ordinance that would have segregated the city by setting aside every third block as the city developed for blacks. This would have prevented the formation of ghettoes. Blacks and whites would have had separate school systems, but would have shared the same services and businesses. A long history of free blacks had led to numerous black businesses and institutions, like the ones on Pennsylvania Avenue. The boom in war jobs brought widespread prosperity in the 1940s and 1950s.

Factory jobs have disappeared, and middle-class blacks have left poorer areas for better neighborhoods of the city and county. They left behind those who could not or chose not to function in modern society.

Males are difficult to integrate into civilized life in any society, and poor black males are only somewhat more difficult than poor white males. Males were given a leg up and privileges in part to motivate them to stay out of trouble – but male privilege is a thing of the past. Employers who hire black women get a double affirmative-action credit and avoid the difficulty of male surliness.

The descent into social disorganization has become a vicious circle among poor blacks and increasingly among poor whites.  A niece informed me that at her public high school in Florida the life plan of most of the white girls was to get pregnant and go on welfare.

The first three years seem to be crucial to brain development. Children need to be talked to and read to – but middle class children hear millions more words by age three than welfare children do. Because of this stunted development, poor children have a hard time in school, which is a difficult environment for boys in general. Because they have such a hard time in school, poor black boys especially reject learning, and never develop skills which could make them employable. Because they are unemployable, they are not good marriage prospects. Black women have their children without husbands, and the children grow up in a stunted environment and the cycle repeats itself.

How to break the cycle? No one knows. Ending the war on drugs would stop the process of mass incarceration and criminal records that make it difficult to get jobs, but it would lead to wider drug use that would contribute to unemployability. How to get parents to talk to and read to their children? Sometimes the parents can’t read themselves, and their idea of discipline is to yell at kids to tell them to be quiet. If children are not raised in a middle-class way that helps them develop their minds, they will have grave difficulties in functioning in a middle class society.

The culture of poverty and unemployability is most severe among poor blacks, but is growing among poor whites. How to change a self-destructive culture? No one really knows. Perhaps a religious revival like that of Methodism in the English working classes, who were in a bad way before Wesley came along, but that does not seem to be on the horizon.

 

 

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Baltimore, Shame, and Anger

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Baltimore riots

I arrived back from the West Coast to a much-changed Baltimore. All the progress that the city has made over the past twenty years is now threatened.

I think that what we are seeing in Baltimore is displaced anger caused by shame.

Last night, while West Baltimore was flooded with thousands of police, there were six shootings unrelated to the riot; they were all black victims, and the odds are about infinity to one that the shooters were black.

Each year several hundred black men in Baltimore are killed by other black men – and not word or a protest about it.

Now, even one unjustified killing or death by negligence by the police is too much. The police as agents of the state must be held to the highest standards, and it is in everyone’s interest that the police treat all citizens with respect.

But the reaction to a few deaths of black men at the hands of the police and as opposed to deaths of tens of thousands of black men at the hands of other black men is disproportionate.

Communities, like individuals, can suffer from shame (think of the sexual abuse in the Catholic Church). Shame about an evil for which one is responsible causes disproportionate reactions to lesser evils for which someone else is responsible. I think we have all seen this in people we know, and perhaps in ourselves.

But of course, such anger does nothing to correct the evil for which one as an individual or a community is responsible.

What do the rioters want? For the police to stay out of their neighborhoods, so criminals can rob and kill without let or hindrance? In that case we would have thousands rather than hundreds of black deaths in Baltimore each year. If the police were absolutely courteous and handled every arrest with a camera crew present, it would do nothing to stop the black-on-black violence.

BTW, the majority of policemen in Baltimore are black, as are the mayor and police chief, and the new state’s attorney.

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The First Kiss and El DotTow

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Tristram Tupper, my wife’s second cousin once removed, had a houseboat on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, in the 1920s. While lazing about Claiborne, he wrote a story, “The Four Brothers,” which appeared in the April 7, 1928 Saturday Evening Post and which was quickly adopted to the screen as The First Kiss, with the young Gary Cooper and Fay Wray.

First Kiss Poster 2

 

James Dawson researched the history of this major artistic event for The Tidewater Times.

The plot is:

after years of dissolution and drink, the noble Talbot family, which had given its fine name to the county, had fallen on hard times. Pap Talbot, the son of the distinguished Rev. Henry Talbot, was a drunkard and his four sons not much better. Pap had named his first three sons William, Ezra and Carroll in an attempt to ingratiate himself with his father-in-law, William Ezra Carroll, who lived on a plantation in Virginia and was said to be fabulously rich. When that failed, he named his fourth son Mulligan to spite his father-in-law who had an enemy by that name.
When Pap dies and is buried in a pauper’s grave, Mulligan has an epiphany. After an epic battle in which he beats his oldest brother half to death, he states that if his siblings will clean up their acts, go to school and get respectable jobs, that their rich grandfather will finance their education.
And sure enough, the money starts coming in. His three brothers go to school and graduate from college with honors, becoming in turn a preacher, a lawyer and a doctor. During this time, Mulligan still works as a waterman, but never fails to bring the money from Grandpap Carroll.
In the meantime, Mulligan falls in love with Anna Lee Marshall (played by Fay Wray). She is the daughter of the richest man in town and she spurns his advances because, as she so delicately put it, he is “poor white trash.” Mulligan slowly wins her heart and impresses her with his surprising success on the water. He takes her sailing. They kiss.
Then, in a melodramatic plot twist, Mulligan is caught attempting to rob passengers on the Annapolis-Claiborne ferry.

Ferry

The Annapolis-Claiborne Ferry

At his trial, it is revealed that he is not the honest, hardworking waterman that everyone thought, but the notorious Bay pirate “Black Duck,” who, disguised in black oilskins, had been robbing vessels off the coast for years. Grandpap Carroll had died insolvent years before, and the money had actually been coming from Mulligan’s piratical enterprises. While Mulligan is in the Easton jail, his brothers help him break out and he and Anna sail off into the sunset together in the dream yacht that he built.

First Kiss sailing off

Gary and Faye 1928

For the movie is the ending had to be made more moral.

In the movie, Mulligan sells the boat he built and pays back all the money he stole, which triggers his arrest. He is tried and found guilty, but released into Anna’s custody and the two live happily ever after.

I especially like the idea of a pirate robbing the ferry.

The film is lost, but someone found the theme song and created a series of stills on You Tube.

Here are some stills:

First Kiss poster

 

First Kiss 3

 

First Kiss 2

The filming of the movie in 1928 was the biggest thing that had happened in St. Michael’s since the War of 1812.

The cast and crew, about 75 people, stayed at the Pasadena Inn in Royal Oak. Pauline Valliant, who worked as a hostess in the dining room there, recalled in a May 20, 1973 Baltimore Sun article that they soon felt right at home and grew to love the Eastern Shore. Gary Cooper, the rising young actor who played the lead role of Mulligan Talbot, rose for an early morning swim each day before the filming started, and lead actress Fay Wray, who played Cooper’s rich sweetheart, liked it so much that she convinced her fiancé John Saunders, a Hollywood screenwriter, to come east and the two were married on June 15 at Calvary Methodist Church in Easton. Their wedding reception was held on a skipjack in St. Michaels harbor.

Serving as a rower was the young Elmer T. Parkinson; he grew up to be the captain and handyman for my wife’s grandfather, R. Templeton Smith, who had a house at Emerson Point.    Elmer persuaded R. Templeton, who was from Pittsburgh, that a cabin cruiser, the Osona, was tricky and needed a professional captain to take it out one the dangerous waters of the Miles River.

Elmer also took up painting under the name El DotTow (Elmer, his name; Dorothy, his wife’s name; and Townsend, his son). He painted mostly duckscapes.

Elmer and teh Infant Charlie

Elmer Parkinson and the infant Charles Podles 1984

He also painted R. Templeton’s dog, Willie, a yellow lab, in profile; he gave Willie a human eye. Somewhere in the Pittsburgh house is a genuine El DotTow. My wife seems reluctant to seek it out and photograph it for posterity, despite its important art historical connections to her grandfather and to Gary Cooper and to Tristram Tupper.

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Tristram Tupper: General and Screenwriter

in Tupper Family, Uncategorized 7 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , ,

tristram-tupper

Tristram Tupper (1885-1954) was the son of the Rev. Henry Allen Tupper, Jr., and of Marie Louise Pender. He was therefore the second cousin twice removed of my wife. He was also the brother-in-law of Gen. George Marshall. He was married twice: to Clara Caroline Tarbell (1885-1966), of whom was born Caroline Tarbell Tupper (1920-?) and Tristram Tupper, Jr. (1926-1999); and to Marion Cecile Ferrill (1908-1982. In ancestry.com there is listed a marriage to Ruth Reynolds (1892-?) of whom was born Ruth Reynolds Tupper (1910-?); but I cannot verify the existence of this marriage and child.

Tristram attended Phillips Academy and graduated from the New York Law School in 1912. He tried his hands at various occupations, none successfully, as he admitted.

In July 1917 Tristram married Clara Tarbell, the niece of the famous muckraking writer, Ida Tarbell.

Tristram in the Great War

Sargent Study

John Singer Sargent

Study for

The Americans Are Coming

Widener Library

In 1916 he enlisted as private in the Army. He went to the Mexican border and then to France as the 7th Regiment, the Silk-Stocking Regiment, in which the young male members of New York Society served. As the 107th it sailed with Gen. John Francis Ryan’s 27th Division, fought in France, broke the Hindenburg Line.

A line in the Social Register didn’t mean much in the trenches

Private Vanderbilt

 Private Vanderbilt and new French friends

or offer much protection from German shells.

Graves of NY

The Fallen of the 107th 

Monument ot the Dadny Seventh

 The monument to the 7th.

Monument fierceness

It portrays the fierceness of battle

Monumemnt pain

 and the results of battle.

Tupper was an Adjutant General to Gen. John Francis O’Ryan.

John F. O

Gen. John Francis O’Ryan, Commander of the 27th 

Tristram and teh staff

 The staff. Tristram is fourth from right

On August 30, 1918 John Singer Sargent moved to the New York Division at Vierstraat Bridge near Ypres. It was at this time he did his studies for Gassed.

Gassed studies

Gassed

 

Tristram first encountered Sargent when Sargent was drawing General O’Ryan.

Oryan by sargent

Gen. John Francis O’Ryan

by John Singer Sargent

Tristram met Sargent again in the trenches, a meeting Tristram wrote about in “Sargent’s Studio of Shellfire” in the New York Times, March 23, 1919.

John Singer Sargent, self-portrait

John Singer Sargent, self-portrait

Tristram described the landscape: “this valley might truthfully be called the valley of the shadow of death.”

The maps showed neat rows of trenches.

But there were no trenches – nothing worthy of the name – merely shell holes and torn places in the earth surface where soldiers might escape enemy observation through the day if they lay flat on the ground and did not move. The enemy held the high ground in this sector, had held it since the valiant British Army plunged forward in the mud, and disappeared forever on its way to Passchendaele.

Paul Fussell in The Great War and Modern Memory describes how soldiers drowned slowly in the mud, and how the landscape was haunted by its names: The Valley of the Passion.

Vierstratt Road A. Y. Jackson 1917

 Vierstratt, by A. Y. Jackson, 1917

Later Tristram saw Sargent on the battlefield, searching for a dugout in which a soldier had drawn a picture. Then he saw him on a hill, watching he battle win which the Americans were pushing back the Germans at Vierstratt, Sargent had his umbrella and canvas and paints. But Sargent was not painting.

The reason was obvious – all the paintings of all the great galleries of the world can give no adequate impression of war. It is indescribable. You may read all the books in the libraries, you may look at all the paintings of the masters, and you will not get anything akin to the feeling caused by the sight of a man stumbling forward, wounded, with the dream of life fading from his eyes.

Ypres ruins

Ypres, 1918

The last time Tristram saw Sargent was at Ypres.

Where not a house had a roof and not a room four walls – a ruin more complete than Pompeii.

As he sat among the ruins of the Cathedral of Ypres, painting an arch under which a broken timber had jammed, he talked of art after the war: Artist would rise to take the place of those who had been killed, and as he talked a pigeon, perched high on the broken walls that were once the tower of the Cathedral of Ypres. Sargent pointed with a paint brush to the pigeon. “It’s in the heart of every living thing,” he said. “the thing that has brought the pigeon back to the cathedral tower where it used to live will bring men back to these ruined towns and cities. They will build again. Home has an irresistible power. Men and beast always return.”

Vierstratt Monument

 _____________________________

_____________________-_

  Tristram in Hollywood

After the War Tristram took up writing for a living: Novels and short stories and screen plays, first for silent movies and then for talkies. For fifteen years he wrote scenarios for Fox, Republic and Universal Pictures.

Adventuring, (The Saturday Evening Post Jan 27, Feb 3, Feb 10 1923
Four Brothers, (The Saturday Evening Post Apr 7 1928
The Language of the Angels, The Saturday Evening Post Jun 3, Jun 10 1922
The Magnolia Grove,  The Saturday Evening Post Aug 3 1935
The Man Who Knew Nothing on Earth,
The World’s Greatest Stories Apr 1929
The Man Who Swam the Pacific, The American Magazine Jul 1937
Prelude to Summer, The American Magazine Aug 1936
The River, The Saturday Evening Post Nov 26, Dec 3, Dec 10 1927; (western)
A Storm at the Crossroads,  The Saturday Evening Post Jun 16 1923
Three Episodes in the Life of Timothy Osborn,  The Saturday Evening Post Apr 9 1927
Too Old to Be Spanked,  The Saturday Evening Post Nov 2 1946
When the Bands Not Playing,  The Mother’s Magazine Sep 1917

Tristram Tupper ad 1930 - Copy Tristram Tupper ad 1927 - Copy

 

 

Tristram Tupper Book 3

Tristram Tupper Book 5

Tristram Tupper ad 1929 - CopyTristram Tupper Movie 1

 

 

 

 

 

Tristram Tupper Movie 3

  Tristram Goes to War Again

In 1939-41 Tristram was Public Relations Officer for Fort McClellan. There he met Marion Ferrill, who was chief nurse. In the Second World War he was a Brigadier General in charge of war correspondents. They were difficult to handle. In Ed Kennedy’s War we read

During the last days of Algiers a new general had arrived to take command of public relations in the Mediterranean Theater. He was the mouse-like Brigadier General Tristram Tupper from Hollywood, a scenario-writing brother-in-law of General George Marshall. Although his job naturally called for contact with correspondents, he went into concealment. Efforts to seek him out failed. When months went by without a sight of him, word spread that there was no General Tupper. After we were established in Italy he made a few furtive appearances. He excused his absence by saying he would be of more help to us by staying far away. He was right, for when he assumed personal supervision  – as press arraignments for  the invasion of  southern France were made – the result has almost every correspondent howling. Assignments were made with the aid of charts, lists, timetables, and the drawing of straws. Tupper planned  to send correspondents in on successive waves. Had not most of the correspondents scheduled to wait for the later waves found means to circumvent his program, they might not have gotten into France until the campaign was over.

Clara and Tristram separated in 1935. On August 6 1947 Clara divorced him on the grounds he stayed away from home and was seen with other women. He married Marion Ferrill, who started Marion Tuppers Moonglade Preserves.

Tristram retired from the Army in October 1945.  With Arthur Love he set up the publishing firm of Tupper and Love. His big commercial success was his sister’s book about life with his brother-in-law, Gen. George Marshall.

Together cover

Tristram died in 1954.

Tristran Tupper 1886-

 ________________________

___________

 The Tupper Children

These are my wife’s third cousins, once removed.

Caroline Tupper UCLA 1939

 

Sadie Hawkins Day at UCLA, 1939

Caroline is on the far right

Caroline Tupper (1920- ) enlisted in 1942 while she was at UCLA; she served in the WAC in the Pacific in WWII and again in Korea.

Caroline Tupper WAC

Caroline in her WAC uniform

She was in Army Intelligence in Hollandia, Leyte, and Manila.

Dr. Robert  Overbeck, who had been at Johns Hopkins in geology and worked for a mining firm in the Philippines. His wife and son were in Manila. When the Japanese invaded, Richard Stevens Overbeck (1917-1972) , an engineer who had graduated from Loyola College and Columbia, volunteered to help construct the defenses of Corregidor. He was captured and survived the Bataan Death March.

Richard Overbeck 1

 Overbeck after rescue

The parents and son were interned. Richard was on a Japanese prison ship with 1800 Americans when it was torpedoes in October 1944 (Paul Fussell mentions this disaster). Only eight survived. Robert got on an abandoned Japanese lifeboat and managed to sail to China. He returned to the United States, was commissioned in Army Intelligence, and served in the Philippines.
 Robert Overbeck

Overbeck in uniform, 1945

There he met Caroline.

Caroline Tupper portrait

Caroline’s engagement photo

They were married on February 18, 1945 in the chapel at Fort Myer. They were divorced in 1948.

Caroline studied under a goldsmith and designed jewelry for Tiffany and other stores.

She was recalled in the Korean Conflict and served in the Army Security Agency.

Later Caroline taught jewelry in a public school.

Caroline Tupper at school

 Caroline Tupper. 1972

El Camino Real High School

Woodland Hills, California

The only mention of Tristram Tupper Jr. (1926-1999) I could locate is in connection with a traffic accident. In August 1948 he hit a seventy-five year old pedestrian who had to be taken to the hospital.  This Tristram’s life was less eventful than that of his family.

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Allen Tupper Brown, War Hero

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Allen Tupper Brown (1916-1944), the son of Clifton Stevenson Brown and Katherine Boyce Tupper, was born in 1916 and was twelve when his father was murdered in 1928.

After his widowed mother met George Marshall, Allen was not initially enthusiastic. His mother recounts

The next summer  I told my sons that I had asked Colonel Marshall to visit us at Fire Island as I wanted him to know them. Clifton suspected something at once and said, “If it makes you happier, Mother, it is all right with me.” But Allen, then twelve, sad, “I don’t know about that, we are happy enough as we are.” Early the next morning he came to my room. “It is all right, Mother, about your asking Colonel Marshall.” That summer George told me that Allen had written him a most amusing letter in which he said, “I hope you will come to Fire Island. Don’t be nervous, it is OK with me. (Signed) A friend in need is a friend indeed. Allen Brown.” And they were friends until the end.”

Allen went to Gilman in Baltimore, and then to Woodberry Forest and the University of Virginia. He started in the promotion department of the New York Times in 1936.

Allen married Margaret “Madge” Goodman Shedden of Westchester; he was Katherine’s   youngest child and the first to be married. They had one son, Allen Tupper Brown Jr. (Tupper), and lived on a farm house in Poughkeepsie.

In November 1942 Allen enlisted in the Armored Force. He went to OCS at Fort Knox, and in June 1943 graduated as a second lieutenant. Just before going to African in August 1943. Allen and Clifton and James Winn were at Dodona, the family house in Leesburg. There

Jim, a Regular Army officer, and Clifton, being a bit down in the mouth that Allen, the youngest and last in the service, was to be the first to get to the front. As we [the Marshalls] approached the Allen was saying, “why shouldn’t I go over first? I am a tanker, and the task lead the fight.”

Clifton broke in with, “Where would the tanks be without the Antiaircraft?”

Jim came back with, “Who clears the way for the tankers? – the Field Artillery.”C

For that dinner I had provided all of the things Allen like most.

After dinner we had quite a ceremony. In the field below the house I had dug up an old horseshoe, a rather small one that had probably been on the hoof of some ante-bellum lady’s riding mare. We gathered in front of the garage while Allen hung up the horseshoe, and we drank to his health once again. I recall that at first he hung the shoe with the points down A protest went up – his luck would run out – so it was taken down and while Madge held it in place Allen nailed it with the points up. The next morning he flew off for England on his way to the front.

Allen Tupper Brown photo

2nd Lieutenant Allen Tupper Brown

On June 29, 1943 George wrote to his stepson, to whom he was very close. They had both gone to pains to conceal their relationship, lest Allen be the recipient of any favoritism. George, however, did intervene, against his own policy, after Allen graduated from OCS. George explained that

I feel quite differently about intervening in this way when it is a move to the front rather than the opposite.

That is, instead of protecting Allen, he had acceded to Allen’s desire to be sent to the front and put in danger.

Clifton and Allen were together at the battle of Monte Cassino and then Allen left for the Anzio Beachhead. Allen wrote

I feel sorry for any German in Italy. The horseshoe had held my luck. I shall take it down this Christmas and keep it for the rest of my life.

Sherman tanks disembarking at Anzio

Sherman tanks disembarking at Anzio

Allen commanded a tank at Anzio.

Just after receiving these letters from Allen and Clifford on the morning before Decoration Day, George left for the office, but returned an hour later,

General Devers reported that at 10 AM on May 29, 1944 that near Campoleone

Allen was killed in action on the 29th while leading his platoon in an attack west of Velletri. He was shot by a sniper when he stood up in his turret to observe the front with his field glasses.

Other reports indicate the sniper through a hand grenade.

Clifton later told his mother that

He had reached the scene a few hours after Allen’s death and had been given permission to go to the front.  Not wishing to expose a driver to unnecessary danger he had driven himself and talked to each man in Allen’s platoon. He has collected his brother’s belongings and attended his funeral on Decoration Day. Gathering some flowers in a near-by field he had placed them on Allen’s grave for Madge and me.

Here is the last letter that his mother wrote to Allen. It is marked “return to sender.”

Allen Tupper Brown last letter

Katherine went to Fire Island.

I went to my room and hanging in my closet was a black sweater, from Allen’s Woodberry days, with a big bock “W” in yellow. I opened my top drawer and a white box lay there. Removing the lid I found the box full of bronze medals such as little boys win at swimming races, and there along the medals was  small gold football marked “Allen Tupper Brown.”

The Marshalls received hundreds of letters of condolence. George answered them all personally to spare Katherine. The one letter that brought Katherine some comfort said

Your son will always be young and unafraid, he will never have to grow old, he will never know such grief as yours.

Allen was Katherine’s youngest child and the first to die.

On June 20, 1944, George was in Italy and visited the Anzio cemetery and spent a half hour at Allen’s raw grave. He then went to the spot where Allen was killed. When George visited Pius XII in 1948, he and Katherine went to the Anzio military cemetery to visit Allen’s grave.

Anzio 1

 The American Cemetery 

In July, 1937, Allen had written a letter to the New York Times:

When a man becomes of importance to the world is it necessary for him to forget the common decencies of life?

Should a man become so great  that when encountering opposition to a cause that is of greatest interest his feelings should be so contorted as to let him dwarf the death of a friend and supporter beside an issue of political importance? Should any man become so great that into his personality creeps a slight stubbornness and a touch of ego that unbends to nothing, not even to death? How great is a great man?

Madge’s brother, Lt. Robert L. Shedden of the Army Air Force, had been killed while on a mission over Europe on January 22, 1943.

Madge married John White Pendleton (1908-1971), a VMI graduate and Rhodes scholar.

Allen Tupper Brown, Jr.

 Tupper. Kitty amd Jimmy

Tupper Jr. on left, with his cousins Kitty and Jimmy Winn

There  is an Allen Tupper Brown  who is still alive; he may be the surviving son.

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Clifton Stevenson Brown, Jr.

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The second child of Clifton Stevenson Brown and Katherine Boyce Tupper was Clifton Stevenson Brown, Jr. (1914-1952). He was the third cousin once removed of my wife.

During the war Colonel Brown served in Africa, Sicily, Italy, France and Germany. He and his brother Allen were only seven miles apart in Italy.  While he was in the Army of Occupation in Germany an old radium burn on his foot flared up and he was evacuated to Walter Reed, but was released and was able to go through with the wedding.  He married Em Bowles Locker on August 25, 1945 at St. Stephen’s Church in Richmond, H. St. George Tucker, presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church, conducted the ceremony; Kermit Roosevelt was a guest. He and Em had one child, Carter Boardman (1949- )

After the war he worked for Louis Marx Company, the toy manufacturer, and for IBM. He died in Walter Reed Hospital  at the age of thirty-eight.

Em Bowles Locker

Em Bowles Locker as Scarlett

 

Em Bowles Locker (1916-2015) was a native of Richmond with  a perfect Southern accent.

Her chance for undying fame came when she tried out for the role of Scarlett O’Hare.

Em Bowles first learned of Margaret Mitchell’s seminal Civil War-era novel in August 1936 on her way home from Camp Michigamme in Michigan, where she had spent the summer working as a sailing and drama instructor.

During a stopover at Vassar-friend Mary Morley Crapo’s house north of Detroit, Em Bowles noticed a book opened and turned upside down sitting next to the fireplace. It was “Gone With the Wind,” and Mary was convinced that Em Bowles would make the perfect Scarlett in the movie, which was already in the works.

Once home in Richmond, Em Bowles picked up her mother’s new copy of the novel.

“I took it back to Vassar with me and almost flunked out the first month because I was reading it!” she says.

The girls unanimously urged their Richmond friend to try out for the part — though Em Bowles was not just another pretty face with genteel Southern manners. She was a seasoned amateur actress who had already spent three years acting with Vassar’s well-known Experimental Theater.

She had a full dress screen test, but she was deliberately given bad advice by someone who favored a different candidate, and lost out.

Frank McCarthy and Locker

Frank McCarthy and Em Locker 1937

However, she did get to attend the premiere in Richmond.

At the “Gone With the Wind” premiere in Richmond the following month, she led a procession from Capitol Square to Loew’s Theater and spoke to the audience about the film and her special part in bringing it to life.

Later, at a special celebration of the film at the John Marshall Hotel, she and childhood friend Frank McCarthy — a Virginia Military Institute graduate who would go on to serve as a wartime aide to Gen. George Marshall, assistant secretary of state and become a producer for the motion picture “Patton” — led the Grand March and Exhibition Waltz.

That was the end of her acting career.

Em Locker 1942

Em Locker, 1942

 

It was presumably through McCarthy that she met Gen. Marshall’s stepson, Clifton Brown. McCarthy was the best man at the wedding, and Molly was the maid of honor.

Em Bowles Locker wedding picture to Brown

Em Locker, 1945

Her obituary details her work in public relations.

ALSOP, Em Bowles Locker, who was known at national, state and local levels as a public relations innovator and accomplished civic leader, passed away on March 3, 2015, at the age of 98. Born in Richmond on November 16, 1916 to noted educator Willis Clyde Locker of Orange, Va. and Mary Augusta Bowles (a 1905 Hollins graduate) of Salem, Va., she was predeceased by her brother, Corporal Willis Clyde Locker Jr., decorated for bravery and killed in action in World War II; and by her husband of 46 years, Benjamin Pollard Alsop Jr. She is survived by her daughter, Carter Alsop. After St. Catherine’s School in Richmond, Mrs. Alsop went to Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, N.Y. where, fluent in both French and German, she was chosen to spend a summer at the University of Heidelberg, Heidelberg, Germany during Hitler’s pre-war reign. Upon graduation from Vassar in 1937, she was appointed by the president of the College of William and Mary, Williamsburg, Va. to serve as assistant to the Director of Public Relations. In this capacity, she researched historic Williamsburg’s first Guide Book. Soon, she moved to New York City where, having become a model with the Powers Modeling Agency, she was chosen by its founder, John Robert Powers, to develop – and to become – the first director of a modeling school that would expand the services of his agency. Originally named Powers School, it is currently called John Robert Powers New York. As director, she was a sought-after public speaker, a radio show guest, a journalist for national media and a public relations consultant for Eastern Airlines, Coty Perfume, Revlon lipstick, The Rheingold Brewing Company and Columbia University. For the Rheingold company, she created a new marketing concept. She chose a professional model as a corporate symbol to be “Miss Rheingold”. This set in motion the employment of beautiful women trained as spokesmodels to grace advertising and marketing campaigns throughout corporate America. Returning to Richmond during WWII, she envisioned an event – “The Book and Author Dinner” – for Miller & Rhoads Department Store to drive sales and boost store brand recognition. She was later cited as the event’s Founder by The Junior League of Richmond. Working also for the USO, the War Bond Drive and the Aircraft Recognition Center, she went on to become a noted fundraiser for several nationally recognized war benefit programs in New York and Washington, D.C. After the war, while living again in New York, she was asked by Helen Hayes “Queen of the American Theater,” if she would become her Executive Assistant. This began a lifelong friendship between the two. In 1953, three years after returning – once again – to Richmond, she married Mr. Alsop. October, 1954: her national promotion of the first Autumn Tour of Virginia’s Historic Sites drew thousands of visitors to Virginia for the one day event in spite of the arrival of Hurricane Hazel! 1955.

For some reason the obituary does not mention the first marriage.

She lived to be almost 100; but she said a lady never reveals her birthday.

Em Bowles Locker

Em Locker at ?

Carter Boardman (Brown) Alsop

Carter Boardman Brown (1949), who took the name of her mother’s second husband, Benjamin Pollard  Alsop, Jr., is my wife’s fourth cousin. Carter was born in 1949, and indicates her parents’ marriage ended in divorce when she was an infant.

Carter Alsop cover

She is a debutante and motorcyclist:

 In 1977 she became the first woman to be granted a professional road-racing license by the American Motorcyclist Association. The following year she won her first major championship, the Western-Eastern Roadracers’ semipro series, placing first in eight of 16 national events. Though she spent much of last season out with injuries, Alsop hopes to compete this March in the Daytona 200, the Kentucky Derby of motorcycle competition. She will not be the first woman to start in the race, however; Gina Bovaird entered but did not finish last year. Carter thinks she has a good chance to complete the grueling run. “It’s like Rocky, ” she says with a smile. “I just want to go the distance.”

As a teenager she exhibited her landscapes in a Richmond art gallery and fought with her mother and stepfather, a retired manufacturer, over coming out as a debutante. They won. Carter was introduced to society at parties in Manhattan, Philadelphia and Richmond. She claims she only went along “to enjoy the dancing.” At 20, she quit Briarcliff College to take up motorcycle racing. Her parents were aghast. Carter had seen a classmate with a helmet covered with racing stickers. “It belonged to her fiancé,” Carter says. “From that moment I knew I wanted to race bikes. I’d always wanted a motorcycle. I’d grown up on horses. It was an extension of a horse.”

To support herself, Carter painted murals and portraits, sold vacuum cleaners and started a furniture business. Then, in 1974, she went to work for a Honda dealer in Richmond. “They had a prize for the best salesman of the week—one hour at the local massage parlor,” she laughs. “I won it every week.”

In 1975 she returned to Briarcliff, graduating two years later with a bachelor’s degree in English literature and art. She turned down a chance to apply for a Rhodes scholarship and returned to the race track. “I was alone,” she says. “I slept in the back of an open truck next to the spare parts. I even had to hitchhike to one meet. It was lonely.”

Though she won the 1979 national sidecar championship race with driver Wayne Lougee, the season proved disastrous for Carter. She lacked a sponsor (a season on the circuit can cost $100,000) and was sidelined constantly by equipment failures and accidents. She has suffered three concussions, broken her collarbone four times and aggravated a chronic back problem. “My neurologist said I wasn’t in any immediate danger,” she reports, “but he told me a time will come when the head injuries could cause problems.”

When her racing career ends, Alsop will have no problem finding other outlets. She has already appeared as a stunt woman in the Burt Reynolds movie Hooper, is rewriting a screenplay about a female motorcycle racer for a Hollywood producer and would like a career in broadcasting—”or perhaps be the first woman to break the speed of sound on land. I’ll always compete,” she says. “It’s in my blood.”

In the Reynolds movie she crashed into a “brick” wall. She explained:

It actually was a balsa wood “wall” with cartons and mattresses on the other side, but it was dangerous, as were some of the other jobs I did as a stunt woman. The pay was very good – and it was nice to be paid for crashing for a change.

She seems to have survived her career.

Carter Alsop portrait

Carter Alsop

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Molly Pender Brown and Her Descendents

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Molly Brown

Molly Brown

The first child born of the marriage of Clifton Stevenson Brown and Katherine Boyce Tupper was Molly Pender Brown (1912-1997). She was my wife’s third cousin, one removed. She was sixteen was her father was murdered, and eighteen when her mother married George Marshall. Molly married James Julius Winn (1907-199) and had three children, James Julius (1942), Katherine (1944), and Ellene (1949).

Molly’s godmother was Mrs. William Randolph Blanchard. It was she whose home they visiting when Katherine was invited to the dinner where she met George Marshall. Molly was at school in Florence in 1930 when her mother was married to Lt. Col. Marshall.

A 1925 graduate of Marion Military Institute at Marion, Alabama and a 1929 graduate of the United States Military Academy at West Point, New York, James Julius Winn was a career Army officer with over 30 years of active duty. Shortly after his commissioning, he was assigned as a military aide to President Franklin D. Roosevelt in the White House Winn states that he was a student at Ft. Benning in 1929. He recalls the party Mrs. Marshall gave at Ft. Benning for her daughter Molly in 1930 or 1931. He was assigned to Ft. Myers in 1937 and was there when the Marshalls came in 1939.

Fort Myer 1

Quarters Number One, Fort Myers

Residence of the Joint Chief of Staff

 

Dining room

Oval Dining Room

Site of Brown-Winn wedding

In 1940 Molly married Captain James Julius Winn.  Katherine recounts

Molly’s wedding on Christmas Day in Quarters Number One at Fort Myer was the first wedding, I believe, ever to take place in that house. She came down the stairway on George’s arm, followed by her maid of honor, Mary Winn. They passed through the drawing-room and were met by Captain Winn and his groomsmen at the altar which had been constructed at the far end of the oval dining room. The bride’s path was flanked on each side by white chrysanthemums and tall standards holding white candles. Her gown was of cream satin with an extremely long train, and her cap and veil were of Rosepoint lace. She kept her eyes steadily on Captain Winn and his were on her. She said afterwards that this was pre-arranged to keep her from trembling. After the ceremony they walked out beneath the crossed swords of the groomsmen, while the orchestra played Lohengrin’s Wedding March. As soon as the reception was over, they left for Panama and I did not see Molly again until she came home a year and a half later with her baby son.

He and Molly were at Ft. Rucker, Alabama in May 1944 when they got word that Molly’s brother Allen Brown had been killed. Assigned to 1st Army Artillery, Winn was ordered to the European Theater after the Normandy invasion. On June 30, he arrived in Normandy and was at Le Bourget at the time of the liberation of Paris.

James Julius Winn

James Julius Winn

In 1946-47 Winn served as American liaison officer to the British Army in India. He saw combat during the Korean Conflict, when he served as an artillery adviser to the Republic of Korea’s First Field Army. In 1954-55 Colonel Winn served in Japan as deputy operations officer, US Army Forces Far East. His last active duty assignment was as commanding officer of Fort Ritchie, Maryland. He died on Sunday, December  30,  1990, at the age of 83.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

The children of Molly Pender Brown and James Julius Winn are my wife’s fourth cousins.

 

 

Molly Winn at Dodona with Marshalls and children

 

Molly Winn with her children and the Marshalls at Dodona

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James Winn Jr.

James Winn, Jr.

Jimmy Winn and Morgenthau

Jimmy regards Secretary of the Treasury Morgenthau dubiously

James Julius Winn, Jr., (1942- ) married Elizabeth Kokernot Lacy (1946-) of Texas. He worked as an attorney in Baltimore, starting in the firm of Piper and Marbury.

Elizabeth Lacy

Elizabeth Kokernot Lacy

The Kokernot family owns the Kokernot O6 Ranch in Texas.

Kokernot Ranch

KOKERNOT RANCH. The Kokernot Ranch, branding O6, covers some 500,000 acres in Jeff Davis, Pecos, and Brewster counties. The O6 brand was registered in Calhoun County as early as 1837 and was purchased by John W. Kokernot in 1872. In 1883 Kokernot and his brother, Lee M. Kokernot, leased grazing land from the state and began running cattle on the open range in the Trans-Pecos area. The brand was registered in Jeff Davis County in 1889 and transferred to L. M. Kokernot in 1896. Settlers began to move into the area; so in 1912 Herbert Lee Kokernot, son of L. M. Kokernot, began purchasing the land and continued to add to his holdings up to 1938. H. L. Kokernot, Jr., took over the ranch management in 1920. In 1939 ranch holdings stood at 300,000 acres. The rough terrain of the ranch necessitated use of the old-time mule-drawn chuck wagon, so that the O6 retained much of the traditional ranch atmosphere.

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_________________

 

Katherine Winn

Kitty Winn

Katherine (Kitty) Winn (1944-  ) had an extensive career as an actress before she married Morton Winston in 1978.

She studied acting at Centenary Junior College and Boston University, graduating from the latter in 1966. During her college years Winn acted in student productions at Centenary Junior College, Boston University, and Harvard College and summer stock for two summers at The Priscilla Beach Theatre south of Boston. Shortly after college she joined the company at American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco where she remained for four years under the artistic direction of William Ball.

She has (secumdum Wiki) appeared in

Motion Pictures

Year Name of Film Role Other Actors
1971 They Might be Giants Grace Joanne Woodward, George C. Scott
1971 The Panic in Needle Park Helen Al Pacino
1973 The Exorcist Sharon Spencer Ellen Burstyn, Linda Blair
1973 Message to My Daughter Miranda Thatcher Martin Sheen
1976 Peeper Mianne Prendergast Michael Caine, Natalie Wood
1977 Exorcist II: The Heretic Sharon Spencer Linda Blair, Richard Burton
1978 Mirrors Marianne

Kitty Winn in The exorcist

The Exorcist

Movies for Television

Year Name of Film Role Other Actors
1970 The House that Wouldn’t Die for ABC Barbara Stanwyck
1972 The Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe for NET Harriet
1974 The Carpenters for KCET Sissy Vincent Gardenia
1975 Miles to Go Before I Sleep
1977 The Last Hrrah for Hallmark Hall of Fame Maeve Skeffington Carroll O’Connor
1983 The Tragedy of King Lear for KCET Cordelia

Series for Television

Year Name of Series Role Other Actors
1973 The Streets of San Francisco for ABC Barbara Talmadge Michael Douglas, Karl Malden
1975 Beacon Hill for CBS Rosamond Lassiter Nancy Marchand, Beatrice Straight
1977 Kojak – “Kojak Days: Part 1” Carla Magid Telly Savalas, Kevin Dobson, Dan Frazer,George Savalas
1977 Kojak – “Kojak Days: Part 2” Carla Magid Telly Savalas, Kevin Dobson, Dan Frazer,George Savalas

Awards

Cannes Film Festival

Year Performance Award
1971 Helen in The Panic in Needle Park Best Actress Award

Kitty Winn in Needle Park

Kitty as Helen in Needle Park

Rob Boylan writes of her acting in that film:

Kitty Winn won Best Actress at Cannes in 1971 for playing Helen, an innocent girl from the Midwest who comes to New York and ends up a junkie, in The Panic in Needle Park (streaming on Netflix). Co-written by husband-and-wife duo Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne, and starring the then little-known Al Pacino as the charismatic hustler Bobby, Panic is a stark, withering account of drug use that remains just as relevant 40 years later. Though she starts out straight, curiosity finally gets the best of Helen and she sneaks a hit while Bobby is out cold. There is a devastating moment later in the movie as they walk the streets together. He cradles her face and sees the drugs in her eyes. “When did that happen?” he asks sadly, but she can’t answer. The line may be Pacino’s but the scene’s disquieting heartbreak is all Winn’s.

She has recently returned to the stage as Carol in The Last Romance for the San Jose Repertory Theater (2011).

 Kitty Winn in the Last RomanceKitty Winn and Will Marchetti

Charlie McCollum writes of that play

The early moments of “The Last Romance” echo the sentiments of “September Song,” that pop standard from the late 1930s by Kurt Weill and Maxwell Anderson.

An older man sits alone on a bench in a park ablaze with the colors of fall. He is clearly waiting for someone — perhaps anyone — to enter his life. You can almost hear the song’s lyrics in the background: “When the autumn weather turns the leaves to flame, one hasn’t got time for the waiting game.”

“Last Romance,” which opened Wednesday at San Jose Repertory Theatre in a regional premiere, is all about romance and whether you can find it again in your golden years after losing the one you love. It is also a work you end up liking more than loving.

Ralph Bellini (Will Marchetti) is a blue-collar kind of guy, who has worked all his life for the railroad, though he was once a talented opera singer. After the death of his wife, he lives with his younger sister, Rose (Sharon Lockwood), who becomes almost a surrogate mother to him.

Then one day, he sees Carol Reynolds (Kitty Winn), an elegant and reserved woman who lives in an upscale apartment building nearby and walks her dog in the park. There’s a spark in Ralph’s heart, something he hasn’t felt in a while.

It turns out that Carol may be lonelier than Ralph. She has just gotten her dog because she is afraid of growing old completely alone.

This odd couple gets off to a stumbling start since neither has done this dance in some time. He makes inappropriate jokes and lies about things. She is reserved and, it turns out, also lying about things.

But somehow, it all starts to come together, and Carol and Ralph find themselves falling into a romance, if not precisely love. Then things get complicated, and it is, as Ralph suggests early on, like opera.

“The thing about opera, see, is all the lovers want to do is be in love,” he says. “But it ain’t ever that simple. Something always gets in the way.”

Katherine Winn 2011

Kitty

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Ellene Winn and statue November 1978 at VMI

Ellene at VMI in 1979, unveiling the statue of her step-grandfather, Gen. Marshall

Ellene Winn (1949 – ) married Michael Hall Mobbs.  He represented the Secretary of Defense at the Strategic Arms Reduction Talks in the 1980’s. It appears they are divorced and he has married a Russian attorney.

Michael Hall Mobbs

Their children are Michael Hill Mobbs, Jr.  and Ellene Glenn Mobbs (my wife’s fourth cousins, once removed).

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Mike Mobbs

Michael Hall Mobbs Jr.

Michael was a neighbor of ours in North Baltimore and has followed the family military tradition. The community paper in 2006 reported

Cadet Michael Hall Mobbs Jr., son of Ellene Winn of Roland Park and Michael Mobbs of Washington, D.C., has been named to the Cadet chain of command at the U.S. Military Academy. Mobbs was chosen as the brigade command sergeant major, the third highest rank in the Corps of Cadets.

When he was at in Fort Bragg, North Carolina, in 2013 he and Scooter engaged in the Spur Ride:

Capt Mobbs and Scooter

 Captain Mobbs and Scooter

— The annual spur ride is a tradition which tests the best of the best within the U.S. Army’s cavalry career field. Capt. Michael Mobbs and his dog, Scooter, recently proved just how far they would go to earn the honor of becoming spur holders–an honor bestowed upon those troopers who complete a spur ride.

Mobbs, an infantry officer and company commander of Charlie Troop, 3rd Squadron, 73rd Cavalry Regiment, in the 82nd Airborne Division’s 1st Brigade Combat Team, strived to set the example for his paratroopers by participating in his squadron’s spur ride, Oct. 6. In a move rarely undertaken, Mobbs invited Scooter to participate by his side in the grueling, team-building event here.

About three years ago Mobbs took in Scooter, a puppy who escaped from a dog fighting circuit, and welcomed him in as part of his family.

“I’ve always had a lot of respect for Scooter,” said Mobbs. “He’s been a great family dog [and has been] protective of my girls and our home.”

Mobbs said inviting Scooter to participate in the event was a practical matter. The commander said he takes care of Scooter while his wife takes care of their two daughters and second dog in Washington, D.C.

This year’s spur ride was particularly intense because all the events, which included tasks ranging from ruck marches to paddling boats, were packed into a 24-hour time span. There was no opportunity for rest, and the candidates were pushed to their limits to earn their spurs.

Mobbs said he was very impressed with Scooter’s performance during the spur ride, and he believes that Scooter probably motivated several candidates who saw him driving on when things got particularly tough. He said that Scooter’s reward for participating was the honor of becoming an honorary spur holder, a steak at the end of the spur ride, and the 48-hour nap he took after it was all done.

“I think in another life he would have made an outstanding service dog,” said Mobbs. “He’s clearly demonstrated that he has the mental and physical stamina required.”

Mobbs set out to inspire his troops and take part in a tradition that spans back to the early 1700s. He did just that by earning his spurs, and along the way he introduced the cavalry to Scooter, its newest honorary spur holder.

Michael is married and has two children.

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Leenie and Andrew

Andrew and Leenie

Ellene (Leenie) Glenn Mobbs married Andrew Moore in Pittsburgh on June 7, 2014. Ellene attended Carnegie Mellon (like her cousin my son Thomas Podles, who was there at the same time) and graduated with a degree in creative writing. She has published several poems:

“Before the House Wakes” appeared in the Blast Furnace Press 1.2 (2011).

Before the House Wakes

Bayberry leaf air, the porch.
I lie, while quiet the wooden chairs and benches, tearing warm
Portuguese bread, soft under my fingers. Not far
from ocean pines that grow from salt water sand,
I think of midnight
and spread the pear jam,
eyes bruised and losing sleep.

The mist will seize before the oven sun, pots and cups,
swollen pines take the air and I will track
its dampness onto linoleum and buckled
sheets. But now, bluebirds
through brush and scented water, hushed, stir
the leaves, the bayberry, the pine.

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