Bio
I’ve read dozens of autobiographies. Most are bad. A few stand out: 1) John Huston’s amazed me because it said absolutely nothing of value in 444 pages; and, 2) Eddy Rickenbacker’s, who survived being lost at sea for twenty‑four days when a seagull landed on his head.
He caught it, disemboweled the poor beast, and used the guts for fish bait.
Beryl Markham’s $.35 an acre back when Grandpa bought the original place in the late 40’s.
Packed up and ready to leave for Sheffield, Illinois (where Lawrence’s sister Aunt Helen and Uncle Irvan lived), Dad asked his mom if she’d like to escape the misery as well.
Sadly, she hung on until Lawrence divorced her twenty‑some years later; then he married a succession of women who never equaled her in any way. At the end of the alcohol rope, he asked her back. My pride in her stems from the response: take a hike.
Grandma Scott spent her remaining years either working at a local children’s home, or babysitting, and her funeral overflowed with appreciative adults she’d nourished as kids.
Grandpa died drunk and alone, driving himself to the hospital in Columbia where he was treated for some bizarre form of cancer that they promised would dissipate … if he’d only turned his back on the juice.
To his credit, Jim used to visit Grandpa in his nasty late stages, driving all the way out there with his girlfriend – the first of his itchy crotch women – and they’d have a nice visit until Grandpa got into the party mood and got up to fetch the Southern Comfort.
“Well, I guess we’ll be going,” said Jim. Then Grandpa would put the liquor back in the fridge. This dance lasted all afternoon, but Grandpa remained sober during their visits.
Like most alcoholics, Grandpa wasn’t all bad. Sober, he was highly intelligent, well‑read, and humorous. Played saxophone and motorcycled cross‑country with Grandma. We all wished Dr. Jekyll could keep Mr. Hyde locked up in the closet.
But he had his own key.
Mark Twain Nexus, Redux
Grandma Mary Scott paid her way through beauty school after Dad and Janet left home, then opened a shop in nearby Hannibal. Whenever Grandpa ran out of juice money, he’d drive to the shop and rifle the cash box.
But he also had some hillbilly friends living in a couple of rooms inside this gigantic house outside town where I rambled and played with their unwashed brood eating straight out of the ice cream container, no spoon required. I remember many fireplaces, and a huge front porch.
Fifteen years later I passed by Hannibal after attending the farm sale with Jim after Grandpa’s death. We blew a radiator hose on the way down and pulled in just as the sale concluded.
The few valuables had been scooped up in our absence, so my default inheritance became a leftover double mattress still in the plastic, something Grandpa must have purchased right before he died.
That mattress fit into the covered bed of our 1990 Ford F-150, so we slept on it for the next twenty years on camping trips across the US and Canada.
One is allowed to brew lemonade with life‑lemons.
As I drove toward Hannibal on the way home after the sale, I passed that big old house of yore. But instead of the dilapidated shack that my memory recalled, I witnessed a refurbished miracle.
Pulling over and taking the tour, I learned that Mark Twain’s friends John and Helen Garth actually owned the place back in the day:
Two of Samuel Clemens’ childhood friends remained close to him all his life: John and Helen Kercheval Garth. They entertained Clemens on visits to Hannibal and corresponded with him many times. Samuel Clemens, John Garth, and Helen Kercheval were all students at Mrs. Elizabeth Horr’s school and later at that of J. D. Dawson. John is probably one of the boys who provided Clemens with inspiration for the character Tom Sawyer.
Here’s the Mark Twain kicker.
He used to smoke cigars sitting on the same porch we played under. One day he was smoking a stogie on the porch while visiting the Garths when the Barnum and Bailey Circus passed by on the gravel road.
When a circus came and went, it left us all burning to become clowns; the first negro minstrel show that came to our section left us all suffering to try that kind of life; now and then we had a hope that if we lived and were good, God would permit us to be pirates. These ambitions faded out, each in its turn; but the ambition to be a steam-boatman always remained. - Life on the Mississippi
Mom’ first sight of Dad occurred when she spied him walking down the road to a service station with an inner tube around his neck. They “blind” dated a few days later – set up by mutual friends – and married in June 1955. The first time she took him home to meet the family, Grandpa Cogger lay on the couch taking a nap with a newspaper over his head. Mom introduced Dad, and Grandpa harrumphed under the newspaper, never taking it off his face. Despite the strange introduction, the two were life‑long buddies. The wedding was forty‑five minutes late because Grandpa Cogger’s new shoes ended up in the refrigerator along with all the ham sandwiches … stored in shoe boxes.
Providing literal cold feet for the matrimony to follow.
And I believe Mom saved Dad’s life, or at minimum extended it by thirty years.
He was intrinsically good, worried about the abuse his mother suffered, and asked her to come to Illinois, and later took care of her for the last thirty years of her life.
But he flinched at hugs in those early Sheffield days. Didn’t know what they were, really. A lifetime spent dodging curses and fists — working slavishly for a selfish juicer had toughened his emotions — but Mom’s family became the loving functional refuge he’d never known, and therefore, our own family received a pattern based on love, giving, mutual respect, and frequent attendance at the First Congregational Church, surrounded by like‑minded townsfolk. Sinners indeed, but trying to get a handle on it.
Lawrence hurled in and out of our lives for several decades, usually feeling sorry for himself during lonesome holidays, telling us about friends who treated him better, Dad sitting there absorbing the final insults in silence.
One day Jim and I were home alone and Grandpa drove down the lane, opened the driver’s door, and fell out into the driveway. Collecting himself, he dragged his body to a stand, took three wobbly steps toward me, and attempted a slow-motion roadhouse punch to my head, which I simply sidestepped as he fell back to the ground.
That was the last memory of my patriarchal Grandfather, except for his nose sticking out of the casket a few years later after he died alone, the Southern Comfort gaining a head‑start on the embalming fluid.
I say all this in praise of my parents, one who overcame parental abuse, and the other, who modeled normalcy and gave us goals by going off to college at age 36, graduating with honors at Bradley University. And though she traveled 100 miles to school and back three days a week, studied, and kept the farm books, we never missed a meal or wore dirty clothes.
Perhaps the need to succeed is genetic.
Her mother Esther Plum – my maternal grandmother – grew up one of ten children on a small Minnesota farm which they lost during the Great Depression after moving from another rough situation in Iowa. One year her daddy supposedly shot off his shotgun and declared:
“No Christmas this year!”
“Why?” the kids wailed.
“Accidentally shot Santa,” he answered, walking off into the woods in search of supper deer.
But Esther’s brother Bill joined the Navy before WWII, worked his way up to Captain, earned a PhD in physics at the University of Missouri on the GI Bill, and was later chosen to be on the team that built the first lunar rover.
I have no proof that it was named after Dr. Plum, but here’s a picture of astronaut Charles Duke, Jr. standing in front of Plum Crater – lunar rover in the background – along with shiny Earth.
On the Scott side, Sidney married Elizabeth Batdorf, a smart, practical woman who enabled them to parlay their small farm into a little empire, 1,500 acres and a purchase of the town’s grain elevator. The small park in the middle of Neponset is named after Sidney, who fought in the Spanish American War before returning to raise cattle, corn, kids, run a business, serve the community on the school board, then lose most of it when Elizabeth died and he married a financial black hole floozy named Ruby.
Happily, cousin Alan Scott and his diligent wife Deborah subsequently expanded the original 80 acres to nearly its original 1,500 with elbow grease and frugality.
Elizabeth’s father Michael and uncle Jonathan joined the Union Army, fought with Sherman through his plunge into the South, faced capture at Missionary Ridge, and were imprisoned in Andersonville. History buffs recall that earlier in the war escaped prisoners from Andersonville – bony ghosts with ribs and hip bones sticking out through their skin – wandered through Sherman’s camp one moonlit evening, which incensed and drove him to destroy railroads and lay waste to the countryside in order to take food away from foraging Confederate armies and bring a quicker end to the horror.
Michael suffered a severe face wound in Tennessee, but lived a year in that raging hell hole before dying the next spring.
One of my earliest memories of being entirely enthralled in a story was my junior high perusal of Andersonville, by MacKinlay Kantor. The horror surpassed the gas chambers, which I’d studied in countless WWII recollections.
Admittedly, the corn crib prisons on Rock Island, Illinois – sitting in the wind smack in the middle of the Mississippi River in the dead of Midwestern winters — was a special hell to Confederate prisoners.
Jonathon somehow survived, mustered out, and spent his final days farming in Iowa.
Lana and I were married on her family farm – on the front porch of the oldest residence in Hancock County — in the Chinquapin Valley near Sneedville, Tennessee, one hot August Saturday. Her ancestor John Mills fought for the South, perhaps opposite the Batdorfs at Chickamauga, and is buried in the Democrat cemetery off the north pasture, next to the woods.
Perhaps fifteen years after the ceremony and lively party where willing Chicagoans introduced to white lightning kicked up their heels – at one point the square dancing resembled a Grateful Dead bacchanal – we found ourselves at dusk standing on the hill east of the homestead, under a large dogwood, looking at family markers in the Ferguson family plot.
“Looks like we’ll end up here someday,” I said.
“I will,” answered Lana.
“You’ll be down there with the rest of the Democrats,” she laughed, pointing down to the dark edge of the woods where a cow was shaking, working out a plopper.
