You may not have noticed, but I pretty much took the month of May off from Substack. I’ve been working on a novel, doing my forty at the day job, being a family man, playing in a band, and other stuff. I’d like to say I’m back in a fairly regular way, but I’m not going to commit to anything. The recent spate of mass murder and subsequent non-debate has left me tired and jaded, so much so that I haven’t been commenting on many of the popular Substacks I regularly read.
But today is different. Today I have something to write about.
It started a couple of days ago with an email thread sent by my cousin Cindin about gathering in Tucson at the Evergreen Cemetery. This tradition goes back to 1913, when the family ventured out to place flowers on the grave of the patriarch, Col. William Herring. He was the first attorney general of the Arizona Territory, the first chancellor of the University of Arizona, a big booster of the quest for statehood (so much that he refused to raise a flag from his personal flagpole until said Arizona was admitted to the union, which it was shortly before his death in 1912), and general Honorable Citizen. He was never actually a colonel, but everyone called him that. He looked quite a bit like William Howard Taft, and very likely knew him when he lived in New York.
I haven’t been in Tucson for more than a decade, so I didn’t plan on going. But it got me thinking about my own childhood in Arizona and my personal experience celebrating Memorial Day. For some reason, my family seemed to consider it to be ours and ours alone, making a bigger deal of it than Easter or Christmas. I heard that Col. Herring had somehow invented it, or was otherwise involved with its creation, but there were conflicting stories about it. When I tried to research it later, his name was nowhere to be found. I put it up to family lore.
The first Memorial Day I can remember was when I was four. My parents had moved back to Tucson from California when I was a few weeks old, so I think I’d been taken along since I was a baby. This time, though, I was an active participant. I was excited as we piled into the car to go to my grandmother’s house in the part of downtown known as “Snob Hollow,” though even then almost all the mansions and large houses were on their way to demolition or the dubious fate of becoming a law office.
The Franklin House was a wedding present from my great-grandfather Selim Franklin to his new wife Henrietta, a stately brick territorial with a peaked roof and oversized windows. It was set on an acre of lawn and surrounded by twenty-foot tall oleander hedges that put forth gorgeous pink and blue flowers every spring. The family would gather in the yard armed with shears and buckets, everybody wearing gloves because oleanders are wickedly poisonous. I remember the joy of being able to participate in the lopping and stuffing and carrying, trying hard to not touch my face with my now-toxic hands. The most exciting thing of all was getting to ride in the back of my grandfather’s pickup truck with the big kids, all of whom seemed vastly old and worldly.
And here’s where my memory gets hazy. My grandfather had a full-sized pickup, but I cannot for the life of me remember if it was was a Ford or a Chevy. This may seem like an insignificant detail, but it’s one of those small facts that can pivot a narrative one direction or another. If it was a Chevy, it meant something and showed a complimentary, even heroic, aspect of my grandfather. If it was a Ford, it blears him with a shabbiness of stubborn resentment.
In 1927, John Hardy Carroll met Gladys Franklin on a Florida golf course. They dated and fell in love despite her having a masters’ from Wellesley and his education stopping (like Jethro Bodine) at the eighth grade. When her father dropped dead on a different golf course later that year, Gladys took the train home to mourn with her mother and siblings.
John, not to be deterred, set out across the country in a 1919 Model T Ford. He was armed with his tools, a valise, and Dr. Eliot’s Five-Foot-Shelf with which he planned to educate himself. As he drove west he wrote her love letters that were as remarkable for their poetic observations as the restrained passion. She kept the bundle tied with ribbon in her bottom drawer, and I read them end-to-end one afternoon shortly after her death. He told of the astonishingly arduous journey through a country with few paved roads and no reliable maps, infrequent gas stations and a paucity of mechanics (something to be considered when you’re driving a used car known as much for breakdowns as anything). At least there were plenty of spare parts, and he was a mechanic by trade.
Though his handwriting was careful and bore the signs of much revision, he was eloquent in describing his adventures. I recall reading about him having to repair an axle at a blacksmith’s shop, and having so many spare tires lashed to his fender that he could make a river crossing without the aid of a ferry.
He signed each letter Jack the Giant Killer, then Your Jack, and finally with a simple skull and crossbones. It was unlikely that my grandmother was able to write back much, though I do recall him talking about certain points in the journey where he could collect a general delivery letter. None of her correspondence was in the pile, and the letters themselves vanished into the estate.
I wish I’d taken them and made copies because memory is faulty. More on that in a moment.
He made it to Tucson and asked for her hand, calling her from the Santa Rita Hotel and threatening to go back to Florida if she vacillated. The details and sequence of this are lost, but my brother is going to Tucson to digitize a box of tapes of interviews with my grandmother. I hope to learn more. This might be a hell of a novel.
So now I come to the dilemma about the truck of my childhood: my grandfather was enormously intelligent despite his lack of formal education, and had wonderful southern manners, and was a hell of a mechanic. He somehow was able to talk his way into purchasing a Chevrolet dealership in Superior, Arizona, where my grandmother was to teach school. This was 1929, the year where more than five million new cars were sold (a record that would stand for two decades). With his charm and integrity, John Carroll sold a lot of cars.
The future looked bright right up until the end of October.
To add to the misery, cotton prices collapsed, so most of the new wealth in Superior dried up. The customers had been taking advantage of Alfred Sloan’s GMAC financing, so the cars were bought on credit. My grandfather was faced with a choice: keep the dealership and repossess the cars he’d sold, or assume the loss of his investment and retreat to live with his domineering mother-in-law in her Tucson mansion.
So here’s the question about the truck he drove in 1970:
Did he stay loyal to Chevy and continue to drive the car made by the company that ruined him, knowing that it wasn’t their fault, or did he carry a grudge all the decades of his life?
My grandmother told me how he couldn’t abide bananas after living on the Mobile docks as a starving runaway teenager where he ate United Fruit’s cast-off ripes for months on end. Throughout his life he carried a hatred for them and the poverty they represented.
My dad would know the answer to this one, but he may not have told me the truth anyway. Dad was fond of Beowulf and was prone to ignoring the faults of his heroes. My grandfather enlisted in World War One as was proud of having been part of the famous Rainbow Division, but his name doesn’t appear on any roster.
The family story was that he had to stay stateside because of scarlet fever and missed being wiped out with the bulk of his regiment, but this is one of many family stories where the facts have misted over. I do have this photo as well as his Army-issue New Testament.
However, it turns out that Col. Herring actually did somewhat “invent” decoration day when he was a New York Assemblyman in 1873. My cousin Marge found this clipping from the NY Times.
Thanks for reading!
Wow! How lucky you are to have such a rich family history with all the stories and lore to go along with it. No wonder you’re a writer! I of course think the best way to preserve these kinds of memories is through a documentary movie. Pictures, letters, etc. can come alive through the “Ken Burns effect.” A fictionalized version, either in novel or movie form, would allow for more drama, but I prefer the more truthful, honest depictions of the past as you’ve done in this essay. 🤗