Ninety-nine years ago, on December 9, 1912, my dad was born in a small, rural community in north Florida known as
Fanlew. Some of you may not know that I was named for him; he was “the first” Laurie Skipper. (Yes, “Laurie” was originally considered a male name – sometimes used as a nickname for Lawrence.) As I sat eating dinner last night and reflecting about his life, I realized that I’ve never really talked about him much. I wrote a eulogy for Mom’s funeral and have reflected back on her in various blogs. But, I’ve never really talked about or paid tribute to Dad. So, bear with me if this is lengthy, for it is long overdue. And, it’s mostly for me. :)
Realize that just because the community had a name did not mean that Dad’s family lived “in town.” They lived out in the country – or, as we would call it, “the backwoods.” Fanlew was a community whose livelihood depended primarily on turpentine and the turpentine mill, so it was an area densely wooded with pine trees. When the trees in an area were drained of the sap, they were milled for the wood. Then families would move to another area to do the same. Because of the railroad coming through Fanlew, it survived as a community. Granddaddy (Wallace Skipper) was one of the few who did not actually work in the turpentine or milling industry. He worked for the owner of the mills, but in a different capacity. He was a rancher, of sorts. The man who owned the mills also owned most of the land in the area – hundreds and hundreds of acres. He had cattle that was allowed to free range. Granddaddy took care of it, often being gone for days or weeks at a time to check on it or round some of it up for sale, or whatever. Grandma Vickie (Victoria Andrews Skipper) and the family were apparently used to him being gone. Of course, with no telephones they would not hear from him in any way from when he left until he returned, however long that was.
I can’t even imagine what life was like for Dad’s family. But I know a little about the birth of his older sister, Lois. She was born quite prematurely on a very cold January day. Fortunately, their mother’s sister, Lula, was visiting from Perry, about 50 miles away, when Lois was born. Though there was no doctor or way of weighing her, Aunt Lula claimed she was so tiny that a silver dollar would completely cover her face. Lula knew that the only hope of her surviving was to keep her warm. Though they lived in Florida, that was not an easy task in the rickety, wood-frame house in which they lived. As Dad said, “you could count the chickens under the house.” (For those not familiar with such things, most of the houses were built up off the ground on some sort of pillars. I guess leveling them was easier that way than trying to dig out a level foundation. Since they were built up, you could usually crawl under a house. What Dad was saying was that there were cracks between the boards in the floor large enough that you could see through them and see the dirt or whatever was under the house.) So, Lula knew she had to do something to keep this tiny infant warm. She heated bricks by the fireplace. She then took a drawer from a dresser, wrapped the bricks in towels and lined the drawer with them, then made a bed for Lois in the middle. It apparently worked very well as an incubator; Lois lived a long and healthy life.
I’m assuming Dad’s birth and the births of his brothers, Oliver and Sed, were less eventful. I don’t really know anything about his early childhood. Grandma Vickie died when Dad was in his mid-teens. Any stories she had seem to have died with her. And Dad’s life changed significantly. He found himself suddenly responsible for all the things she had done. As indicated, Granddaddy might be gone for days at a time. The animals (chickens, hogs, mule, and sometimes cattle) had to be fed, the garden tended, food cooked, clothes washed, and his brothers (who were still young) tended. Lois was a couple of years older, but she quickly married her sweetheart to not have to take on that responsibility. So, it fell to Dad to do it all. Dad managed to graduate from high school, but he really did not get much of an education. He missed too much due to all the responsibilities. But, he made sure his brothers went and he went as much as he could.
That sounds so tough, particularly in our society today. I’m sure from Granddaddy’s perspective he was doing all he could to keep the family together. He had been orphaned as an infant when both of his parents died in a flu epidemic. He and his twin sister were taken in by the same family, so they remained together. Their older siblings went to live with other families. We never even knew how many there were or with whom they lived. That was just what happened in those times. Some family with a child that was a friend to one or more of the orphans would just take them in. Sometimes they would keep their last name; sometimes they would take the name of the family with whom they were now living. Given that none of them (including my father and his siblings) had a birth certificate, there was no real issue with legal adoptions or name changes.
As I recall, Dad was 19 when Granddaddy remarried. With a new “mom” in the home to take care of his brothers and all the other things, Dad moved out on his own. I know he went to work for someone who had a room (I think in the barn) where he could live. I don’t remember what he did. I think it was farming. That would make sense, since that was what he knew how to do. Over the years, he did a number of things. One that I remember was being a taxi driver. Realize that Dad moved out on his own in 1932 – three years into the decade-long Great Depression. I believe he worked a couple of WPA jobs. I know he worked in Mississippi for a while, I believe doing some sort of construction. I’m not sure if that was WPA, but he did work a WPA job building roads in a national forest between Tallahassee and the Gulf of Mexico. At that point, the road building equipment was all manual – meaning that men pushed it! “Modern” road-building equipment was developed during WWII.
Somewhere along the way, Dad met and married Marcene Pate. I guess you would say they eloped, but they did so with the permission of her mother and step-father, Bessie and John Pelt. Then WWII came along. After Japan bombed Pearl Harbor, Dad enlisted in the Navy and was sent to the Pacific front. His road construction experience landed him in the SeeBeas, putting down landing strips on the islands in the Pacific. That was where he learned to handle a motor grader and what started him in that field for the rest of his life. I heard someone use a term recently that I had not heard in years. He was a “blue top” grader. That means he could strike a “blue top” match with the edge of his blade on the motor grader and light it. Seriously! (That’s precision.)
After the war, with the depression era behind, I’m sure things looked better. He returned to Tallahassee and life with Marcene. The only down side for them was her inability to have a child, so they decided to adopt. “Little Laurie” had been part of their family for about 9 months when another tragedy occurred. Marcene died. She had required some abdominal surgery, but was doing well and was supposed to be released from the hospital to go home the next day. That night, a blood clot broke loose and hit her brain, causing a fatal stroke. The day after her funeral, the representative from the state orphanage came to pick up the child. According to Florida law at the time, the adoption was not final for a year – and a single parent did not qualify to adopt. So, Dad lost his wife and his infant son within a week. I’ve often wondered what happened to that baby – who adopted him and how his life turned out. I’m sure he never knew that another family had taken him at birth and loved him – and that he had been taken away from them. Because Marcene was an only child, her mother and step-father had been doting grandparents, and they lived next door. When Marcene died, Dad stayed close to them. In some ways, Bessie had become the mother he did not have. In another way, they were friends. They remained part of the each other’s life until she passed away and she became “Grandma” to us.
A couple of years after Marcene’s death, he and Mom met and married. The odd part of the story is that Mom and Marcene knew each other and had even double-dated before Marcene started dating Dad. So, Mom knew her mom and the step-father who had raised her, Bessie and John. If you did not know the relationship, you would have assumed Dad was their son and Mom was their daughter-in-law. A year and a half after they married, my brother was born; a year and a half after that, I “showed up.” :) “Grandma” and “Pa John” definitely treated us like grandkids! We spent far more time at their home than at “Grannie’s” – Mom’s mother. We went to their house every Saturday night. We would cook and eat dinner and then spend the evening. We watched the country music shows on their black and white TV – the Grand Old Opry and then the Porter Wagner Show – for Dad and Pa John. Then we watched The Lawrence Welk show for Mom and Grandma (and me).
I must take a side trail here. Family is a wonderful thing. If you have family, do not fail to hug them and tell you love them. For those of us who do not have family, we have to rely on those relationships that are “like family” even when they are not. We could not have been loved any more than we were by Grandma. And she was just as much a grandmother to us as our natural grandmother on Mom’s side. And my Dad could not have been any more loving and faithful to her, if she had been his mother. The same was true of Mom. Grandma never drove. So Mom (usually with me in tow) took her to the “shopping center” every other Friday night. This was before the days of malls. The “shopping center” was where you shopped. The one that we went to had among other things a Sears, a Neisner’s Five and Ten Cent store, a Walgreens drug store, and a Winn Dixie grocery store. We went to Neisner’s, Walgreens, and Winn Dixie every trip. There was also a Lerner’s (women’s clothing), two shoe stores (Butler’s and Thom McAnn’s), a jewelry store, and various other small stores that came and went over time. But, back to the point – when you don’t have any (or much) family, there can be people to whom you are not related that are closer and more faithful than many who are natural family. Those of us who have no family (or none that is close) definitely need that. :)
When Arthur (my brother) and I came along, Dad switched from working for a private contractor to working for the county. It was a substantial pay cut, but he didn’t have to travel or “move with the job.” He did not want us living in a trailer that was hauled from job to job, disrupting our lives and schooling. Nor did he want to move away from Grandma and Pa John or his sister (whose husband had died). Family was important to him. When Arthur and I were both out of high school, Dad went back to work for a private contractor. He would travel with the job; but Mom, Arthur, and I stayed “at home.” He would come home any weekend he didn’t work on Saturday. As Mom often said, Dad’s idea of a standard work week was 50-60 hours. (So now you know where I got that from!) Sometimes he had every other weekend off; sometimes it was every third weekend. He lived in one of the trailers that the company owned and pulled from site to site as they completed one job and moved on to the next one. Usually, he was sharing it with another worker. So, he was away from the family more than he was home from the time he went back into private contractor work in the mid-70s until he finally retired in 1987 – at age 75. Then, after retiring, he worked for a short time for someone in Tallahassee who had a contract to grade the roads in a national forest south of Tallahassee. He actually ended his road construction career literally where he started – on those same roads he had help create using the manual equipment as part of the WPA program between WWI and WWII!
After finally retiring, the next major event of his life was in 1988 when my brother died. We all knew that was extremely difficult on Mom. I think it was harder on Dad than we realized. Men of his generation – “the greatest generation” – did not share their feelings or emotions. But I know he was hurting. He even had a small stroke the morning of the funeral, but he was alone at the time it didn’t affect him enough that anyone else noticed. A few days later, he had another one that was more noticeable. I’m sure the internalized stress was a major contributor.
By the time Arthur died in November 1988, Granddaddy (Dad’s dad), Pa John, Grandma, and Dad’s sister, Lois, to whom he was very close, had all passed away, as had Grannie (Mom’s mom). The family was getting smaller and smaller, and I was now living in Kansas. Christmas day had gone from “a house full of people” to just the three of us. Usually, we included a couple of my friends who had no family in the area to brighten their day and ours.
In November 1994, Dad had a stroke that left him in a comma. At first, it appeared he would recover and come out of it. Then his vitals began to slip. Three weeks (to the day) later, he finally slipped away. The saddest part of that to me was that he was alone when he did so. Mom had finally moved him from the hospital to a nursing home. The best one in the area was in a small town about 50 miles away and an opening came up there, which was rare. Since the doctors had no way of knowing how much longer he would live – it could be hours, days, months or years – Mom made the decision to take the opening and move him. Three days later, they called her in the middle of the night to say he appeared to be dying. Since she could not see to drive at night and it was too far to be able to get a cab, she was waiting for daylight to make the drive over. He did not make it that long. He died as he had lived most of his life – alone. It still bothers me when I think about that. That made the fact the I was able to be there for Mom as she was slipping away all the more important and precious to me.
I’ve realized as I reflected on this that I got a lot more from my Dad than just my name. He was not an educated man; in fact, he could barely read. He was, however, “good with figures.” Maybe that’s where I got my math aptitude. :) He was a very hard worker – and his day did not end until all the chores were done. He would come home from work, have dinner, and then go out to either tend to the garden he had planted or chop wood for the fireplace that was our primary source of heat in the house I grew up in, or whatever had to be done. I guess he learned that when he had to care for “things at home” and his brothers and still try to go to school. Other than Saturday nights, I rarely saw him sit down and watch TV until after he retired. So it’s no wonder that I don’t “stop to play” until my work is done. It’s the way I was raised. He was also one who would always “lend a hand” to someone who needed it. I think that comes from growing up in a time and place that it was “just what you did” when a neighbor needed help. I think that should still be true, though today we will pay someone to do something before asking “a neighbor” (a friend) for help. He was also generous and would always help someone in need, even when he did not have anything to spare. I grew up poor, but we never went hungry or without anything that we really needed. For all his faults or shortcomings, he did believe it was his responsibility to make sure his family was cared for. In looking back, he instilled a lot of values in me – not because he talked about them but because that was how he lived his life.
Well, I’ve rambled for probably too long. But, as I said, “it’s mostly for me.” :)
In many ways, I’ve missed Mom the most. But that is because I had her here, living with me for nearly 12 years after Dad died. The last few years of her life, my focus was pretty much on taking care of her. So there was a significant change in my life when she passed on. But I do miss Dad – and Arthur as well.
Sometime when you are hugging and kissing those you love and who love you, say a prayer for all those people in the world who do not have anyone with whom to share that simple affection and joy. There are likely a lot more of them that any of us realize – many of whom have no one to even do that much for them.
Blessings to you as you enjoy your loved ones – be they natural or “legal” family (adopted or by marriage) or simply those who have “become family” to you. Enjoy ever moment you have with them.
