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Carlos Eduardo Carbajal struck a pose at my house recently the minute he saw me with my camera. He and his mother, my niece Terry Dale Cavet, and her husband, James Cavet, had come to dinner. Carlos, who is my great-nephew, is all energy and all little boy. He just turned 5 this summer. Terry and James are in the process of adopting him. I think his idea of how to pose for a picture has been heavily influenced by martial-arts movies. It was still in the 80s and very humid that night, so we decided to eat inside instead of out on the deck. Carlos was greatly disappointed. He wanted to go play in the dirt.
Rowan Massie Miller, my great-great-niece, was born Aug. 25, 2007. Her mother, my great-niece Jennifer Lynn Dale Miller, and her father, Nathan Miller, shared this picture with me last summer. She seems to share a trait with other children in the family's past -- a love of digging in the sand. I recall many hours of digging holes with my sister Dianne. We were convinced that if we dug deep enough, we'd get to China. Actually, if such a thing were possible, we'd probably have ended up somewhere in the Marianas Trench.
Lindley was born June 2, 2007, to my nephew Jeffrey Dale and his wife, Beverley. That makes Lindley my great-niece. Her mother shared this picture of her, taken this summer. Have you ever seen such blue eyes?
Terry Lynn Dale and her brother, Michael Wayne Dale, were captured on her first birthday by a News Leader photographer.
The first Dale I remembering being born was not my sister. I was only 3 years old when she came along. But Terry Lynn Dale, my brother Jimmy's daughter, was born on St. Patrick's Day, March 17, 1954, when I was 11. Terry already had an older brother, Michael Wayne Dale, who had been born Aug. 28, 1951, but I had not yet met Jimmy and his wife, Shirley, when Mike was born.
When Terry was a year old, the News Leader splashed a series of feature pictures of her and her birthday cake and her brother across the front page as a St. Patrick's Day feature. With her strawberry blonde curls, she was a holiday natural.
Our eldest sister, Dorothy Dale Warren, and her husband, William Russell Warren, already had two children before I met them. William Russell Warren Jr. was born Oct. 13, 1948, and Mary Elizabeth Warren was born April 28, 1950.
I remember well when Bobby, our middle brother, married Camilla Robinson on Sept. 9, 1961. My mother and father and my sister Dianne and I attended their wedding together. By that time I was already a sophomore at the University of Richmond. Their daughter, Evelyn Annette Dale, was born Oct. 22, 1963, when I was still in college. But I was in the Air Force in Germany when her younger brother, Jeffrey Vernon Dale, was born on May 17, 1968. His parents asked me to be Jeffrey's godfather. Jeffrey Dale, my godson and nephew, married Beverley Stone, and they have a daughter, Lindley Caldwell Dale, who was born June 2, 2007.
Michael Wayne Dale, my nephew, grew up to attend the University of Richmond, where he majored in journalism. He told me recently that his decision on a major was influenced by me, although I had had no idea of that at the time. He married Mary Rebecca Massie on May 19, 1973, and they now have two grown and accomplished -- and very smart -- daughters, Jennifer Lynn Dale, born March 17, 1978 (St. Patrick's Day, her Aunt Terry's birthday), and Melissa Brooke Dale, born Dec. 15, 1979. In an ironic "roots" way, Melissa is now living in Savannah, which is where the earliest Dale of whom we are aware lived before the Civil War.
Jennifer, my great-niece, married Nathan Hammer Miller, and they now have a daughter, my great-great-niece. She is Rowan Massie Miller, born Aug. 25, 2007.
My nephew Billy (Dorothy's son) has been married twice. His children are Lisa Dale Warren (my great-niece), David McGinn Warren (my great nephew), and Bryan Eliot Pyles Warren (my great-nephew). Bryan's aunt, my niece Mary, dotes on him. My great-niece Lisa married Greg Your, and they have a daughter, Jaqueline, and a son, Conner -- my great-great-niece and great-great-nephew.
My niece Terry Lynn Dale married James Ray Cavet on June 8, 1996. They are in the process of adopting a child from rural Honduras, who has lived with them here in Richmond since he was 4 months old. Carlos Eduardo Carbajal, who was born June 9, 2004, suffered injuries to his left hand and a portion of his scalp in a crib fire when he was an infant in Honduras. Terry, who spent much of her career as a pediatric nurse, and James have provided a loving home for Carlos, who, I must admit, is the apple of my eye. Despite the troubles he had as an infant, Carlos is now a cheerful, inquisitive, optimistic, affectionate, independent -- and sometimes, yes, stubborn -- little boy. With his dark good looks, irrepressible smile and big brown eyes, he will be a heartbreaker in another few years.
This building is where two generations of us, my mother and then I and my sister, attended elementary school. I took this photo on Aug. 25, 2009.
Today it's unusual for two generations of the same family to attend the same elementary school, but my mother went to Helen Dickinson Elementary School in Fairmount in the 1920s and my sister and I went there in the 1940s and 1950s.
The building had stood for about 30 years by the time my mother was enrolled. It dates back to about 1895. It stands at the corner of 21st and T streets and is said to be the work of architect Charles M. Robinson. In the photo above, you see the original three-story part of the building. At the opposite end is a 1950 addition.
The school was originally named Fairmount Elementary, but it was renamed in 1925 in honor of a former principal. In 1958, long after I had completed the 6th grade and moved on, the name was changed back to Fairmount Elementary. The school closed in 1979. It has since been rehabilitated as housing for the elderly and handicapped.
I could never get away with misbehaving at Helen Dickinson Elementary (which is not to say I never misbehaved). In the late 1940s and early 1950s, some of the same teachers who had taught my mother a quarter century earlier were teaching me. They had no qualms about telephoning my mother if I got into trouble, which wasn't too often, given that I knew the consequences.
I drove to the old school this morning to take a picture of it. I gave little thought to the building itself 60 years ago, but now it strikes me as a beautiful example of turn-of-the-century school architecture.It is now listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
This fuzzy, undated image must be from 1953 or 1954 and was taken at the Rappahannock River at Wildwood, near Bowlers Wharf, where my parents rented a cottage from friends each summer. At the left with his son, Billy, is my brother-in-law, Bill Warren. Next to him is my sister Dorothy with their daughter, Mary. I am bending over, digging in the sand, at the far right. The boy in the center was from the neighboring farm. He knew all there was to know about life on the Rapahhannock, and his parents supplied us with fresh milk from their cows and fresh corn, tomatoes and a host of other vegetables from their farm.
When my sister Dianne and I were very young, we didn't know we had a brother and sister who were already adults. This snapshot is probably from the winter before we met Jimmy and Dorothy.
"Hi. My name is Donnie Dale, and you must be my brother."
What a shock that must have given James Vernon Dale Jr., who had thought that the most stressful thing on his agenda that night was talking to a group of Cub Scouts on Church Hill.
My best guess is that I was about 10 years old. I was a member of the Cub Scout pack that met at the House of Happiness, a social services center on Venable Street. I liked scouting, and I stayed with it until I was in high school.
I vividly remember the night in 1952 when our regular scoutmaster told us that there would be special guests at our next meeting, two scout leaders from another troop in Richmond's West End. Their names, we were told, were Bob Warren and Jimmy Dale.
By the time I was old enough to know what "Sr." meant at the end of my father's name I knew there had to be a "Jr." somewhere, but I didn't know who he was. I knew that my father had been married twice before. I was an inquisitive kid, and I had pieced that much together. My mother had taken me and my sister by the hand on the bus to go visit my brother Bobby, the child of my father's second marriage. I had attended at least one birthday party for Bobby at his mother Louise's house, and Bobby had been to our house. My mother told me later that she was determined that my sister Dianne and I would at least know Bobby.
But the relationship between my father and his children by his first wife, Lillie Durham Dale, was too strained to bear talking about in my presence. That, I think, was my father's fault, plain and simple. It was only later that I learned that after Lillie died, he had abandoned his children to the care of Lillie's sisters, their aunts. One aunt took the oldest child, Dorothy, and the other took the youngest child, Jimmy. There apparently was a great deal of animosity towards my father on the part of the two aunts. And rightly so, it seems to me. My father walked away from his kids, never contributed to their support, and never saw them again to my knowledge.
Until, that is, 1952, by which time Dorothy and Jimmy had married and had children of their own. Dorothy's children, Billy and Mary, were toddlers, and Jimmy's child, Mike, was about a year old. His sister, Terry, wouldn't be born for another two years.
After the announcement that we'd be having guest speakers at the upcoming Cub Scout meeting, I thought about little else for a week. I didn't tell my parents, but I kept wondering if Jimmy Dale could be my brother. What were the odds that I'd run into him at a Cub Scout meeting? And what would I do?
At the age of 10, I was old enough to know that this could really shake up the family tree. And I looked forward to that, as only a 10-year-old boy could, seeing only positive potential results and giving no thought to how things could easily veer out of control. For example, I never thought about how it would affect Jimmy if some kid popped up and said, "You must be my brother." And I gave no thought to how it might affect my father or my mother when I told them I had met my brother. I was as self-centered as any child of that age. It was all about me.
It was a long week, but when the scoutmaster introduced Robert Warren and James V. Dale Jr., I knew what that meant. I have no recollection of what they spoke about or why, but after the meeting, I grabbed my chance, walked up to Jimmy Jr., and said my piece.
He must have been flabbergasted. In fact, I know he was flabbergasted - and rattled and astonished - because many years later he told me so. And to put the icing on top of the cake, his co-speaker, Bob Warren, was the brother of my sister Dorothy's husband, Bill Warren. For me, it was a two-fer. I met my brother and my sister's husband's brother at the same time.
I told my parents. They were astonished as well. I had halfway expected somebody to be mad at me, but that never happened.
At that point, the grownups took over. My parents invited Jimmy and his wife to visit us at our house in Fairmount, and they did. So did Dorothy and her family.
Other family occasions followed, at Jimmy and Shirley's house, at Dorothy and Bill's house, at our house, and at the cottage my parents rented each summer at the Rappahannock near Center Cross. We took family outings together, piling us kids, picnic baskets and all the adults into several cars for a visit to Jamestown, another time we picnicked by the river in Yorktown, and we went to the Ground Squirrel Wayside picnic area on Route 301. Dorothy, my brother's wife (Shirley), and my mother were all great cooks. We had some good food on those picnics.
I was delighted. I loved having a brand-new (to me) brother and sister. They were nothing but kind and loving, and they were great fun to be with.
If there was strain, I wasn't aware of it, although there must have been. I'll never know, because I never talked about it with either my parents or Jimmy or Dorothy. Looking back, I think Dorothy and Jimmy must have been at least curious about the father who had abandoned them. I suspect they both thought their own children should get to know their grandfather, as well. My mother did all she could to smooth the way, but it must have been hard on all of those involved, especially Dorothy and Jimmy. I have great respect - and gratitude - for them: They must have swallowed hard and thought, "These are the cards we've been dealt, and we just have to make the most of them."
As to my father, I suspect he had to deal with a great deal of guilt. How could he not? I said in an earlier post that I had come to the conclusion that he did his best as a father. This is not to say that he was the best father, nor is it to say he was the worst. He did the best he could, even though that might not have been good enough for anybody, including himself.
But the rift was healed, at least enough for him and his adult children to manage to interact socially, even though I doubt that all was forgiven and forgotten. Nor should it have been.
Most of those directly affected are gone now. And it is for us who remain - my brother Bobby, my nieces and nephews, their now-grown families, and all the greats and great-greats - to do the best we can. We seem to have succeeded, and I treasure them all.
My father's relationship with his only cat surprised me.
I have always loved animals. I asked repeatedly as a child to have a cat. But my father wouldn't allow it. We always had dogs - one was a childhood cocker spaniel, jet black, named Mr. Boh (after the TV commercials for National Bohemian beer), and the other was an Airedale mix named Mordred (for the dark knight in the tales of King Arthur). I've owned two dogs and four cats as an adult.
The change in my father's attitude came when I was living in my own apartment, in about 1971. I was going back to Germany on vacation, so I asked my parents to keep my cat, a solid black, sleek 2-year-old male named Pusskuss. (The name came from an attempt at "pussycat" by the young son of a friend.) It took the wily Pusskuss less than 24 hours to have my father wrapped around his paw, my mother told me later. Pusskuss slept with my father, watched TV sitting in his lap, and followed him from room to room like a puppy. Two weeks later, when I came home and my parents picked me up late at night at the airport, my dad suggested that it might be best not to disturb Pusskuss until morning. "He's asleep," he told me. Yeah, right. I took Pusskuss home with me that night.
A month later, my parents adopted a Siamese kitten, which they named Takhli (after the name of a small town in Thailand, much in the news then because there was an air base there during the war in Vietnam). My father doted on that cat. He had a picture of her in his wallet when he died. Takhli lived out the rest of her pampered life with my mother.
The picture above is of my father and Takhli in early 1972. Takhli is in her favorite place.
This is the only photograph I am aware of that shows my father, James Vernon Dale Sr., with all of his children. Dorothy Dale Warren, in the red dress standing at the left, was the eldest. On the far right is James Vernon Dale. Jr., grinning for all he's worth. Dorothy was born Sept. 3, 1924. She died Dec. 8, 1990. James Jr. was born May 28, 1926. He died Oct. 29, 1974. They were the children of my father's first marriage, to Lillie Pearl Durham, who died when her children were very young. Dorothy and her husband, William Russell Warren Sr., had two children, Billy and Mary. James Jr. and his wife, Shirley Ann Barker Dale, had two children as well, Mike and Terry.
On the lower right is my father's middle child, Robert Edward Dale, who was the son from his second marriage, to Louise Elsie Meador. Louise and my father were married Oct. 28, 1933. Bobby was born Nov. 15, 1934. Louise and my father were divorced on March 5, 1941. Bobby and his wife, Camilla Robinson Dale, have two children, Annette and Jeffrey.
Six months after his divorce, my father married my mother, Mary Helen Nichols Dale, on Sept. 6, 1941. I was their first child, born a year later on Sept. 11, 1942. (That's me in the back with the mustache and camel sport coat.) To my right is Dianne Christine Dale, who was born March 8, 1946, after my father returned from service in the Solomon Islands in the Navy in World War II. (My father's eldest son, James Jr., also served in the Navy in the South Pacific in World War II.) Dianne died Feb. 9, 2005.
My father is at the lower left. He remained married to my mother until he died Aug. 28, 1972.
I think this rare photograph of my father and all of his children was taken in either 1970 or 1971 at a family reunion at Bobby's house. My brother Bobby and I are the only two of my father's children who remain alive.
That family reunion at Bobby's house was a festive holiday party as well as a family gathering. Dorothy and Jimmy Jr. were great fun to be around. I always thought of Dorothy as a kid masquerading as a grownup - and I mean that in the best possible way. It was hard to be around Dorothy and not have fun. Jimmy Jr. was definitely a grownup, but he had a wicked sense of humor, too. Some of my best memories of Jimmy Jr. are of playing bridge with him and his wife, Shirley, which we did much more often in the years just before he died. He and Shirley always found interesting women of their age to be my bridge partner (although the truth of it is that I was usually the person they called when they desperately needed a fourth; they played much more bridge than I did, and were far better at it). Bobby is the quietest and most grounded of us children. That meant than when he did talk, we all listened to what he had to say. Dianne, the youngest of us, could hold her own in our word-play conversations, which seemed to be a Dale trait. She was quick-witted and very determined that no one would treat her as anybody's kid sister. She was a fierce social advocate on the moral issues that divided the country in the 1960s and 1970s, and in dinner-table disagreements with our parents about Civil Rights, the Vietnam War and feminism when she and I were in our 20s, I never saw her retreat one bit. She could drive our parents to distraction on occasion.
But back to the reunion. Bobby's wife, MIllie, deserves all the credit for organizing it at her house and supplying us with excellent food and drink. She told me recently that she did it because she thought it was about time for a gathering of all of the Dale clan. And speaking of food, what will forever live in my memory of that party was Millie's big silver bowl of iced boiled shrimp. I am afraid I made a pig of myself on that shrimp.
This undated photograph is of Horace Thomas Nichols, my mother's father. He brought his family to Richmond from Southwest Virginia because that's where his job with the C&O Railway brought him. He was born in 1886 and died in 1952, when I was 9.
To borrow from the title of Dorothy Allison's 1992 book, there's a bastard out of Carolina who played an important role on my mother's side of the family, the Nicholses. But more about him shortly.
I can trace the Nichols side of the family as far back as 1790, to Pasquotank County, N.C. Pasquotank is now part of the Elizabeth City Micropolitan Statistical Area, and it's in the northeast corner of North Carolina, on the Atlantic Coast. Benjamin must have been something of a pioneer, because a year later he shows up in Surry County, N.C. Surry County, in northwest North Carolina, had existed as a geographic entity for only 20 years. It's 14 counties west of Elizabeth City, and hugs the border right below Grayson County, Va. Benjamin Nichols was essentially then living on the edge of the country's western frontier. Benjamin Nichols was my great-great-great-great-grandfather.
In 1791, the same year he arrived in Surry County, he married Elizabeth Miers. I know nothing further about her. But Benjamin and his wife and their children appear to have lived in Surry County until their deaths. Their part of Surry County became part of Yadkin County (named for the river) in 1850.
Benjamin and Elizabeth Nichols had a daughter, also called Elizabeth, my great-great-great-grandmother, whose exact dates are unknown. We do know that although she never married, she bore a son in August of 1828 and gave him the name Asay Columbus Nichols. Asay, who was my great-great-grandfather, was the man who saved the name in that branch of the Nichols family: He's the bastard out of Carolina in my family tree. For had his mother, Elizabeth, been married, her son would not have been a Nichols. He would have borne his father's last name and not his mother's.
I don't know what the attitude was toward illegitimacy in Yadkin County in the early 1800s, but my guess is that it was different from the ideas that came later with the Victorians and that persist in many ways today. Civilization on what was then near the country's frontier brought one into close daily contact with the cycle of life, from farm animals to human beings. It is clear that my great-great-great-grandmother was not shunned and was kept in the family fold with her bastard son.
When he was 23, Asay Columbus Nichols married Martha "Patsy" Head on the last day of 1851. Asay and Patsy had six children and then moved across the border to Grayson County, Va., where they had three more children. The last of their children born in Yadkin County was Ace McClellen Nichols. His birth came in 1865, the last year of the Civil War. Ace was my great-grandfather. At some point between late 1865 and 1868 they moved to Virginia.
Ace married for the first time in Grayson County, but the marriage date is unknown. He and his new wife, Charlotte Matilda Delp, had two sons, Horace Thomas Nichols and Benjamin Nichols. Horace was my grandfather, born in 1886. His younger brother, Benjamin, was born four years later. When Horace was just 6 and Benjamin only 2, Charlotte Nichols died leaving Ace a widower. It took him three years to find another wife, Della Ward. Ace and Della had no children and divorced quickly. In April 1898, Ace married his ex-wife's younger sister, Laura Novella Ward, and the two had a daughter named Jinnie, born in 1899.
Ace McClellen Nichols and third-wife Laura appear in the 1910 U.S. census living in Washington County, Va. Washington County is one county farther west of Grayson County, very close to the southwest tip of Virginia, with Abingdon as its county seat. Ace and Laura and the children had moved to Washington County, however, at least by 1906, because it was there and then that his son Horace met and married my grandmother Louella Williams when she was 14 and he was 20. Granny and Grampa Nichols had six children, five of whom survived childhood. They were Annie, Mary Helen (my mother), Joseph, Louise and Hazel.
My grandfather escaped from a life of either subsistence farming or working in the Southwest Virginia coal mines by getting a job with the C&O Railway. He stayed with the company until he retired in the 1940s.
My grandfather Horace Nichols died at the age of 66 on March 16, 1952, when I was 9. Granny lived until Dec. 9, 1985.
Their daughter Mary Helen, born in 1914 in Green Springs, Va., was my mother. Green Springs is in Louisa County in central Virginia. Granny and Grampa Nichols had moved east as he moved up with the railroad company. Along the way they had lived for a time in Gordonsville, also in Louisa County. By the early 1920s, they were living on Carrington Street in Richmond, just up the hill from the C&O Railway headquarters.
My mother, Mary Helen Nichols, married my father (his third marriage) on Sept. 6, 1941. I was born Sept. 11, 1942. My sister, Dianne Christine Dale, was born after my dad returned from World War II in the Pacific in the Navy. Her birthday was March 8, 1946.
Dianne died Feb. 9, 2005, of cardiac arrest just as she'd stepped out of her morning shower. Neither of us ever married, and neither of us had children.
My mother was the last of her siblings to die, on July 27, 2007. I do not know the date of death of her eldest sister, Annie, but it was in the 1990s, if memory serves. Married twice, she had no children. Joseph lived to be 65 and died on Christmas Day 1981. He and his wife, Lillian, had no children. Louise married Frank Call and the couple had five daughters. Frank had also spent his career working for the C&O Railway. He died at the age of 84 in 1994. Louise died July 22, 2003. In addition to her five daughters, her obituary listed four grandchildren and three great-grandchildren. Hazel, the youngest of my mother's sisters, married late in life. Her husband, Hubert Barklage, spent his career in the U.S. Army, and for a time they lived in Alaska and in Tacoma, Wash. They were headed to Virginia by car when they had an accident in Saluda, Mo., in 1994. Hubert was killed instantly, and Hazel died shortly thereafter of injuries from the crash. They had no children.
My Uncle Joe Nichols was thus the last in his line to bear the Nichols name.
Louella Williams Nichols, my grandmother, lived to be 93. I took this picture of her circa 1971.
My grandmother, Louella Williams Nichols, represented pure, unadulterated love to me. My parents loved me, of course, but Granny had none of their responsibilities for discipline, physical care and making sure we were raised right. Her job, as she saw it, was to love us unconditionally. Granny, to me, represented warm hugs, laughter and fun, and an energy and zest for life right up until her last months. She was essentially the only grandparent I knew. My grandfather Nichols died when I was very young, and both of my Dale grandparents died before I was born.
Born in 1892 in Washington County, Va., Granny was Southwest Virginia to her core. (For all of her life she pronounced the name of the county of her birth as WARSHington.) She married my grandfather, Horace Thomas Nichols, when she was just 14 years old, in 1906. She bore six children (one of whom, a daughter, died in early childhood when she choked on a piece of roast beef at a Sunday dinner at home). Her surviving children were Annie, Mary Helen (my mother), Louise, Joseph and Hazel.
She grew up on a farm, and before she and her young family eventually moved to Richmond, they still subsisted primarily on meat and vegetables that they raised and grew themselves, despite the fact that her husband had a job with the C&O Railway. She told me on several occasions that she used to take her infant children with her when she was tending to the crops, sometimes using an old apple crate as a bassinet. With no indoor plumbing, she told me, she had to walk to the spring at the bottom of the hill on which her house stood to fetch water by the bucket.
She never lost her farming skills. When I was a very young child, I remember seeing her take a live chicken, place its head on a stump, and chop it off with an axe. The headless chicken got up and ran around the yard until it died - a matter of a minute or less. (It's from this that we get the saying "running around like a chicken with its head cut off," meaning acting in a frantic and aimless manner.) The sight horrified me, but Granny hung that chicken on the clothesline by its feet and let the blood drain. Then she plucked it and fried it for dinner. Her favorite piece of fried chicken was what she called "the parson's nose" or, sometimes, "the part that goes over the fence last."
I remember vividly a time in early 1980 when my mother - who had always raised tomatoes, green beans, spring onions, butterbeans and cucumbers in our back yard - decided that the time had come, at age 66, to stop doing the back-breaking work of preparing by hand the 20-by-20-foot garden. Granny was visiting my mother, now a widow, that warm spring day and asked my mother when she planned to start her garden. My mother told her that she didn't think she was up to it. "Helen," Granny said, "give me the shovel and I'll dig it for you." My mother helped, but Granny did the lion's share of the work that day. So there was Granny, 88 years old, still digging in the earth to plant crops. She was quite a farm girl.
After she and her husband were separated, long after their children were grown, Granny lived in a large house on East Broad Street across from Chimborazo Park. I have next to no memories of that house, but I do remember when she and her youngest daughter, my Aunt Hazel, lived on Marshall Street across from Billups Funeral Home on Church Hill. The house is now gone, swallowed up by the old Nolde Brothers Bakery, which has since been sold and converted into condos. When Granny lived there, the bakery was still very much in operation, and I remember the comforting smell of baking bread permeating the house. Family lore has it that I was terrified by the sound of the noon whistle at the bakery. I don't remember being afraid, but I do recall the piercing sound of the steam whistle signaling lunchtime.
Granny and Aunt Hazel next lived on Oakwood Avenue, near Oakwood Cemetery on Church Hill. It was there, when I was about 6 or 7, that I accidentally killed Aunt Hazel's beloved parakeet. She often let it fly loose in the house, and I remember wanting to play with it. The parakeet flew into the folds of the dining room draperies and I went for it. Tragically, I didn't see that the bird had slipped from the draperies to the floor, and as I ran up to the window, I stepped on the bird. I cried almost as much as my Aunt Hazel.
After my Aunt Hazel married, Granny moved to the farm in Hanover to live with my Aunt Annie and Uncle Walter. Later, they moved to a new brick bungalow they built on Chamberlayne Avenue in Henrico County (which my Granny always pronounced Hen-WRECK-uh County). It was on the front porch of that house that the picture above was taken.
When Granny died at the age of 93 on Dec. 9, 1985, she had seven grandchildren and four great-grandchildren. She loved us all unconditionally, and we adored her in return.
This undated snapshot of my great-grandmother Williams was taken in her kitchen in Chicago. My mother recalls taking the train to Chicago as a little girl to visit. It would be helpful if we could read the calendar on the wall to the left, but even when the photograph is enlarged and digitally enhanced, I can't make it out. She had at least five children. At the time of the death in 1985 of my grandmother Louella Williams Nichols, four of great-grandmother Williams' children still survived - two sisters and two brothers. Three lived in Illinois and the fourth lived in Indiana. My great-grandmother Williams' family moved north from Southwest Virginia at some point following the marriage of her daughter Louella to my grandfather Horace Thomas Nichols in 1906.
This snapshot taken in the backyard of our house in Fairmount, probably in 1951 or 1952, is of my Uncle Joe Nichols (left) with his arm around his wife, Aunt Lillian. To her right is Uncle Walter and my Aunt Annie Nichols Gowin. (She married Uncle Walter after divorcing Bick Corker, her first husband, who had lived on the same block of Carrington Street as the Nichols children in the 1920s.) On the right is my mom, Mary Helen Nichols Dale. Standing in front of them are me and my sister Dianne Christine Dale. Note the rosebud on my lapel. I suspect the picture was taken by my father on Mother's Day.Richmond's first TV station, WTVR TV, signed on in 1948. My Uncle Joe Nichols was a ham radio operator, and his interest in amateur radio led him to buy one of the first TV sets in the family. I can remember visits to his house in Richmond's far (then) West End when we would all gather around that small early TV to see who would be on "Toast of the Town," which was the original name for Ed Sullivan's Sunday-evening broadcast. (Uncle Joe had always been interested in radio. My mom used to describe the crystal receiver my Uncle Joe made in the 1920s, when radio broadcasts first began. Only one person at a time could listen through a set of headphones.) It would be about 1951 or 1952 before our family got its first TV set. (Later, in 1961, I landed a job at WTVR TV, but I'll save that story for another day.)
Before TV came along, families and friends visited back and forth frequently. For entertainment, they talked, told stories about the Great Depression and World War II, and played board games and card games. A treat for us kids was when the adults would play Monopoly, Parcheesi or Chinese Checkers with us. The adults would sometimes play cards. Sometimes the men would play penny-ante poker while the women talked. On other occasions, the men and women (but not the kids) would play a card game called Rook, which I never learned how to play.
However, it quickly became clear in those early days of watching TV at my Uncle Joe's house that once the TV set became a fixture in the living room, family visits turned into family TV-watching sessions. Board games, card games and just talking and telling family stories faded away.
This fuzzy, undated photograph was taken at one of the Sunday-afternoon family visits in the late 1940s or early 1950s to my Aunt Louise, my mother's younger sister, and my Uncle Frank in Chesterfield. My mother's only brother, my Uncle Joe, is half turned away from the camera at the left. The short woman to his right is my Aunt Louise. My mother stands with her hand to her cheek next to Uncle Joe's wife, Aunt Lillian, who has her arms folded. At the right, waving to the camera, is my cousin Mary Frances, Aunt Louise's eldest daughter. I am not sure which of Mary Frances's sisters is running in front of her. In the background you can see the woods where we loved to play as kids. (See previous post.)
In this photograph from the very early 1950s, my father, James Vernon Dale Sr., is sitting with two of his sisters, Mildred on his left and Pansy on his right. Pansy's husband, Beauchamp (pronounced BOH-shahmp), is on the far right. I do not have the date of Mildred's birth. Pansy was born in 1895 and was 8 years older than my father. The photograph was taken in the living room of our house in Fairmount on a Sunday afternoon.
My father drove to Williamsburg to bring Aunt Mildred to Richmond for the visit. This get-together was planned, but it was not at all unusual for family members to visit unannounced on Sundays in the 1940s and 1950s. My father's sister Lorraine also visited us fairly often, as did my father's brother Gerald, who was then living in Gaithersburg, Md.
Our family also made regular visits to see my mother's younger sister Louise (who had a family of girls and whose husband, Frank Call, had worked for the railroad) near Chester in Chesterfield County - then a very rural area. We would also drive up Route 33 to visit my mother's older sister Annie and her second husband, Walter Gowin. Aunt Annie and Uncle Walter lived on a working farm adjacent to Scotchtown in rural Hanover County. Scotchtown was the home of Patrick Henry from 1771 to 1778, but it had not yet been restored by the Association for the Preservation of Virginia Antiquities. The two farms were ideal places for my sister and I to ramble and explore.
I have very pleasant memories of Sunday afternoons at my aunt's farm in Hanover. I recall one afternoon when my cousins, my sister and I made fresh peach ice cream under one of the two huge trees on the broad front lawn while at least a dozen Nichols grownups sat talking in the shade in chairs brought from the kitchen. My grandmother Nichols lived at the sprawling farm with her daughter and son-in-law after my grandfather died when I was 10, in 1952. She was a great cook all of her life and thought nothing of feeding Sunday dinner to a dozen or more each week. It also didn't matter to her that the kitchen in the farmhouse was dominated by a green, cast-iron wood-burning stove. She would test the temperature of the oven or the stove's surface with her bare hand and cook mashed potatoes, biscuits, country ham, fried chicken, green beans, fresh corn and fresh tomatoes - yes, all for one meal and all from scratch - and bake an apple pie or two for dessert.
The farmhouse - two stories, frame, square, painted white with dark-green trim and a front porch that ran the width of the house - also had a hand-crank party-line phone on the wall in the kitchen, an outhouse out back and a galvanized tub for Saturday-night baths next to the cast-iron stove. When they first moved in, there was no electricity. I remember one incident involving the outhouse clearly, and it must have been when I was staying at the farm for a few days. My grandmother in her nightgown had gone to the outhouse right before bedtime. My aunt and uncle and I were in the kitchen. When my grandmother came back in, she had a short branch with a dead snake, at least 6 feet long, draped over it. She had found it in the outhouse and killed it. I remember being frightened of going to the outhouse in the dark for some time after that.
My Aunt Louise was a good cook, too, and I loved to eat at her table almost as much as I enjoyed the chance to play with my girl cousins, especially Mary Frances, who was older than me by about 2 or 3 years, and Ellie, who was a year younger. There were woods across the road from their house, and to the side was a patch of brush where wild huckleberry bushes grew. We'd pick and eat huckleberries until our hands and faces were purple-blue with juice. The price for the huckleberries, however, was getting chiggers. That meant a bath in hot water laced with vinegar when we got back home.
There was a stream in the woods across the road, and cattails grew along the stream. Sometimes, as dusk fell, our parents let us dip the cattails in kerosene and run around the yard pretending we held medieval torches. On languid summer evenings we'd catch fireflies and stash them in Mason jars with holes punched in the lids. We'd also catch June bugs in the heat of midday in the summer. We'd tie a 6-foot length of cotton thread to a June bug leg and hold the other end of the string as the June bug flew around us in circles.
My Uncle Frank used to hunt, and that reminds me of a story involving my sister Dianne, who was 3-1/2 years younger than me. Once, for Sunday dinner at my aunt and uncle's house, my aunt made what Dianne and I thought was chicken and dumplings. As the family began to eat, Uncle Frank asked how we liked the rabbit. My sister, who had been eating along happily, got the most amazing look on her face. She was horrified. Between sobs, all she could manage to say to my Uncle Frank was, "You killed Thumper!" She left the table, but I kept on eating. As far as I was concerned, Thumper was quite tasty with my aunt's dumplings.
This 1868 engraving depicting Sherman's march to the sea is by Alexander Hay Ritchie.
I don't know why my Savannah ancestors moved south to Thomasville, Ga., after the Civil War or why they later moved to Richmond in my grandparents' generation. But Savannah's history makes speculation possible and plausible.
Savannah is right on the Atlantic coast. Just north of the city is the South Carolina state line. Savannah was founded Feb. 12, 1733, by Gen. James Oglethorpe and a small band of settlers. They immediately named their landing spot Savannah. The settlement prospered, basing much of its economy on cotton and rice, and it became for many decades the largest city in Georgia.
The Civil War brought profound changes. Perhaps the biggest challenge in Savannah's history was being caught in Union Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman's crosshairs in his March to the Sea from Atlanta (remember "Gone with the Wind"). Sherman and his troops left a swath of terror and destruction from Atlanta right through to Savannah in 1864. In that year's dollars, the physical damage is estimated to have exceeded $100,000,000. It was total, merciless warfare, in which plantations and farms, businesses and crops, and towns and livelihoods were destroyed.
On Dec. 21, the mayor surrendered the city, and Savannah was occupied. The war ended five months later.
Between the end of the war and 1900, Savannah's population increased slightly (farmers who had been wiped out sought jobs in the cities), but it fell from being the 41st largest city in the U.S. to being the 62nd. By 1930, it was no longer even in the top 100. The area did begin to produce rice and cotton again after the war, but heavy industry and manufacturing didn't emerge in the region until late in the 1800s and the early 1900s. Another blow was dealt in the 1920s: the boll weevil devastated the cotton market.
All this is by way of laying the groundwork for some assumptions about the movements of the Schmidts and the Dales. When Henry Schmidt, my great-grandfather, returned to Savannah after the Civil War, he came home to utter destruction. How to earn a living? How to feed his growing family? We know he left for North Carolina and was never heard from again. Perhaps it was because he was seeking work. Perhaps he was simply not able to cope with what must have seemed like insurmountable obstacles. Perhaps as he traveled north he died after being injured, by accident or design. Or perhaps he had met someone in North Carolina when he was mustered out of the Confederate Army in 1865. Whatever his reasons, the further north he traveled, the better were the conditions in the Antebellum South's cities and countryside.
I believe his daughter (my grandmother) and my grandfather probably left Savannah for Thomasville before the birth of my father to escape Savannah's shattered economy. Thomasville is on the Georgia-Florida border just north of the Florida panhandle. Sherman and his Union troops had come nowhere near there.
It's also plausible that with Georgia faltering, they then decided to move north to Richmond, which offered the advantage of a quickly recovering economy - the city soon became a center for cigar and cigarette manufacturing, for example. By 1924, my father had met and married his first wife in Richmond, and a Dale child had been born here. Eight years later, my grandmother Dale died and was buried in Richmond, and three years later my grandfather Dale died and was buried here. To the best of my knowledge, all of the Georgia-born Dales had by then left their battered state and were in Richmond, Washington, D.C., and Maryland.
And it seems to me that their reasons for abandoning Georgia, simply put, were employment and the opportunity to improve their lives. That's pure speculation, but it's plausible and it fits with the known facts.
This picture of my father, James Vernon Dale Sr., was taken - along with the picture of my mother below - in December 1968. My father was then 65 years old. I was in the U.S. Air Force at the time. They had the portraits made at Richmond's Caston Studio on Dec. 9 and framed and mailed them to me in time for Christmas. When the package arrived in my mailbox in Germany, I was totally convinced that my parents had sent me a book. On Christmas morning, I opened the package in my room at the NCOQ and was much happier than I would have been with any book they might have sent. I believe that this is the first formal portrait for which my father had sat since World War II. I believe the one below, of my mother, was the only formal portrait for which she ever sat.
This picture of my mother, Mary Helen Nichols Dale, was taken in December 1968 when she was 54 years old.
My grandfather Edward Kennedy Dale was born in Georgia four years after the Civil War.
I can only work my way back to 1810 on my father's side of the family. That's when Margaret Selena was born in Baden, but I don't know if that refers to what was then a grand duchy but now a German state or to the town of Baden-Baden, which was called Baden at the time. A year later, in the same town, Peter Straub was born. When they grew up, they married. We know the Straubs came to America following their marriage, because they had a daughter, Clara, who was born Dec. 4, 1841, in Augusta, Ga.
The Straubs are among my great-great-grandparents. I don't know when either of them died, where they lived at the end of their lives, or what his profession was. So far, we haven't found any records of other children.
Their daughter Clara was my great-grandmother. She grew up to marry Henry Schmidt, who was born in Hanover, Germany, in 1835. I don't know how Clara and Henry met, or why she traveled for her wedding to Germany - which must have been a tough journey in those days - but Clara and Henry were married Dec. 30, 1858, in Mecklenburg, Germany. Had Henry first come to the U.S. and met Clara here, or had she gone to Germany and met him there? We can only speculate, but we know that the Schmidts quickly settled in Georgia.
(I knew next to nothing of the family's connection to Germany when I enlisted in the U.S. Air Force in 1966 and was stationed at Bitburg and Spangdahlem in Germany, yet I found the country to be beautiful and alluring and have returned a dozen times since my three years there as a young man.)
The American Civil War began April 12, 1861. My great-grandfather Henry Schmidt enlisted in the Confederate army that same year in Savannah. He was a member of the DeKalb Rifles, First Regiment Georgia Sharpshooters. He was shot in the hip at Chickamauga on Sept. 19, 1863, apparently not seriously, and served until 1865, the year the war ended. He was discharged at Greensboro, N.C., and returned to Savannah. (Trust Southerners of my great-grandparents' generation to make sure history remembered, if not much else, that they well and truly served the Lost Cause.)
My great-grandparents had a son, Henry L. Schmidt, shortly after the war started. Henry L. Schmidt was born in 1862. (He was hit by a train on May 17, 1896, and died. He is buried in Cathedral Cemetery in Savannah.) A second son, Robert Lee Schmidt (named, no doubt, for the Confederate general) was born in 1864, but the reason for his death six years later, on Aug. 7, 1870, is unknown. The Schmidts had three more children, William L. Schmidt, born in November 1872, Mary Christine Theresa Schmidt, born in January 1874, and Eloise Agnes Schmidt, born April 15, 1876. Mary Christine Theresa Schmidt was my grandmother. You can see her picture in the previous post.
I don't know when or where my great-grandfather Henry Schmidt died. Clara, his wife, eventually applied for a Confederate pension and stated that Henry left Savannah in 1889 for North Carolina. She received three letters from him within three months, she stated in her application, and then never heard from him again. Clara Straub Schmidt lived to be an old lady, dying in Savannah on Dec. 15, 1930, at the age of 89.
There's another great-grandfather, James Dale, from whom I get my surname. Little is known about him other than his name. His son's death certificate lists James Dale's birthplace as Savannah and his wife's name as Eliza C. Doubrley (although it could be Doubeley; the handwriting is barely legible), who had been born in South Carolina. But James and Eliza Dale had a son, Edward Kennedy Dale, who was born in Georgia on Nov. 13, 1869. The son grew up to marry Mary Christine Theresa Schmidt on Dec. 17, 1890, in Savannah. Edward Kennedy Dale's death certificate lists his occupation as "upholsterer" at a hotel in Richmond. My father often told us that his father worked at one time for a weekly newspaper in Thomasville, Ga., where my father was born (which intrigued me as I began to focus on journalism as a career).
Edward Kennedy Dale and Mary Christine Theresa Schmidt Dale had a passel of children, as we say in the South. My Dale uncles and aunts were Gerald, Lorraine, Mildred, Happy (whose real name was either Harry or Bertram; the records are not clear), Pansy, William and Florine. My father, James Vernon Dale, was born on May 25, 1903. My grandparents Edward Kennedy Dale and Mary Christine Theresa Schmidt Dale both died before I was born. She died Jan. 23, 1932, here in Richmond. He died June 18, 1935, also in Richmond. Both are buried in Riverview Cemetery in Richmond.
Of their children, my aunts and uncles, I only knew Gerald, Lorraine, Mildred and Pansy. Uncle Gerald was almost the spitting image of my father and drove a taxicab in Washington, D.C. Aunt Lorraine and Pansy did not live in Virginia and I saw them rarely and only as a child. Aunt Mildred was the victim in an abusive marriage in the 1930s. She had what used to be called a "nervous breakdown" and was institutionalized in the state mental hospital in Williamsburg, Va. Our family would visit her often, sitting outside on benches on the broad lawn in warm weather, us children listening to her soft voice. She was a sweet and gentle woman, very kind and loving to my sister and me. Nobody would tell us kids the details of Aunt Mildred's story, and there is nobody left alive now who knows.
My father painted and hung wallpaper all of his life except for his service in the Navy during World War II. He was very good at it, doing work at Monticello in Charlottesville in the 1930s (there are family pictures somewhere of him and my mother as a young couple, picnicking on the lawn at Jefferson's home). By the time I became aware of what he did for a living, he was the go-to man in Richmond when it came to difficult jobs such as hanging murals and high-end wall-covering materials. He was active in the church we attended, eventually becoming chairman of the board at Fairmount Methodist Church. He died Aug. 28, 1972, at the age of 69 in Stuart Circle Hospital in Richmond. He had suffered several previous heart attacks in the 1950s and 1960s. He, my mother and my sister Dianne are buried in Washington Memorial Park in Henrico County.
Note: My sister Dianne's research in Georgia courthouses and cemeteries lists the birth date for our grandmother Mary Christine Theresa Schmidt Dale as you see it above. But when he provided information for her death certificate in 1932, my grandfather Edward Kennedy Dale listed her birth month as February (he gave no day) of 1870 and gave her age as 61.He also listed his father-in-law's name as William and his father-in-law's birthplace as Mecklenburg, Germany. The correct name was Henry, and Henry was actually born in Hanover, Germany. (Mary Christine Theresa Schmidt Dale did have a brother named William.) However, Edward Kennedy Dale's parents-in-law were married in Mecklenburg. I lend more credence to my sister's research, since Edward Kennedy Dale appears to have made so many mistakes in outlining his wife's family history and was also unable to supply the maiden name or birthplace of his wife's mother for the record. In the space for his mother-in-law's maiden name and birthplace are the words "don't know."
I am indebted to my late sister Dianne Christine Dale and to my niece Terry Lynn Dale Cavet for their help with the research on my family.
My grandmother on my father's side was Mary Christine Theresa Schmidt Dale. She died 10 years before I was born, in 1932.
In this 2006 photograph, Helen Nichols Dale is holding the photograph seen in the previous post of her father and her, taken more than 60 years previously.
Helen Nichols was 11 when the Church Hill tunnel collapsed on Oct. 2, 1925.
Dark-haired, pretty, a little shy and with always curious brown eyes, Helen lived in the 18-hundred block of Carrington Street on Union Hill, a neighborhood that sat on a bluff over the Shockoe Valley looking toward downtown Richmond. Named for the coming-together of the 13 original colonies, Union Hill was a blue-collar neighborhood, laid out in 1805 and populated with one- and two-story frame or brick houses. Carrington was paved with cobblestones.
There was one important reason Helen liked the two-story brick house where she lived with her mother, father, three sisters and one brother: It had indoor plumbing. Helen had never lived in a house with indoor plumbing.
Her parents, Horace Thomas Nichols and Lou Ella Williams Nichols, had worked their way to Richmond from far Southwest Virginia, where they were born. Horace's parents were tobacco farmers. When he was 20, in 1906, he married Lou Ella. She was 14 years old.
Horace got a job with the Chesapeake and Ohio Railway Company. As he grew more experienced, the company moved him east. That's what brought him and his family to Union Hill in 1923.
Helen had never lived in a place as large as Richmond. Instead of having to walk down a dirt road to the country store to use a telephone, here she could go to a neighbor's house. Instead of hauling corn to the mill, the family could buy packaged cornmeal at the Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company, a chain grocery store on nearby Venable Street.
The fact that people in Richmond lived so close together meant Helen had more friends than ever before. There were at least 15 other children on her block alone. Helen's best friend, Irma Giovanetti, lived a few doors down. Another friend, Margaret Garbett, lived right across the street. They all went to Fairmount School together at 21st and T streets. Helen did well in school. She loved to read.
Helen thought the city was noisy. Nobody on Carrington Street owned a car. They rode the streetcars that clanged through Richmond's neighborhoods. Horse-drawn wagons clopped and rumbled over Union Hill's rough cobblestones. The milkman brought fresh dairy products, butter and eggs at dawn. Later, the iceman's wagon came by with 25- and 50-pound blocks. Another vendor sold bread, rolls and pastries from his cart. Still another sold fresh vegetables in season.
All the neighbors knew each other, and on warm evenings they'd gather on their wide front porches and talk until dark. Helen recalls the Reams sisters in particular. She'd go to their house down the block every week or so and thread "oodles" of needles for them, some with white thread and some with black. The two elderly sisters could still sew enough to mend, but they could no longer see well enough to thread a needle.
Helen remembered life on Union Hill in 1925 as much harder than life 80 years later. She recalled her mother baking pies, cakes and biscuits in a wood-fired stove. To test the oven temperature, Lou Ella would stick her hand in it. Helen's mother also canned fresh fruits, vegetables and meats in a hot, airless kitchen in late summer. In the winter, a fireplace in each room provided warmth, but the parts of the house that weren't being used were left cold.
There was no electricity. But the house had gas lights, much better than the reeking kerosene lamps they'd used in the country. And the family had a wind-up Victrola. Helen's father liked to listen to hymns.
At around 3:30 on Friday afternoon, Oct. 2, 1925, the temperature was in the upper 60s according to the Weather Bureau in Chimborazo Park on the far side of Church Hill. The bureau recorded more than an inch of rain that day, but afternoon skies were fair.
* * *
It was clear that something had happened. Neighbors called to each other. Radio hadn't come to Richmond yet, but word spread fast. Within seconds, it seemed, everybody from one end of Union Hill to the other knew what had happened.
The train tunnel under Jefferson Hill had collapsed. And people were trapped.
Helen and the other neighborhood children ran from Carrington Street across Venable Street and two blocks more to Jefferson Hill. Soon, the crowd numbered several hundred.
"We ran right up to the edge of the park and looked down. All we could see were the workers outside. The train was in the tunnel underneath us. We were way up on the hill," she remembered. That put them about 80 feet above the frantic activity at the tunnel's west entrance.
"I suppose they were trying to figure out some way to get in there. We had to stay up on the hill. They wouldn't let anybody down there."
Helen knew that her father was a section foreman for the C&O, what the family always called "the railroad." But it never occurred to her that he might have been on this C&O train, in this C&O tunnel, that Friday afternoon.
He was.
"I just never thought of that," she said. "It didn't seem important. We were too young to take anything seriously. We went to the park to see what all the excitement was, like children do.
"That's where my memory stops. I was so young, and it was so long ago ... I just didn't think to be worried about Daddy."
News was hard to come by at the top of the hill, and eventually Helen got tired of watching and went home for supper, still not knowing that her father had been part of the work crew on the train.
But he hadn't been trapped in the cave-in. He escaped by the narrowest of margins.
Horace Nichols walked out of the tunnel a scant few minutes before the cave-in. He came out to fetch a tool -- just before a few bricks dropped from the tunnel's ceiling, breaking electrical connections as they fell and plunging the tunnel into darkness. Workmen felt a rush of air, and the roof caved in. Engineer Thomas J. Mason died in his locomotive. (His body was recovered eight days later.) Fireman Benjamin F. Mosby died later that night. Some of the 200 or so day laborers, mostly African Americans, escaped death by crawling under the flatcars.
Helen didn't recall whether her father came home for that evening's supper around the trestle table in the kitchen on Carrington Street, but she doubts it. "I know he spent a long time working to dig people out." The rescue efforts continued until Oct. 10.
"It was later when we found out that Daddy was working in there just before it collapsed and walked out in the nick of time. We were way up on the top of the hill that afternoon. I wouldn't have recognized my daddy from that far up even if I had known he was down there.
"It was just something that happened."
* * *
Church Hill remained a part of the Nichols family for two more generations. Helen married a weekly newspaperman's son from rural Georgia, Jimmie Dale, in 1941 and had a son nine months after Pearl Harbor and a daughter right after the war ended. After the war, the Dales bought a house about eight blocks from Carrington Street. Their two children attended the same school Helen had attended, where they were taught by a few of the same teachers. (The school, built about 1895, is still standing and now serves as housing for the elderly and handicapped.)
Helen's oldest sister, Annie, married Bick Corker, a boy who lived on Carrington Street.
Joe, Helen's only brother, joined the Army in the late 1930s and was stationed on Corregidor Island in the Philippines when World War II broke out. He was captured by the Japanese. He weighed 85 pounds when he came home.
Horace Nichols died in 1952, and Lou Ella died in 1985. Helen was the last of the five Nichols children to die.
The story of Horace Nichols' narrow escape from the Church Hill tunnel has been told by four generations of Horace's descendants - not always in detail but always with a sense of awe.
Helen Nichols Dale was my mother. In her last year of life, I discovered that she was a good interview. Her memory was excellent. And she was honest enough to own up to it when the details escaped her. At age 92, she could say "I don't remember" without a trace of embarrassment.
Although I had heard the story of Grampa and the tunnel all of my life, I interviewed my mother over the course of three weeks that summer in 2006 and then confirmed what I could of her memories. The details she recalled 81 years later were impressive. She remembered childhood friends she hadn't seen in 75 years - and how to spell their names correctly. Everything that I could find on the record about the disaster was consistent with the family story.
The final question I asked her involved the effort to recover the locomotive. Did she think it was possible?
She responded with an answer rooted in a lifetime of practicality: "I don't know why they think they can do it now when they couldn't do it 81 years ago. That doesn't make any sense at all."
The effort in 2006 to recover the locomotive was suspended after city engineers raised concern about the hill's stability. Historians believe three men died, and they suspect one body is still inside.
This picture of Horace Thomas Nichols and his daughter, Mary Helen Nichols Dale, was taken during World War II. They were my grandfather and mother. He was a meticulous man, and she inherited the trait. Note his vest and his hat, which she is holding.
This image of me at about age 14 months or so has gone halfway around the world and back again. Along the way it picked up its unusual frame. (Click on the image to see a larger version.)Take a good look at the image above. No, not at the baby picture of me. Nothing much unusual there. But look at the frame.
My mom mailed a baby picture of me to my dad, probably when he was in Wellington, New Zealand, on his way to Bougainville as a Seabee in World War II. I first saw the picture after the war ended. He told the family many times how it came to be framed. Once things settled down to some extent on Bougainville, commerce between the island's indigenous people and the Seabees and Marines began in earnest. Mahogany was a ready material. The island people made mahogany warclubs intricately inlaid with mother of pearl (and deadly lethal in appearance), highly-polished mahogany bookends, even mahogany crosses, to sell to the Americans.
There were other materials available on the island, too, but they weren't indigenous to Bougainville. The natives scavenged the wreckage of Japanese and American planes scattered across the island. Combined with traditional Solomon Islands materials, the bits and pieces of the planes allowed the natives even more success at boosting their economy.
The frame for the picture above was made of a cross-section of a mahogany tree. The cover over the snapshot was cut from the acrylic windshield of a downed Japanese plane. The screws were taken from the cockpit. I don't know what my father paid - or traded - for the assembled frame, but I am sure it wasn't much. Yet it has survived for all these decades. I found it when I cleaned out my mom's house. I hadn't seen it in years.
My dad, James Vernon Dale Sr., was a man straight out of his time. Born in Thomasville, Georgia, in 1903, where his father was a weekly newspaper editor and subsistence farmer, he eventually made his way through Savannah and up to Richmond. He married three times once he got here, all before the war. His first wife was Lillie Durham Dale. They had two children, Dorothy and a son named for his father. After Lillie's death, the children were raised by their aunts on her side. James Sr. then married Louise Dale, and they had a son they named Robert. Following their divorce, Bobby was raised by his mother. Then, in 1941, three months before the war began, James Sr. married my mother, and they had two children, me and my sister Dianne Christine Dale. James Sr. and Mary Helen Nichols Dale stayed together until he died at the age of 69 in 1972. Bobby and I are the only surviving children of my father's marriages.
I say he was a man of his time because he didn't have the slightest idea of how to deal with or raise children. That was woman's work. Intellectually, he loved his children, I believe. But emotionally, he was distant and authoritarian. I don't know about Lillie (and her sisters) or Louise, but I suspect that they, like my mother, provided the emotional support their children craved. It took me a good two decades after his death to process my feelings about my father. My conclusion was that he did the best he could. He and my mom clothed Dianne and me, fed us well, educated us beyond what he had achieved, and provided a safe home.
My perspective is unique, and it might well have colored my opinion. I spent the first three years of my life as the sole focus of my mom's attention while my dad was in the South Pacific. When he came home, my father had to work his way back into the family. I suspect this was not an easy thing to do. I think - but I do not know - that having to re-establish himself in the family led to a certain, persistent jealousy of my mom's focus on her firstborn. I am sure that my sister, born after the war, and my half-siblings, born before the war, had their own unique perspectives of my father. But life is like that. Things happen, and they have consequences that roll on for decades. As Faulkner said, "The past is not dead. In fact, it's not even past."
My dad, James Vernon Dale Sr., was photographed in the jungle of Bougainville in April 1944, when he was 40 years old.
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