Family treasures

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.