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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.
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