Whatever I paid to search the Dallas Morning News archives last month allowed me access to something like 50 articles, but only for 24 hours. So after I found what I was looking for (confirmation that one of my mom’s father’s wives really did shoot him), and had exhausted all possible searches on the subject, I typed in other Texan . . .
Depression isn’t something my dad’s family ever talked about, but in the last few years I’ve learned that my granddad suffered from it. My aunt and I unearthed his meditation on February (below) when I was in Tennessee last summer. Until reading these notes, I never particularly thought of him as a religious guy.
I’m amazed at how radiant and kind-faced Gran Newt, my great-great grandmother on my dad’s father’s father’s side, looks in this photo, considering she raised her children in a house without a ceiling. Her son told the Drew, Mississippi newspaper it was so frigid on winter mornings that “when papa would walk through the hall to the other side of . . .
This shot of my mom’s father in front of Honolulu’s Ilikai Hotel is undated, but I tell myself it’s one of the last photos taken of him before his death in Phoenix, in 1970. I like to think he went out partying. My grandmother always claimed he died of cirrhosis of the liver. My mom, as I recall, disputes this, . . .
In 1944, in a fit of passion, my grandfather wrote out a will leaving everything to my mother, his only child. When he died a successful real estate broker in 1970, though, his plans were a little different.