{Prompt: How would you describe your grandfather}
Retired Professor and Grandpa
By the time I was born, my grandfather was about to retire, or he had recently retired, from his job as a chemistry professor. I was born in 1964, at the beginning of the space age. He was born in 1897, at the beginning of the machine age. He was over 65 by the time I had any concept of the world around me — by the time I discovered that he was my grandpa.
Now that I am in my sixties, and recently retired myself (5 years ago at the time of this writing), I think I understand him a little better than I did during his lifetime.
I think he enjoyed his solitude and he enjoyed the quiet country life, but he needed to be productive and he enjoyed a challenge. After retirement, he moved back to his family’s farmhouse, and out of the city. He created a garden and a woodworking shop on the family farm to occupy his time.
For me the woodworking shop was a mysterious place. I only saw the dimly lit interior from the rustic, aging wooden porch, and even the interior was obscured by sawdust floating up into the rays of the summer sun, moving around in a gentle swirl, like the floating misdirection of a magician’s handkerchief. I was too young and timid to venture inside, and had probably been cautioned not to. I was too young, at that time, to be a carpenter’s apprentice.
He worked methodically on wooden frames, wooden stools, and miniature windmill-style wooden weather vanes. His woodworking shop became a replacement for his chemistry lab. Instead of chemistry beakers, condensers, burners, and flasks; he had woodworking saws, planes, lathes, sanders, and shellac.
In the garden, he worked just as steadfastly, to grow all the vegetables that he brought to the table. I imagine he spent a lot of time learning how to amend the soil, control the weeds and pests, and produce fruitful crops. Once he retired to Virginia, he had a lot more time and space for the wonderful vegetable garden than he had before while working as a chemistry professor in Columbia.
I imagine that those two hobbies (woodworking and gardening) were his new occupation, filling his time and stimulating his mind. And they yielded tangible rewards — wooden furniture that could be admired and gifted to family, and an abundance of foods that could become a source of sustenance and communion at dinner time.
Willard and Mary at their 50th anniversary in 1976.
My memories of my grandpa (as I called him), were of a no-nonsense, professorial man with small silver, wire-rimmed glasses and a bowtie. He wore short-sleeved, button-down shirts, and he had strong sun-tanned arms with visible veins.
I never knew him to joke around or play around with children, but from time to time he would enlist the grandchildren in helping with food preparation or helping in the garden; or I should say, I think he did, because I was among the youngest of the grandchildren, and was never very helpful.
On at least one occasion, he brought out a sizeable watermelon, and… whap, whap, whap… he sliced it up, lickety-split. There were fresh watermelon slices sitting outside the side door, between the canning room and the garden. I think he sat back and watched the bedlam that ensued, as we all tried to eat it down to the rind, getting pink watermelon juice all over our baby cheeks.
He must have been amused as we tried to nibble around and dribble out the black watermelon seeds without ingesting them. And someone had the idea of a seed-spitting contest. He probably set that affair in motion with an idle remark. “I wonder how far you could spit a watermelon seed…” I think that’s about when I first heard the expression, “within spittin’ distance,” meaning not very far.
On one occasion, when I was older, he found me mesmerized by the flames of the wood in the fireplace, and he tried to draw me into a discussion about the chemistry of burning wood. Different elements in the wood create different colors of flame in the fireplace. I, unfortunately, had nothing to say. I was just enjoying the ephemeral movement of the flames, as they licked around the crisp, splintery split-pieces of firewood. Neither of us was very talkative. So the conversation died.
Thanksgiving Dinner and Church at the Farm House
But clearly he cared about the family. He made Thanksgiving dinners possible, placing an unbelievably long row of tables in the middle of the farmhouse addition, with stained, black walnut wooden stools pulled up at the corners for the littlest children.
Possibly my first conscious memory is of sitting in a baby seat at the corner of that Thanksgiving table, surrounded by family. As I got older, I learned to take a little food and pass it along. I’m pretty sure that grandpa was the one who encouraged the good table manners. I learned to politely ask for someone to “please pass the butter beans.” (You could never get enough of them.)
I loved the butter beans and the corn pudding, but I didn’t like the okra, even though I was encouraged to give it a try. And I did give it a try, but I had the sort of unpleasant, visceral reaction to okra that I’d never had before. Something about the slimy texture and the fuzzy surface was repulsive. Although I’ve heard that fried okra can be really delicious, I don’t think I will ever get past the smell and memory of the well prepared, but truly revolting, baked okra that I had in my childhood.
Unfortunately, my experience with okra at the farmhouse, made me fearful of the rhubarb pie, which I refused to even try. I had never, ever, heard of okra, much less rhubarb; so after my difficulty with okra, I was understandably cautious about rhubarb. I thought, “You won’t fool me again.” “Even if you put it into a pie, to feed it to me, I won’t be deceived.” There was no way I was going to eat a pie with cut-up stalks of a vegetable, even if it came with strawberries and whipped cream. It was a shame.
Dinner at the home of Cora and Rev. Wm. Whitesell (center).*
Grandpa (and Grandma) were very religious, and in the setting of a Methodist service, I felt more at home. I knew the Lord’s Prayer, and the Doxology. I even knew most of the Nicene Creed. I enjoyed attending the little church in Stanley — a change of pace from our big city church in Raleigh. It was a charming chapel, with dark wooden pews and lofty beams, sunlit stained glass windows, and a piano in front of the altar — all packed within a space the size of a classroom. It had a small vestibule at the entrance, below the bell tower, where there were people to greet you when you arrived, and the pastor would always wait to meet you as you departed.
Inside Stanley United Methodist Church.
I was somewhat versed in the parts of the Bible, and a number of passages, but I knew nothing compared to my cousins, the Minyards. Their father had insisted that they read the entire Bible. I don’t know if they read it from beginning to end, but I was more than content to get my biblical lessons abridged for me — from children’s Sunday school, from radio evangelists, from The Upper Room, from study aids, or, best of all, from allegorical series like The Chronicles of Narnia, by C. S. Lewis.
Whenever we went to church with Grandma and Grandpa, I would observe him preparing for Sunday School, like he must have prepared for chemistry class lectures in his past. He studied the Bible verses and referred to the cross-references in the Bible concordance. He put notes in the margins of his Bible, and created his own annotations. He led the senior Sunday school class, standing in front of the pews in one section of the tiny church to give the reading, solicit opinions, and steer the course of discussion.
It was clear, from his actions, that grandpa had had a whole other life before he retired, before his children, and his grandchildren. He was comfortable leading a group in study, even if only on Sundays. He owned a farm, but had no cattle. He had a garden in the front yard, but he tended it in the fashion of an organized researcher. He had a woodshop, but he didn’t make crafts for sale. He gave them away to his family.
Willard Whitesell - Circa 1923.
Grandpa’s Other Life
Today, through genealogical research, I know that my grandfather (Willard) lived in three or four different towns before he graduated high school. He was the son of a Methodist minister, whose job took him to different places in the Virginia mountains. Willard was the preacher’s kid, never staying very long in one place before moving to the next parish.
Willard was born at the end of the 19th century, and he was two and a half years old when the 20th century arrived. His family lost two children at a time when child mortality was high. Children frequently died from pneumonia, diphtheria, or other infections. (These were the days before the advent of vaccination or the discovery of antibiotics.)
Willard was two when his sister, Lucille, was born. She survived. He was four when his second sister was born, but she died less than 6 months later. Willard was five when a brother was born, but this brother died before he reached two years of age. Another brother, Edwin, was born when Willard was twelve, and Edwin lived a long, healthy life. But by age twelve, Willard had already lost two siblings, and must have been at least a little wounded by the misfortunes that he and his family had faced.
At age eighteen, Willard went off to college, first to Bridgewater College in Rockingham, VA, close to home, and then to Randolph-Macon College in Ashland, in central Virginia. (It was an all-boys school.) In October 1918, shortly before the end of World War I, he served in the US Army at Fort Washington, on the Potomac, near Alexandria, Virginia. Fortunately, he wasn’t required to serve active duty in the war, and he was able to leave the Army and re-enroll in college in 1919.
He went to Johns Hopkins University, in Baltimore, Maryland, just a little bit further from his family in the Shenandoah mountains. He earned a Ph.D. in chemistry in the next four years. By the time he graduated in 1923, chemistry was a burgeoning but still developing field. This was before the development of modern methods of refining petroleum or the creation of plastic polymers. The nature of the atomic nucleus was only starting to be defined, and it was years before the structure of DNA would be worked out by Watson and Crick (and Rosalind Franklin).
Willard went even further from home, to work for the University of South Carolina (USC) in 1923. He became an associate professor of chemistry in a new USC department. That same year, Mary Atkinson, a recent graduate of Emory University (with a master’s degree in chemistry) also moved to South Carolina, to teach chemistry at Columbia College nearby. Mary also attended graduate school at USC from 1924 to 1925, when she and Willard must have met.**
Within two years, they were married in Mary’s hometown, Newnan, Georgia.
Mary and Willard - circa 1926
They must have enjoyed the roaring 20s together: radio broadcasts, telephone communications, moving pictures, and the advent of modern automobile transportation. They endured the Great Depression with their first two children, and by 1941, amid the years of World War II, they had a full contingent of four children in their family.
So far as I know, Willard and Mary were busy raising those four children — Billy, Mary Lou, Margaret Ann, and Frank — until Frank graduated from high school in 1958. Willard worked as a chemistry professor at the University of South Carolina, from 1923 to 1962 — almost forty years! I never heard much about those forty years, and the paper trail for those years is sadly lacking.
Memories of a Fruitful Life
By the time I had much interest in my family tree, my grandparents were quite old. My grandfather passed away in 1991, the same year I was married and completed my medical degree. Somehow, I was able to take time off and drive up for the burial at Graves’ Chapel during my medical rotations.
My grandmother passed away in 1993, a little less than a year before her great-grandchildren, Jasmine and Samantha, were born in Columbia, South Carolina, the same town she lived in with Willard for about 35 years.
I didn’t really know much about Willard or Mary, although I knew I had their love and support. I imagine that they knew all about me and my brother, since my mother (Margaret) lived with them during the twilight of their years, staying with them from 1986 until the day that each of them passed away. Then she stayed in Stanley, Virginia, and took their place.
My memories of my Grandpa, Willard, are relatively few, but they are beautiful, nonetheless. For me, he is that shadowy figure inside a woodshed, working on a thick wooden stool, while sawdust swirls in the doorway, and a farm cat looks for shade in the crawlspace underneath.
He is that slightly bent-over fellow out in the garden, with the suntanned arms, putting a watermelon into a wheelbarrow, and bringing it back to a shady spot where he and the grandkids can cool off and enjoy the fruit of his labors.
He is that fellow with the small round glasses and bow tie, standing in the prismatic, colored light of the church’s stained glass windows, with a Bible in his hands, holding forth on the blessings we are given by God.
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*Also pictured - Mary, Frank, Willard, Virginia, Jim, Carolyn, Cora, William, Margaret, Bill, Mary Lou, Lucille, (picture possibly taken by Edwin)
** Mary Atkinson also attended graduate school at Bryn Mawr in 1923, and the University of California in 1925.
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