The Truth of My Family Is Different

I’m happy to say that an essay I wrote, “Stories from the Lost Nation,” will be published next summer in an anthology of writing about fathers and their children. The essay originally appeared in the summer 2009 issue of Colorado Review, edited by Stephanie G’Schwind, who is also editing the anthology. Here’s an excerpt. You can read the whole thing here [.pdf]. If you’re not familiar with Colorado Review, check it out and consider subscribing.

The truth of my family is different when I coast down off the hill. The bumps begin to add up. This is country where it is easy to get lost, even for my dad and my aunts, for people who grew up here and whose people once settled here. I once rode in the car with Dad and Mary K on a trip back—this was just a couple years before Mary K died, and her hair was white and Einstein-ish and her grin typically elvish; nobody could ever giggle with more high-pitched ambiguity than Mary K—and they spent the entire fifty-minute ride debating the efficacy of various routes to and fro, although “debate” is the wrong word. They weren’t arguing; this was more a ritual, a mapping out of Clinton County in conversation the way that Joyce is said to have mapped out Dublin in Ulysses.

“You always took the Such-and-Such Road, didn’t you?”

“Oh no”—and that voice of hers would dance up two or three octaves—“goodness no. Now, Tom. The only way to get to So-and-So’s was to take That Other Road.”

“But didn’t That Other Road go west?

“Did it?”

And so on, with rhetorical stops in DeWitt, Delmar, and Maquoketa. In Toronto and Lost Nation, Petersville and Charlotte—pronounced shar-LOT. When Dad turned off 61 to find the “old homestead,” as he likes to put it, there was the obligatory mention of Mr. McClimon, that cigar-chomping Irish farmer who, back in 1926 or thereabouts, obstreperously refused to sell his land to the government, which was trying to extend the highway. The line on the map was forced to loop around him.

And the conversation also began to loop, confusing even Dad and Mary K. It was as if the geography of Clinton County refused to sit still for them. On another trip back, a few years earlier, we actually did get lost, hopelessly lost. We were headed for a McGinn family reunion at the home of Father Ed Botkin, another of Dad’s cousins, and we ended up stopping at a Casey’s for gas and advice. My aunt and uncle and two cars full of cousins happened to pull in at the same time, retreating from the opposite direction. We hadn’t planned it, but we became a caravan and were all lost together.

Stories, you’ll recall, are like maps. They are the opposite of simple. As Mandelbrot suggested, the more carefully you study them—zooming in on perfectly straight lines until they begin to waver and then finally to squiggle—the less they’re able to perform their original function. They don’t answer questions but only ask them.

[July 31, 2013]

image: Route 136 east of Delmar, Iowa (Google Maps Street View)

Some Identification, Please

Tom Wolfe, school ID, 1956

The Untouchable

It turns out that a Wolfe relative was commissioner of public works in Chicago in one of the most corrupt, mob-infested administrations in the city’s history. How corrupt? Where the mayor was concerned, two words: Al Capone. Where Richard W. Wolfe was concerned: The Chicago Tribune published on its front page images of canceled checks and bank statements bearing Wolfe’s signature, suggesting that he helped divert most of nearly $140,000 in flood-relief money (some of which was raised from school kids!) into the mayor’s own coffers. It gets worse. When a state’s attorney subpoenaed payroll records from Wolfe, looking for evidence of graft, some mobsters showed up at the garage where the records were stored and killed a night watchman in a failed attempt to get at them first.

Yet nothing ever seemed to touch Commissioner Wolfe. Remarkably, obituaries in the New York Times and even in the Tribune, published in 1951, make zero mention of any scandals. And the Trib really, really hated Wolfe back in the day. (It must have been awkward for Wolfe that his sister’s kid was a reporter there.)

Don’t worry, though. The commissioner got his payback. In 1930, the mayor, Big Bill Thompson, planned to give a campaign speech attacking the Tribune bosses and the publisher’s sister-in-law, Ruth McCormack, who was running for U.S. Senate. A sudden bout of appendicitis prevented Thompson from delivering his speech, so he had Wolfe do it for him.

It was Halloween night at the Apollo Theater in Chicago:

Wolfe employed a verbal scalpel to tear open eighty years’ worth of Tribune misdeeds. Rambling and reckless, Thompson’s speech linked old Joe Medill to the assassinations of Abraham Lincoln and Mayor Carter Harrison, accused the nineteenth-century editor of debasing half a dozen pre-pubescent girls, and blamed the death of Governor Len Small’s wife on the paper’s relentless hounding of “the greatest constructive governor the state of Illinois ever had.” Thompson also dredged up the affair between “the moral pervert” Joe Patterson and the wife of a friend, leading to Patterson’s fervent embrace of Socialist doctrine …

The mayor, through Wolfe’s Irish brogue (the commissioner was born in County Limerick), went on to accuse the current publisher of the Tribune of adultery and, to some ears, he expressed hope that “some courageous citizen” might kill him. Ruth McCormack lost her election, but, in the name of all things just, so did Thompson. And aside from having to appear before a grand jury, Wolfe faded into obscurity.

He had a great run, though. For a fuller accounting of his life, including how he fits into the Wolfe family tree, go here. Or, in the photos below, you can relive his rocky time as commissioner through headlines from the Chicago Tribune. We could all wish for such an interesting career!

As a taste, here’s my favorite, in which an alderman (with the Tribune‘s help) makes fun of Wolfe for having published a forty-three-page book titled Culture, a volume I have just ordered, by the way:

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images: Richard W. Wolfe (left to right) from the Chicago Tribune, May 7, 1931; Chicago Tribune, May 30, 1909; Chicago Tribune, November 12, 1916; headline from the Chicago Tribune, July 28, 1928

[July 14, 2013]

We Were Utterly Shocked

My dad didn’t know much about his own father, Raymond Wolfe, who died when he was nine months old. So he took whatever information, anecdotes, etc., he could find and ran with them. In an e-mail Dad wrote in 2007, he mentions a letter Ray received while on the school board:

Dad [Ray Wolfe] apparently had a very strong personality, was well liked, and was active in the church and community. I know, for example, that he was on the public school board at a time when [my sisters] Sara and Mary Kay were both attending the parochial school in Delmar! (Somewhere in Mary K.’s stash of memorabilia there is a letter to Dad from a man named Harrington suggesting that Dad’s position on the public school board while his kids attended private school was somewhat of a conflict of interest. At that time Delmar had a parochial high school which Sara and Mary K. attended, and they always defended Dad in that one, but I agree with Mr. Harrington.)

In my dad’s stuff I found such a letter, although it’s not from a man named Harrington but from Mr. and Mrs. A. L. Kinrade—probably Archie Leonard Kinrade (1897–1990) and his second wife, Emily M. Coverdale (b. 1889). It does not charge my grandfather with a conflict of interest, but does chide him a bit and rather provocatively suggests that he does not have the courage to think for himself. Doesn’t necessarily fit with the image of Ray Wolfe handed down—strong personality, etc. Judge for yourself:

Delmar Ia. April 8 ’38

Mr. Wolfe:—

We were utterly shocked at your reaction at the school board meeting Tuesday night. I was under the impression that you were a man that would hold your own ground and stand on your own two feet. I did not think I was misjudging you when I merited you as a very capable man, who would be a benefit to the school and its surrounding society.

Can’t you see that we need a man who will use his own mind to do his thinking with and not rely on someone else’s gray matter, which is not always too good?

Mr. Wolfe if you had children in the public school I am positive that you would think differently. But it won’t be long until you will have and you certainly want to keep the school in the superior condition that it is now in. You have nothing against Mr. Reid have you? Not even any personal difference when he came into the school three years ago it was in bad shape but he pulled it through. So why kick him out when he alone is responsible for the excellent condition of our school.

You are a smart man Mr. Wolfe and I know you will think this over and do the right thing.

Respectfully,

Mr. & Mrs. A.L. Kinrade

Here are scans of the original letter.

[July 13, 2013]

All Class

Undated class picture, Delmar, Iowa. Thomas Wolfe is in the front row, third from the right. There are a few more smiles this time!

What He Did Do Was Farm

An e-mail from Tom Wolfe to one of his nieces, providing history and recollections of his family, especially his mother:

October 15, 2007

Dear Mary,

I’ve been meaning to respond to your note from way back when for a long time now, but I’ve found it hard to do—largely, I think, because it’s hard to write about Mom, and I never knew Dad. I’ll give it a try though.

In case you’re not aware, the founders of our Wolfe family in America were John R. and Honora Buckle[y] Wolfe. She was reportedly from Belfast, making theirs a most unusual union in those days. They probably arrived in the U.S. from Listowel, County Kerry, Ireland in 1846, perhaps traveling through Canada, though I don’t know for sure. John R. came from relative wealth, so it’s not clear just why he and his family emigrated. It was, of course, during the Potato Famine, and leaving was the thing to do then. They arrived with three or four of their eventual ten children. John R. worked across the country on the railroads and Hennepin Canal before settling in Lost Nation in 1854 where he took up farming with other Wolfes who apparently accompanied him on the trek. Their fifth child, my grandfather Maurice (pronounced “Morris” by many Irishmen), was the first of that family to be born there.

Maurice married Sarah McAndrew (s?) sometime or other and promptly had five sons: Ray (my father, born in 1896), Phil (no children), John (two children, Jack being a good friend), Melvin (five children and Cousin David’s dad), and Jimmy (five children). Uncle Dan McGinn always claimed that Grandfather Maurice was once a Texas Ranger, but I don’t believe it. He also alleged that he was an excellent shot with a 45 caliber revolver, a gun that is very heavy and difficult to shoot accurately. What he did do was farm, and that’s where his five sons were raised. Sarah died first, sometime in the early to mid twenties, and Maurice died toward the end of that decade.

Mom’s paternal ancestor was Peter McGinn, who was discharged from the British army somewhere in Canada (rather than Ireland) sometime after the Napoleonic Wars ended (1815). I don’t know whom he married, but they had ten children together and eventually moved to Petersville, Iowa around 1830 to join some of their children and probably to escape the much colder winters up north. The remarkable thing about that is that he must have been around seventy or so when they moved, and there were no planes or trains to take them. They probably walked or went by canoe the whole distance!!! One of Peter’s grandsons was John McGinn who married Kathrine Spain, and they had twelve children, the eleventh being Gladys, my mother (born in 1903).

The old McGinn homestead south of Delmar and not far from Petersville is a huge place and was truly an awesome house for me to visit as a child. The first floor had a kitchen (with a servants’ staircase off it) and several rooms—parlors, sitting rooms, dining room, and formal living room. The upstairs had an enormous number of bedrooms. I counted them all when I was young but don’t remember the exact number. There may have been as many as twelve. When Pete McGinn married Peggy Troy, she immediately had the entire interior refurbished. Interior walls were removed throughout the house, and the number of rooms everywhere was sharply reduced. There was also an old fashioned, walkup attic with hordes of antiques stored there. The only thing I can remember for certain after all these years is an old, windup victrola. The old house was truly remarkable.

The original John McGinn farm was really big, so much so that he gave farms to many of his sons, and Uncle Pete inherited the home place. I don’t think the daughters received anything, but maybe they received some money. I doubt it though. Women were expected to marry or go into the convent. Three did the former and two the latter. Presumably, Grandfather John was pleased.

I don’t know too much about Mom as a girl. The dictum in those days and one, incidentally, that I would like to see resurrected, was that children should be seen (occasionally) but not heard. Accordingly, when company came, the kids would be sent upstairs out of the way while the adults often sat in the kitchen talking about the most interesting topics of that or any other day—other people. During these conversations, Mom and the other kids would huddle at the bottom of the servants’ stairs off the kitchen and listen through the closed door.

Mom always liked to dance, so she and some of the others would sometimes attend them in DeWitt using various conveyances. During the winter, they might take a horse and buggy with a sleigh on it, and in the warmer weather they might ride those railroad hand carts. They lived, you see, close to a railroad track which ran to DeWitt.

When Congress declared war on Germany in April, 1917, Dad was twenty and Mom fourteen and hadn’t met yet. He entered the Navy the next year but was fortunate not to be sent overseas, spending his war tending the animals at Great Lakes Naval Base. While there, he contracted the Spanish Flu pandemic which killed 50 to 100 million people, far more than died from combat. Fortunately, he recovered and was discharged early in 1919.

My parents first met, I believe, at a dance in DeWitt. According to my Uncle Dan McGinn, one of Mom’s older brothers and a man who loved to talk but was not above embellishing a story if it pleased him, Dad would ride his horse to Petersville to see Mom, sometimes taking shortcuts through fields by cutting the fence wires (a detail I really find hard to accept). In those days, it wasn’t all that easy to get around. Henry Ford’s Model T was popular, but the roads were terrible, a family would have only one car, and the car would often be jacked up with the tires removed during the long winter months. That’s why Dad probably did ride his horse to see her, but I don’t know about that wire cutting story.

They married in 1925 when Dad was twenty-eight or twenty-nine and Mom was twenty-two. They began farming in Lost Nation but lost it within a few years. They turned to the McGinns for help and were invited to stay in a house (no longer present) near the corner of the Delmar road and the road to the McGinn home. I don’t know if Dad helped the McGinns farm or whether he rented land elsewhere, but I’m guessing the latter. Sometime in the early thirties, they bought the land near Delmar that came to be my home. In 1926 Sara appeared, three years later it was Mary K.’s turn, followed by Margie in 1938, and I in 1940. The setting was complete.

Most of what I’ve learned about my dad has been through Mom and Sara, and to a lesser extent, Mary K. Dad apparently had a very strong personality, was well liked, and was active in the church and community. I know, for example, that he was on the public school board at a time when Sara and Mary Kay were both attending the parochial school in Delmar! (Somewhere in Mary K.’s stash of memorabilia there is a letter to Dad from a man named Harrington suggesting that Dad’s position on the public school board while his kids attended private school was somewhat of a conflict of interest. At that time Delmar had a parochial high school which Sara and Mary K. attended, and they always defended Dad in that one, but I agree with Mr. Harrington.) Incidentally, one thing Sara remembered the most from that school was walking down a row of desks and having the boys pinch her as she walked!

Dad loved horses, always had several around the farm, and went to Montana often to shop for horses. Somewhere there is a photo of him in full cowboy garb that I always thought was real, and I didn’t learn until I was an adult that it was merely one of those photos where you stick your head above the cardboard cutout of the cowboy! I was never a bright child.

The presence of all those horses on the farm gave Sara and Mary K. an opportunity to become skilled equestrians. Even Margie was pretty good, certainly better than I. A few years ago I made the mistake of observing to Mary K. that I thought the presence of those horses at that time meant that the skill level was based on age, with Sara being the best and I the worst. Your mother looked at me for a moment and then suggested quietly, but with some passion, that she believed herself to be a better equestrian that Sara. I dropped the subject quickly.

Ed Lassen once told me a story about my parents that I found interesting. Mom must have been looking out a house window and saw Dad doing something to a horse that disturbed her, so she came storming out of the house and really ripped into him in the presence of Ed, a young hired man. I mention that because Mom once told me that she was a very quiet presence until Dad died and she had to remake herself just to survive in this big, bad world.

According to Mary K. or maybe Margie, Sara was very close to Dad. At any rate, she was fifteen and a junior in high school when Dad died—just shy of his forty-fifth birthday. Mom enrolled her in Mt. St. Clare College in Clinton for her last two years, so Sara was away from home and without a father. That must have been a very tough time indeed for her. Mary K. was not quite twelve at the time of his death and probably didn’t become impossible for a year or two. Margie was just turning three when Dad died, and I was a mere nine months old.

Because I was so young, I really don’t know what happened to the rest of the family immediately after Dad’s death. I only know that I was sent to Lost Nation to stay with Uncle Melvin and Aunt Frances Wolfe, Cousin David’s parents. I stayed there a few weeks, and during that time I believe Aunt Frances potty trained me or at least tried. She was famous for doing that with her grandchildren, and I think that’s what she did with me.

The farm needed attending after Dad’s death, and Uncle Ed McGinn, a bachelor brother three years older than Mom and living, I believe, in the small town of Manning in western Iowa, came to the rescue. He ran the farm and lived with us for about seven to ten years. Ray Schmidt from across the road then rented the farm until Ed Lassen took over in 1952, after his return from a stint in the Korean War. He rented it for ten years while living in his house in town. Our neighbor, Ray Schmidt, resumed renting after that. Mom was diagnosed with cancer in 1962–63 and had to abandon the farm for various places in Davenport.

It is difficult to describe Mom very accurately. She had no physical or personality traits that set her apart from the crowd. She was quiet but tough. As I mentioned earlier, she forced herself to be tough after Dad’s death. She was not very strict as a mother though. She seldom raised her voice, and it worked fairly well with the girls, I think. None of them was particularly evil and gave her no particular heartache. They all had lots of dates, and she seemed to trust them. Margie, for example, would catch rides to the Fairyland dances near DeWitt every Sunday night in good weather and ride home with someone else. Afterwards, I’d hear her go to Mom’s bedroom and tell her all that transpired.

I was much harder for her though. I was more likely to give her grief, but she quietly tried to steer me in the right directions. I regret that I didn’t make it easier for her. She did have a way to get my attention though. When she really wanted me to obey her, she would use the Dad card. As I began to pressure her to drive before I could get a license, for example, she gave me almost a “Win one for the Gipper” speech. “The last words your father said to me before he died,” she told me with a straight face, were, ‘Be sure not to let our son drive before he gets his license.’” I bought that line. I’m not sure if I really believed her, but I know that she felt pretty strongly about it; and as I’ve said before, I was never a bright child.

Mom was diagnosed with cancer while still on the farm and lived for about three years after leaving it. She and I lived together for awhile, and she lived in a couple more places alone; but most of the time she was having various surgeries at the U. of I. hospital in Iowa City or undergoing chemo and radiation treatments in Davenport. In August of 1965, she entered Mercy in Davenport and never left, dying in bed on March 8, 1966. There were three days and nights of wakes plus the funeral. Afterwards, my sisters and I were totally exhausted, but we did manage to talk a great deal about Mom and Dad, conversations dominated by Sara and Mary K.

Mom’s influence on me has been enormous. So many things I do are a direct result of her injunctions. For example, she always said to visit the elderly and the sick, and to bury the dead; thus, I try to visit sick friends often and attend wakes and funerals as well. She believed that the really good parking places in front of church or elsewhere should be reserved for the elderly and/or infirm, so I usually pass them by in favor of more distant spots. The hardest thing for me to do, however, is to remain patient and civil when I’m around people who drive me nuts. I keep reminding myself that Mom would not want me to be rude, so I try to follow her advice. Sometimes it even works. I miss her all the time.

Your revered ancestor,

Tom Wolfe

[July 5, 2013]

images: Saint Patrick’s Cemetery, Route 136, Delmar, Iowa; Route 136, east of Delmar; east of Delmar, September 2011 (all Google Maps Street View)

Dimby and the Kerryman

This is a family story. It involves a royally bred horse, a famous wager, a pitched battle, married cousins, and, like all Wolfe tales, someone named Maurice. It begins, however, with someone not named Maurice, someone who has just died.

Richard J. Wolfe—the brother of Maurice, the nephew of both Edmund Maurice and (my favorite) Maurice Morris, the grandson of Maurice James, and the great-grandson of James Maurice—met his reward near Streator, Illinois, on May 25, 1927. Mr. Wolfe had been born near Ballybunion,* a small town in County Kerry, Ireland, and to mark his passing, the Kerryman newspaper, on December 10 of that year, published a story noting that the deceased had been “a very large farmer and breeder of horses.”

There’s more to the story than that, of course, but in order to get there, the Kerryman must first plow through some pretty dense genealogy. As it happens, the dead Mr. Wolfe and his widow, Catherine “Kate” Maher, were cousins. Her maternal great grandfather, like her husband named Richard James, was the brother of her husband’s paternal grandfather, the aforementioned Maurice James. (For those keeping score at home, her great grandfather is my great-great-great grandfather.)

I know. Nobody cares. But the Kerryman needs to at least acknowledge this stuff because it’s Kate Wolfe Maher Wolfe’s grandfather (which is to say, the deceased’s father’s first cousin) who’s really important here. And his name is … wait for it … Maurice Richard.

According to the paper, he “emigrated from Knockanasig** after he had made a lasting reputation as owner of Dimby, a racehorse whose name is still fresh in the traditions of the once famous Ballyeigh† racecourse.” The Kerryman continues:

Dimby was bred by William the Fourth, King of England. In the possession of Maurice Wolfe, his most notable performance was the winning of a challenge at the then goodly sum of one hundred pounds aside. The match was decided at Ballyeigh in or about 1840. The defeated horse was Roller, owned by a Mr. Gunn, a connection of the Roches of Athea. Dimby became the sire of The Rambler, also owned by Maurice Woulfe, and a good winner in the forties of last century. But it was perhaps the best of Dimby’s progeny that met a fatal misadventure and died without being tested on a racecourse. It was from the dam of May Morning, Victory and Tally Ho, and was bred by “Johnny Connell, of Rathmorrell,” whose memory as a sportsman is still so affectionately treasured in Kerry and Limerick.

If you’re like me, this needs some unpacking—but it’s worth the effort, because this is where the pitched battle comes in. The Listowel Races are a big deal in Ireland,‡ but their origins actually trace to a location nine miles away: just south of the deceased’s hometown of Ballybunion. There, where the River Cashen meets the River Feale and flows into the sea, was the Ballyeigh racetrack. According to a more recent article in the Kerryman, “Each year thousands converged on this picturesque setting to enjoy the festivities associated with this event, i.e. a variety of games, horse-racing and a pre-arranged faction fight which concluded the event."

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Wait, a pre-arranged what?

A pre-arranged faction fight. The term “faction fight” refers to “pitched battles between feuding bands at fairs and other public gatherings.” They were especially prevalent in Ireland from 1760 until 1845, and while they began as battles over territory, they “often reflected more modern tensions, such as power conflicts between kinship-based mafias led by ambitious members of the middle class.”

At Ballyeigh, the combatants were, traditionally, the Cooleens and the Iraght O’Connors (the latter comprised of the Lawlor and Mulvihill families). On June 24, 1834, for instance, twenty people died when 1,200 Cooleens crossed the Cashen and attempted to surprise 2,000 Iraghts. According to the Kerryman, the Cooleens’ attack failed and, driven back into the river, they attempted to swim or boat to the far bank. “The contingent who were pursuing them had lost all reason in the heat of battle and pursued them into the water,” writes the Kerryman. “One boat was caught and upended and the occupants who could not escape by swimming were battered under the water until they drowned.”

The Kerry Evening Post reported on the event back in 1834: "It is computed that no fewer than one thousand men were engaged on each side, and there were nearly an equal number of women employed in supplying the combitants with sticks and stones." Arrests related to the "sanguinary and murderous" battle were still being made a month later.

This gives you a sense of how passions flared at Ballyeigh and why winning a hundred-pound bet there a few years later might have been a big deal.

Anyway, various safety-minded adjustments to the Ballyeigh races were implemented, but then, in 1856, violence erupted again. The particular race that set things off was won by none other than Johnny O’Connell, mentioned above, who rode May Morning—a relative of our renowned Dimby—to victory over Timekeeper. That horse’s owner, George Sandes, accused O’Connell of cheating, a fight broke out, and O’Connell ended up in the Ballybunion jail. In October 1858, the races moved to Listowel.

At this point, that original Kerryman article, the one mourning the death of Richard J. Wolfe, returns to its subject, noting that a legion of Wolfes had sailed for the States and one even “kept a high-class stud of Norman horses.” What it doesn’t mention is that once the Wolfes reached the rolling fields of eastern Iowa their interest in horse flesh may have taken a different turn. According to the History of Clinton County (1879), a “Horse-Thief Protection Society” was founded in the years immediately following the Wolfes’ arrival, its mission to protect the people from what it called illegal “horse-raising.” Its officers’ names tended away from the Irish.

As my dad once wrote:

The motivation for the Society is unknown to the writer, but in a land heavily populated with English and Germans, as well as with the Irish, it must have been distressing indeed to see so much evidence of what Sir Walter Raleigh unflatteringly called the “Wilde Irish” so dangerously near them. Prudence alone would have dictated such a move.

All of which is to say, lo, how far the Wolfes did fall … from horse-racing to illegal horse-raising in but one generation!

images: Maurice Richard Wolfe, of Dimby fame (Knockanure Library) and a Google Maps Street View shot of Ballyeigh, where the Cashen meets the River Feale and flows into the sea; “Eyes of the Races,” Listowel Races, September 16, 2008, by Barry Delaney (Flickr)

———

* Yes, I know. What a painful name! Actually, in Irish it looks like Baile an Bhuinneánaigh and derives from the Bonyon family, who claimed a castle there in 1582. You can see its lovely remains here.

** Cnoc an Fhásaig, or hill of the wilderness

† Baile ui Fhiaigh, or O’Fay’s town

‡ Listowel (Lios Tuathail, or Tuathal’s fort) being the hometown of my own great-great grandfather, or Kate Maher’s great uncle …

Smile!

I found this photograph among my dad’s things. I’m guessing it’s his first-grade class picture, which would make the tight-lipped teacher Miss O’Brien. Fourth from the left in the back row—that’s little Tommy Wolfe.

“My teachers taught me by hand,” Dad wrote in an essay from 2003. “In other words, they took immediate and unsubtle action when I misbehaved. My first grade teacher, Miss O’Brien, had a large paddle and demanded that offenders step to the front of the class, grab their ankles, and accept a few whacks. When she caught me crawling around the floor one day, she called me forward to receive my punishment; but I was too frightened to go and thus got away with it.”

He continued:

Other teachers had other methods, but they all tolerated little or no nonsense from me.  My second grade teacher, Miss Kruse, made us put our noses in circles on the chalkboard, a fairly non-violent approach, but she also had a good right cross. I discovered that once after pushing a classmate’s face into the water fountain and having to explain myself to her. After telling her an outrageous lie to the effect that my brain had no control over my hand, she simply swung her right hand and gave me a resounding slap. My third and fourth grade teacher, Miss Barr, made us stand in the corner, sometimes with our hands over our hands. She also pinched our ears with her long fingernails and hit us with yardsticks, rulers, and her hands. Despite it all, I never doubted that I deserved what I received, I certainly never told my mother, and I really liked her anyway.

I could stare at this picture for hours. By my count, two girls are smiling and one girl is smirking. Everyone else looks terrorized.

[July 2, 2013]

Young Love

Thomas and Frances Wolfe, undated

Till Death

Marriage certificate for my grandparents Raymond B. Wolfe and Gladys E. McGinn, Clinton County, Iowa, August 25, 1925

In Which My Talent Is Recognized

In 2005 my dad authored an essay titled, simply, “Sex.” In it he related the following anecdote, of which I have no memory:

As a parent I tried not to make the same mistakes as my mother, but it wasn’t easy. When my son Brendan was somewhere between four and seven, he was watching a public television show about reproduction in our upstairs bedroom with my wife Franny while I was downstairs washing dishes. I later learned that at one point he began drawing madly and asked his mother if what he had drawn was in fact a vagina. When she stammered something possibly incoherent, he asked her what it was and what the sex act was. She, true to her upbringing, told him to go ask me. When he came into the kitchen, he showed me the picture, a remarkable likeness of a vagina for such a young kid, and then he asked me how the act was done. I thought about blowing him off but decided to be frank. I explained it graphically but briefly, and that’s all he wanted. He received the information in the same manner he would have if the question had been how dew was formed. He absorbed it and then walked away having already lost interest. I had finally done something right as a parent!

[June 28, 2013]

image: Grey Line with Black, Blue and Yellow by Georgia O’Keeffe (1923) 

Black Sheep

Brendan Wolfe, Lost Nation, May 26, 1975

Sailing the Black Star Line

My great-great grandfather, John R. Wolfe, arrived in America from Ireland in 1847. He sailed on the Cornelia with his wife, Honora, and their young son James, along with Wolfe’s cousin Maurice’s family. The packet ship, which weighed 1,040 tons, was built by Brown and Bell of New York and and part of the Black Star Line. Owned by Samuel Thompson, the Black Star Line ran eighteen ships between Liverpool and New York in 1847, sailing every six days. John F. French was the ship’s master.

The ship pictured above also was owned by the Black Star Line, about which you can find more in Queens of the Western Ocean: The Story of America’s Mail and Passenger Sailing Lines by Carl C. Cutler (1961).

I must admit that I had hoped, prior to conducting this research, that the owner of the Cornelia might have been Robert Bowne Minturn, my wife’s great-great-great grandfather. Part owner of Grinnell, Minturn, and Company, one of the largest and most successful transporters of Irish immigrants to the United States during the Famine years, Minturn operated the Blue Swallowtail Line between Liverpool and New York. In other words, my wife’s family transported Irishmen just like my family, and even on Brown and Bell–built ships.

Anyway, the Wolfes arrived arrived in New York City from Liverpool on August 23, 1847. You can find their names on this passenger list: Maurice, his wife, Ellen, and their children James, Ellen, Maurice, Mary, and Johanna; and John Wolfe, his wife, Honora, and their son, James. (Here's the full page, in .pdf form.)

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There are a couple of problems here. John R.’s son James was not thirty-five; he was four. Probably a simple mistake. Additionally, Maurice may have had other children, alive at the time, who settled in the United States but who are not listed here.

Whatever the case, Cutler’s book shows us where the Black Star ships docked in New York (pier 30 or thereabouts)—

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—and the New York Daily Tribune (August 23, 1847, page 3) reports on the ship’s arrival:

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The newspaper records provide a bare account of the journey—passed a ship bound for Liverpool on July 22, sighted what was perhaps the John R. Skiddy on August 1, encountered a fishing boat off Marblehead, Massachusetts, on the sixth—while mentioning that five passengers died en route. The ship’s more celebrated passengers, however, including Arthur St. George—namesake to a line of Irish politicians—arrived safely. (Here's the full page from the Tribune, in .pdf form.)

From New York, the Wolfes traveled to LaSalle County, Illinois. How did they get there? What kind of money did they have? Did they have contacts in that place? Alas, I don’t know …

[June 26, 2013]

image: the packet ship Huguenot of Thompson’s Black Star Line, New York to Liverpool, being struck by lightning (Peabody-Essex, Salem, Mass.)

There Was a Vast Unbroken Prairie

This obituary of JAMES BUCKLEY WOLFE appeared in the Oxford Mirror, page 5, on February 3, 1916. Wolfe was my great-grandfather Maurice’s oldest brother. What strikes me is how this obituary, more than most, seems to be a means of remembering the early history of Clinton County, Iowa. Wolfe is cast in the role of the archetypal pioneer: one who made a pilgrim’s progress from Ireland, through the Slough of Despond (Chicago, apparently), fields of fire, and finally to the Celestial City, otherwise known (ironically?) as Lost Nation. It’s as if the obituary writer were not so much taking stock of James Wolfe as s/he was of the entire community.

Anyway, as for the misnomer in the headline: Wolfe did have a younger brother called John B., born in 1851.

Obituary of John B. Wolfe, Pioneer

James B. Wolfe was born in County Kerry, Ireland, April 13, 1844, and died at his home near Lost Nation, Iowa, January 27, 1916. When an infant he came to this country with his parents. The history of his life is the story of the immigrant and pioneer. They came to Chicago. Where a vast city now stands there were then only swamps and sloughs. Afterwards the family moved to Ottawa, Illinois, and later, in 1854 came to Iowa settling on the same farm, a part of which the deceased owned at the time of his death.

At that time, where there are now prosperous well tilled farms, there was a vast unbroken prairie over which the deer roamed at will and through which surged the all devouring prairie fire sweeping everything before it. Here, the deceased experienced the struggles and privations of pioneer life. Through the sides of the rude hut of a home, the wind and the weather blew. Often did he tell of how he shook the snow from the bed covers on awakening and brushed it aside on the floor to make a bare place upon which to stand while dressing. He lived to see the great evolution and progress of the past almost three quarters of a century. He saw the railroad, the steam engine, and the automobile displace the rail and the ox drawn wagon of the pioneer and the transformation which has made an unbroken, unpeopled* prairie the garden spot of the world.

The deceased united in marriage to Annie O’Connor, February 8, 1872, which union was blessed with seven children all of whom with the wife survive. They are John O. C., Nora L. and James L., of this place; Mrs. Frank Goodall [May R.], of Toronto; Doctor Jeremiah, of Grand Mound; Mrs. I. S. Ryan [Anna], of Welton; and Attorney Walter I., of Dunlap. Besides, the deceased leaves to mourn his death four brothers and three sisters as follows: Judge P. B. Wolfe, Mrs. T. D. Fitzgerald [Katherine] and Mrs. D. Langan [Margaret I.] of Clinton; Attorney Richard B. of DeWitt; Maurice B. of Lost Nation; and Sister M. Scholastica [Johanna] of St. Joseph’s Mercy Hospital, Sioux City.

He was a man of sterling worth and unimpeachable character who counted every man his friend. Always a natural leader of men he held many positions of honor and trust, though never a seeker after public acclaim. At the time of his death, he was president of the Lost Nation Savings Bank.

The funeral services were held at St. James’ church, Toronto. Requiem High Mass was celebrated by Father McNamara assisted by Father Regan of Oxford Junction and Father Small of Lost Nation and the choir of the Sacred Heart church, Lost Nation. Father Small paid an eloquent tribute to the faith of the deceased—a life-long Catholic in which faith he so calmly and resignedly passed away.

The remains were borne to their last resting place by sight of his life-long neighbors and friends, namely James Connors, Anthony Early, William Burnett, Thomas Early, Edward O’Donnell, Edward Scanlan, M. P. O’Connor and James Hughes.

Those from a distance who attended were, Judge P. Wolfe and daughter Mollie and Mrs. T. D. Fitzgerald and daughter Margaret of Clinton; R. B. Wolfe and family and Mrs. M. Scanlan of DeWitt, Iowa; John B. Wolfe of Melrose, Iowa; Kate Carroll, Kilkenny, Minnesota; Mrs. B. McBride of Hawarden, Iowa; Hugh Buckley, Chicago; O. S. Gilroy and Jennie McLaughlin of Bettendorf, Iowa; and Mr. and Mrs. T. J. Leahy of Fulton, Illinois.

* It should go without saying that this was not true.

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image: Where the forest meets the prairie, Buena Vista County, Iowa, by Samuel Calvin (University of Iowa

I Do Hope I Won't Be Too Hard on You

The first note my dad ever wrote to me was in my baby book. I was not quite five months old.

January 26, 1972

Brendan, me boy,

I trust, lad, that the time will come when you will exhibit a bit more intelligence than that presently displayed. You are on your third day of diarrahea (sp?), and you seem to enjoy it! I had rather expected you to exercise a bit more control by now.

Actually, Brendan, I am quite proud of you. I get rather excited when I think of your future. I do hope I won’t be too hard on you. Love God and your fellow man, and serve both. Remember the Sermon on the Mount.

Peace,

Your Father

[June 25, 2013]

image: two pages from my baby book, including my first picture, which my dad labeled “Neanderthal Man”

I Am Still Trembling As I Write This

I found this essay among my dad’s papers.

ON FAMILY FUN

Tom Wolfe

January 6, 1981

Who in the name of all that is sweet and holy ever said that families should stick together in order to have fun? I have a profound distrust for anyone espousing such a philosophy. Over the years, I have discovered that sanity for me lies in avoiding “family fun” like the plague.

Occasionally, I stray though. Last summer, a friend and I thought we would try the super father role, a mental derangement of which we all paid dearly, fathers and children alike. For three days and two nights, we stayed on a small Mississippi sandbar with six small, screaming, and semi-delirious children, seven million mosquitoes of indeterminate age, and the filthiest, smelliest scum the Mighty Mississippi could offer us for water. By the end of this nightmare, neither of us could tolerate children any[more], nor, for that matter, were we too crazy about each other. This winter holds no terror for me. I laugh at twenty inch blizzards, and I scoff at sub-zero weather because I know in my heart that nothing could possibly be worse than a child-and-mosquito-infested sandbar!

My wife not only believes in “family fun” more than I do but she practices it often. It is presumably for this reason that she smokes God knows how many cigarettes a day, has stomach cramps, and has a little twitch beneath her left eye. She will periodically gather all our children into the kitchen and tell them they are going to have “fun” cooking something. Our teenaged girl invariably mixes the wrong ingredients, then spills it all onto the floor; our nine-year-old boy sticks his face as closely as possible to his mother’s Gallic countenance and talks nonstop; and our seven-year-old girl just manages to be underfoot. After about a half hour of this “fun,” my dear, gentle wife will invariably snap and scream some horrible epithets at the children wihci [sic] would destroy any normal psyche but, strangely enough, never seems to significantly damage their relationship with her. She always insists afterwards, long afterwards, that it was worth it.

Recently, “family fun” unobtrusively insinuated itself into our home once again like a fog in the night, this time in the guise of apparently harmless games called “Scrabble” and “Uno.” At first, other family members played the game, but I, not trusting such things, gave it a miss. Unfortunately, I weakened and was soon seated around the table with everyone else. I even smiled a little—but not for long.

Tonight was surely one of the most harrowing examples of all this I’ve experienced in recent years. Our teenager took forever keeping score; our little one kept showing all her cards and nearly drove me crazy with her creative method of dealing cards; and our freckle-faced boy giggled until both my wife and I were on the raw edge of hysteria. I am still trembling as I write this, and I doubt that anything on God’s sweet earth will induce me to participate in such “fun” again.

[June 25, 2013]

image: “On Family Fun” by Tom Wolfe, pages 1 and 2

He Is Survived by Four Small Children

An obituary for my grandfather RAY WOLFE, from the Jackson Sentinel, September 16, 1941:

Rites At Delmar Thursday For Raymond B. Wolfe

DELMAR – An unusually large and sympathetic assemblage of the relatives, friends and acquaintances of the late Raymond B. Wolfe were gathered together in St. Patrick’s church at 9:00 o’clock Thursday morning, Sept. 11, to attend the funeral services. Requiem high mass was celebrated by the Rev. J. J. Hopkins, with the Rev. James Quinlan, of Charlotte, and the Rev. Herald O’Connor, of Lost Nation, as his assistants on the altar. Interment was made in St. Patrick’s cemetery, Delmar, with the Rev. J. J. Hopkins officiating at the ritualistic service. Eight members of Timber City Post No. 75, The American Legion, of Maquoketa, under the command of Glen Bailey, composed the firing squad, and Hugh Fletcher, bugler, sounding taps, as military honors were accorded the deceased veteran of the world war. Casket bears were also Legion comrades: Charles Rasmussen, Allen Bracket, Percy Cassin, Peter McGinn, Ralph Guise, and Dan Waters. Deceased was born October 27, 1896, the son of Morris [Maurice] and Sarah Wolfe, near Lost Nation. He married Gladys McGinn, of Delmar, on August 25, 1925, and they lived on a farm near Lost Nation before moving to Delmar. He was a veteran of the world war, and a member of Timber City Post No. 75, The American Legion. Besides his wife, he is survived by four small children, three daughters, Sarah [Sara], Mary and Marjorie [Margery], and one son, Thomas; and four brothers, Philip, John, Melvin and James, all of Lost Nation.

Here's another.

[June 25, 2013]

image: Thomas Wolfe and Ray Wolfe, Delmar, Iowa, 1941

The Toponym of Lost Nation

From Wolfe’s History of Clinton County by Judge Patrick B. Wolfe (1911):

There seems to be no means of absolutely ascertaining the origin of the name Lost Nation. Many and various theories to account for it are set forth by the residents, some of which will be here given. It is certain that the region about the present town was called Lost Nation long before the establishment of the station, also that the locality was not known as such by the very earliest settlers.

One version, not very widely credited, has it that a tribe of Indians starved and froze to death here in early times. May people give credence to the story that a German named Balm was looking for some relatives here in the times when the prairie was unbroken and covered with grass high as a horse, and when asked where he was going, said that he was looking for the “lost nation.” H. V. Cook is said to have come over into this locality to buy stock from this same Balm when he settled here, to have searched for him one day and a part of the next before locating his cabin, and thus to have called it “lost nation.” Again it is related that some hunters from Brookfield township looking over the western prairie from an eminence noted the little settlement of a few houses under the clump of oaks before mentioned, and said to his companions that there was a small nation down there. Reply was made that it must be a lost nation. This is a more satisfying theory than some of the others. It is also said that a hunting party was lost here, remained for some time, and named their camp “Lost Man Camp.” Others state that the name was given because of the wild and somewhat inaccessible character of the region. Perhaps none of these theories is correct.

The station established by the Sabula, Ackley & Dakota in 1871 was named Lost Nation because the surrounding country had been long so called. Some years ago there was agitation among the people to have the name changed, but this was firmly opposed by the older settlers, they rightly urging that, aside from the associations to them connected with the name, it was better to have a name which expressed a meaning, even though somewhat romantic, than one of the colorless names borne by the majority of American towns. And it seemed to them that the possession of such a name was a valuable asset to the town.

[June 25, 2013]

image: Lost Nation Iowa train 106 by Flickr user Mark LLanuza

The Ballad of Short Dick

An onomatological curiosity in the Wolfe family: my great grandfather was Maurice; my great (x3) uncle was Maurice, as was his son and two of his nephews, one of whom—wait for it—was named Maurice Morris. Maurice Morris’s brother, by the way, was Edmund Maurice. Edmund Maurice’s father was Maurice, and his father, my great (x4) grandfather was James Maurice. James Maurice’s brother was Maurice James, aka Young Maurice, whose father also was Maurice James, aka Old Maurice. Young Maurice had a nephew, Edmund Maurice, whose father was Short Dick. And, finally, Old Maurice’s grandfather, which is to say my great (x7) grandfather, who farmed land in County Limerick at the time Cromwell’s men came through, was the original Maurice James, or Really Really Old Maurice.

[June 25, 2013]

image: ca. 1920. Standing (left to right): Maurice Wolfe, Frank and Mary Carraher, Sarah McAndrews Wolfe, Ray Wolfe, Phil Wolfe, Melvin Wolfe. In my father’s hand, seated: “McClains (sp.) from Clinton (They liked chicken!).”

The Old Goat, R.I.P.

This is my dad’s obituary—as I wrote it and pretty close to how it appeared.

THOMAS A. WOLFE (1940–2012)

Thomas Anthony Wolfe was born in Maquoketa, Iowa, on December 20, 1940. The son of Raymond Bernard Wolfe (1896–1941) and Gladys McGinn Wolfe (1903–1966), he was the great-grandson of Irish immigrants. The youngest of four, Tommy—as his sisters insisted on calling him—found himself deprived of a father as an infant and set free on not quite two hundred acres of Clinton County farmland. As a result, he lived inside his imagination. He became his hero, Jackie Robinson, by throwing balls against the barn and scooping up grounders. He found stacks of freshly mown hay to be occasions for an intense kind of dreaming. “What I remember most about farm life,” he once wrote, “was an aching feeling of loneliness.”

Wolfe graduated from Delmar High School in 1958 and then, with support from an uncle, from St. Ambrose College, in nearby Davenport. He later earned a master’s degree in American history from Western Illinois University. Having decided to forego farm life, Wolfe began his teaching career in Blue Grass, Iowa, before moving down the road to Walcott, where he taught across the hall from Frances Cupp Wolfe, whom he married on August 1, 1964. The couple—a sometimes uneasy mixture of Irish and French ancestry—raised three children in Davenport: Bridget Colleen (b. 1967), Brendan Martin (b. 1971), and Sara Elizabeth (b. 1973). As the names suggest, Wolfe’s Irish side often prevailed, although he lovingly called his wife Françoise. She called him “the old goat,” only sometimes lovingly, and they managed until 1993, when they separated. Divorce followed soon after.

Until his retirement in 1997, Wolfe held court in a room at Walcott Junior High School (later Middle School), mostly teaching American history. His great passion was for teaching, which took him back to the farm he never quite left: it was an exercise in imagination. A colleague remembers his closet full of hats. “He would put on a hat and act out various historical characters,” she recalled, and if on one occasion he actually tumbled from a windowsill during a performance—that made it only more memorable for his audience.

Wolfe’s other great passion was the teachers’ union. His wife Fran beat him to it, voting to strike on an occasion when he didn’t, and her zeal rubbed off on him. He served two terms as president of the Davenport Education Association, and was a near-annual delegate to assemblies of the state and national unions. For at least a decade he served as Midwest regional director of the NEA’s Peace and Justice Caucus, and in 2012 the Iowa State Education Association presented him with its highest honor, the Charles F. Martin Award for Association Leadership. He accepted with a generous and very funny speech calling for an end to the bitter and unthinking partisanship of American politics.

Tom Wolfe, who died at his Davenport home on August 4­, is survived by his sister Margery; his former wife; his close friend Nancy Porter, of Iowa City; his three children; and his three grandchildren. (His sisters Sara and Mary K died in 1998 and 2004, respectively.) One imagines he has finally returned to the old Wolfe homestead in Clinton County, to the hay bales and reveries. “As long as I live,” he wrote, “I’ll associate freshly mown hay with those dreams and yearnings, and I won’t know whether to be happy or sad.”

[June 24, 2013]

image: Tom Wolfe, ca. 1980s