When I was young, a kid, our family moved a lot, due to my father’s air force career (nine moves in twenty-three years). During my first marriage, we also moved a lot for my husband’s job.* I know a lot of people from that life (from those two lives: my childhood and my first marriage) who had never moved out of the town they grew up in, but moving didn’t seem unusual to me. I didn’t mind, I was used to it. And I made some friends I still have. (That’s a very air force-y thing as well.)
But my father’s life before he joined the US Air Force was pretty scattered, too, and it has to do with the parents he had.** Jimmy Clarke was born in St. Louis, Missouri, on 19 February 1929. His parents, Bessie and Harry, divorced not long after that (I’ve not yet been able to pin down this date; it would have been very early 1930s).
I’ve heard all the stories about how Jimmy was a bit of a wild child, a bit of a troublemaker (most of them from Jimmy himself!). But the stories fail to take into account that divorce, which was quite a stigma for a small boy to carry around in those days. Divorce just wasn’t done.
According to Redbook magazine, “When a person filed for divorce in most states in the ’30s, they still had to prove they were the victim of cruelty, adultery, or abandonment.” Adultery, I’m sorry to say, would square with what I heard about Harry from my father: he was a traveling salesman (often medical supplies and, early in his career, shoe polish—and definitely a way to be easily unfaithful), and he was good at it. He was nice looking, he smiled easily, and he was a good conversationalist. My father inherited those talents from him.
Harry always had money, he was very vain, his clothes and other accoutrements were always of the highest quality. You can see these things in the many photographs I have of him. He loved to dress up in costumes (I have photos of him in a US Navy uniform, for example, although he never served a day in any branch of the US military). He loved photo booths and I have lots of photo strips that resulted from them. Seriously, he was a very vain man.*** He squandered a fortune, my father told me once (and I wrote it in my notes), on clothes, cars, and women.
I wasn’t kidding.
He had lots of photo portraits made too.
He doesn’t particularly sound like husband material, does he? (He ultimately married three times.) But wait, let’s compare and contrast Bessie—maybe there’s a connection in their backgrounds.
Harry grew up in a rural area, among a large family, in what was called Edgefield District (now Edgefield County), which was established in 1785; by the 1930s many of the family were in Johnston (population in 2010 was just 2,362). Harry’s mother died when he was thirteen, his brother Mahlon Ray eight years, and his sister, Kathleen (Kippy) just seven. Their father, William Simeon Clark—everyone called him Sim—remarried and had two more children, Evelyn and Phil. Sim was a farmer and he owned his land and home, according to the Census Bureau.
Harry was born 26 Oct 1900.
The county was rural then and it is rural now. When Harry was growing up it was … rough, judging by photos I’ve seen. Wikipedia has some history: “In his study of Edgefield County, South Carolina,**** Orville Vernon Burton classified white society as comprising the poor, the yeoman middle class, and the elite planters. A clear line demarcated the elite, but according to Burton, the line between poor and yeoman was never very distinct. … [Y]eomen were clearly distinguished from poor whites by their ownership of land (real property). Edgefield’s yeomen farmers were “self-working farmers,” distinct from the elite because they worked their land themselves alongside any slaves they owned.” As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, my father has described his people as “poor dirt farmers,” and the photos I have seem to confirm it. Especially the dirt part.
I have no idea what made Harry leave (or how he got an opportunity to leave) Edgefield District. (If I were a speculating woman, though, I’d posit that he crossed the Savannah River and went the twenty or so miles into Augusta, Georgia, and got a job, to start with. And one job would have led to another. In various papers I’ve read that he was based in Baltimore at one point, and later in St. Louis, of course. Who knows where else!) I have no idea about the family circumstances, other than Sim was the third of ten children, and they were all living in the area.
• • •
Like Harry, Bessie Robinson grew up in a rural area (Alexandria and Smithville, Tennessee) among a large family. But the families seem … different. When I talk about the Clarks I talk about the men, the fathers. When I talk about the Robinsons, I talk about sisters (Bessie and her sister Addie were close; their mother, Ada, and her sister Cornelia were also very close) and mothers and grandmothers (Ada and Nelia’s mother, Mary E. Martin, who lived to be almost ninety-six). It’s a completely different vibe, frankly. Friendlier. (Definitely less dirt.) Maybe it’s just me making this up from what I see in the photos?
Two sisters in a family of boys. (In order of birth: Addie, Fred, Frank, Bessie, Ernest.) Addie was nine years older than Bessie, so I’ll guess here Bessie was a young teenager and Addie early twenties.
Addie and Bessie were close, close, close, as long as Addie lived, well into adulthood, although in the later photos she doesn’t look well. Bessie called her “Sister.” Here I’ve opened the locket so you can see the beautiful design on both sides.
I have so many photographs from this family. And I heard a lot of stories from my father, some of which I have mentioned elsewhere. They lived close to one another. They socialized a lot. They took photographs of their kids and their kids’ friends. They loved their friends, their aunts and uncles and cousins, their children.
Bessie’s daddy was Billy Robinson. He transported the US mail between Smithville and Watertown, through rolling Tennessee hills. In his time, of course, he drove a pair of horses pulling a buckboard cart, and though Watertown is only twenty-three miles away, it took some time back then. He was a friendly guy, Billy was, and well known. And he loved kids. I’ve been told (by the Foster sisters) that local kids used to wait for Billy’s return after school. They’d meet him on the outskirts of town and he’d take them up onto the cart and ride them back into town.
Bessie’s aunt, Nelia, married Jimmy Beckwith, who was, I’ve been told, a pharmacist. His brother—whose name is lost to me at the moment—had a store that also had a photography studio. Since I have dozens of studio-type photos taken in the late 1800s and early 1900s—as well as a photo of the store itself—I have no reason to doubt this story. The family put these photos into albums and boxes and I have a lot of them. (Seriously, I have many, many photos of the Robinsons and their kin.) Some of these photos are quite special.
The sitting girl not wearing a hat is Addie, my grandmother Bessie’s older (and only) sister. The girl directly above her with the cheeky grin is one of the Foster sisters. I’m guessing these girls were between fourteen and sixteen years old here. But what’s the story? This is my guess: Smithville was a rural setting and a small town; everybody knew everybody. It was summer, the girls were out picking daisies and then one of them said, “Let’s go get Mister Beckwith to take our picture!” And they did. I have no idea if this is true, but what do you think?
This is Frank Robinson; it’s written on the back of the photograph in the handwriting of someone from the time. (I have several photos with this backdrop, so I feel confident this was taken at Beckwith’s.) I think he looks a lot like my father. I’m guessing he was perhaps mid-twenties here, and was obviously a snappy dresser. Frank was the middle child (there’s lots of assumptions to be made with that!) and I’ve often wondered if he was the one who died by knife. In fact, he died in 1920, which would lend credence to that—around age thirty. His brothers all lived much longer lives.
I have this photo framed, hanging in the guest bathroom (where sun never shines, which is a good thing for old photographs). People come back from that room and mention this photo—the magnificent christening gown, or “That baby is holding a purse!” (The purse is interesting, isn’t it? It looks like something my mother might have carried in the 1950s. But I believe this is a photo of Ernest, the youngest child of Ada and Billy Robinson, and he was born in 1906. They probably gave him the purse so he’d sit still for the photo.) Finally, though, there’s another interesting thing about this photo that people don’t even notice until I send them back to the bathroom to look again. Can you see it?
The Martin women were handy with needles: they sewed their own clothing, embroidered pillowcases and tabletop protectors (like lamp mats and dresser scarves), sewed quilts, and created beautiful crocheted doilies. I possess examples of all of these items. When I was a little girl, Bessie bought a small doll and handmade beautiful outfits for her. (This was pre-Barbie, though when Barbie came along this doll, ahem, joined the family and even shared her clothing with Barbie.) When I married the first time I carried one of the beautiful handkerchiefs Bessie’d made using a cut-thread technique. It was “something old” even then.
The Martins/Robinsons were a big, sloppily happy family. So why did Bessie leave ? My father told me she’d gone to St. Louis as a young woman to “get out of the country.” Or, possibly, I think, to have a larger circle of men to meet, or a different kind of man to meet. It was a postwar (WW1), postpandemic (Spanish flu) decade, the 1920s, and people were on the move, society was changing. I also believe she may have followed her older sister, Addie, who had married Robert Calhoun and moved away, apparently to St. Louis.
Regardless, Bessie moved to St. Louis, a brave young woman in the big city—these weren’t called the Roaring Twenties for nothing, you know. The History Channel says,
For the first time, more Americans lived in cities than on farms. The nation’s total wealth more than doubled between 1920 and 1929, and this economic growth swept many Americans into an affluent but unfamiliar “consumer society.” People from coast to coast bought the same goods (thanks to nationwide advertising and the spread of chain stores), listened to the same music, did the same dances and even used the same slang! … The most familiar symbol of the “Roaring Twenties” is probably the flapper: a young woman with bobbed hair and short skirts who drank, smoked and said what might be termed “unladylike” things, in addition to being more sexually “free” than previous generations.
I don’t know about that last bit—Bessie was a churchgoing woman (Disciples of Christ) until the day she died—but I have plenty of evidence that she embraced the fashion. She worked as a milliner (“one who designs, makes, trims, or sells women’s hats”) which would fit in with her skills as a seamstress, which were legion.
Very 1920s, don’t you think?
• • •
I think the connection I mentioned earlier is the obvious one: Harry and Bessie met in the changing society of the 1920s. They were attractive young people, smart, successful, and they enjoyed doing fun things together. (Harry even got Bessie to dress up as a sort-of cowboy—yes, in pants. Have I mentioned I have photos?)
Harry and Bessie’s engagement photo. 192x? I have no idea when the engagement was official, or when this photo was taken. Sometime before the spring of 1924. 🙂
Their families seems to have approved—I have photos of her with his fam in South Carolina and him with hers in Tennessee—but on the day of the wedding they just went downtown in St. Louis to the registrar’s office and the justice of the peace and got married on 19 April 1924. (I have their original marriage certificate.) No fancy wedding. Then they went off to Castlewood (now a state park established in 1974 but back then just a lively resort) for a honeymoon. When she died, I was given her wedding ring set—a beautiful platinum basketweave design for the diamond; the band is inscribed “Harry & Bessie 1924”—and my wonderful daughter-in-law wears it now, which makes me happier than I can articulate here.
On their way to the courthouse. Note the fur stole.
Harry and Bessie built a house on a lot at 5209 Davison Avenue with two flats, one upstairs, one downstairs. On the alley behind it they built a separate, smaller apartment/house that they lived in so they could rent out the two larger flats. And life was good.
Their son, James Eugene Clarke, was born on 19 February 1929.
Harry and Bessie holding a four-month-old Jimmy in front of 5209, before the front porch was added.
My father said he can’t remember them ever living together (emphasis his)—though photos taken when he was an infant and young toddler seem to indicate they did—and claimed they divorced soon after he was born. Perhaps they were together through his toddlerhood, but I know the divorce came earlier than one would wish for one’s little boy. Harry moved out, but he was present in their lives, off and on. They did things together—swimming, camping, picnics. Still, it wasn’t great for Jimmy, with a traveling salesman father and a working mother and a Great Depression to contend with. (As an adult he hated chicken, wouldn’t eat it, as he’d had a roaster every Sunday for a decade. Mom had to wait until he was off flying somewhere far to serve us kids fried chicken, which we all loved, even her. He was weird about a lot of things that reminded him of his St. Louis life.)
As I’ve said, by his own admission Jimmy was in trouble a lot. He started smoking at age eight, he told us kids. (It was supposed to be a cautionary tale—and none of us do.) And Harry would arrive and carry him off to South Carolina in the summer, often leaving Jimmy with Kippy and Dr. Wilson (her husband) so Harry could get back on the road. I believe this and other kindnesses she showed him are why my father loved Kathleen and kept her in his (and all of our) lives.
Note date: 1937. He was just eight years old. This might have been the time they went to observe court proceedings for fun.
As I’ve noted elsewhere, Jimmy dropped out of high school his freshman year, 1943, and later got a GED certificate in South Carolina so he could enter the University of South Carolina in the fall of 1949.
• • •
Bessie never remarried. She moved into the upstairs flat—where my family visited many times, where she kept and cared for her own mother in Ada’s very old age—and lived in that house she and Harry built together until the day she died, at home, at age 78. When my father retired from the air force (age forty-three) and moved the family (minus me) back to Tennessee, he tried to persuade Bessie to move to Murfreesboro, too, so he could keep an eye on her: there were a lot of stairs up to that second-floor apartment. But Bessie would not be budged. In fact, for years she’d had her name on the wait list of her church-sponsored retirement home, but every time she got to the top of the list, she’d say no and let the next old person take her spot instead. (Annabelle Martin Tremaine—Bessie’s first cousin—told me this story.)
• • •
Harry may have been a city man, but he retained his country skills. He taught Jimmy to swim and to hunt when he was old enough to handle a rifle (though I’m not sure either of them were good enough shots to provide dinner). He could cook a meal over a campfire. The family (whether they were still married or not) went camping together, for heaven’s sake. All that see-the-country outdoorsy-ness was passed on to Jimmy, who would go on to pass these pursuits (though not the guns) on to his young wife and family. Harry was also an accomplished horseman; he loved horses and was supremely confident with them.
In the photos I have of my father, which he went through with me, some years ago, to identify places, ages, and so forth, he would often say things like, “Oh, that was Davenport, Iowa—Harry had a girlfriend there.” Old habits died hard with Harry. He married a second time to a woman named Alice Weber and then in the late forties married Edna Louisa Baumgarth (b. 1910); they had twin girls, Jane and Janet, on 2 January 1951. I was born two and a half years later.
Harry was fifty-one when the twins were born, and he gave up sales and moved back to rural Owensville, Missouri, about eighty miles from St. Louis. (Still rural: its population in 2010 was just 2,676.) He built a house on a hillside, and I spent a summer there—maybe 1964—between sixth and seventh grades learning 1) the meaning of humidity; 2) the joys of eating tomatoes straight out of the garden; 3) that my grandfather read a lot of of Louis L’Amour and Zane Grey (and so did I that summer); and 4) that Jehovah’s Witnesses really, really dislike Catholics and they say so out loud.*****
Harry raised horses in Owensville, and supported that habit with a saddle and tack shop attached to the house. (It smelled so good in there.) He also raised pheasant for eating, and during the weeks I lived with them I witnessed Edna take one out of the cage and prepare it for supper. (Tastes just like chicken.) I wish I could say I got to know my grandfather that summer, but I really didn’t. He spent most of his time sitting in the living room smoking cigars and grunting at us kids. To this day, though, I adore the smell of a cigar.
• • •
That’s the story of my father’s parents, and how they shaped him or didn’t shape him. Daddy saw a lot of America east of the Mississippi as he was growing up, from a train or a car (again, I have photos); he probably got around a lot more than many people of his generation. He spent quality time with his father, and perhaps learned why fidelity in marriage was a good thing. At the very least he learned a lot about women. He watched his mother work for a living, and he honored and respected her throughout her life. (I don’t think he liked her much, but I don’t know if that was her fault.)
Young Jimmy lived a peripatetic life, passed around among the adults who were responsible for him. When it was his turn to be a responsible adult, the air force life probably didn’t seem all that different to him. As I’ve processed what I know about him, I’ve come to appreciate on a deep level the kind of man he became, and what he made of himself, given his upbringing. (Which is another post entirely, of course. Stay tuned.)
* I didn’t want that life for my son; I wanted him to have a sense of place (and he does). We lived three years in an apartment across the street from his grammar school after my divorce, and then fourteen years in our house on Hillside Court. He graduated to his adult life from that house, and I’m proud of that. I’ve lived in this house, now, for thirteen years.
** Bessie Lee Robinson (b. 31 August 1894, d. 1973); Harry Elijah Clarke (b. 26 October 1900, d. 28 April 1966).
*** Harry was also, my father told me, the person who added the E on our last name, making our family the Clarkes. What kind of person feels the need to do that?
**** Orville Vernon Burton, In My Father’s House Are Many Mansions: Family and Community in Edgefield, South Carolina (U. of North Carolina Press, 1985).
***** Edna was a JW and was raising her daughters that way. They still are.
Wanderlustful 