Ramblin' with Roger

Posts Tagged ‘Leslie Green’

My father’s cousin Ruth sent this picture of my sister Leslie, her friend Linda, our cousin Debby, and Leslie’s friend Nita. We all went to Trinity AME Zion Church in Binghamton when we were growing up, which was two very short blocks from our house.

Not sure of the vintage of the photo. I’m guessing that Leslie’s in 8th or 9th grade Read the rest of this entry »

I was listening to my favorite podcast not hosted by Arthur. It is a music podcast, which should be no surprise. The second tune in the set was a song called Passing Through. I went to the website to see to whom it was attributed as the original artist of the song, and it said Leonard Cohen. I said to myself – I often talk to myself – “There is NO WAY that song was originally done by Leonard Cohen.”

My certitude came from the fact that my late father used to sing that song when he performed in my hometown of Binghamton back in the 1960s. While I didn’t know all of the specific origins, I did know that his song selection was established in the late 1950s and early 1960s from albums by people such as Woody Guthrie, Harry Belafonte, Odetta and Pete Seeger. Cohen came into prominence as a singer/songwriter later in the 1960s.

I thought maybe it was a song Read the rest of this entry »

One of my sisters discovered this March 18, 2005 interview with my mother’s first cousin, my first cousin once removed, Frances Beal this autumn, conducted by Loretta Ross. Fran is about 12 years younger than my mother and 13 years older than I am. Her kids are about a dozen years younger than my sisters and I. Her late mother, Charlotte Yates, was my beloved great aunt.

Her politics are far more liberal than mine. She, I suspect, would eschew the term “liberal” altogether, in favor of “radical”. What is truly interesting about the piece though, from my specific POV, is her retelling of her history, which invariably overlaps with mine.

BEAL: OK. I was born in a relatively small city, upstate New York, called Binghamton, New York , as was I. In school they used to tell us, Bing bought a ham and it weighed a ton: that’s how to spell Binghamton…
Read the rest of this entry »

When I married Carol Powell on May 15, 1999, it was not only a blending of families, it was a mixing of family sizes. My family is very small, while hers is ginormous. Since both of my parents were only children, and all of my grandparents, by that point, were deceased, this was pretty much it on my side of the ledger: (L-R) my niece Rebecca, her mother/my sister Leslie, Carol, me, my mother Trudy, my late father Les, my niece Alexandria, and her mother/my sister Marcia.

Whereas my new wife had LOTS of relatives. My mother-in-law had seven siblings, my father-in-law two. My wife had three brothers and over 30 first cousins. I, of course, had no first cousins since I had no uncles or aunts. Read the rest of this entry »