Anniversary

“I may be a headache, but never a bore.”


My parents were married on March 12, 1950, in Binghamton, NY. I always found that very convenient to remember; I would often say that I was their early third-anniversary present.

When their 50th anniversary was coming up – in 2000 (easy math!) – my sisters and I were trying to plan a surprise party at my parents’ church in Charlotte, NC. The only trouble was that there was an occasional conflict with the date, which was a Sunday. It turns out that my father was ALSO planning a surprise anniversary party at the church, for my mother. Once we were apprised of that fact, we gave up trying to surprise them both and concentrated on her.

So my sister flew in from San Diego, and my parents-in-law, my wife and I drove down from upstate New York, staying at a local hotel. My father did most of the decorations of the room at the church. my father needed to rest more often than he did just months before when he was primarily in charge of decorating the church for Carol’s and my wedding in May of 1999.

The family did meet before that Sunday morning; I suspect my mother figured something was up even before that. But we managed to keep her away from the decorated room.


During the service itself, much to my surprise, and definitely to my mother’s, there was a renewal of my parents’ wedding vows. (Whether my father knew, I was never able to ascertain.) I’m positive that when the pastor brought her up and ask her whether she’d marry him all over again, she did think about it for a few seconds before saying, “Yes.” Undoubtedly, what ran through her mind is a quote she attributed to my father, which I heard him say once or twice, but which she repeated regularly: “I may be a headache, but never a bore.”

After the church service, we had a lovely party, and we kids DID manage to surprise both of them with a video of some still photos, put together with music. Interestingly, we never got a family photo taken, as we had in 1995 and in 1990, maybe because the process was too fraught with drama – a tale for another time. In any case, that was my parents’ last anniversary together – until now, if you believe in an afterlife – because my father died on August 10 of that year from prostate cancer.

This is what their joint headstone reads:
Leslie Harold Green
9-26-1926 8-10-2000
(Military Info…)
Les
Renaissance Man

Gertrude Elizabeth Green
11-17-1927 2-2-2011
Trudy
Wind Beneath Our Wings

Frances Beal: Voices of Feminism Oral History Project

When my cousin Gertie — Trudie, they call her now — started to date the man who eventually became her husband – my father, Les Green –, he was deemed too dark for the family.

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 the retelling of her history, which invariably overlaps with mine.

Here’s a picture of Frances Beal.

The info in the italics is mine.

Frances Beal was born in Binghamton, NY, on January 13, 1940, the daughter of Ernest Yates [ my maternal grandmother’s brother- ] who was of African American and Native American ancestry, and Charlotte Berman Yates, of radical Russian Jewish immigrant roots. When Fran’s father died in 1954, her mother moved the family to St. Albans, an integrated neighborhood in Queens. In addition to observing her mother’s participation in left politics, Fran was profoundly affected by the murder of Emmett Till, as was I. After graduating from Andrew Jackson High School in 1958, she became involved in civil rights activities and socialist politics while attending the University of Wisconsin.

She married James Beal, and from 1959 to 1966, they lived in France, where they had two children and Fran became attuned to the internationalist/anti-imperialist politics of post-colonial African liberation struggles…

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…
ROSS: And your mother’s name was?
BEAL: Charlotte Berman. And she had eight brothers and sisters, and she was like the third oldest of the eight brothers and sisters. And then they went to Binghamton and —

So that’s how my parents met, actually, because my mother was working in the office of Berman’s Motor Express, the family business. My father was working for Canny’s – two blocks from the house I grew up in – … And they actually did a lot of shipping between Binghamton and New York City, whereas Berman’s used to be between Boston and Binghamton…

Well, they got married and then presented the family with the facts. And I think that happened basically because they knew. Now my father was 12 years older than my mom, so when my older brother was born, she was 24 and I think he was 36… And my brother Raymond, now deceased, was one of those seven-month babies, right? (laughs)…it was early in 1937. That’s when they got married. And then my brother, as I said, my brother was born in November 1937. And then I came along in January of 1940. And I had two other brothers, approximately three years apart: Donald, who was born in 1943; and my brother Robert, who’s just six years younger than I am, was born in 1946.

And on my father’s side, they were extremely poor, my father’s side of the family. On my dad’s side of the family there was Gertrude Yates [Williams] – my maternal grandmother, who died in 1983, she was the oldest. Then came Edward Yates, my Uncle Ed who died c 1970. Then came my father, Ernest Yates, and then Deana Yates, my father’s younger sister who died c 1965, one of the first people I knew to die.

And they lived — there again is an interesting story. My grandmother’s mother was part Indian, and when the white persons came to the Susquehanna Valley — that’s where the Susquehanna River and the Chenango River come together…cities grow up on rivers, and the Indians knew that, too, because that’s what they used as their mode of transportation. So the whites essentially pushed the native population out up into the hills. And they gave like a plot of land to the Indians, right? Now what’s interesting culturally here is that the Mohawk, or Iroquois Indian Confederacy, was matrilineal, so that meant that property and family was passed through the woman, the female, and not through the man. And that was a very, very powerful cultural tradition, that even though the whites, when they gave out the property, they gave it to my grandmother’s brother because he was the male. He turned around and gave it to Lillian, my grandmother – [my great-grandmother]- because that’s how you do things, in terms of being an Indian.

And that thing was so powerful, that that’s exactly what happened all down through when we sold the property. When my grandmother died, she died intestate, meaning no will. Therefore, all four of her children and these — there were about 16 people, really, that could have some say in this lot with a house, really more like a cabin, on it. And so they all got together. They decided they should give all of this property to Gert my grandmother, so again, [in] the second generation, it’s going to a female. And then my cousin Gertie – my mother –, who’s the oldest female, she gets the property. And when she gives it up — even though she has a son and two daughters, her son [me] is the oldest and two daughters — she turns that property over to my female cousin, Leslie Ellen Green, my sister. So I just thought that it’s a very powerful holding on to certain customs of how you do things…

A more funny story is that we used to go up and stay with my Aunt Gert on the hill, and down the street, there was another family and they [had] about four kids. And my Aunt always said to us, “You should not play with them because they are bad people and their mother is immoral.” Turns out — we didn’t know anything else like this, but when my Aunt Deana died, one of those kids came to the funeral and was talking to my mother. It turns out these are cousins of ours, that our Uncle Frederick had all these children with this Indian woman, but they never got married. So they were considered, you know…shameful. This characterization of my grandmother is absolutely accurate.

Now I have to say, my family on my father’s side was very much impacted by the racial notion of the time, so they liked it that my father married my mother because she was white. That was, you know, really acceptable. When my cousin Gertie — Trudy, they call her now — started to date the man who eventually became her husband, my father, Les Green, he was deemed too dark for the family. And I think my father and my Uncle Ed had to intervene and say, Listen, I’m not going to be able to ever speak to you again unless you stop this nonsense. But then the two of them, also — my Uncle Ed didn’t marry a white woman, but a woman who was very light-skinned, and she had quote “good hair,” you know, flowing hair. And so there was a lot of racial confusion in that family, from which, you know, my dad came.

But just to give you an idea of how this racial thing also worked, there’s many women who — I mean, I had gotten married and I had a couple kids, and like many, I didn’t know what I could do with the kids in the summertime. So I had my Aunt Gert take them for three weeks to, you know, partly look after the kids. And this was during the ’60s, right? And I was already heavily into an Afro and not putting a curling iron [in my hair]. And my kids had never even seen one. So I was at work and they were staying with their Aunt Gert, and I get this frantic phone call from my Aunt Gert, “Please, you have to speak to your elder daughter. She’s out in the street and she says she’s going to run away and she’s going to New York City, and I can’t get her to come back.”

So I had my Aunt Gert go into the back of the cabin, you know, the other room that was like a two-down, two-up cabin, type of thing. [I went to my grandmother’s house every day after school from kindergarten through 9th grade, and even lived there for a few months in 1975]. She came in and she started crying. The girls were five and four. They had never seen a curling iron in their life. And in this house, the heat, there was this big, big cast-iron stove that covered one whole length of the kitchen. And in it you had the wood-burning and coal-burning stove. So Gert had started the fire and put [in] these coal-burning things, and flames are leaping up when she takes the burner off. She sticks the comb in there. The elder one’s watching all of this, getting more horrified by the minute. And so then she takes it out, wipes it on the dish towel, right? And she says, “Come here.” “What are you going to do with that?” She said, “I’m going to straighten your hair. You look like the wild woman from Borneo.” And I was laughing, because that’s what my same Aunt Gert used to call me when my hair would get it: “You look like the wild woman from Borneo.” (laughs). The elder girl grabs her sister’s hand, runs out to the sidewalk, and bursts into tears. And she told me later, “I didn’t know which way to go!” (laughs). So this is, you know, three hundred miles [away], so of course, I’m in New York City, I have to jump into my car, drive madly three and a half hours up to Binghamton to kind of try to save the situation. [Our house was four or five blocks from my grandmother’s, so I heard this story at the time.].

My father died of cancer [when I was one year old], and then finally six months later we moved to New York City, into Queens. But it was into a house because my mother thought that with us kids coming from a town where there were big back yards and big houses — and you know, when we would get too noisy she would just put us in the back yard to run around — that we would be too much to move into an apartment. She just could not imagine living in an apartment. So we moved into St. Albans, a three-bedroom house and then she re-did the upstairs for me, so that I could have a bedroom up there… [We would visit that house several times a year when I was growing up; it seemed enormous at the time.]

Jimmy Beal! James Beal. And he’s the father of my children… And I think part of moving back to the United States after staying [in France] six years, was to set the basis for us to dissolve the marriage — which happened within months of us returning home, literally. Fran’s kids and their cousins were, despite the distance between New York City and Binghamton, and a nearly a decade in age between her kids and my parents’ kids, our closest relatives. Jimmy Beal died in October 2010.

There’s lots of other interesting stuff in there – it’s 50+ pages long – about people she had met in her journey, but I wanted to specifically excerpt what I did because it involved people I know or knew.

The Crocodile Song

I do not know the origins of The Crocodile Song, don’t know who wrote it or when, never heard anyone else sing it.

My father would have been 84 tomorrow. There’s a guy, Ray, who was my friend from second to ninth grade. He went to a different high school and moved to the Finger Lakes region of New York State. However, I was in his wedding in October 1976, and I got to escort his mother, who was the Den mother of our Cub Scout troop, down the aisle.

He’s now my Facebook friend. About a month ago, unbidden, he started sending these messages, a verse at a time:

“Sung by: Les Green
To the kids of the ‘50s and ‘60s at Daniel S. Dickinson, PS #9 School, Binghamton, NY

“The Crocodile Song”
First verse
Come gather around me children to tell the truth I’m bound
Here’s a story when I went to sea and the wonders that I found
Ship wrecked was I one lonely day and cast upon the shore
Now I decided to wonder way the country to explore, explore the country to explore
So I sang, toddle oddle oddle oddle oo I ey, toddle oddle oddle oddle oo I ey
Now, I decided to wonder way the country to explore

Second verse
Well, I had not long walked when there beside the ocean
I saw something move, like all the world in motion
Now I creep up beside the thing, it was a great big crocodile
From the end of his nose to the tip of his tail was about 500 miles, yes about 500 miles
So I sang, toddle oddle oddle oddle oo I ey, toddle oddle oddle oddle oo I ey
From the end of his nose to the tip of his tail was about 500 miles

Third verse
Now I could plainly see this was none of the common race
For I had to climb a tall tall tree before I could see his face
The wind was blowing so hard up there, it blow with a gale form the south
and I lost my grip on the big tall tree and fell smack dab in the crocodile’s mouth, yes smack dab in the crocodile’s mouth
So I sang, toddle oddle oddle oddle oo I ey, toddle oddle oddle oddle oo I ey
I lost my grip on the big tall tree and fell smack dab in the crocodile’s mouth

Fourth verse
Now I could see this crocodile was going to nab a victim….. me !
so I ran down his throat you see, and that’s the way I tricked him. see?
Now I wandered around for a year or two, until I reached his craw (that’s his stomach)
There was a rum case, not a few, and a thousand pullets (little chickens) in store in store, a thousand pullets in store
So I sang, toddle oddle oddle oddle oo I ey, toddle oddle oddle oddle oo I ey
There was a rum case, not a few, and a thousand pullets in store”

Final verse
Now the crocodile grew very very old and at a great long last, he died
It took him about six months to catch a cold he was so long and wide
His skin was about 10 miles thick, I think, or some where there about
For I was fully six months digging my way out, yes digging my way out
So I sang, toddle oddle oddle oddle oo I ey…, toddle oddle oddle oddle oo I ey
For I was fully six months digging my way out
and I got out just in time to come here and sing this song for you!

Ray wrote, “I think we all can remember every word of every song he sang.” Yes, twice a year, from when I was in kindergarten to fifth or sixth grade, my father came to our elementary school and sang songs to my class. Did the same for my sisters, the elder one for sure, since he often sang to each class on the same day. It was always slightly embarrassing when he sang Irene Goodnight, since there was a girl named Irene in the class, and the scuttlebutt was that I put him up to singing the song because I had a crush on her, which I did not.

I do not know the origins of The Crocodile Song, don’t know who wrote it or when, never heard anyone else sing it. There’s another Crocodile Song on the Internet, but it ain’t this one!

I know I sang at my baby sister’s class – specifically remember The Old Lady and the Fly – when she was in kindergarten and I was in 6th grade. Leslie and I also sang at our niece Alex’s class several years ago, part of the Les Green tradition.

J is for Just large enough, and Jupiter

My father painted, right on the ceiling in my room, the solar system!


When we were growing up, we lived on the first floor of a small two-story house, which was owned by my maternal grandmother; my paternal grandparents lived upstairs. On our floor was the master bedroom and kitchen in the back; the parlor, bathroom, and another bedroom in the middle; and the living room in the front.

I had two younger sisters, so they eventually slept in bunk beds in the second bedroom. To make a room for me, my father built a wall in the parlor that ran from the kitchen entrance about 2/3 of the way into the room, then another wall at a 90-degree angle from the first, leaving about an entrance to my room the size of a standard door, though I did not actually HAVE a door. Then he built a solid piece of wood – think one large shelf – held up by the two new walls and the existing wall to serve as the frame for my “bed”. On top of that was actually a foam mattress.

I did have room for my stuff under the bed, including a very low dresser. Around the corner was my bookcase, filled with my Golden Book Encyclopedias, my World Almanac, and other books.

In one of those books was a description of the solar system, and it gave relative sizes of the sun and the planets. The sun was a beach ball, Jupiter was a grapefruit; I forget the rest. So my father painted, right on the ceiling in my room, the solar system! This huge sun, and the various planets, including their known moons at the time. I specifically remember that according to the book: Jupiter had 12, Saturn 9, Neptune 5, Uranus and Mars 2 apiece, Earth and Pluto, 1 each.

And since the walls my father built didn’t go to the ceiling – there was a single ceiling light that illuminated the parlor, now essentially a hallway, and my room – anyone coming to visit us who came into the kitchen or bathroom was likely to see at least this massive star on the ceiling.

Incidentally, my father painted on the walls a lot. In my sisters’ room, there was a very good Tinker Bell and the head of Felix the Cat. In the living room, on one wall, was a stark snowy mountain scene. On the other was a marketplace in Europe done in the style, as I think back on it, of Monet.


Oh, yeah, Jupiter, named after the Roman god. It now has over 50 satellites; some may actually be asteroids, pulled in by the planet’s massive gravitational force. It appears that Jupiter has lost a stripe fairly recently, having something to do with dissipating gases. From a NASA Voyager recording, you can actually hear Jupiter. The planet 11 times the size of Earth was, on September 20, 2010, only 368 million miles away, as close as it will get for 12 years.

Finally,

Jupiter’s Two Largest Storms Nearly Collide, storms larger than the diameter of the planet Earth (Credit & Copyright: Travis Rector (U. Alaska), Chad Trujillo (Caltech), et al., Gemini Obs., AURA, NSF)

ABC Wednesday – Round 7

G is for Green Wedding

My father and sister sang at our wedding reception. I think I did too.


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.

So when they wanted a picture of my side of the family, you might wonder: who ARE all of these people? Most of these are direct descendants of my late great aunt Charlotte, the little woman in the front right of this photo above.

My mother’s mother Gert had three siblings that reached adulthood, but only one, Ernest, who married Charlotte, had children while my mother was growing up. So even though they were a decade or more younger than my mother, my mother’s first cousins by Ernest, who died back in the 1950s, and Charlotte, were the closest child relatives she had. And even though they lived in Queens, New York City, Charlotte’s grandkids were the closest child relatives my sisters and I had, besides each other, likewise 10 years or more younger than we were. Charlotte, BTW, was the sister-in-law of Professor Irwin Corey.

So the folks in the photo are one of Charlotte’s sons (and spouse) near the center of the photo, two of her granddaughters (plus a spouse), and a couple of her great-grandkids, along with the folks in the first picture. Whereas the picture on my wife’s side was a virtual mob scene by comparison.

This is the Yates side of the family that showed up at my niece Rebecca’s wedding to Rico in 2005. There was some difficulty between the bride’s mother and the groom’s mother, who wondered why the first cousin of the bride’s grandmother should be indicated in the program. As I described here, ultimately the extended family was listed, though the bride’s uncle, i.e., I, was inadvertently left off.


Oh, at Carol’s and my reception, my father and sister sang. I think I sang one song with them, Rebecca probably performed a number or two, and even niece Alex sang Yellow Submarine with her young cousins. Leslie also sang at the wedding.

I’ve been thinking a lot about weddings because my daughter is going to be in her first one this coming month, the Pakistani event of her babysitter, which will be an elaborate affair. More on that after the fact. If you’re also planning to tie the know with your soulmate soon, you’re probably already trying to find those tungsten wedding rings for him.

The website of niece Rebecca’s band, Siren’s Crush.

ABC Wednesday – Round 7

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