Tag: my mom

Down Memory Lane – the Zionites

Trinity A.M.E. Zion church, 1956

A good friend of mine from my hometown of Binghamton, NY, Cee, wrote that on Friday, May 22, they “attended a wonderful presentation by Brenda Cave James on local Black churches, Susquehanna Street prior to urban renewal, and more.

“One of her display boards caught my eye…” A display showed two different musical revues by the folks at Trinity A.M.E. Zion church in 1948 and 1956. The latter event, with the performers dubbed the Zionites, is of particular interest to me.
Before that, a little history from WBMG-TV (2024). According to  Broome County Historian Roger Luther, “AME Bethel closed its doors around 1930, and the congregation merged with AME Zion Church, formerly located where Columbus Park now stands.” I was baptized in the AME Zion church at that previous location. “In 1957, AME Zion was moved to its present-day location at the corner of Oak and Lydia streets.”
Musical triptych
There were three segments of the 1956 program, Down Memory Lane, which was directed by two women I knew from church: Beccye Fawcett, who was my boss when I worked at the Binghamton Public Library for several months in the late 1960s, and Dorothy Owens, a stalwart in the choir.
Part 1 represented the Gay Nineties. For one song, the Floradora Girls danced. Among the women: Geneivive Taylor, another librarian, and Gertrude Green, my mother! A couple of songs were performed by Luvenia McElroy, my sister Leslie’s godmother. Mack Green, presumably my grandfather McKinley Green, performed a Buck and Wing Dance.
The Roaring Twenties included Leslie Green (misspelled as Lesli) performing “Sonny Boy” with his son. Wait, what?  I would have been three at the time. For the Rocking Fifties segment, my dad performed folk songs.
The December 3, 1948, performance at Binghamton Central High School also featured my mother, who was then Gertrude Williams, and my father. It was directed by Beccye Fawcett. The repertoire was limited to the Gay Nineties. 
I believe Brenda Cave James is the daughter of the late Allen Cave, who was the vice-principal of Binghamton Central High School.

Encyclopedia Americana

married 76 years ago today

Les and TrudyIn musing about how I (eventually) became a librarian, I thought about how my parents bought us the Encyclopedia Americana when I was nine. Or twelve or at some time in between; I don’t quite remember.

I am pretty sure the purchase resulted from a door-to-door salesman visiting our home. While our parents didn’t get into the details of the household economy, my sisters and I knew that we weren’t particularly flush with cash.

My mother was a bookkeeper for McLean’s department store in downtown Binghamton, NY.  She was well-suited to the job, as I also saw in her home budgeting.

My father was probably working nights at IBM in nearby Endicott, driving a forklift, a job he hated because it was not intellectually stimulating. He had done and was still doing other jobs, notably floral arranging, sign painting, and a bit of singing, but they were not lucrative enough to support a family of five.

So the purchase of the Americana was a big deal. I’ve read the set costs somewhere between $200 and $300, depending on the binding. That would be around $2000 in 2026 dollars.

It was pitched as an educational investment for the family. But everyone knew who was most likely to read it was the kid who memorized stats from the backs of his baseball cards.

Aardwolf?

Sure enough, I read the entire set, starting with Aachen, followed by aardvark, aardwolf… I didn’t know what that was, but it isn’t an aardvark or a wolf.  It took me more than a year to finish. But I sped up the process when they purchased an annual update to the standard set, to reflect the changes, usually political.

One of my sisters commented that my father was certainly the one who used the Encyclopedia Americana more than anyone else, besides me. I was told that he wasn’t much of a student as a kid, but his innate curiosity as an adult required him to always be learning. 

Along with the World Almanac, which I received for Christmas every year, my parents boosted my geek cred. 

Les Green and Gertude (Trudy) Williams got married on March 12, 1950, and stayed together until my father died on August 10, 2000; my mom died on February 2, 2011. 

Keeping score in bowling

cognitive prosthesis

I wrote about my mother four years ago on the broad topic, but this will focus on keeping score in bowling. My sisters remember that she was in a league for at least a decade while in Binghamton, NY, and for about five years in Charlotte, NC. Recently, I learned from one of my sisters that my mother got her bank job in Charlotte because she had been the captain of her bowling team, which showed that she displayed leadership qualities! I did not know that!

In Binghamton, she bowled with her good friend Pat Fink, later Jones. But my sisters say she was also on a team with Pat Whitfield Jones, a woman from our church who was a daughter of my godparents; my parents were her son Walter’s godparents.

I don’t specifically remember where my mom and her friends bowled. But I’m sure I went to some of her league games with her.

Keeping score

Moreover, as noted, I learned to keep score in bowling from my mother and/or her friends. But with the current lanes, scoring is automatic. I was mildly saddened when I first experienced this “new” thing.

Here’s a real sidebar, where  Cory Doctorow alluded to a phenomenon: “I used to walk around with a hundred phone numbers in my head. Now I remember two, maybe three on a good day. Which is fine!…

“Whenever we adopt a cognitive prosthesis, there’s always someone who overweights the value of the old system of unassisted thinking, while ignoring the cool things we can do with the free capacity we get… 

“Versions of this continue to play out. When I was a kid, there was a moral panic that pocket calculators would make us all innumerate (an argument advanced by people who know so little about mathematics that they think it’s the same thing as arithmetic).

“Now I keep hearing about millennials who can’t read an analog clock, a skill that has as much objective utility as knowing how to interpret a slide-rule or convert from Francs to Lire to Deutschemarks. Not actually useless, but entirely bound to a specific time and place and a mere historical curiosity at some later date.” [I’m not sure I agree with the analog clock analogy, but whatever.] 

Yet I still can keep scoring in bowling, which has value to me. I love that my mother taught me something of what is now of limited applicability precisely because it links us not only to the task but also to a specific timeframe. My childhood memory is remarkably spotty, so I embrace whatever connection exists. 

Family

My father and my sisters would occasionally bowl, but my sisters said they weren’t very good at it. This was before bowling establishments installed barriers to prevent people from throwing gutter balls. I was pretty competent in my few years in a league. I assume the years of my mother’s play made her a decent bowler. 

So this was Roger and his mom again, which is cool. Gertrude Elizabeth (Trudy) Green, nee Williams, died on this date in 2011.

My mom’s bells

Jean Nate

I was talking to my sisters recently about my mom’s bells, our mom’s porcelain bells. She used to collect these souvenir items, which were easy to come by. It was great because when traveling for the SBDC in the 1990s, I would get one from Nashville, New Orleans, Orlando, or wherever the ASBDC annual meeting took place.

My sisters gave me some context of the whole thing. My father returned from a trip somewhere and brought her a bell. Knowing her, she would have said, “Oh, that’s very nice.” So he would get her another bell and another. Suddenly, she had a collection of them. 

This went on for several years until one day, I heard that she didn’t want those “dust collectors” anymore, and I thought, “Oh, what a bummer.”

The more accurate story was that she was dusting them. The bells resided on this semi-wall between the dining room and the living room of their house in Charlotte, NC. She got up on a step ladder or a stoop, fell, and hurt herself. That was the end of her collecting the bells. I did not know the why of the story until recently.

It makes me wonder if she ever really wanted that collection of bells or if she saw that it gave my father, me, and maybe others joy at getting her something that she didn’t have. It saddened me to think that perhaps she never really wanted the bells. Once she experienced physical pain as a direct result of having them, that was that.

Toilet Water

When I was growing up, the go-to present for our mom was JEAN NATÉ. “The perfume was first launched back in 1935 for the Jean Nate Company, which was later bought by Revlon. This timeless classic possesses citrus, floral, and spicy notes, such as lavender, jasmine, rose, carnation, lily of the valley, cedar, tonka bean, musk, and sandalwood.” But it’s described here as Eau de Toilette.

It was often a bust when I tried to go off script in gift giving. In 1981, I bought her an LP, Joe Jackson’s Jumpin’ Jive, based on my understanding that she liked some of the original Louis Jordan and Cab Calloway songs. She was a tactful woman, but it was pretty evident that she did not particularly enjoy my selection. I went back to the bells.

My mom, Gertrude Elizabeth (Trudy) Green, nee Williams,  would have been 98 today.

This picture is 75 years old

March 12, 1950

This picture is 75 years old.

I looked through all of the pictures of my parents, Les and Gertrude (Trudy), on their wedding anniversary, March 12th, that I have posted on this blog. Interestingly, from 2005, when I started the blog, to 2011, the year my mom died, I didn’t post any. Since my dad had died in 2000, I didn’t even think to mention their anniversary.

After she died, though, I felt liberated to write whatever about them. And it also recontextualized how I saw them as a couple. My sisters and I often have ZOOM conversations on Sunday afternoons, which started during COVID, and early on, a lot of conversations were about their dynamics individually and as a couple.

Still, I often used a group photo, as I did here on March 12. It’s probably because I think it’s a hoot; it looks like a bunch of wary relatives.

Changing it up

But to my knowledge, I’ve never used this photo. My sister Marcia, the keeper of the pictures, posted it on Facebook eight years ago, and then sister Leslie reposted it recently. I have no idea who took it. If I were a betting man, it would probably be one of my maternal grandmother Williams’ brothers, Ed or Ernie Yates.

This picture is in the First Ward of Binghamton, NY, near 13 Maple Street, on March 12, 1950. I was always grateful that they decided to get married in a year ending with a zero; it made the math much more straightforward. So I can remember the family drama on March 12, 1995, for instance, a story for another time.

My father looks happy in this photo. But my mother is more contemplative, wondering what she’s gotten herself into, which is a reasonable concern. Or maybe she’s just looking at someone, maybe a younger cousin. I use the terms “mother” and “father” loosely because I wasn’t born until five days shy of three years later.

My parents were married 50 years and two days shy of five months.

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