In a book of old family photographs one picture is particularly distinctive. Unlike its deckle edged counterparts, this one doesn't feature people grouped near running boarded cars, fan wielding rocking chair sitters, or deployments in and around the local baptismal creek. Obviously posed by a professional, it shows a jug eared fifteen year old in basketball uniform wearing kneepads (KNEEPADS!) with the handles of a silver trophy stuck in his mitts. The bauble represents basketball mastery over 7 counties and was awarded to microscopic Ridgeway High in 1937. The youth was mother's youngest brother Emory.
As with lots of the era's males, my uncle's enthusiasm was severely tested in World War 2; it left just about the time he received a purple heart and his corporal stripe on Guadalcanal and didn't return till years later. After V-E day he attended The Citadel on G I bill, but Emory's nerves were too shot to be successful. Returning home, by necessity, experience, work, and will he pushed into Northwestern Mutual's sales force's top 5 percent, married a beautiful woman and 3 children followed.
Emory was of that pillar-of-the-community type about which little is newsworthy. Dozens exist in your home town. The quintessential good providing churchgoer and loving husband, he was a huge booster of Martinsville High athletics, 4 time Chatmoss Country Club golf champion, and by nature taciturn in the extreme.
In our attempts at small talk, my uncle mainly delivered quick questions (stiff conversational jabs released with boxer's pugnacity), and dour comments about my hair length. Our mostly non-interaction was largely a non-thought; it was dismissed as being just his way. Yet, after cancer picked him clean twenty five years ago, mom informed me his last word to her was my name croaked over and over. Evidently he went to his grave carrying unsettled issues between us, and because I didn't know their seriousness I couldn't resolve them.
If anything's worth saying, it's worth saying now- not tommorrow or next month. Praises and pans and prose and poetry are for the living. To the unconvinced, here's exhibit A:
"January 17th, 1943 - Private Emody Wilson, stationed at barme base, San Diego, Calif., arrived Sunday for a week's visit with his parents, Mr. and Mrs. Early Wilson, on the Ridgeway road."
When that 60 year old blurb was reprinted four months ago it inspired this piece. I may have been the only reader to notice his misspelled name.
Dan Taylor
