Somewhere we have a penciled thank-you note from John W. Davis, who is about as famous as whichever team finished third in the NL pennant race in 1939. (It was the Dodgers, 12 1/2 games out.) Davis was the Democratic nominee for President in 1924, and he did far worse than the 1939 Dodgers.

He was trounced by the less-than-effervescent Calvin Coolidge. Coolidge’s workdays at the White House were at most seven hours, punctuated by summer naps on the portico. Sadly, these had to be suspended when Coolidge began collecting dense crowds, silent tourists, watching gravely and debating among themselves in urgent whispers over whether the president had passed. After all, Harding had pulled that trick.

To be fair, the White House staff frequently had the same problem when the president was conscious.

Meanwhile, John W. Davis would go on to a distinguished career, arguing 150 cases before the Supreme Court. Today, Davis is noted mostly for being on the wrong side of every one of them. If it was racist, reactionary, or repressive, he defended it passionately, with the conviction and confidence of one who knows that God Almighty is his co-counsel. The crowning of his legal career—thank the aforementioned Lord–came when he lost Brown v. Board before the Warren Court. (Earl Warren, who turned out to be the biggest booby prize Ike had gotten since Field Marshal Montgomery, was the former Republican Governor of California, which goes to show how much times have changed–and Davis demonstrates the same for Democrats.)

But the Democrats could’ve run Sacco and Vanzetti (has a nice ring, doesn’t it, for a law partnership?) in 1924, and I think Grandma Gregory–the woman, hard to knock down in a windstorm, next my Grandpa John in the photo below–would’ve worked her heart out for them as long as they were Democrats. She got to the convention as a delegate that year–103 ballots in a sweltering New York City summer, the delegates trapped in a battle to the death inside Madison Square Garden–and this was only four years after women had gotten the vote. She would later become the Texas County, Missouri, Party Chairwoman and a powerful figure in downstate Missouri politics.

She is undoubtedly why, when I actually watched a national political convention for the first time, when I was 12–-and when they actually meant something– I was entranced. Barry Goldwater would eventually beat my guy, William Scranton, for the 1964 Republican nomination. Probably our favorite film, in my high school years, was The Graduate. I enjoyed the following year’s Democratic convention just as much, for the Democrats in 1968 had the same intense focus and sense of direction that Dustin Hoffman’s Benjamin had shown in the movie. None.

In Depression-era Missouri, before every election, my Dad remembered, a new car would pull up outside my Grandfather’s farmhouse and two men in three-piece suits (usually reserved for funerals, and even then for the Deceased) would deposit a bank-bag full of cash on Dora Gregory’s kitchen table. For them, it was but one more stop on a kind of purgatory circuit. That part of the state was thinly populated, so you had have a real passion for soybeans to make the drive enjoyable.

They were bagmen for the Kansas City Pendergast Machine, one of those old-timey operations that brought dead voters back to life, among other shenanigans.

Pendergast’s Kansas City was a kind of cultural hub for the Depression-era Midwest.  Louis Armstrong played here, for example, and a new variant of Barbecue found a home here, too.

Meanwhile, in Texas County in the 1930s,  the Civil War had not quite ended. When my father was 12 or 13, there was a Confederate veteran still alive in in Houston, the county seat. There also was one Union veteran in the same town. The two had not spoken since 1865.

FDR’s first term was past its midpoint when, on July 4, 1935, the county band was playing  the National Anthem. A frayed cartridge belt in the old Confederate’s mind finally snapped: he leaped on the old Yankee, and the two rolled around on the courthouse lawn, knocking over potato salads and tubs of sweet tea in their personal Antietam. When six young man finally pried the two apart, the old Confederate triumphantly held up the Yankee’s ear, which he’d removed with a Barlow knife.

Most of the people of Texas County were considerably calmer and much kinder, especially if you happened to be a horse, about which, like my Mom’s ancestors from County Wicklow, they were passionate.

Tom Pendergast had Texas County in the bag, because, come Election Day, my pre-teen Dad handed out fives to waiting voters, murmuring, “The Democratic Party thanks you,” over and over, like a priest at Eucharist, so the Democrats never lost Texas County. The bank bag on Grandma’s kitchen table assured that.

To be fair to the Machine, it distributed food, not just bribes, and people in the hills were hungry in the depths of the Depression. A young Dad also helped distribute food to the needy. Grapefruit stymied them. “We boiled it, Bob,” they told him apologetically, “an’ then we fried it, but it still tasted putrid.” (Dad, a supply officer in 1944 London, also gifted an English family he knew with a bag of oranges. They virtually adopted him: the British had not seen oranges since the fall of France in 1940. Citrus fruit seems to follow the course of my father’s life.)

Boss Pendergast also made the career of Harry Truman possible, which, in turn made me possible: Truman favored my grandfather’s blackberry wine on campaign swings downstate–he’d stop for a sip or seven– and that little talent of Grandpa Gregory’s paid off in World War II: Truman got Dad appointed to Officers’ Candidate School as a Quartermaster, and so he served much of the war defending London’s pubs from the Nazi Hordes, which saved me the inconvenience of having him get killed before I had the chance to be born.

After, the war, my Mom was an Eisenhower Republican, so my parents had lively political discussions. One of them doomed dessert, because the colander of fresh strawberries, washed for strawberry shortcake, wound up on my father’s head, upside-down. JFK’s nomination brought political harmony to the marriage: Dad voted for him because he was a Democrat; Mom because he was Irish Catholic.

I wish I could say I loved my Grandmother Gregory, but she was a steel-spined schoolmarm who didn’t tolerate foolishness, by which she meant Consciousness, and she used to whack us absently with her cane. We stole her eyeglasses in revenge. And, sadly, by the time I knew her, she was edging into dementia, and though she couldn’t locate her dentures, or her eyeglasses, she could remember, in vivid detail–you could almost smell charred flesh and sick-room alcohol–how every person in southern Missouri had died between the War Between the States and the 1939 Dodgers.

It didn’t take a lot to prompt a Grandma Gregory Death Story, and, looking back from the fullness of years, I now realize that some of them were humdingers.

My favorite was the neighbor who suddenly disappeared. The family and the authorities and happy coonhounds–they like to be kept busy, or they get saucy– looked for several days, to no avail. When one of the kids finally did find him, he was at the bottom of the family’s well, where he’d plummeted after a massive coronary, which makes you wonder if they ever thought of lemonade the same way again.

Grandma liked that one, too.

Oddly, these stories were poignant because they showed she was already living in the past; her connections to modernity would grow more and more fragile. But, as  a younger woman, she was shrewd, forceful, and I think had the same instinct, in a political sense, that leads orcas to crippled seals. I would not mess with that woman. And for that, and for her steel, I admire her and I am immensely proud to be her grandson. 

    My grandfather, John Smith Gregory, was born in Shelby County, Kentucky, in 1862. He was a father of eight, a farmer in south-central Missouri, a lumber estimator, outdoorsman, and a sipper of life, in that life included lovingly fermented batches of blackberry wine. Harry Truman was a fan of that wine. On campaign swings downstate, he made it a point to pay court to my grandmother, a local Democratic powerbroker with money ties to Truman’s patrons, the Kansas City Pendergast Machine, but after those formalities, the heart of the Senator’s visit would be a sip or four of John’s blackberry wine.

That wine may have made me possible. When my father–who was a kind of miraculous afterthought, the last of eight children, born in the vigor of my grandfather’s fifty-sixth year–went into the Army in World War II, he stood as good a chance as any other country boy of being vaporized by a German 88 shell somewhere in the dark canopy of the Ardennes. Instead he spent the War, as a Quartermaster officer, in a series of frontal assaults on London’s pubs, or, as he did one evening, bellowing seditious rebel songs– after splitting a bottle of Johnnie Walker Scotch with an Irish elevator operator he’d befriended–and this was thanks to Sen. Truman’s endorsement of his candidacy to Officers’ Candidate School at Camp Lee, Virginia.

(By the way, London Bobbies tried to arrest Dad and the elevator operator, who knew ALL the verses to “Wearin’ of the Green,” but he was a good elevator operator. Up to the fifth floor. Down to the third. Up to the fourth floor. Up to the sixth. Down to the second. After sprinting up the hotel staircase and clumping down it, the exhausted Bobbies gave up.)

This is the song they were singing, as performed, logically, by the Orthodox Celts. They’re from Serbia.

Wearin’ of the Green

Since my family’s forebears were Virginians, teaching dance had been central to the way they socialized their children. My family must have raised their children that way from the days they’d emigrated, in the 1690s, from the dismal Midlands of England to the banks of the James River, so Grandfather’s most formidable talent may have been his dancing. (On the other hand, the Gregorys had no gift for real estate. They sold Mount Vernon to the Washingtons.)

So his Virginia roots meant that John Gregory had become, by reputation, a kind of Ozarkian Astaire and every girl who had the chance to be his Ginger Rogers would have a moment on the dance floor with him where she would realize, with a sudden pang of delight, that she was gliding, as if the sawdust-strewn floor had become polished glass.

My grandmother was not amused by the line of pretty teenagers who shyly sought a place on Mr. Gregory’s dance card. She suspected, too, and I’ll bet she was right, that those girls liked also his twinkly eyes and the soft smile beneath his silky white mustaches. My Grandmother was not given to smiling. She had a temper and, with it, a strong and wide body: she was a hard woman to knock down in a windstorm.

Years later, on her visits to us in Arroyo Grande–visits we regarded with as much enthusiasm as an Irish monastery might muster for a Viking raid–she’d absently whack us with her cane, and she had a forehand that would’ve shamed Rafael Nadal. She had been a schoolmarm and we think it was PTSD, and where veterans might see phantom Vietcong, Grandma saw farm boys eighteen hands high spitting streams of tobacco juice at recess. Something snapped inside her then and set her to whacking the nearest target of opportunity.

We hid her glasses, or, if that particular whack had an extra sting, her dentures, in revenge, but gave them back because she otherwise tended to describe, in graphic clinical detail, how every person in Texas County, Missouri had died between the end of the War Between the States and the Eisenhower Administration. Her grandfather, by the way, had been a Confederate brigadier general of modest accomplishment and minimal talent–I was named for him, and for his son, a staff officer killed in action, thanks to a lucky but devastating Yankee artillery shot, in Arkansas–so that branch of the family saw themselves as gentry. They were insufferable. Despite that, John Gregory indulged my grandmother; he was a tolerant man.

He had a genius for math. My Dad inherited this gift; he became a gifted accountant and, for almost twenty years, the comptroller for Madonna Construction. I, as my geometry teacher at Arroyo Grande High School, Mrs. Otsuji, noted ruefully, had no talent in that direction, nor in any plane. But lumber companies sought out Grandfather because he could eye a stand of pine and calculate, with eerie precision, how many board-feet it would yield.

He was a competent but unorthodox farmer: in the Ozark foothills any money there was to be made–and there wasn’t much–was to be made in tobacco and corn and hogs. John accepted that reality but his real passion was an anomaly. Cultivating ginseng was to John Gregory was what stamp collecting was to Franklin Roosevelt; given my grandmother’s personality, it was his outlet—he was not a talkative man, but I can imagine him, almost poetic, winning over dubious neighbors at the local grocer’s about the miraculous attributes of ginseng. He won them, too. In a little shirtpocket notebook I still have he has meticulously recorded his sales figures: J.K. Davis, $250; John Helsey, $50; W.T. Eliot, $62.50.

But his hallmark, the essence of his character, was his kindness. My father remembered this most of all: during the Depression, there’d be an occasional knock on the farmhouse door. It’d be a jobless man on the move.

–May I sleep the night in your barn, sir?
–Young man, you may not. Grandfather would eye the stranger coldly, for dramatic effect.
–However, we DO have a spare bed. How about some bacon and eggs?

It was these visits that so impressed my own father with the cruelty of the Great Depression. These strangers, who wolfed down my grandmother’s meals (beneath her stony exterior there was a deep humanity she didn’t like to let out much), were not “bums:” they were college students, engineers, veterans of the Great War, and one, a violinist, paid for his supper and bed with a solo concert: Bach and Boccherini found a rapt audience in a little farmhouse on the Ozark Plateau, in a kitchen warmed by a wood stove and lit by kerosene lamps instead of footlights.

When they hung a ne’er-do-well –the local bully–at the Missouri State Penitentiary, the barbershop crowd bet that not even John Gregory, in town for his every-other-day shave, could find anything nice to say about him. There was a pause, but not a long one, underneath the hot towels: ”The man,” he said, “had a beautiful set of teeth.”

My grandfather was killed by a driver from Wichita Falls, Texas. He was deaf in the direction of the Texan’s Ford roadster, traveling fast; Grandma had called Dad back to the house because he was barefoot and no son of hers–what would the general think?– was going to make a social call to Mr. Dixon’s looking like a hillbilly. He never forgave her. Had my father been crossing the road with his father, he would’ve heard the Ford’s approach.

The impact broke both of John’s legs. But even at seventy, he had an athlete’s body and he fought hard to live in a Catholic hospital that must have caused my Church of Christ grandmother intense anxiety, looking out for Grandfather while listening intently for any Papist heresy, like the click of Rosary beads.

As a teenager, Grandfather had accepted a dare from two friends to swim across the Red River in flood, and John was the only survivor. Not this time: the river was too strong and there was nothing to do but to watch him, as graceful then as he’d ever been waltzing with a pretty girl, when he finally made the choice to let the current carry him away.

After they drove him back home from Springfield, there was a big funeral. I still have the yellowed obituary. Despite the fact that it was the darkest year of the Great Depression–1933–there would have been big honey-cured baked hams and fried chicken and candied yams and mashed potatoes smooth as clouds and a battery of salads, casseroles, and pies, dusted with sugar,  from every farmhouse in a twenty-mile radius.

Both my father and his sister, my Aunt Bill, talked about him always in Homeric terms. He was their father, and he was their hero. They found it hard to let him go, so they never did. That turned out to be a good thing, for me. It’s good to love a man you never met.