A book, a photo, and a coincidence

Cults Like Us: Why Doomsday Thinking Drives America ~ by Jane Borden, 2025, cultural anthropology, 304 pages

This colorful and enlightening pop history explains why the eccentric doomsday beliefs of our Puritan founders are still driving American culture today.  The current rise in far-right extremism as a natural result of our latent indoctrination, so the author proposes that the United States is the largest cult of all.

Since the Mayflower arrived at Plymouth Rock, cult ideology has been ingrained in the DNA of the United States.  Journalist Jane Borden argues that Puritan doomsday belief never went away; it went secular and became American culture.  From our fascination with cowboys and superheroes to our allegiance to influencers and self-help, susceptibility to advertising, and undying devotion to the self-made man, Americans remain particularly vulnerable to a specific brand of cult-like thinking.

With in-depth research, Borden uncovers the American history you didn’t learn in school, including how we are still being brainwashed, making us a nation of easy marks for con artists and strong men.  Along the way, she also revisits some of the most fascinating cults in this country presenting them as integral parts of our national psyche rather than aberrations.

Family photo

A photo I found recently among my stuff shows my dad holding my little brother and me when there were only the two of us children.  Since Billy was two-and-a-half years younger than I was, I think the photo was taken about 1944 or 1945.  I believe our car was a black 1940 Chevy.

I could call this coincidence #1142

I love coincidences.  I went to the Café one morning this week and got back to my apartment a bit before noon.  I looked to see how many steps I had taken by that time.  There would be many more steps before I went to bed, but I smiled when I saw that at 11:42 a.m. I had taken exactly 1,142 steps.

Here's what I posted this week:

1. Monday's focus was on food, HERE.  Fried okra is my favorite food.
2. Wednesday was a "purr-fect" day to "Adopt a Shelter Pet," HERE.
3. Thursday was about May Day protests, HERE.
4. Saturday was a family birthday, HERE.  My twins are now 65 years old.

Sunday Salon is hosted by Deb at Readerbuzz.

Wisdom gained the hard way

Here's a STORY that I posted in early 2007 on another of my blogs, a blog I called Words from a Wordsmith.  It's a long story, so I'll understand if you skip through it.  However, there's another photo of cats in boxes near the bottom.

"Wisdom begins in wonder." — Socrates

"This is who I am, and I like who I am.  It has taken a lifetime for me to get here." — Note to myself, June 18, 2006

Who can I talk to?

When I was younger, I talked to young and old, men and women, boys and girls, and found no one interested in what I was curious about.  At some point most children quit asking "Why?  Why?  Why?" and get on with living, the same way everyone else does.  I am as curious now as I was as a child.

Some of the big questions I had were "Why are we here?" and "Why is there something instead of nothing?" and "Why are things the way they are?"  I have not found all the right answers yet, but I have figured out some of the right questions.  What I did not find was someone who wanted to talk about these fascinating ideas.

If I have no one to talk to, no one who is interested in the same questions, then where do I find answers?  In books, of course.  If I were a child now, perhaps my answer would be "on the internet, of course."  If I were the age of my children, perhaps my answer would have been "on television programs, of course."  I see today's internet as a natural extension of the books that gave me knowledge in the '40s and '50s and '60s and '70s.  Then I started getting degrees:  the bachelor's degree in 1975, the master's degree in 1987, the doctorate (almost) in 1998.  But it was all about "Who can I talk to?"

If nobody in my world wanted to talk about my interests, then I had to find authors who would talk to me.  I began reading where I had questions, going from one book to another whenever an author would kindly provide me with a bibliography.  I would find another book on the same subject or a similar subject and read that one.  My discussion partners may have lived many years ago or many countries or continents away, but we shared the same ideas.

Why not ask my parents?

Well, I did, but when I was still very young, I began to learn that adults were not always honest with me.  What, no Easter bunny?  No tooth fairy, either?  And no Santa?!!!  Being a precocious child, I began to see a pattern here.

I never saw the Easter bunny, who left me eggs when I was asleep.  (And why EGGS, anyway?  Chickens lay eggs.)

I never saw the tooth fairy, who left a coin in exchange for my tooth.  (And why would a fairy want a tooth?  My mother's explanation was that she used them like bricks to build fairy houses.  Okay, THAT made sense, based on her tiny size.)

I never saw Santa either, a jolly old elf who managed to leave gifts all over the world in the middle of one night.  (But how did he get all those toys on his small sleigh?)

I never saw the Easter bunny, the tooth fairy, Santa Claus.  Yes, it's a pattern.  Hmm, what ELSE have they told me about that I've never seen?  God and Jesus, that's who!  So when will they tell me God isn't real either?

What do I want to know?

For starters, I always wanted to know WORDS.  That is at the heart of what a wordsmith is, one who loves words, collects words, wants to understand words.  My earliest full memory is about words, a story I've told many times, so you've probably already heard it.

I see my grandmother's chandelier beyond the head of my uncle (possibly Uncle Paul), who is looking down toward Nancy and me standing at his feet.  He asks Nancy, "What grade are you in?" and she says, "First grade."  That's all of the conversation I remember, but my perplexity rings clear in my memory.  What were they talking about?  How could she be in a "firstgrade" when I could clearly see she was in a room?  What's a "firstgrade," anyhow?  I didn't even understand our uncle's question, but Nancy knew and she answered him.  EVERYBODY knew what the words meant . . . except me!  I couldn't stand it!  I wanted to know what all the words mean, all of them, every word in the world.  Even Nancy, a little girl herself, knew what these words meant, and I didn't.  It was so frustrating.

As an adult I pondered my memory of confusion and perplexity, realizing I must have been very, very young if Nancy was in the first grade.  Nancy, after all, is four years older than I am.  Let's see, she would be six years old in the first grade, making me . . . two?!?  This means I struggled with words and trying to understand grown-up talk from the age of two?  Wow!  In later years I realized an uncle whose name I didn't know would probably be one who lived away from Chattanooga (my hometown).  Many people were milling around in Grandma Reynolds's living room that day, meaning an uncle (one of her sons) was there for something big.  A funeral?  Probably, since Grandma died in early May 1943, and I remembered that uncle was wearing a dark suit.  That means I had just turned three years old a week earlier, and Nancy was nearing the end of her first year in school.

What else did I want to know?

How about God-stuff?  I started learning words, exploring ideas, thinking big thoughts, and going to church every time the door was open, it seemed, because Mother was very faithful.  When I was little, she took me to HER Sunday school class because she was worried about leaving me in the nursery "alone," without her.  When I was about eighteen months old, she later told me, she decided it was time to help me settle in with other children.  So she explained to her Sunday school class that she would be in the nursery for the next few Sundays.  When she opened the door to the nursery, she was surprised when I exclaimed, "Oh, Mother, boys and girls!"  And I never looked back.  She didn't miss a single Sunday in her own class and I was, finally, happily in my own!

My parents went to different churches.  It was only after she married him that my mother found out Dad had been telling HIS mother he was going to dances when he was really going to church with my mother.  Grandma Setliffe would have been upset to find out he was attending another church, so apparently dancing was more acceptable.  Dad and his family went to Central Church of Christ when I was little, and Mother and her family went to East Lake Methodist Church.  We were a divided family, but it almost wasn't that way at all.

One Sunday morning Mother attended church with Daddy, thinking a family should worship together.  She had decided that, during the invitation, she would march down to the front and change her membership.  That morning's sermon was about the First Baptist Church and, Mother later told me, Dad's preacher "preached them into Hell and not back out again."  She said she could imagine it being the Methodists next week, and she just couldn't stand being in such a church.  Dad went to his grave not knowing how close Mother came to joining his church.  By then, he had joined HERS.

Anyway, I grew up attending two very different churches.  By the time I was eight, I was ready to join the Methodist church.  I don't remember what I made of their differences, but I had decided the Church of Christ was not for me.  Mother thought I was too young at eight, and even at nine and ten.  When I was ten-and-a-half, I told her one Sunday that I was going to go down front when the preacher gave the invitation, since she wouldn't talk to him about my desire to join.  She gave in and told "Brother King" (Rev. John King) that I insisted on joining.

I remember my baptism.  Methodists allow children to be baptized ("christened") as infants OR as a consenting believer, but my Daddy was firmly in the Church of Christ which insists on believer baptism by immersion only.  So I was not baptized as a baby.  Since Methodist churches rarely have baptismal pools for immersion, Brother King borrowed the one at the Baptist Church one afternoon.  I was a skinny little kid at ten and couldn't have weighed much, but when my bare foot slipped . . . oh, my!  I was sure I was going to drag poor, thin, elderly Brother King down with me!  But no, he held on and didn't lose me and I went under the water.

How do I love God and other people?

The main thing I learned from my mother was that I was loved by her, by my father, by my aunts and uncles and cousins, by God.  She sang "Jesus Loves Me" to us children, and I believed it because I felt loved.  If God loves us, then we are supposed to love God and each other.  That was clear to me.  The next logical step is to figure out how to do that.  How do I love God and other people?

When I was eleven, Mrs. Florine Morgan was my Sunday school teacher.  One Sunday she told us that there were only three doctors in the whole of the Belgian Congo.  Okay, so as an adult I can deduce what she REALLY said was there are only three Methodist missionary doctors in the Congo, but that's what I "heard" her say.  I decided from that day that I should be a medical missionary to Africa.

When I went to college, I was working on a degree in pre-med so I could become a doctor and go to the Congo.  Although I had a merit scholarship to Emory University, I chose to attend in my hometown (the University of Chattanooga, later the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga) because Clyde said "if I love him" I wouldn't go so far away.  And he told me he would go to Africa with me as a missionary.  He even changed his major to facilitate his being accepted, he said.  He lied, and it was never changed.  After we were married, I asked why he lied to me and he said, "I figured you'd outgrow these childish ideas."

Now what?

I spent the first year of marriage in tears, wondering how I'd gotten myself into this mess.  After letting me use his car every workday while we were dating, Clyde refused to let me drive after we were married, not even on our honeymoon, saying, "Statistics show that wives are not good drivers."  What?!?  I tried to explain I was still the same person, to no avail.  No job ("not MY wife," he said), no college ("women don't need higher education," he said), no books to read, no money to buy them anyway (the money he earned was HIS money), no car to go anywhere, just staring at four walls after I'd made the bed, and then waiting for him to come home.

In high school I had been in concert band, orchestra, and marching band, becoming Band Captain in my senior year.  I got to go on all the band trips, including once to Washington, DC, where our band marched at half-time, seen on television across the nation.  I played in the Youth Symphony, taught bassoon to a younger student, and played in the college band while still in high school.  I was in the writer's club that met after school every week.  I wrote a short story for an English class that my teacher had me read before a meeting of English teachers.  I published poems and articles in school papers, took a required history class in summer school just so I could take all the electives I wanted to study during the year, and never saw the inside of our study hall until we were given an IQ test in my junior year in high school.  I was either president or secretary or some position in every club I joined, and I was elected to the National Honor Society.

I had been into everything I could manage to find time for, so sitting at home doing nothing was absolute torture.  It lasted less than two months.  After getting married on February 28, 1959, I had had enough of staring at four walls by mid-April and got a job at Sears.  My boss told me, months later, I had made the highest score ever recorded for Sears-Roebuck applications.  Huh, so I did have a mind, but a mind that had been suddenly deprived of any stimulation whatsoever.  The job lasted until the last day of that year because Sears (and most businesses, at that time) had a rule:  No woman could work past the mid-term of her pregnancy.  Yes, I made the classic mistake of thinking I could make the marriage better by having a baby.  I now know more than I knew at age 18 when I got married or at age 19 when I got pregnant, but I'm glad I had my children when I was in my early twenties.

Numbers are also words

It's sad to waste a mind or, for that matter, to mind a waist.  Oops!  Here I am again, playing with words.  Lest it appear I was all one-sided, I must say I have also loved numbers all my life.  When I sat on Mother's lap while she looked through a magazine, I wanted her to read me the long number in ads for, say, tire mileage.  When she read me nursery rhymes, I wanted her to read me the page numbers, too.  I would tell Sassy, my aunt Lillian, that I loved her to the end of the line and then some!  In other words, beyond how far I could count.

I remember I could count to twelve at age four because I learned to count the numbers around Mom's watch.  And that reminds me of a story.  In other words, this wordsmith also became a storyteller.

I needed a tonsillectomy, which Dr. Harold Starr would do in his office.  Since they would be using ether on me, Mother explained they would have me smell some "perfume" and I should count all the numbers around her watch when they did.  They started the procedure and put the ether mask over my face.  Mother asked me to count the numbers, but I didn't.  After a little bit, they removed the mask to see whether I was already asleep.  I wasn't.  They did it again, and I still refused to count.  When I woke up after my tonsils were gone, Mother asked me, "Why wouldn't you count?"  In great indignation I told her, "I didn't LIKE that ole PEW-fume!"

While taking a state exam during the sixth grade, I probably lowered my score because of my fascination about one particular question.  Using a symbol I had never seen before, with a 49 inside it, the test gave me four answer choices:

(a)  5

(b)  6

(c)  7

(d)  8

Well, that was easy.  The only one of those numbers that had anything to do with 49 would be a 7, of course.  Also, that funny looking symbol seemed to be telling me the answer; it was shaped like a division sign but had a little thing like a 7 attached to the bottom left of it.  I know now it was the "square root" sign.  I had the right answer without ever having studied square roots.

That was probably the most fun I ever had on a test!  But I devised other ways to have fun with boring tests.  When we were tested on our assigned spelling words, maybe ten in all, I would wait until the teacher had called out more than half of them before starting to write.  That way, I not only had to spell each word correctly, but I also had the challenge of getting the words in the right order!

In my ninth grade algebra class the teacher started explaining our homework, for the FIFTH time, because most of the students still didn't get it.  I had "gotten it" the night before when I did my homework and was bored to tears.  Miss Blackwell didn't change anything when telling them again, so why bother?  Being among the tallest in my class, I was seated on the back row, and beside me was a bookshelf.  Ah, yes, books.  I found an interesting title, probably also math, and slid it off the shelf.  Just as I started looking through the book, the teacher spotted me and called me down, even though nobody in the class was aware of what I was doing.  So I was chastised for knowing algebra too well.

As a mother of elementary school children, I went back to college.  So did a woman who lived about half a mile from me.  We carpooled, so our children knew each other and were playing in her yard while I tried to help her grasp the concept of algebra.

4x = 16

X is the unknown.

That means 4 times "something unknown" = 16

so 4 times WHAT = 16?

About then our children ran past her back deck and Barbara, having heard my question, yelled, "FOUR!" as she disappeared around the house.  I couldn't help but laugh because that's exactly what I would have done as a child.  I don't know if Jeanette ever did learn algebra.

During my stay-at-home time, when the only books available to read were my college textbooks and his, I took down his trigonometry book and started going through it, page by page.  In two days time I taught myself a third of his book.  It was such fun!  Clyde continued his college courses in night school.  One night he was stumped by a calculus problem, and I looked over his shoulder, curious about it.  I had never even had trigonometry, much less calculus, but after studying his figures and strange symbols I'd never seen before, I told him, "I can't explain HOW to fix your error, but it's right here in this section."  When he reworked that part, he was able to solve the problem.  I still don't know calculus, but I seem to have an affinity for numbers.

Most of my grandchildren could probably tell you "Grandma's favorite number" is nine.  It's a magic number!  Multiply 9 times anything, say 9x2.  The answer is 18; now add those two digits: 1+8=9.  Do it again: 9x4=36, and 3+6=9.  This is fun!  Again:  9x9=81, and 8+1=9.  One day in the car I kept Cali entertained with this "numbers game" while we rode along, with her in the backseat and me driving.  She wouldn't have been able to multiply this "big" number in her head, but it works as well:  106 x 9 = 954, and 9+5+4=18, and 1+8=9.  There are other games we could play with nines, like adding up all the single digit numbers:  1+2+3+4+5+6+7+8+9+0=45, and 4+5=9.  Okay, I'll stop now.

Thinking outside the box

Do you know that feeling when you are working on a difficult problem and everything suddenly comes together?  That's what I call an "aha!" moment, a time when everything is wonderfully and completely clear.  The pieces have all fallen into place and you can see the big picture.

Writing is the process by which I synthesize what I am learning at the time.  (Then I added:  "to be continued" at the end.)

The famous "Dewey" left the first comment.  She was a blogger early on, but she died in 2008.  I miss her still.  This is what she said:  "I had that same line of thinking when my father told me Santa wasn't real.  I said, 'What about the Easter Bunny?'  Nope.  'Tooth fairy?'  Nope. 'God and Jesus?'  My dad said they actually were real, but I don't think I ever thought they were real again after that day."

Then Dewey added a comment about numbers:  "Nines are the most fun ever!  Do you know the hand game with nines?  If you hold up your hands, and put down one finger, then the answer to nine times that number will be the two numbers on either side of the finger you put down.  So if you put down the sixth finger, you'll have five fingers on one side and four on the other, so 54."  Wow!  No, I had never heard that.  It only works with the smaller (hand-sized) numbers, obviously.  But what fun!

I responded to her:  "Dewey, the more I learn about you, the more I realize how much we think alike.  I am so glad I'm getting to know you."

My friend Ginnie commented:  "Please do continue!  I was enjoying every word, until you hit the wall.  Please, keep going!"

=========================================================

*** NOTE:  I wish I could tell Dewey and Ginnie that what I typed at the end (adding "to be continued") is actually a quote from Colleen's Loose Leaf Notes blog.  On the sidebar, Colleen says:

"From the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia I write to synthesize what I'm learning at the time, whether it be poetry, a political commentary, or a letter to my family in Hull, Massachusetts, where I'm originally from.  Whenever I don't know exactly what it is I'm doing and it borders on wasting my time, I call it research.   'Dear Abby, How can I get rid of freckles?' was my first published piece at the age of 11."

Similar words

I was reading the last essay in Oliver Sacks' 2015 memoir Gratitude when I encountered a word I've never used, though it was obvious to me what the word meant in context:

"We lived in a fairly Orthodox Jewish community in Cricklewood, in Northwest London — the butcher, the baker, the grocer, the greengrocer, the fishmonger, all closed their shops in good time for the Sabbath, and did not open their shutters till Sunday morning" (p. 34).

At first glance, the grocer and the greengrocer are the same in my mind, but then I thought, "Green, as in growing stuff."  Yes, that's pretty much what the dictionary says.

Word of the Day #1

green·gro·cer /ˈɡrēnˌɡrōsər / noun (British) = a retailer of fruits and vegetables.

Word of the Day #2

gro·cer /ˈɡrōsər / noun = a shopkeeper who sells foods such as meat, flour, sugar, canned goods, as well as fruits and vegetables.

There's the key to why the term "greengrocer" is not one I use — it's British.  My dad was a grocer.  He owned a small grocery store in the early 1940s, before he was drafted into the Army during the Second World War.  He was also a meat cutter (not a butcher, he insisted, who butchers the animals), so that means he had meats in his store as well as fruits and vegetables and other things.

Caring for self on a day of sad remembrance

Self-Care Bingo

Back in March, a couple of weeks after our lockdown began, I posted this Self-Care Bingo card.  This seems like a good time to post it again.  Click on the image to enlarge the words, if you can't read them.

• Drink another glass of water (twice; we need to stay hydrated)
• Create something
• Listen to a favorite song
• Cultivate gratitude (5 times; feeling grateful lifts my spirits)
• Read a poem
• Cook something sustaining
• Offer to help someone
• Inhale/exhale
• Connect with someone (3 times; especially important if you live alone or with only a pet for company)
• Clean up a messy spot
• Look at something beautiful
• Go to bed
• Turn off the news (twice)
• Eat something tasty
• Relax and do nothing
• Watch something that makes you laugh

Did I miss any suggestions on the Bingo card?  How many of these have you been doing?

National Pearl Harbor Remembrance Day

A blogger I've never visited before began her post today:  "Most of my fellow American readers, followers, and lurkers are too young to have remembered the attack on Pearl Harbor.  In fact, most of us weren't born yet..."  She reminded me it's the anniversary of the deadly day in 1941 that got the United States into the Second World War.  I was too young to remember the event, having been born the year before.  I do remember the day my Daddy went off to war three years later, when I was four-and-a-half.  He was drafted even though he had two children and a third on the way.

Memories are made of this ... and this ... and this

Chattanooga telephone directory, September 1944

A woman named Cathy posted this picture in the "You Know You're From Chattanooga If..." group on Facebook, saying, "This piece of history is talking to me!  It’s been through some rough times.  Hopefully I can preserve it."  And she was willing to look up names for those of us who were curious.

I didn't know if our phone number in 1944 was in the name of William E. Setliffe, Jr. or Bonnie Reynolds, since we moved into my maternal grandmother's house with my Aunt Bonnie in 1943.  I memorized my address and phone number as a child:  3208 5th Avenue, and 2-9060.  I thought my paternal grandfather — William E. Setliffe, Sr. — might also be in that book, even though he died during that year.  Cathy reported, "There's two listings for William E. Setliffe Jr."

• W E Setliffe Jr (r) 822 E Main....6-8990
• Mrs. W E Setliffe Jr (r) 3208 5th Av....2-9060

She added, "I don't see your grandfather listed."  I didn't remember off-hand which month my grandfather died (I was only 4, after all).  It was probably earlier in 1944.

My dad's listing at 822 Main Street would be the grocery store he owned at the SW corner of Main Street and Central Avenue, directly across the street from Miss Griffins Foot-Long Hot Dogs.  Her little stand used to be right at the corner in a little triangle until the streets were widened.  Her place is still at that corner, but now it's bigger.  I asked if Gladys Setliffe was listed, but Cathy didn't find my dad's mother listed.  I remember that she lived on Cameron Hill after his father died.  When she remarried and moved to Florida a few years later, I was in the third grade.  That would have been the spring of 1949.

Mom, me, and Dad holding my brother Bill, in the house on 5th Avenue about 1944

Family memories

Then I started thinking about the (r) Cathy had mentioned.  I presume that means "residence," and both listings have that (r) designation.  When I was very young, we lived behind the grocery store.  Then we moved about a block up Main Street (toward the Ridge) before moving in with my Aunt Bonnie after my maternal grandmother died.  Maybe the grocery store had no phone, or maybe my dad had one in the back where we used to live.  After all, who would have had time to answer the phone all day, when he was running the store by himself?  He was also the meatcutter, chopping and weighing and wrapping meat.  Phones were not as ubiquitous in the 1940s as they are now.

Word of the Day

u·biq·ui·tous / yo͞oˈbikwədəs / adjective = present, appearing, or found everywhere.  Ubiquity is generally used to describe something "existing or being everywhere at the same time, constantly encountered, widespread, common."  Ubiquitous can also be used as a synonym for words like worldwide, universal, global, pervasive, all over the place.  Example:  "Phones were not as ubiquitous in the 1940s as they are now."

Blast from the Past

Imagine the smile on my face and the uplift this message on Facebook gave me last week.

"Hey, Bonnie — I feel badly that we've lost touch over the years.  I think the last time I saw you was at a Bible study when you were leading Forrest Avenue United Methodist here in Chattanooga, but I still remember you fondly from Baylor days when you worked in the library.  You were so encouraging to me in so many ways.  In fact, I used to call you my 'guru,' and you'd sign your notes 'bjguru.'  I'm back in Chattanooga now, although over the past decade or so I worked some here and some outside of Philadelphia.  I just happened to think of you the other day and wondered how you were doing, then thought I'd check Facebook and see if I could find you.  Looks as if you're in Missouri now: what led you there?  Hope you and your family are safe and well and that you're happy and enjoying life.  You were always a great influence on me, and I'm grateful."

Keith was in high school when I met him in 1974 at Baylor School in Chattanooga.  I was working in the school library, shelving books much as I do now at the Crown Center for Senior Living.  That's how I paid my way through college for my first degree.  I remember Keith bringing the children's choir from First Christian Church to sing at Forrest Avenue United Methodist, maybe in the late 1980s.  A group of six-year-olds.  More memories.  Keith and I are now Facebook friends.

Stories about my mom

For Christmas 2003, I gave each of my grandchildren a piece of history, a story about their ancestors.  Everyone got a different tale, which meant they would have to share their stories in order to get a fuller picture of the people from their past.  My three grandsons got stories about their great-grandfather William Elmer Setliffe, Jr., which I shared last week.  My four granddaughters got stories about their great-grandmother Mildred Inez Reynolds Setliffe.

For Cali

My mom was a cook.  That, I believe, was her identity.  She loved to cook for her family and, when she needed to work outside the home, she worked in the cafeteria at Clifton Hills Elementary School on Rossville Boulevard [in Chattanooga, Tennessee].  By taking some classes, she became a cafeteria manager in the city school system.  Cooking was her life, and she loved food.  The one thing that probably stands out in the minds of her relatives and friends is Mom's white fruit cake.  I should probably put that in capital letters:  "White Fruit Cake."  She learned to make it from her mother Inez, my Grandma Reynolds.  Here's the recipe:

White Fruit Cake

1/2 to 1 lb. candied cherries (chopped fine)
1/2 lb. ground shelled pecans
3 cups flour
1/2 tsp. salt
2 tsp. baking powder
2 cups sugar
1/2 cup butter (2 sticks)
1 cup sweet milk (or water)
1 tsp. flavoring (vanilla or almond extract)
5 egg whites, beaten
Fresh grated coconut
Milk of fresh coconut

Mix and bake in usual manner for white cake:  Cream butter and sugar together until thoroughly creamed.  Add dry ingredients, alternating with milk, into the sugar mixture, beginning and ending with dry ingredients.  Add cherries, pecans, and flavoring.  [To keep cherries from sinking to bottom of cake, first lightly flour the pieces with part of the flour.]  Gently fold in egg white.  After cake is cooled, pour milk of fresh coconut over both layers.  Ice with 7-Minute Frosting and cover with fresh grated coconut.  Add cherries on top to decorate it.  Good served with boiled egg custard that is thin and runny, made with 5 egg yolks, 1 cup sugar, 1 cup milk per egg, and nutmeg.

This looks sort of like white fruit cake.

In case you want to make this yourself, here's how we did it when I was a kid.  Mom always got a fresh coconut.  We kids would take it out to the sidewalk and pound away at it with a hammer, working hard to break the tough outer shell of the coconut.  Once that was off, we would drive an ice pick into a couple of the three "eyes" of the now-hairy-looking coconut. Then we'd carefully pour the coconut "milk" into a glass, complaining loudly when the coconut didn't produce much milk because that would affect the taste and moisture of the cake.  Then, tired, we'd go play and let Mother go about the real work of producing the cake as described above.  It really is best with the custard.  Everyone enjoyed the soft, moist "white fruit cake" better than the hard, dark ones with lots of tough fruit, even though the only fruit in Mom's cake were coconut and cherries.

The stories I gave to Brandy, Kenzie, and Cady will have to wait until I find them again.  After typing this last week, I put the spiral-bound booklet in a "safe place" until I had time to finish typing this blog post, and now I can't find that "safe place."  I spent nearly an hour this evening searching through papers, under piles of magazines, in the other room, anywhere I could imagine, and I simply cannot find those seven stories.  The booklet is here somewhere, so maybe next week I'll post "the rest of the stories."

Stories about my dad

For Christmas 2003, I gave each of my grandchildren a piece of history, a story about their ancestors.  Everyone got a different tale, which meant they would have to share their stories in order to get a fuller picture of the people from their past.  My three grandsons got stories about their great-grandfather William Elmer Setliffe, Jr.  My four granddaughters got stories about their great-grandmother Mildred Inez Reynolds Setliffe, which I'll share next Thursday.

For Kendall

My dad spent a lot of his growing-up years on Main Street [in Chattanooga, Tennessee].  That's where his father, my "pops," had his meat market.  Both my dad and his brother Jeff became meat cutters like their father, and each eventually had his own store or meat market.  Dad opened his grocery store at the corner of Main Street and Central Avenue, only a few blocks from where his father's meat market had been.  The meat counter had a glass front like those in a deli today.  I have a 1942 photo of the store showing Pops on the left (with center counters hiding the fact that he had had one leg amputated), Dad wearing his white apron and leaning an elbow on the back counter where he weighed meat on the big white scales, and two assistants in the back.

I remember living behind our store, and Dad's parents lived there with us.  One morning, Pops was shaving in the bathroom and one button of his long johns was unbuttoned.  I giggled and pointed and sing-songed:  "I see Popsy's hiney!"  My elders enjoyed that story for years.

I remember only a few "important" things about the store, since I was only two when I lived there.  By important things, I mean my job.  I got to arrange the apples in the front window.  My daddy let me stand on a stool and put the apples on the slanted board.  I can also tell you exactly where the cookie bins were ― in the center of the store.  Getting a cookie, either to sell or nibble, meant taking the silver top off the big glass container and reaching in for the cookie you wanted.  The jars were on a lower shelf, exactly at the eye level of a little girl like me.

I told [my son] David, when he was promoted from bag boy to the meat section of Pruett's [grocery store] on Signal Mountain, that he was following in the footsteps of his ancestors.  I could remember seeing my dad with gauze around a thumb because he had chopped meat a bit too close to his own hand.  Once when I was at Pruett's, I saw David behind the counter with his thumb similarly wrapped ― and the bandage was soppy wet.  Until that moment, I had forgotten that Dad's bandage was also usually wet from handling the frozen food.  I was not too happy about that particular connection between my son and my father, but I guess it comes with the territory ― using meat cleavers and sharp knives.  Still, I couldn't resist telling David no one wanted part of his thumb in their meat.

When I began managing the Trenton bookstore in August [of 2003], I felt totally at home.  Recently, it occurred to me that the bookstore is about the size of Dad's meat market and I'm following the family tradition, retailing to customers who prefer small stores.  No wonder I love working there.

For Chase

My dad had two children and one more on the way in 1944, when World War II was in its next-to-last year.  Being a father had kept him out of the war until then, but in 1944 he was drafted.  He had to leave before Christmas, but Santa was good to us that year and came early so Daddy could enjoy Christmas with us before he left.  I was four years old as I stood on the sofa, waving goodbye to him through the window, and Billy would have been barely two.  Dad was wearing his Army uniform and waved as he walked up the sidewalk.  My little sister, Ann, was born the following March and was several months old before Daddy came home again.

The Army had a funny way of assigning jobs.  Because Dad owned a meat market and grocery store, someone must have thought "food" and decided my daddy should be a cook.  He didn't know how to cook, not at all.  So he wrote home to his wife, my Mama, and asked for her recipes.  Can you imagine taking a recipe to make something for a family of four and multiplying it to feed thousands of men?  That's what he did.  Apparently he did a pretty good job as a cook and came home still cooking "enough to feed an army."  He loved to make chili, but there was always enough to feed the whole neighborhood, literally!  So we would have a block party even before it was called that.  He would use a white coffee cup to ladle out the chili.

It's funny that I miss his chili and wish I could have some now, because I never wanted his chili when I was a child.  It burned my mouth and was too spicy for me.  I guess that's the way the soldiers preferred it, and I would probably like it now.  I wonder if I could find his recipe if I looked through old family papers.  Probably not, because Daddy mostly cooked by dumping in lots of meat and beans and spices and tasting until it was just the way he wanted it.

If he were still alive, I know he'd be sitting around telling you about all his exploits in Japan and in the Philippines.  He would tell you about sailing to the Philippines on the U.S.S. Enterprise, an aircraft carrier.  It was the biggest ship the Navy had at that time, so you could probably find a photo of that ship in a history book or an encyclopedia.  But I've saved you the time by printing out some information I found online for you.  He loved to tell stories, and he would illustrate the letters he sent home to us.  He drew not only things he saw, but cartoons about cows or anything he thought would make us laugh and enjoy his letters.

For Jamey

My dad was in the Army during World War II and was sent to Japan near the end of the war.  He was in the First Cavalry [division], which had a yellow patch with a black stripe slanted across it and the head of a horse in the upper part.  It looks like the one at the right side of this paragraph.  One of the funny stories he told was about the Japanese making replacement patches for the Army and making the "horses" with long ears.  They were making jackasses out of the First Cavalry!

My dad liked to tell stories and make people laugh, so I'm never quite sure whether a story was true or was "elaborated."  Even though Dad was a cook, he also drove big trucks and (according to him) led convoys of trucks because of his good sense of direction.  The soldiers, after all, couldn't read Japanese road signs.  When we children would ask him to tell us about the war, he said he had "captured two Japs."  Then he would tell the truth about that capture:

One night he was writing a letter to Mama (and us kids) and heard footsteps in the gravel outside his tent.  When he went silently to investigate, he found two Japs (what we called the Japanese people during the war).  The two were trying to steal food, and Daddy was the cook.  He grabbed both of them without having to fire a shot.  Only at the end of the story did Daddy admit the two he "captured" were children.  Although he didn't say so, I can only imagine my child-loving daddy fed those hungry kids before he turned them in.

In another story Daddy told us about hearing piano music coming from a Japanese house he was walking past.  He stopped and tried to tell the owner he wanted to listen.  The man, however, thought Dad wanted his daughter, who was playing the piano.  So he got very angry and ran Dad off, even though he simply wanted to listen to the music.  Back home in Chattanooga, as Daddy knew, I was learning to play the big upright piano in the living room.  All he wanted was to think about music and his family.  My dad was a family man who loved his children.  He was missing us when he heard the piano inside that house.

One hundred years ago today

My dad was born on October 9, 1918.  That's one hundred years ago today.  This photo was probably taken in 1945 or late 1944, when he was drafted because of World War Two, even though he already had two children (me and my brother Billy) and my sister Ann was born three months after he left.  He served in the Philippines and in Japan.  No, really, he SERVED.  What he served was food.  The Army made him a cook because he owned a grocery store, which means food, which equated with being a cook in someone's mind.  Happy Birthday, Dad!

Mom's Monday ~ 100 years

Mildred Inez Reynolds Setliffe (1917-2004)

My favorite photo of my mother was taken in 1987, the year she turned 70.  Today marks a century since she was born.  One hundred years ago!  That's hard for me to fathom.

Reynolds family at home at 3208 5th Avenue, Chattanooga, Tennessee

Here's a photo when she was 12 or younger, since her dad died in a traffic accident when she was only 12 years old.  That's her on the front row, a tall girl with her sister Bonnie (behind her), their six brothers, and their parents on the left.

She loved her four children, twelve grandchildren, and great-grandchildren.  I'm not sure how many great-grands she had before she died, but seven of them were my grandchildren.  This photo shows her with one of my sister's granddaughters.

Here's our family about 1944, when I turned four and Billy was about a year and a half old.  Later that year, Dad was drafted and had to sell our grocery store.  Mother couldn't run the store.  She was pregnant, had the two of us children to look after, and ― besides ― Dad was the meat-cutter in the family.  With him gone, Mom had to learn how to drive.  He didn't see Ann until she was several months old.  They didn't have Jimmy until 1949.

So what would she want me to tell you about her, besides her love of family, of course?  Maybe .....

• that she taught an adult Sunday School class for more than forty years;
• that she was president of the PTA (Parent-Teacher Association) of my elementary school two different times;
• that she went back to school and became a cafeteria manager (she always loved cooking), 
• that she took college courses when she was Assistant Manager of the Food Service at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga;
• that a grandson called her "gallivanting granny" when he talked to a trucker while they were on the road visiting family;
• that she never seemed to sit down when she had the whole family over for dinner because she was too busy getting things for everyone.

Nah, she wouldn't want to brag, but I'm doing it anyway.   I love you, Mom, and I miss you.

Edited to add what my daughter Sandra sent in an email about her "Jamma" (Auntie is my Aunt Bonnie):

Mom,  I loved the pics and biography you wrote.  However, when you mentioned "taught a Sunday school class" I wish you had taken it a bit farther.  Knowing Jamma, she would want her biggest legacy, being a strong Christian, to be given more emphasis.  When she was in her last stages, her memory often failed on so many things.  She often "switched" family generations around and she thought I was you and you were Auntie.  However, one thing she could always remember perfectly was:

"Jesus loves me this I know,

For the Bible tells me so,

Little ones to him belong,

We are weak but He is

      strong. 

Yes, Jesus loves me

Yes, Jesus loves me

Yes, Jesus loves me

The Bible tells me so."

I truly love remembering how happy she was, even when nearing her end, when we would sing this together. 

Happy 100th, Jamma!

Daddy's day ~ William Elmer Setliffe, Jr.

My father was born on October 9th, 1918.  That's 99 years ago!  This photo is from World War Two, probably about 1945.  He died in traffic in 1964 when he was only 45 years old.  He was excited about the Interstate Highway being built through Chattanooga that year, but he never got to drive on it.  He met only the first six of a dozen grandchildren.

This family photo shows him with my mother (who died in 2004), me, and my brother Bill (who died in April).

 

Two more photos of him, with Billy and me.

This day is his.  It's the day he was born, but also the day he is remembered by fewer and fewer family members because we are dying off; only two of his four children are still alive.  My three children met him, but the twins were barely four and my son was not yet a year old when a drunk driver ran a stop sign and slammed into the truck he was riding in.  They don't remember him, even though one of the girls said at the time, "Grandpa got died."  They both called National Cemetery "flower land" when they visited his grave with me after the funeral.

Others in the U.S. may be celebrating Indigenous People's Day (or perhaps they still call it Columbus Day), but for me, it's Daddy's Day.
I love you, Dad.

50 years ago today ~ my dad died

Similar to my dad's grave, but 50 years later.

FLOWERLAND

When Grandpa got died
Us went to him's house
But he wasn't there.

Then Mom let us go
To a beautiful place
With flags everywhere.

But the prettiest spot
Was all covered with flowers
With some up on stands.

We liked it so much
That we asked to go back
To see Flowerland.

— BSJ  6-1-64

My dad died on May 27, 1964, exactly 50 years ago today.  We had to hurry to bury him that year, before the Memorial Day weekend.  As I was going through an old box yesterday, I found a 3x5 card on which I had typed this poem.  Using some of their own words, I wrote it from the viewpoint of my twin daughters who had turned four that month.  My son was only 11 months old.  Fifty years ago.  Half a century.  Hard to imagine.

Family Matters ~ by Rohinton Mistry, 2002

The title says it all: family matters. We could take it either of two ways, as an assertion that family DOES matter, or that the book takes a look at family business, family stuff. This book says both. And reading it made me consider both aspects of my own family. Having been through major surgery earlier this year, I could empathize with 79-year-old Nariman Vakeel, who had Parkinson’s disease and a broken ankle, because neither of us could take care of ourselves. He was totally dependent on his family in a way I never was, because of his broken ankle, but I could certainly relate to his feelings. He ended up in the home of his daughter Roxana, her husband Yezad, and their two sons, all crowded into a small home in Bombay. I could also relate to Yezad, who was fascinated by photographs his boss showed him, old photos of Yezad's neighborhood:

"The photographs had made him [Yezad] aware how much the street and the buildings meant to him. Like an extended family that he'd taken for granted and ignored, assuming it would always be there. But buildings and roads and spaces were as fragile as human beings, you had to cherish them while you had them" (p. 197).

I don't have the photos that Yezad studied, but I have photos of my town, Chattanooga. This one is dated 1942, when I was two years old.


It looks nothing like Chattanooga today, except of course for Lookout Mountain in the background serving as an orienting landmark all of my life. Everything changes as buildings are demolished to make room for new ones, as dying parts of town come back to life and new businesses crop up. "The way things used to be" is a fragile sort of thing, as the quote above says.

Yet looking at our old photos sparks memories and, sometimes, helps us see new things. This photo of my grandfather when he was sixteen reminds me of my recently married grandson, the high forehead, the nose, the eyes. I am amazed at the resemblance. My grandfather -- William Elmer Setliffe, Sr. -- died in 1944, when I was only four and the town still looked a lot like that photo of Chattanooga above.

Let me close with two more quotes from the book. Both are from Yezad's boss:

"Everyone underestimates their own life. Funny thing is, in the end, all our stories -- your life, my life, old Husain's life, they're the same. In fact, no matter where you go in the world, there is only one important story: of youth, and loss, and yearning for redemption. So we tell the same story, over and over. Just the details are different" (p. 197).

"From three pictures, so many memories. And this can happen with every single photo -- each one conceals volumes. All you need is the right pair of eyes," he made the gesture of turning a key, "to unlock the magic" (p. 197).

Family Matters ~ by Rohinton Mistry, 2002
Rated: 8 of 10, a very good book.