Foster Dickson's Blog, page 48
March 20, 2019
Lazy Afternoon Reruns: “Exploring a Few Stereotypes”
I have been a fan of The Onion for a long time, mainly because their farces cut straight to the bone of what we all know but probably don’t want to say. Before the internet was a part of American life, I used to subscribe to their newspaper, and I still read it online and follow their feed on Twitter. Not too long ago, I was browsing Twitter for daily banter, and the satirical online news source that recently named Korea’s newest dictator Kim Jong Un the “Sexiest Man Alive” ran the following article: “PR Firm Advises U.S. To Cut Ties with Alabama.” I had to look to see what it was.
March 19, 2019
Dirty Boots: A Column of Critical Thinking, Border Crossing, and Noblesse Oblige
In the essay “Not Compassionate, Not Conservative,” which appeared in the Winter 2007 issue of The American Scholar, University of South Alabama political science professor Ethan Fishman wrote, “Conservatism as a political philosophy is analogous to conservatism as a personality trait. Both stress moderation, practicality, and prudence.” The essay also outlines Fishman’s contentions about the modern phenomenon of “pseudo-conservatism,” which has “adhered to an ideology of anti-intellectualism, substituting feelings and emotions for rational discourse.” The more traditional conservatism, Fishman tells us, relies instead on those three traits listed above, as well as “a belief in the existence of natural law, a set of moral ideals that gives meaning to such terms as honor, integrity, justice, and courage”— all good things.
Forecasting what was to come, Fishman wrote in 2007 about “pseudo-conservatives” being “suspicious of reasonable analysis” and having “an insistence on political conformity,” and he added that some politicians and voters are “describing themselves as conservative because the term appeared to identify them as being diametrically opposed to the forces they perceived were threatening both their lives and their social positions.” Near the end of the essay came this statement:
As long as citizens remain fearful of their status in society and as long as Americans continue to dread attacks from powerful enemies committed to the destruction of their country, [American historian Richard] Hofstadter warned, the specter of pseudo-conservatism never will completely vanish.
What came to my mind as I read this dozen-year-old commentary were: assertions about “alternative facts,” constant firings and resignations from the White House, accusations of a dishonest media and “fake news,” and concerns over foreign hacking and immigrant caravans— all lacquered with the repeated reassurance that things are better than they ever have been.
Closer to home, in Alabama, the term conservative has become a post-Southern Strategy political synonym for acceptable (where liberal is the synonym for unacceptable.) The implication, of course, is that a conservative politician embodies those values of “moderation, practicality, and prudence” and has the underlying values of “honor, integrity, justice, and courage.” Yet, the facts and results are complicated. While some of our conservative leaders may well have those character traits, neither the rash of criminal charges, convictions, guilty pleas, and resignations that have cascaded across Alabama politics in recent years, nor our failing schools and overcrowded prisons could be attributed to the virtues of moderation, practicality, and prudence being put into fullest action in the governance of four-plus-million people.
[image error]However, if those seven virtues describe what it means to be truly conservative, then I might actually be conservative, too! Despite considering myself either a liberal-leaning moderate or a fairly moderate liberal, I also value those traits – moderation, practicality, prudence, honor, integrity, justice, and courage – and would like for our government and corporate leaders to exhibit them in recognizable ways. Rather than regarding my left-leaning politics as the American version of conservatism’s contrapasso, I think of liberalism and conservatism at their best as being counterbalances to one another, and when balance is achieved, our country is better for it. For me, to be liberal means: free-thinking and open-minded, considerate of opposing viewpoints, respectful of differing lifestyles, and steeped in empirical knowledge and facts— all of which are valuable in a multiethnic, multiracial, geographically large, democratic nation that respects the freedoms of speech and religion.
Although Ethan Fishman claims the virtues of “moderation, practicality, and prudence” for Team Conservative, those values are not so much conservative as they are just plain good and right. While self-proclaimed conservatives today decry the further-leftward move of the Left, toward positions more radical, I can assure anyone who is open-minded enough to hear it that the shift is based on the general lack of “moderation, practicality, and prudence” in our political leaders, in our economy, and in our society. There is nothing moderate, practical, or prudent about gerrymandering or any other mode of limiting voting rights. There is also nothing moderate, practical, or prudent about starving our public schools. That’s where the anger comes from: when a hard-working person doesn’t see fairness or opportunity in the system, he or she will support significant changes being made to the system. And that is a particularly moderate, practical, and prudent approach to politics.
Even though the equalizing initiatives that left-leaning politicians will proffer and endorse over the next year or two would probably benefit Alabama, I don’t spent any time worrying or wondering about whether many ordinary Alabamians will actually consider their validity. (65% of Alabamians voted straight-ticket last November, an option that forty-three states don’t even allow.) The conservative/liberal heuristic is so strongly rooted down here that it’s probably more likely that we’ll all subscribe to The American Scholar than that many will change their voting habits. However, if we’re to stick with being a conservative state, then let’s have Ethan Fishman’s ideas be entrenched as the litmus test: does this candidate/bill/policy exhibit the values of moderation, practicality, prudence, honor, integrity, justice, and courage? If the answer is yes, then the outcomes and benefits should be obvious . . . and Alabama should become a recognizably better place.
“Dirty Boots: A Column of Critical Thinking, Border Crossing, and Noblesse Oblige” posts will be published regularly on Tuesday afternoons.
To read recent posts, click the date below:
Or to find and read earlier posts, click here for a full list.
March 18, 2019
Lazy Afternoon Reruns: “For Job Creation, Local is Better”
In his 1993 book The Selling of the South
" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">The Selling of the South, historian James C. Cobb writes about Southern states’ Depression-era invention of using tax breaks, free land, and cheap labor to woo businesses to locate new industrial facilities in our region to remedy the desperate unemployment of the period. The innovator responsible for putting this strategy in motion in the mid-1930s was Mississippi’s governor Hugh White, and at the time, his state desperately needed any help it could get. The Mississippi Historical Society’s History Now website explains:
By any measure, Mississippi entered the Great Depression far behind the rest of the nation. The mere 52,000 industrial jobs the state claimed in 1929 fell to 28,000 by 1933. Bank deposits dropped from $101 million to $49 million over the same three-year period. Nearly 1,800 retail stores closed as sales shrank from $413 million to $140 million. Farm income was reduced by 64 percent. The average annual income, already the worst in the nation at $287, fell to an unbelievable $117. On a single day in 1932, one-fourth of the state’s farm land was sold for taxes.
White’s “Balancing Agriculture with Industry” program (BAWI), which was adopted in various forms all over the South, combined the state government’s power to organize and negotiate with a reliance on local chambers of commerce recognizing and offering up their own communities’ resources. Essentially, local leaders would identify unused land, untapped labor, and money available for investment, and the state would help the community find a company that could use what they had. BAWI may have been a viable engine for economic recovery in a mostly agrarian society— but as a long-term solution in the modern Sun Belt South, not so much.
March 16, 2019
Southern Movie 33: “White Lightning”
In terms of Southern moonshine movies, 1973’s White Lightning is the gold standard. The movie and its 1976 sequel Gator are among a series of great films starring Burt Reynolds in the 1970s: Deliverance, which preceded them in 1972; The Man Who Loved Cat Dancing and The Longest Yard, which came out between the two, and Smokey and the Bandit, which followed them in 1977. (White Lightning also came out the same year as another Southern classic, Walking Tall.)
White Lightning begins ominously with two men paddling a canoe through a swampy lake while towing another canoe that holds two other men, who are bound and gagged. One of the men in the first boat is in a sheriff’s uniform, and the other in a clean, white, short-sleeved shirt. The light is dim, their pace is slow and calm, and ominous, twangy swamp music plays. When the older two arrive at a point that seems to satisfy them, the two bound men, who are young and long-haired, are blasted with a shotgun and their canoe sinks into the lake. The older men then paddle nonchalantly back the way they came.
In the next scene, we see the auto shop of a prison where a shirtless Gator McKlusky (Burt Reynolds) is working on an engine and joking with the other men. After a moment, the prison warden comes in to tell him that he has a visitor. In a large, empty room, Gator finds his sister Lou Ella, who tells him that isn’t his mother or father who is dead but his brother Donnie, who was found in the lake. Their daddy thinks it has something to do with the sheriff “on account of them protesting.”
Back in the bunk room, Gator is lying on his small bed, alone and brooding, when an officer comes in, berating him as a lazy moonshiner who he thinks he can do anything he pleases, but when the officer yanks Gator’s feet of the bed, the prisoner jumps up and belts him. Gator begins first to stride away, then to run once it becomes clear that he will be trying to break out of jail! The music plays then speeds up, as Gator McKlusky is making his way through the rural landscape . . . in his prison-issue white clothes and in broad daylight. We already know that he won’t get far. Gator soon runs right into the warden, on horseback and brandishing a shotgun.
But Gator won’t get the punishment that we think he’ll get – extra years, or worse – since he has decided to cooperate with law enforcement. He wants to find out who killed his brother. Up to this point, Gator has kept his mouth shut about the moonshine business and has been doing his time. However, this turn of events has changed everything. In a dim office, Gator begins to spill the beans, which gets him out of jail and into a car with two law men who give him the details of the situation he is to infiltrate.
[image error]Once Gator is out of the men’s car and into his own, we get to see the real Gator McKlusky, behind the wheel of a brown 1971 Ford Custom 500 that hauls ass. He peels off his prison-issue coat and tie and throws them out the window. He has the wind in his hair, but catches the attention of an Arkansas State Police car, which is no match for him. Gator flies into town, shakes those cops and another on a motorcycle, and is greeted by two pretty blondes who are smiling and glad to see him.
Next, Gator goes home, to the small shack where his parents farm, but the reunion isn’t as happy as his parents might like. Though their elder son is home from prison, he is home to seek out his brother’s killer. As peaceful people, his parents urge him not to do this, though his father intimates that Donnie’s death had something to do with “the kinds of things college kids do these days.” Gator tells him that he has no plans to get a job or to bring in a crop, but will go to Bogan County and get the sheriff JC Connors (Ned Beatty).
The first step is to make contact with Dude Watson, a two-bit mechanic on the dirt-track circuit and a moonshine runner who is in danger of heading to prison himself. Dude is skittish and evasive but recognizes that he has no choice: work with Gator or get busted. Gator tells him, “I’m gon’ help you make a few deliveries, take down a few names.” About Dude’s resentment at being roped-in, Gator tells him that he only plans on going after JC Connors, to which Dude replies, with a sly smile, “You may as well swim on over to China and get ol’ Mao Tse Tung,” and drives off.
However, Gator won’t give up that easily. He shows up at Dude’s ramshackle auto shop. Dude sees Gator drive up, gets his gun, and goes outside to meet the unwelcome stranger, but Gator sneaks around, goes inside, and meets him, taking the gun away. The men fuss with each other, and Gator punches Dude for calling him a “stool pigeon,” then they get down to business. Gator explains that he only wants Connors because his brother was killed, and Dude retorts that he doesn’t care a lick for Connors, but isn’t fool enough to help— and moreover, obtaining legal proof to convict Connors would be impossible. Everybody is involved, and no one is going to crack under pressure. Ultimately, Dude says, “If you want to get that sheriff, you’re gon’ have to kill him.” But he decides to help Gator anyway.
The two men proceed into town to introduce Gator around. As they get out of the car and move across the street to the pool hall, a bright green truck with the words LEGALIZE MARJIUANA on it drives in front them. Gator says, “If they ever legalize that shit, it’ll ruin moonshine forever,” then grumbles about his disdain for long-haired hippies. After Dude stops and speaks to a young blonde woman sitting in her car, he and Gator go inside to meet Rebel Roy, a smiling young man in a cowboy hat who avoids Gator’s anecdotes about knowing someone of the same name once.
Back outside, Dude points out JC Connors to Gator. The sheriff is leaving the courthouse and crossing the street nearby. We recognize the pudgy man in his tight short-sleeve white shirt and little straw hat from the movie’s opening scene. Gator wants to Dude to take him over there to talk, but Dude refuses, so Gator flies out of the parking place, guns the roaring car over to where Connors is standing, and stops in front of him, repeatedly revving the engine. Connors stares cautiously before speaking to Dude, then to Gator, advising him to keep the muscled-up car at a reasonable speed in Bogan County. Gator assures Connors that he will, remarking that there are only two things he’s afraid of: women and the police. Connors replies, “And I bet you’re always trying to hump ’em both.”
In the next scene, Gator is running blocker for Rebel Roy, and Connors is talking to a man in a suit. Connors’ conversation indicates that there is some concern over state and federal officials coming to investigate what is happening in the county, but the concern isn’t his. He says flatly that he accepts the money that keeps the moonshine flowing in the county, because he spreads it around to his men, who could use the extra cash. Meanwhile, Gator and Rebel Roy are toting a batch moonshine and are spotted by the police, who give chase, but once again to no avail. Gator draws the officers to chasing him and ends up making a leap onto a barge, leaving with his car half off the back of it.
Back in town, dropping off the car to get the under-carriage fixed, Gator is informed by Dude that it’s going to cost a pretty penny to fix the damage. Gator laughs it off and then sets about his other task for the day: seducing JC Connors’ middle-aged secretary to gain access to the offices inside the courthouse. Though he does succeed in sweeping her off her feet, he doesn’t succeed in his true goal. Gator gets left on the sidewalk.
By the halfway point in the movie, Gator is in. Dude knows who he is, of course, but Rebel Roy has begun to trust him enough to help with moonshine runs, which has to happen with Roy’s car messed up. Here, we again the young woman from outside the pool hall, Roy’s girlfriend Lou, who has an obvious fondness for Gator.
Roy takes Lou and Gator to the backwoods homeplace where the moonshine gets made. Men in overalls and fedoras are tending barrels of mash and filling plastic jugs with white liquor. Among them is is the balding, gruff Big Bear, who runs the show. As one would imagine, he is immediately suspicious of the new man, and he lets Gator know it, when he snatches him onto the porch during their first conversation and puts a big knife to his neck.
Though Gator has gotten what he wants — to infiltrate the moonshine world controlled by JC Connors — he is in it way deep. Gator continues to try to find out what has happened to his brother, as he also begins a secret affair with Roy’s girlfriend Lou. Connors finds out that someone on the inside is a rat, and the lawmen that Gator is working with show up to Dude’s garage in broad daylight to check on how things are going. Two-thirds of the way into White Lightning, Gator’s chances don’t look good, especially when Connors and his deputies corner Dude’s wife (Diane Ladd), who tells them that Gator is hauling liquor with Roy.
While Gator tries to move closer to his goal of getting revenge on his brother’s killer, the path is full of every kind of peril. He nearly gets caught searching Big Bear’s house, and then in a black juke joint where they make a delivery, the bartender used to know his father. Out back of the juke joint, Roy confronts him about Lou, and the two men get in a fight. Across town, Connors is at Dude’s parents’ house intimidating them into providing Dude’s whereabouts.
That night, when Roy and Gator arrive an isolated house to make a delivery, Dude unexpectedly runs out of the woods, telling them frantically that they have to leave. Suddenly, gunfire comes from the darkness, and Dude is shot dead! Sheriff’s deputies emerge, and the fight ends with the deputies subduing and kidnapping Lou and Gator.
It looks like it’s all over for Gator McKlusky now. He is being held by Big Bear and the deputies, who intend to kill him. However, Gator creates a ruse by appealing to men’s salacious side and convincing them to go search around on Lou’s body to look for her tattoo. When they are distracted, drunk and laughing, Gator uses the opportunity to break loose, fight them off, and rescue Lou, who drives them away.
Badly beaten, Gator passes out and wakes up with a bandage covering half of his face. A woman is using a hacksaw to cut the handcuffs off of him, and he is surrounded by young, pregnant women. Gator doesn’t know it yet, but Lou has taken him to the home for unwed mothers where she once had a baby. Back on the main scene, JC Connors is at Dude’s funeral, as the cast of familiar faces mourn. He is not going to lose control of his county.
At the unwed mothers’ home, Gator gets stopped by a young blonde hippie to ask if he had a brother named Donnie. The girl went to college with Gator’s brother, and now Gator will finally get his answers. It was Donnie, the woman tells him, who decided to gather up some of his young friends and go protest in the worst county of the state. They were staying in a motel room before heading back to the college, when the manager called the sheriff, who came to see about them. Donnie told the sheriff that, without a search warrant, he could do nothing to them, then called him some choice names, but the sheriff didn’t tolerate it. He punched Donnie, then took him and another young protester, and “that was it,” she said. The group never saw them again. Gator can’t understand what Donnie had to protest about, or why he would do it in Bogan County. He was the only one who ever amounted to anything, Gator says to no one in particular.
The brief monologue is then interrupted by another young woman loud-whispering to them that the sheriff is out front looking for Gator! It’s time to rev up that Custom 500 again. On his way out, Gator tries to back over Connors at high-speed but the sheriff, and Connors and his deputies shoot at Gator at he tears off. The music kicks in again, and the chase is on!
Up and down dirt roads and through fields full of crops, Gator eludes the sheriff and his men. It all finally culminates when Gator, the archetypal trickster, makes one last shifty move, parking on an embankment that looks like a hill. He leans coolly against his car and watches a smiling Connors, who believes that he has his man, sail over top, land in the lake, and drown. Last we see of JC Connors, his little hat floats to the top. White Lightning ends with Connors’ massive law-enforcement funeral, which Gator and Lou watch from the sidewalk, among the crowds.
According to TCM’s webpage on the film, White Lightning
traded on some of the most blatant stereotypes of the South corrupt politicians and law enforcers, car chases, irascible outlaws, and sexy Daisy Duke-clad beauties. But the popularity of the films [like this one] lay in their comic tone, playing the normally clichéd elements cartoonishly, and in Reynolds’ self-mocking machismo.
Also, a review titled “All Them Damn Hippies” on the website We are the Mutants also makes a solid assessment about the themes:
White Lightning is the first in a long line of films and TV series about righteous lawbreakers in the post-Vietnam American South, where corrupt cops chase hot-rodding bootleggers and paid-by-the-mile truckers through the meager towns and backwoods scorned by “the people in Washington,” a mythical land whose isolated, protective communities both resent and revel in their perceived marginalization. These films are anti-establishment but also anti-counterculture, sort of an ideological counterpoint to 1969’s Easy Rider, a cribbing of the heroics of 1967’s Cool Hand Luke, whose Southern protagonist was sentenced to a chain gang for a universally admirable crime: destroying parking meters.
Yet, not everyone was so positive. At the time of its release, The New York Times‘ review called White Lighting a “fairly awful movie that keeps producing good things—scenes, performances, moments of insight—that seem connected to better ideas than anything suggested in the film’s larger intentions.” Whatever its flaws or weaknesses, one thing is certain: it launched a genre.
March 15, 2019
Lazy Afternoon Reruns: “No Lonelier Place on Earth”
As perhaps the most pitifully lonely and isolated character in Carson McCullers’ 1940 novel The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, the socialist-revolutionary-turned-carnival-worker Jake Blount’s most notable acts are ranting and raving for workers’ rights, often when he is drunk, sometimes violently. His ongoing frustration that working people will not look at their socio-economic situation and make moves to change it drives him to behave in ways that are unacceptable anywhere, relegating him even further to the margins of society. Standing in the midst of Southern culture, perceiving the inherent and obvious inequalities, Blount is the reformer no one will listen to— at least in part because he seems like a total nut. And it drives him into madness and despair.
March 14, 2019
#throwbackthursday: A Gas Tax for Roads, 1979
It was on this day forty years ago today that the front page of the Montgomery Advertiser featured this short article about then-governor Fob James proposing . . . a gasoline tax to improve the Alabama’s road— which sounds eerily similar to a current proposal by our current governor. I think we might need some new ideas . . .
March 13, 2019
Lazy Afternoon Reruns: “The Old Agrarian-ness of a New Ethos”
In “I’ll Take My Stand: The Relevance of the Agrarian Vision,” originally published in 1980 in Virginia Quarterly Review and re-published online in 2003, the critic Lucinda H. Mackethan writes about “a group of Southern Americans profoundly disturbed by the lack of humane values operating in their world.” She was referring to the contributing authors in the Southern classic I’ll Take My Stand, a small group of perhaps overly nostalgic academics, poets, and critics who looked on a Northern-dominated, heavily industrial country with disdain. But in that phrase, she could have been writing about a lot of modern Southerners, from gun-loving ultra-conservative neophobes to the Gen-Xers who’ve started organic CSAs, letterpress shops, and microbreweries.
March 12, 2019
Dirty Boots: A Column of Critical Thinking, Border Crossing, and Noblesse Oblige
I’ve given up cussing for Lent. And, I’ll admit, I’m already doing a poor job of it.
[image error]Cussing is about the only bad habit I have left. I quit chewing my fingernails a few years ago, after thirty years with my hands in my mouth, and teaching and parenting have caused me to curb other less-attractive predilections, like heavy drinking and outbursts of ill temper. Using foul language, on the other hand, has been one of the few constants in my life. Friends have come and gone, as have jobs and apartments, but there has always been cussing.
The main reason that I know I’ve been cussing for a long time is that I remember being sent to principal’s office in fifth grade because one of my jackass classmates ratted me out for saying some choice words at PE. My mother was called into the conference, and I got the privilege of listing the words I had been saying. (I shortened it considerably for the occasion.) I don’t remember her getting as angry as I thought she would, and with plenty of hindsight, it’s probably because she knew that I learned those words at home and around the neighborhood. I wasn’t pulling them from thin air.
For a long time, I regarded my habit of cussing as something other people could just deal with. If you had asked me, the words weren’t the problem— prudishness was. There was also a small amount of schadenfreude associated with upsetting people, the ones who gasped or got wide-eyed at a well-placed and thoroughly unexpected expletive. All a young man’s pleasures, I’ll give you, but a young man I was.
As I’ve gotten older, and more importantly after I became Catholic, my view on cussing has changed. I haven’t gotten self-righteous about it. What I’m realizing these days is that they’re ugly words for ugly thoughts, and that’s at the root of my current inclination toward diminishing my use of them now. In middle age, as time grows shorter, I don’t want to spend my time with the kinds of thoughts that lead me to say those things.
The problem with quitting cold-turkey is the appeal of cuss words. Some writers and writing teachers will say that the use of a cuss word is a weak substitute for doing the work of finding the right word. I disagree with that, personally: sometimes a cuss word is exactly the right word. If somebody cuts me off in traffic, I don’t think, That inconsiderate guy! Giving up cussing entirely would be so easy . . . if there weren’t people and situations that warrant their use.
During Lent, Catholics are supposed to use the days leading up to Easter to face the evil, darkness, and temptation that burden our lives. Some people give up a favorite pastime or food, which causes them to consciously resist temptation; others add a regimen of prayer or another daily practice that helps them to focus more on God than the world. For me, this Lenten observance is about turning my mind where my faith says it should be: to loving God, my fellow man, and the life He gave me. I may enjoy flinging them about carelessly, but there’s no love in cuss words. And the older I get, the more I’d rather have love in my heart. While anger and cussing have been significant aspects of my life, I’m thinking that maybe I can put a dent in the former by forgoing the latter.
“Dirty Boots: A Column of Critical Thinking, Border Crossing, and Noblesse Oblige” posts will be published regularly on Tuesday afternoons.
To read recent posts, click the date below:
Or to find and read earlier posts, click here for a full list.
March 10, 2019
March 8, 2019
Chasing Ghosts: Crother Louis Foster
Crother Foster, my great-grandfather, lived a hard-working life in central Virginia, and according to his death certificate, which was issued in Lynchburg, he “died suddenly” from a heart attack. Near the bottom of the document are listed his parents, Samuel and Elizabeth (Tucker) Foster of Campbell County, Virginia, and in the space labeled “Informant” is the name AC Foster, my grandfather.
Crother Foster was born in the summer of 1872, seven years after the Civil War ended, in the tiny community of Falling River, Virginia. Though his Virginia death certificate has the date altered to be 1882, that date can’t be correct since we see him in the 1880 census, an 8-year-old who is the next-to-youngest child of Samuel Foster. The family was living then with Samuel’s parents – my great-great-great-grandparents – Anthony and Paulina Foster, who were then 77 and 76 years old, respectively. Below them were Crother’s father Samuel, age 48 and his mother Elizabeth, age 30, with their six children: John, 20; Charles, 18; Radford, 15; Mary Alice, 13; Crother, 8; and Samuel, 6. The family also had the schoolteacher Mariah Craddock living with them as a boarder. (Presumably the teacher had some relation to the family, since youngest child Samuel’s middle name was Craddock.)
In 1898, Crother married Emma Harper, my great-grandmother, who was just 18 years old. By the 1900 census, the couple already had one child, Frank, who was a year old. They were still living in Falling River. Over the next few years, Crother and Emma Foster had more children: Lacy in 1902, Walter in 1903, and my grandfather Andrew Conley Foster in 1905.
However, Emma Harper Foster died in 1908 at the young age of 28. Her brief obituary was posted in the Clinch Valley News in Tazewell, Virginia. Three things are interesting to note about that. First, it states that she was survived by five children, when all available records only show four. Second, Tazewell is nowhere near Falling River. Finally, there is also no explanation of the circumstances of her death at such a young age, and I couldn’t find a death certificate for her.
With young children to raise, Crother quickly remarried. The 1910 census lists his wife as a woman named Rosa, who was 25. Rosa Lee (Holland) Foster had been married previously and had a son named Floyd Chesteen Holland. Floyd and my grandfather, now stepbrothers, were about the same age. At that point, Crother was farming in Falling River and all of children were still living with him: Frank, 11; Lacy, 9, Waltsy (who would be Walter), 7; Conley (who would be Andrew), 4; and stepson Floyd, 3.
By 1920, the situation would be very different for Crother Foster. The census that year lists only him, Rosa, and Floyd living together in Lynchburg, Virginia. Crother had moved to the city. He was in his mid-40s, and his occupation was listed as a box maker in a glass factory. At this point, all of his children had left home, even though the oldest, Frank, was only 21. Frank’s World War I draft card says that he was employed in Portsmouth, Ohio, which is a long way from Falling River. The other sons would have been 19, 17, and 15. Again, interestingly, none of Crother’s children are clearly or easily found in a 1920 census.
[image error]
Crother Louis Foster and family
It’s hard to say what happened in Crother Foster’s family during the late 1910s and 1920s, especially since the 1930 census has him and Rosa back in Falling River, farming, with his two young grandsons living with them. Louis T. Foster and Alfred A. Foster were my grandfather’s sons from his first marriage, and in 1930, the two boys were ages 4 and 1, and living with their Crother and Rosa, not with their parents. (They also had an oldest sister, who was not living there.) One of the few pictures I have of Crother and Rosa show them with two boys, who must be these two grandsons.
The only other traces of Crother Foster in official records come from Lynchburg city directories from the mid-1910s to late 1930s, which has he and Rosa living there. Of course, city directories only show heads of household and spouses, their workplace and home address, but not children.
Crother Foster died in 1938, at the age of 66. In my research, I could find no obituary for him; however, his death certificate listed his address as 914 Cabell Street in Lynchburg, which is only a few blocks from the James River. This simple farmer and laborer lived for most of his life in or near the crook of the Roanoke and Staunton rivers, in the sparsely populated area south of Lynchburg.
This man, who was my grandfather’s father, died ten years before my mother was born, so there are no personal recollections of him to draw from. His older three sons all died fairly young: Frank in 1956, at age 57; Lacy in 1941, at age 39; and Walter in 1952, at age 49. Only my grandfather, his youngest, lived to see his 60s.
Consequently, only a scant few anecdotes about Crother Foster have trickled down through the years. Some of those involved my grandfather’s displeasure at what he regarded as preferential treatment that his stepmother showed to her son Floyd. According to what I’ve been told, Rosa Holland Foster made sure that Floyd had the first and best, and since Crother didn’t stand up for his own children, they could be left without what they needed. Sadly, this might explain the untimely diaspora of Crother’s sons, who seem to have struck out on their own very young.
