For the past couple years, I have been slowly slogging through the treasure trove of writings, pictures, postcard and flotsam and jetsam left behind by my 10 Lancaster family uncles and aunts.
All my mother's siblings lived well into their 90's. They came from humble beginnings in Floyd County, Virginia. and were scattered to the 4 winds of the Great Depression and WW 1 and 2. They became lawyers, teachers, businessmen, nurses and executive secretaries. Not one returned to the farm. The Lancaster family had been on the farm for over 200 years.
My mother, Virginia Ruth Lancaster Shields was the last of the 10 siblings and died at 102 in 2000. Being the longest lived, she became the recipient of all that was Lancaster.
The oldest, Attaway, was born in 1899; the youngest, John Kyle Lancaster, in 1923. They saw much and went far, but no one of them ever returned to the 70-acre farm, except for a few weeks in the summers.
These brief summer gatherings of the 10 siblings, their wives and children (my cousins) were magic. Music, hikes, visiting old haunts and cemeteries, breakfast at Mabry's Mill, swimming at the white rock, frog gigging, walking to Leonard Smith's store for penny candy and visits with neighbors and family kin were a whirlwind of activities...and over too soon.
All Lancaster's were endowed with a gift of storytelling, music and wanderlust. We cousins were overwhelmed and awed at the experiences they talked of. Their early childhoods, the Great Depression, the World Wars. I think we cousins were blessed and never fell far from the orchard of the larger-than-life family trees we were born to.
I know grass never grew under my feet. I can tell a tale as well as any of them and leaned my music by osmosis from the entire Lancaster/Phlegar clan! I still have Uncle Red's banjo with the skin head with the faded words to Ground Hog written on it.
I was the recipient of Uncle John's LG-1 Gibson guitar. He gave me incentive to really learn to play. I found the guitar in a closet and had it restored. it has traveled many years to on stage gigs, jams and festivals.
As I was going through the prodigious mounds of pictures and writings, and hundreds of penny post cards, I began to see how connected they were to their mother, Rachel and to each other.
These cards seemed to me the " text messages" of the day. Most of them written to my grandmother. These cards and letters provided much insight into the daily lives and fortunes of my uncles and aunts.
Uncle Robert Lancaster was a prodigious writer; a lawyer with a Ph.D. in Juris Prudence. He was Fulbright Scholar, and lectured at Bagdad University, University of Tokyo and a long history in the Administration at Sewanee, formally known as The University of the South. He had a great compassion for people and a wonderful Ben Franklin sense of humor.
Uncle Red once told me. "Patrick, you never let your schooling interfere with your education." I look back and say he was right... one's experiences are the sum total of one's education. He was a multifaceted personality, lawyer, scholar, hunter, musician, carpenter, writer, and influenced many a young man at Sewanee. The student body had a nickname for him...called him The Red Dog due to his uncanny ability to know exactly what mischief was afoot on a campus of 600 young men, trapped on a mountain top, miles from civilization. "Men," he would say, I've been young and done it all myself, hard to fool and old red dog."
I found this the other day in one of "Uncle Red's" lecture notebooks, in which he was outlining the Russo American foreign policy of the Nixon administration for a Political Science lecture. Typed on onion paper and folded neatly between the pages...
" I had 12 bottles of whiskey in the cellar, and my wife told me to empty the content of each bottle down the sink---or else.
I began the unpleasant task. I withdrew the cork on the first bottle and poured the contents down the sink, with the exception of on glass which I drank. I extracted the cork from the second bottle and did likewise, with the exception of one glass which I drank. I removed the cork for the third bottle of shiskey and poured the contents down the sink.
I pilled the cork from the fourth sink and poured the bottle down the glass, which I drank. I piled the bottle from the next glass and drank one sink out of it and threw the rest down the glass. I pulled the glass out of the next sink and poured the cork from the bottle. I then corked the sink with the glass, bottled the drink, and drank the pour.
When everything was emptied, I steadied the house with one hand, counted the bottles. corks, glasses and sinks with the other, which were twenty-nine, and as the house came by, I counted them again. I finally had all the houses in one bottle which I drank.
I'm not under the alchofulence of Incohol, but thinkle peep I am. I'm not half so thunk as you might drink. I fool so feelish, I don't know who is me, and drunker I stand the longer I get."
I took My Uncle Red's Political Science class as a freshman at Sewanee. I failed, as you might imagine. I was never destined to become a Sophomore at the University of the South.
I left before Finals in the spring and hitchhiked home to Athens, Ga.
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