The other side of the family: my grandfather

James's father, James Wilburn Melton, called J.W., was born in 1871, in the latter years of post-Civil War Reconstruction. At twenty-one, he married Rose Thornton, settled in Moultire, Georgia, and in 1893 their first son, Wilburn Pruitt Melton, was born. My father was born in 1904. Before James was a year old, J.W. moved his growing family (which would eventually number seven children) to Citra, Florida, to take advantage of an opportunity in the lumber business. Sometimes J.W.'s sawmill prospered, and sometimes it didn't—and as a result there was just enough hardship to insure that quality in my father that

made for success.

At some point in the early 1930s, J.W. and Rose chose to separate. They never divorced.

J.W. actually had a sentimental side. He was a smoker, but could only afford the cheaper kind of cigarettes you roll yourself. When young James got a job as a delivery boy, he spent his first earnings to buy his father two packs of ready-made cigarettes. When J.W. died of lung cancer in 1942, those two precious packs were found crumbling from age in his dresser drawer. He’d never smoked them because that would have destroyed the loving gift from his son.

In 1938 my father sent J.W. on a "grand tour" of Europe. Unfortunately, I know nothing about the motivation for this trip, nor about the ports of call. In fact, I know very little about J.W., because my father rarely talked about him, and he died three years before I was born.

The other side of the family...

I want to give some blog space to my other grandmother, especially because my mother's mother lived with the Meltons in Weston, Connecticut from 1939 until we moved to Greenwich in 1954.

The McClure's were Yankees, and my father used to joke that he was twenty-one before he knew "damnyankee" wasn't one word. He may have been joking, but he was in some way acknowledging the Melton's rural Southern roots.  The McClures were well-educated, urbane Midwesterners. My grandmother was a writer who had published five novels. Grandfather was trained as a medical doctor, but he decided the budding auto industry was more to his liking.  Later he switched  to a third career in finance—unfortunately just before the Great Depression.

When she was widowed in 1939, my grandmother McClure moved into a wing of the Melton house they'd built especially for her.  My father truly loved "Nellie," as he called her, and the extended family lived in happy symbiosis until the Meltons downsized in the mid-1950s. Nana McClure then bought a house with her sister, Gladys Sibley, in Westport, where they lived happily for ten years.

 

Although my mother was a good cook, she was a better supervisor of the series of live-in cooks the Meltons employed, and never failed to inspire them to the culinary heights of which they were capable.  But she never really mastered all of the Southern specialties my father loved. She once asked her mother-in-law how to make those gorgeously flaky beaten biscuits.  Miss Rose's technique was to take handful of this, a pinch of that, knead it until it felt right, and bake it until it was done.  Try as she might my mother could never master it.  In fact, one might say that all things Southern proved difficult for her.

Here's the image of Nana Rose and her chariot, mentioned in my previous post.

James Melton and Rose Thornton Melton c. 1940s

I remember my father's mother, "Nana Rose," but only in her later years, as an invalid, lying in a high hospital bed in the home my father had purchased for her and his youngest sister, Mary, in Jacksonville, Florida. My father had been his mother's sole support for thirty years. He adored her, and sent her an orchid for her pillow every Sunday during her invalid years, and periodically hired an ambulance to drive her—hospital bed and all—around Jacksonville.  

Before she became severely bed-ridden, there's a photo of her in a wheelchair in front of a big old 1930s Packard limousine  with a ramp to the passenger compartment.  It was obviously found or fashioned for her use by my father.  But who drove her in this conveyance, I wonder? Married at seventeen, with seven children born over the space of twenty-four years, separation from her husband (although they never divorced), and numerous illnesses no doubt aged her prematurely. In late 1956, after five years of being completely bedridden following a stroke, the last three years with round-the-clock nurses, Nana Rose died at the age of seventy-eight of congestive heart failure.  Remarkably, my father sang at her funeral. In spite of his sadness, he must have been relieved that this drain on his resources ceased at a time when he was beset by financial woes.

Baby Margo Enters the Picture

According to English essayist Charles Lamb (1817-1834), everyone has two birthdays:  the day on which they were born and New Year's Day. Well, if this is true, then I have three birthdays.  November 17th, the day on which I was born, New Year's Day, and February 27, the day on which I was adopted by Marjorie and James Melton from The Cradle in Illinois.  In my book, that is certainly a day to be celebrated!

After seventeen years of marriage (my mother was 36 and my father 42), they embarked on the adoption process.  Considered by many agencies to be too old to adopt a child, they found a sympathetic reception at The Cradle in Evanston, Illinois.  Other celebrities had "Cradle Babies," among them most notably Bob Hope, Pat O'Brien and George Burns.  I wonder if my parents' friendship with the O'Briens (during my father's short movie career) had anything to do with my advent.  The process, once initiated, took almost a year.  But then, suddenly on February 16, 1946, they got the call to come to Chicago.   My father was on a concert tour, my mother on vacation with her mother at Hot Springs, Virginia.

Here's what my mother wrote in her journal:

"We couldn't meet - Jimmie and I - until February 27th.  Ten days - of dreaming, hoping, wondering what she was like.  Ten days of labor pains! As real as real ones, for I thought of nothing else, and was so tense as to be almost ill.  Jimmie and I talked daily by phone, conjecturing, naming her, planning.  I thought of that little life beginning and the momentous decision that would decide her future.  Was she ours or wasn't she?  I needed her so much that I knew she had to be."

They hadn't told anyone, not even family, that the adoption was imminent.  Imagine the relatives' surprise when my father sang a lullaby on his radio program a few days later, and then announced that it was for his new baby daughter named Marjorie Linda, to be called Margo.

"Hizzoner"

Thanks to one of my faithful friends, I discovered a 1933 movie my father made with Bert Lahr.  The strangest thing is that nowhere in my voluminous press clippings going back to the early 1920s, do I find any mention of "Hizzoner."  I'd always believed that "Stars Over Broadway"  (1935) was my father's first film until my friend Don Peak in Hollywood clued me in and sent me a videotape.  This 20-minute movie's plot is pretty silly, as befits Lahr.  It's the handsome young "singing mayor" for whom all the women swoon (and vote) versus the inept policeman (Lahr) whom the backroom pols pit against him. Let me say, a little bit of Bert goes a long way, but my father at age twenty-nine looks pretty good!

If you're really interested, there's a videotape available at www.a-1video.com/talking.htm for $16.98 (plus shipping).  It's part of a tape called "Talking Comedy Rarities Vol. 1."

Wish I had a photo from this movie!