They tell us we're the sum of those who've gone before us. If that's the case, I guess I owe a lot to some of these people.
They tell us we're the sum of those who've gone before us. If that's the case, I guess I owe a lot to some of these people.
Thomas Jefferson Jordan was my great grandfather on my Father's side. Look at this photo and you know as much about him as I do. I know he married a Cherokee woman (It's from that family that we have this photo.) and he lived for a great deal of his life in Oklahoma in the Cherokee Indian Nation section of the Indian Territority fathering two boys.
Rufus Jordan, my grandfather, was one of those boys. He died a few years before I was born, so I don't really know all that much about him, but I can imagine a great deal from what I've been told.
He was rock mason, like my father who is currently working on a job with stone from a quarry Rufus opened fifty years ago, and much of his life's work is still around to be seen. He did beautiful stone work on people's houses as well as working on various public works projects such as drainage ditches for carrying away runoff from rain storms to helping assemble the huge stone monument at Praire Grove's Battlefield State Park.
I've heard he was a hard man. And I believe that. He lived in hard times and made a living for a wife and seven children in a demanding and punishing line of work. It's natural he wouldn't be the kind of man to lend himself to many tender moments. But he continued working and providing for his family until the moment he died, there's not much better that you can say of some people.
I know a lot more about my great grandfather on my Mother's side, Eugene Phillip Hite, or Gene to everyone who knew him. He lived to his nineties and for quite a few years we lived within sight of their house on the family farm. After they sold the farm and moved into "town," Morrow was all of fifty people on a good day down at the store, I was the driver for several doctor, grocery and bill paying trips.
What I could say about this man would fill four or five web sites. I know there'll never be another man, or a generation of men like him. In the years of the Great Depression he moved his family out of Western Oklahoma to Northwest Arkansas in two covered wagons. To support themselves on the move they followed the fruit and vegetable harvest until they came to Lincoln, Arkansas where they met a real estate salesman. That day he took them in a model T off Lincoln Mountain on a road so steep that when the wagons came to it, they had to use a block and tackle and a pole through the wheels to prevent a run away. The farm he showed them wasn't much. It had a big old two story house and a huge old barn and about forty acres of land to go with it. By the time Great Granddad sold it, the house had burned down one terrifying night to be replaced with a new ranch-style home the whole family had pitched in to build, the old barn with tack and feed rooms, stalls for cattle, mules and horses as well four areas you could store hay in besides the loft overhead had been surplanted by a simple steel hay barn. On top of that over the years neighboring plots of land had been added to the farm until it was just over 280 acres supporting about sixty head of cattle.
That was impressive enough, I guess. But the thing that's always told me more of what kind of man he was came late in his life when he lost both his legs due to poor circulation. When they took the first one, he was coming out of the drugs and felt down for where his leg should have been. When he couldn't feel it, his only comment was "Aw shoot." Then he went back to sleep. I know my comment would have been much different had our roles been reversed.
After he came home from the hospital with two artifical legs he was determined to learn to walk again. Within months he was up and able to walk with only the aid of two canes. I remember how proud we were of him and the look on his face when he managed to take his first steps with those canes. But that was the high point. That level of physical activity was really hard on him and he was in his eighties by this time. Soon afterward his health turned against him.
Carl Marvin Hite was Gene's son and my grandfather. I probably called him Grandfather less than a dozen times in his whole life. Carl liked to pester people in a playful way. It was his way of showing he liked you. (And it's become a trait I've picked up over the years to the devilment of my long-suffering wife.) When I was born he told my Mother that he was going to call me Pedro Lopez. Well, Dad moved fast and told Carl that he'd make a deal with him. He could call me Pete instead of Pedro, if I could call him Carl. Well, Carl agreed and I guess it wasn't until I was a teenager that it ever occurred to me that Carl was also Grandfather. He'd always been Carl to me.
Carl did several things in his life. He was with the family when they moved from Oklahoma to Arkansas, he ran a canning factory, he raised chickens, ran a farm next to the one his father ran, logged timber all over Washington County, Arkansas and ran several sawmills, with his sons and my Father he operated a team of gravel and asphalt-hauling trucks all over Arkansas and drove a truck over the road in partnership with his sons. And that's just a few of the things he did for a living during his life.
He was a quiet man, one of those people who's whole life is an example of how to get along peacefully in a busy world. I think the only time I ever heard him raise his voice was when I was working in his sawmill and he thought I was about to do something really wrong.
He died doing something he told us a thousand times to never do. He was unloading logs from a log truck and the load shifted on him. For some reason he climbed under the overhanging logs to finish unhooking the chains without having a frontend loader there to hold the logs in place while he did so. The load shifted and he was hit in the back of the head by a falling log. Three days later he died in the hospital.
To this day I'm sorry I was so busy with my own life at the time that I was only able to see him twice in the hospital before he died. The first he was asleep and I didn't want to wake him just to say "Hi" and ask how he was doing. On my other visit, he was dying. When I walked into his room they were working frantically to save his life. Fifteen minutes later he was officially pronounced dead.
Some people I know don't like to dream of their dead relatives. I do. In the years since Carl, Great Granddad and a host of other realtives have died, I've often had dreams with them in them. I see these dreams as a valuable chance to visit with them once again and bring them up to date on what's been happening since they've left. I've had several chances to visit with Carl and reestablish, at least in my mind, the balance we always had in the years before he died. I've also been able to tell him about all the things the Great Granddaughter he never had a chance to see because she came along after he was gone has been up to. And I'm always happy for the chance to have these "visits" because I know he's as proud of her as he's been with me.
And so the line continues.
When I get a chance I'll write about the four grandmother's in this family. As they say, behind every great man, there's a great woman.