EPA
I was an experienced docket clerk; I knew more about the nature of the job and what needed to be done than he did or anyone else. He supported me and left me alone. It was this peculiar staff relationship that led to my staying at EPA for the remainder of my work career. As long as I carried out the assignment, an important one, but not a hard one, no one had much to say about my hours, working conditions or whatever, and that was certainly the way I liked it.
During most of this time I had an assistant, a very able young man named Gordon McLeod. He had been hired as the chauffeur of the big boss and had worked his way into my office. He was bright and he was good; he had married into a family of Jehovah's Witnesses and become a Witness. He used to talk to people about 'our little paradise'; I think he enjoyed the freedom from constraints as much as I did.
I expect he considered me a good boss; I never asked him to do anything that I didn't also do myself. In fact I hardly ever asked him to do anything period because he soon learned all that had to be done and did it without any prompting. We were often in a situation where there was not enough work for two people; under those circumstances he just assumed that he was the one to do what had to be done. Gordon was one of the few people who ever worked for me, and certainly about the best.
There were some other employees who did not work out so well. Elaine, a large, young, black mother of 2, sister of others, was described by Gordon as a 'big mama'. He meant that others in her family would come to her for direction, help, etc. Elaine did not mind working, but she would have considered it a violation of her rights not to take every hour of sick leave to which she was entitled. I doubt that she failed to take sick leave any week while she worked for me.
Elaine also managed to get a temporary appointment (lasting a year) and be out a good part of it for maternity leave. She came back to work with about 3 months on her term and set out to rebuild her reputation. At that time we had thousands of pages of material that were to be microfilmed on a machine in the office. I put her to work on the camera and she did a commendable job for us that last three months. I gave her a good recommendation, somewhat to the dismay of some of my associates who knew about her record.
Kenneth was a middle class black, just out of high school. He had a rather minimal sense of responsibility. He made a practice of working no more than four days a week. I finally got him in the habit of calling the office on the days when he was not going to work; he always had a good excuse. When he did come in, he performed fairly creditably.
At EPA the professional staff was almost entirely white and the lower level workers almost entirely black. The personnel department was predominantly black and actually functioned as a sort of road block for any professional employment. The program offices pretty well decided who was going to work for them, but had to jump through various procedural hoops to clear the personnel office.
Jeffrey Camp, administrative officer for the Office of General Counsel, was the man who hired me, and he had his hands full getting me through the personnel office. I had decided that I would absolutely not stay at NHTSA, and in desperation I made arrangements to return to the WNC Conference as a parish minister. Actually I was scheduled to go to Hot Springs. That was not exactly a glowing prospect, but I would have taken it if necessary.
Meanwhile the job at EPA was pending. I finally told them I would not be available after June 1, (coincidentally the same thing I had told Clodfelter 22 years before), and the job came through. I immediately notified the District Superintendent in Asheville. He wasn't surprised at all; in fact he seemed rather apologetic. This was the year before I moved into the retirement status as a Methodist minister.
EPA hired me to set up the docket for the Clean Air Act. A docket clerk is a sort of combination of librarian and clerk of court. I had the care and maintenance of the public records for rulemaking activities in the promulgation of regulations for the Clean Air Act. These of course are quasi-judicial documents, and most of them eventually became judicial documents when the rule was finally made and immediately challenged in court by industry and/or public interest groups.
In one of the job interviews Jeffrey asked me if I could get the job done in a space of 600 square feet. I thought fast and replied that I could do it if I had microfilming capabilities. (I learned later that there were no budgetary limits on setting up this office. I might have demanded twice as much space and 3 times as much staff, but I had no such intention.) At any rate my reply led to the purchase of a 3M camera for microfilming, duplicators and readers. Over the next 11 years we filmed close to 2 million pages of documents--all in house and all with a minimal staff. By reasonable calculations this saved the government a good million dollars over what it would have cost to contract that work and/or maintain hard copy. To maintain hard copies of everything would have required ten or fifteen thousand square feet of floor space filled with filing cabinets.
I became thoroughly convinced that the path to advancement in government most commonly involves larger expenditures of money and more staff. It is very much of a cost plus arrangement, particularly for career mid level management. After our office was about ten years old, some folks from another EPA department inspected our operation and refused to believe that we could do the job with the two people presently employed.
My boss was quite aware that I was saving the government money, and in fact gave me a promotion based on merit after I had been doing it for quite a few years. In general there is no percentage or future for a government manager to economize on his operation. The way to advance his career is to demand more resources and more staff. Thankfully I never had the temptation to go that route, and fortunately Ellie's job provided adequate financial resources for us to live.
At NHTSA I was Chief Docket Clerk with a lot of records and a little help, but very little authority as to how to carry out the job. My boss, Winnie, micromanaged quite a bit and in fact thought nothing of giving me additional work whenever anything came up. In contrast at EPA I had complete responsibility and authority to carry out the assignment, a much more satisfactory arrangement. At the old place I had become conscious of a number of problems that I could do nothing about. At EPA I set up the job so as to avoid some of those problems.
One of the most acute was the simple physical security of the documents. At the old office visitors to the docket were in the habit of helping themselves to the files--and of course a lot of stuff got lost. I finally convinced Winnie we must not allow that and set up a point beyond which the public could not go. We operated with ten copies of everything, and although the docket was much smaller there than it became at EPA, we had a fantastic number of filing cabinets crammed with material.
At EPA I arranged the furniture so the public had no direct access to our documents: they were required to fill out a requisition listing what they wanted. We got it for them and of course they had to check it back in before they left.
On the other hand I designed the copying procedures so that the public did their own copying, then paid us (by check) for what they had done. And finally we filmed everything as soon as possible and stored the hard copy. Thereafter the public had access to microfiche, which they could reproduce on our machine for $.50 per fiche.
Most comparable offices had low level personnel doing these jobs at much greater expense to the government.
I was allowed to design all these procedures and had a free hand in their implementation. Most of the Clean Air Act personnel happened to be stationed at Durham, and I made several trips down there to instruct them in how to conform to our procedures and requirements. I flew down once, drove a government car once as I recall, and on one occasion drove my own car--in order to have use for private purposes in off hours.
All this was kind of fun: setting up an office, getting people to help, developing procedures, etc. etc. The fun lasted about two years, and thereafter the job paled off into a very routine activity. They didn't really need me for that, and I should have looked for another job. But I was getting up closer and closer to retirement age, it was a comfortable (though not very well paid position), and in particular I dreaded the uncertainty of getting in another uncomfortable situation such as I had encountered at the old place. So I sat tight until age 62.
The presence of Gordon McLeod made it easier. As I have already intimated, he did most of the work and relieved me of most of the burdens involved. During this time I got interested in William Blake and eventually did a good bit of the work of writing my book at the office. I began to identify with Walt Whitman, another civil servant, who was in fact fired when his boss found a dirty book in his desk, entitled Leaves of Grass. (Walt got another job soon thereafter.) They never found a dirty book in my desk, but I had one, named Ram Horn'd with Gold. Such are the compensations of the under-achiever.
I looked forward to Gordon taking my place when I retired. Unfortunately Gordon couldn't wait quite long enough. He had two children while he worked for me, and eventually he decided he would have to look for a better job situation. He moved to West Virginia--partly due to his religious interests, but also hoping to better himself economically. I don't know how well he succeeded; I did get a chance to give a good recommendation to one potential employer.
At any rate he sort of left me in the lurch--some two and a half years before I could retire. The job got quite burdensome thereafter It wasn't exactly hard, just tiresome, tedious, lonely, unrewarding. A year or two before I became eligible for retirement Mr. Yamada, my boss, made arrangements to get me a merit promotion; I had been in the same grade level at which I started all those years. Actually there wasn't much reason to have a higher level person at the job. I had finished the higher level job the first year or two when I set up the program.
Thereafter I worked well below my capability. I did this because I liked the working conditions and didn't want to push. Actually I could have done much more for them and would have gladly. In fact I had not been there more than about a year when I volunteered to take charge of the law library as well as my present responsibilities. My boss would have been glad for me to do this, but a young woman, who was leaving the law library objected, and he was not willing to go counter to her wishes. Thereafter I understood that there was little point in my volunteering for additional work.
The best thing about my job of course was that no one bothered me. In the chain of command there was no one between me and the deputy general counsel, a distance of about 7 grade levels. He couldn't care less what I did as long as no trouble arose. I maintained the records, made them available to the public as well as agency personnel, collected money for copying (I refused to take cash, insisted on checks because I had heard of docket clerks having financial problems in the handling of money). We microfilmed all these millions of pages as soon as we could, and then stored the hard copy. That kept the operation in bounds.
Jeffrey Camp, the administrative office, had hired me, but he was not in a position of authority. He provided support regarding physical equipment, supplies, etc. etc. The federal budget runs on a year that ends Oct. 1. Every year around late August Jeffrey would call me and ask me if I needed anything. What he really meant was that he had money that he had to spend---or lose. (One of the worst things a federal bureaucrat can do is to neglect to spend all the money he has been alloted. So I would look around and decide what we could use.
My biggest problem in the 10 years I worked for EPA was to find some way to spend the time. Most of my leisure hours (at the office!) were occupied with doing things with the computer. I had been very much of an anti-computer person for a number of years, but I was converted overnight to a computer nut.
The secretaries had all been given a machine called a Lexitron, which was really a computer dedicated to word processing. One day (it must have been around 1980) Gordon informed me that he thought we might be able to get one. At that time we were using an IBM electric typewriter to keep our records. We did get a Lexitron, and my attitude toward computers went from one extreme to the other instantaneously. How lovely to be able to correct your 'typos' and print out a letter (or whatever) without an error on the page.
During most of this time I had an assistant, a very able young man named Gordon McLeod. He had been hired as the chauffeur of the big boss and had worked his way into my office. He was bright and he was good; he had married into a family of Jehovah's Witnesses and become a Witness. He used to talk to people about 'our little paradise'; I think he enjoyed the freedom from constraints as much as I did.
I expect he considered me a good boss; I never asked him to do anything that I didn't also do myself. In fact I hardly ever asked him to do anything period because he soon learned all that had to be done and did it without any prompting. We were often in a situation where there was not enough work for two people; under those circumstances he just assumed that he was the one to do what had to be done. Gordon was one of the few people who ever worked for me, and certainly about the best.
There were some other employees who did not work out so well. Elaine, a large, young, black mother of 2, sister of others, was described by Gordon as a 'big mama'. He meant that others in her family would come to her for direction, help, etc. Elaine did not mind working, but she would have considered it a violation of her rights not to take every hour of sick leave to which she was entitled. I doubt that she failed to take sick leave any week while she worked for me.
Elaine also managed to get a temporary appointment (lasting a year) and be out a good part of it for maternity leave. She came back to work with about 3 months on her term and set out to rebuild her reputation. At that time we had thousands of pages of material that were to be microfilmed on a machine in the office. I put her to work on the camera and she did a commendable job for us that last three months. I gave her a good recommendation, somewhat to the dismay of some of my associates who knew about her record.
Kenneth was a middle class black, just out of high school. He had a rather minimal sense of responsibility. He made a practice of working no more than four days a week. I finally got him in the habit of calling the office on the days when he was not going to work; he always had a good excuse. When he did come in, he performed fairly creditably.
At EPA the professional staff was almost entirely white and the lower level workers almost entirely black. The personnel department was predominantly black and actually functioned as a sort of road block for any professional employment. The program offices pretty well decided who was going to work for them, but had to jump through various procedural hoops to clear the personnel office.
Jeffrey Camp, administrative officer for the Office of General Counsel, was the man who hired me, and he had his hands full getting me through the personnel office. I had decided that I would absolutely not stay at NHTSA, and in desperation I made arrangements to return to the WNC Conference as a parish minister. Actually I was scheduled to go to Hot Springs. That was not exactly a glowing prospect, but I would have taken it if necessary.
Meanwhile the job at EPA was pending. I finally told them I would not be available after June 1, (coincidentally the same thing I had told Clodfelter 22 years before), and the job came through. I immediately notified the District Superintendent in Asheville. He wasn't surprised at all; in fact he seemed rather apologetic. This was the year before I moved into the retirement status as a Methodist minister.
EPA hired me to set up the docket for the Clean Air Act. A docket clerk is a sort of combination of librarian and clerk of court. I had the care and maintenance of the public records for rulemaking activities in the promulgation of regulations for the Clean Air Act. These of course are quasi-judicial documents, and most of them eventually became judicial documents when the rule was finally made and immediately challenged in court by industry and/or public interest groups.
In one of the job interviews Jeffrey asked me if I could get the job done in a space of 600 square feet. I thought fast and replied that I could do it if I had microfilming capabilities. (I learned later that there were no budgetary limits on setting up this office. I might have demanded twice as much space and 3 times as much staff, but I had no such intention.) At any rate my reply led to the purchase of a 3M camera for microfilming, duplicators and readers. Over the next 11 years we filmed close to 2 million pages of documents--all in house and all with a minimal staff. By reasonable calculations this saved the government a good million dollars over what it would have cost to contract that work and/or maintain hard copy. To maintain hard copies of everything would have required ten or fifteen thousand square feet of floor space filled with filing cabinets.
I became thoroughly convinced that the path to advancement in government most commonly involves larger expenditures of money and more staff. It is very much of a cost plus arrangement, particularly for career mid level management. After our office was about ten years old, some folks from another EPA department inspected our operation and refused to believe that we could do the job with the two people presently employed.
My boss was quite aware that I was saving the government money, and in fact gave me a promotion based on merit after I had been doing it for quite a few years. In general there is no percentage or future for a government manager to economize on his operation. The way to advance his career is to demand more resources and more staff. Thankfully I never had the temptation to go that route, and fortunately Ellie's job provided adequate financial resources for us to live.
At NHTSA I was Chief Docket Clerk with a lot of records and a little help, but very little authority as to how to carry out the job. My boss, Winnie, micromanaged quite a bit and in fact thought nothing of giving me additional work whenever anything came up. In contrast at EPA I had complete responsibility and authority to carry out the assignment, a much more satisfactory arrangement. At the old place I had become conscious of a number of problems that I could do nothing about. At EPA I set up the job so as to avoid some of those problems.
One of the most acute was the simple physical security of the documents. At the old office visitors to the docket were in the habit of helping themselves to the files--and of course a lot of stuff got lost. I finally convinced Winnie we must not allow that and set up a point beyond which the public could not go. We operated with ten copies of everything, and although the docket was much smaller there than it became at EPA, we had a fantastic number of filing cabinets crammed with material.
At EPA I arranged the furniture so the public had no direct access to our documents: they were required to fill out a requisition listing what they wanted. We got it for them and of course they had to check it back in before they left.
On the other hand I designed the copying procedures so that the public did their own copying, then paid us (by check) for what they had done. And finally we filmed everything as soon as possible and stored the hard copy. Thereafter the public had access to microfiche, which they could reproduce on our machine for $.50 per fiche.
Most comparable offices had low level personnel doing these jobs at much greater expense to the government.
I was allowed to design all these procedures and had a free hand in their implementation. Most of the Clean Air Act personnel happened to be stationed at Durham, and I made several trips down there to instruct them in how to conform to our procedures and requirements. I flew down once, drove a government car once as I recall, and on one occasion drove my own car--in order to have use for private purposes in off hours.
All this was kind of fun: setting up an office, getting people to help, developing procedures, etc. etc. The fun lasted about two years, and thereafter the job paled off into a very routine activity. They didn't really need me for that, and I should have looked for another job. But I was getting up closer and closer to retirement age, it was a comfortable (though not very well paid position), and in particular I dreaded the uncertainty of getting in another uncomfortable situation such as I had encountered at the old place. So I sat tight until age 62.
The presence of Gordon McLeod made it easier. As I have already intimated, he did most of the work and relieved me of most of the burdens involved. During this time I got interested in William Blake and eventually did a good bit of the work of writing my book at the office. I began to identify with Walt Whitman, another civil servant, who was in fact fired when his boss found a dirty book in his desk, entitled Leaves of Grass. (Walt got another job soon thereafter.) They never found a dirty book in my desk, but I had one, named Ram Horn'd with Gold. Such are the compensations of the under-achiever.
I looked forward to Gordon taking my place when I retired. Unfortunately Gordon couldn't wait quite long enough. He had two children while he worked for me, and eventually he decided he would have to look for a better job situation. He moved to West Virginia--partly due to his religious interests, but also hoping to better himself economically. I don't know how well he succeeded; I did get a chance to give a good recommendation to one potential employer.
At any rate he sort of left me in the lurch--some two and a half years before I could retire. The job got quite burdensome thereafter It wasn't exactly hard, just tiresome, tedious, lonely, unrewarding. A year or two before I became eligible for retirement Mr. Yamada, my boss, made arrangements to get me a merit promotion; I had been in the same grade level at which I started all those years. Actually there wasn't much reason to have a higher level person at the job. I had finished the higher level job the first year or two when I set up the program.
Thereafter I worked well below my capability. I did this because I liked the working conditions and didn't want to push. Actually I could have done much more for them and would have gladly. In fact I had not been there more than about a year when I volunteered to take charge of the law library as well as my present responsibilities. My boss would have been glad for me to do this, but a young woman, who was leaving the law library objected, and he was not willing to go counter to her wishes. Thereafter I understood that there was little point in my volunteering for additional work.
The best thing about my job of course was that no one bothered me. In the chain of command there was no one between me and the deputy general counsel, a distance of about 7 grade levels. He couldn't care less what I did as long as no trouble arose. I maintained the records, made them available to the public as well as agency personnel, collected money for copying (I refused to take cash, insisted on checks because I had heard of docket clerks having financial problems in the handling of money). We microfilmed all these millions of pages as soon as we could, and then stored the hard copy. That kept the operation in bounds.
Jeffrey Camp, the administrative office, had hired me, but he was not in a position of authority. He provided support regarding physical equipment, supplies, etc. etc. The federal budget runs on a year that ends Oct. 1. Every year around late August Jeffrey would call me and ask me if I needed anything. What he really meant was that he had money that he had to spend---or lose. (One of the worst things a federal bureaucrat can do is to neglect to spend all the money he has been alloted. So I would look around and decide what we could use.
My biggest problem in the 10 years I worked for EPA was to find some way to spend the time. Most of my leisure hours (at the office!) were occupied with doing things with the computer. I had been very much of an anti-computer person for a number of years, but I was converted overnight to a computer nut.
The secretaries had all been given a machine called a Lexitron, which was really a computer dedicated to word processing. One day (it must have been around 1980) Gordon informed me that he thought we might be able to get one. At that time we were using an IBM electric typewriter to keep our records. We did get a Lexitron, and my attitude toward computers went from one extreme to the other instantaneously. How lovely to be able to correct your 'typos' and print out a letter (or whatever) without an error on the page.
The Blake Project
During this period I became interested in William Blake. Northrup Frye's book, Fearful Symmetry, made it possible for me to read Blake's more obscure poetry with some understanding. I read the book a good five times over a period of years. Blake's poetry is quite an intellectual challenge and can occupy one for many hours of creative endeavour.
I studied Blake over a period of about five years, and eventually wrote a book on his poetry, which I entitled Ram Horn'd with Gold (a phrase from one of his poems). The Lexitron was a valuable tool in that occupation. I submitted part of my manuscript to several publishers, but without getting encouragement from any of them; it was not commercial. There is still the option of publishing it online.
Blake always seemed to me like a kindred spirit. A radical rebel against the conventions of society, but a quiet one who knew how to stay out of trouble. His unconventional theological ideas seemed most congruent with my own (and still do!). The ability to 'non-conform' and still survive in society is one of my primary values. I think likely that all three of our sons have acquired that taste and gift to some extent.
A few of my friends have been kind enough to read my book. Our Mission Group at the Church of the Saviour made a valiant effort to study it under my direction, very much a labor of love on their part.
The Computer
Once I discovered the value and beauty of the computer it wasn't long until it became a big part of my life. I found that there was software that made it possible to use the Lexitron for other things than the word processing program for which it was primarily designed. We got this additional software, and I started doing a bit of programming in Basic.
Then Ellie found a little TI machine in a toy store for $50, which gave me a chance to do computing at home. It was pretty primitive, no way to print out anything, and the only form of storage was a kind of tape that had sequential access. Anyway I played with it, got more and more interested and eventually bit the bullet and got a $2500 Epson rig.
A large Epson Users' Group met in Northern Virginia. Eventually I became the disk librarian of the group. I was responsible for publishing a utility disk each month, which we sold to the membership for $5. This was actually the primary financial support of the group: we sold several hundred of these disks over a period of time.
Being disk librarian was fun. I had to find public domain utility programs to put on my monthly disks. Soon it became two disks a month: a CP/M disk and a DOS disk. To get these utility programs I spent large amounts of time with my modem (at home or at the office), contacting computer bulletin boards: one of their primary functions was to provide and exchange for these public domain computer utility programs.
I came to believe that any commercial software could be more or less duplicated with one or more public domain programs. In fact a great deal of commercial software is simply taken from the public domain programs.
After a year or so I started programming in Forth, and wrote several programs which I put on the bulletin boards. I had no original ideas to speak of, but I was interested in seeing for myself how the primary computer tasks were accomplished. I did a checkbook program that I still like in some ways better than the present commercial one. The advantage of my program was that I entered the data with a full screen editor; that makes a lot more sense to me than the conventional way of doing it. I also did a word processor. Some friends wondered why I should waste my time doing things that had already been done. Why does a teenager tinker with motors, doing all sorts of things that have been done? Computer programming was about as close to mechanics as I have ever gotten.
Eventually I worked in Pascal and then in C--briefly in both cases. I always enjoyed programming and would be doing it right now if my time wasn't taken up with other things that at the moment seem more meaningful.
Mark had done his first year of college at University of Delaware. He won a National Merit Scholarship and chose to go to Tulane. He had good relationships down there with Ellie's family. Coincidentally he found an apartment uptown across the street from two old cousins--Helen and Della Mae Jamieson. He shared his apartment with several other architecture students.
Mark got well acquainted with his two young cousins--Julie and Susie Babylon; he probably spent a good bit of time at Uncle Hugh's home especially on weekends. New Orleans was pleasant, but Tulane was not the right place. I think the school was probably too straight laced, too establishment, to Brahminesque and authoritarian. Mark was smart enough to give up on them after a couple of years.
He came back home and lived with us for a few years, working for a construction engineering firm. Then he enrolled at Virginia Tech. VPI met his needs much better than Tulane had done; they were more permissive, allowed him to develop his creativity. He had some good professors who did a lot for him. He finished Summa Cum Laude--the absolute top for any Clayton in memory.
Mark went to work for an affluent architect, designed some luxury houses, did other things, soon came to see that the head man was primarily a salesman and promoter, and treated the architects he employed with contempt. Mark decided he wanted to get more education.
UCLA offered Mark a scholarship to work on a Master's. Out he went and spent two years in West L.A. getting it. Most of Mark's fellow students were foreigners. We later learned (from Kim) that he had lived virtually hand to mouth through those years; we should have helped him much more than we did. Rob was in school at that time and taking quite a bit of the family income, and I had the foolish notion that for graduate studies a man should be on his own. (That was to change when Ellie took a more active role in financial decisions!)
It was July of 1986 when Mark went west. His journey coincided with his grandmother's 80th birthday, so Ellie rode with him to New Orleans for a big gala and flew home while he continued west. Mark took a lot of pictures of the party; unfortunately one son-in-law was absent, still in the Washington area.
In 1987 we flew out to see Mark in West L.A., shared his minimal apartment and drove around in his old car. He went with us over to Cedarpines Park to see Margaret and Jimmy. Ellie found the air pollution so bad as we drove east through L.A. that she couldn't keep her eyes open. We wondered how anyone in the world could be so foolish as to be willing to live in such a filthy environment. Ellie had a great belief that Westwood (UCLA) did not have pollution like the rest of the county (I didn't see as much difference here as she did!).
UCLA offered Mark a scholarship to work on a Master's. Out he went and spent two years in West L.A. getting it. Most of Mark's fellow students were foreigners. We later learned (from Kim) that he had lived virtually hand to mouth through those years; we should have helped him much more than we did. Rob was in school at that time and taking quite a bit of the family income, and I had the foolish notion that for graduate studies a man should be on his own. (That was to change when Ellie took a more active role in financial decisions!)
It was July of 1986 when Mark went west. His journey coincided with his grandmother's 80th birthday, so Ellie rode with him to New Orleans for a big gala and flew home while he continued west. Mark took a lot of pictures of the party; unfortunately one son-in-law was absent, still in the Washington area.
In 1987 we flew out to see Mark in West L.A., shared his minimal apartment and drove around in his old car. He went with us over to Cedarpines Park to see Margaret and Jimmy. Ellie found the air pollution so bad as we drove east through L.A. that she couldn't keep her eyes open. We wondered how anyone in the world could be so foolish as to be willing to live in such a filthy environment. Ellie had a great belief that Westwood (UCLA) did not have pollution like the rest of the county (I didn't see as much difference here as she did!).
That was our first visit to Cedarpines Park although Ellie remembers that Margaret and Jimmy had visited her at Angie, while I was away at school. Margaret proposed that we go camping in the desert, but Ellie vetoed that plan and opted for the beach. We went to San Clemente and had a memorable holiday in that lovely place. I don't remember much about it except for some public tennis courts that looked like part of a country club. And the high sand cliffs leading from the campground down to the beach.
Mark had another good experience at UCLA, especially a teacher that he thought highly of and who seemed to return the favor. I suppose the man probably helped Mark get the job teaching which he found at Cal Poly. He started there as I recall in Jan of 1988, and when he walked into the department office, his fate was sealed--Kim McGrew, the department secretary immediately picked him out as her husband. (That of course was not immediately obvious, but became more so as time went on.!)
Mark had another good experience at UCLA, especially a teacher that he thought highly of and who seemed to return the favor. I suppose the man probably helped Mark get the job teaching which he found at Cal Poly. He started there as I recall in Jan of 1988, and when he walked into the department office, his fate was sealed--Kim McGrew, the department secretary immediately picked him out as her husband. (That of course was not immediately obvious, but became more so as time went on.!)
Tennis
Tennis has been a big part of our lives for the past 20 years and more (See the FIFTH.DAY.) In the Washington area frustrations may pile up. The continuous congestion on the roads and on the sidewalks, the struggle to get away from obnoxious people, the long lines in grocery stores and every other place imaginable--these and many other problems make it a pressure kind of life. (It is definitely a good place for young people!!!) I had the special frustration of being under-employed, underpaid, and a general under-achiever. And tennis was sometimes my salvation. I can remember making Ellie go out on the court with me in the rain, because I needed it so badly. She was a long suffering wife!
We thoroughly enjoyed Mark's tennis exploits at Yorktown, and later at Delaware. At Dover, although a student of the University, he was allowed to play on the Wesley College team (that's where they were housed). He was #2, and at the end of the season went to a tournment near New York City; I guess it was for junior colleges. He reached the semi-finals, and I drove up there in time to see his last match. His various careers were a special fulfilment to me, his father; they came at a time when I was in great need of fulfilment. The achievements of the other two came along a bit later.
It was interesting to see what a different attitude and demeanor many of the Washington tennis players showed from those in North Carolina. Some of them play like it was life or death. Never a smile, never a casual comment, no indication whatever that they enjoyed the game in any way. The apparently transfer to the courts the fierce competitiveness and dog-eat-dog attitude which they exhibit in their careers. A shame! (We did of course find some people who seemed as able to enjoy the game as did we.)
Auntie may have visited us more than once in Arlington. She came one time on an extended visit. She had just given up her home at Glendale and wasn't fully decided where to spend her last days. We encouraged her to consider staying with us. She came to Washington at the time when Marion Connor had begun failing from Altheimzer's disease. I had met Marion in 1974, my first year in Washington. She was a special friend of Louise Baker's. On one occasion that first year Louise had Marion come and tell us a story. She was a great story teller, although I don't exactly remember what sort of stories she told.
When Auntie visited us, Marion's family was looking for someone to be a companion for her and some people encouraged Auntie to take the position. We also encouraged her; I promised her that wherever she might be, I would immediately come and get her in case of need. She took the job.
This was quite an adventure for Auntie. It went on for a number of months. Part of this time she was in a summer home on a lake in Canada with Marion, her daughter and family. The rest of the time they were in an apartment high up over Central Park. Marion's son-in-law, a psychiatrist, conducted group therapy sessions, charging each participant $50 per hour; he must have been bringing home about $1 million a year. His wife also worked as a therapist.
Auntie was fond of all of them and felt that they treated her well. However Marion eventually got to be more than she could handle. Marion was strong as a horse, even as her mind weakened. She was always trying to get away from Auntie. Once she started walking down the stairs, from the 14th floor. There was nothing Auntie could do but follow her. That did it, and Auntie resigned.
She went to Washington State and got into a Lutheran home for the elderly where she spent the rest of her life; she died in 1994. Vernon, Jr's widow and her grandchildren and great grandchildren lived there, apparently gifted people, but not at all like us. Although we went out to see her a number of times, we never saw them, except on one occasion when her grandson came by on some errand while we were in her apartment.
Ellie was always trying to get her mother, a widow in these years to come visit, but the old lady generally refused because she understood that Ellie was at work all day and felt there would be little for her to do. Through the years Auntie had visited us periodically. Before the end of our time in Northern Virginia Auntie had gotten herself well situated at the retirement center in Longview, WA. She became more and more resistant to traveling. But on her last visit, perhaps in 1986 or 87, she had the company of Ellie's mother.
That visit was a very good time for all of us. Auntie always brought out the best in me. Unfortunately I'm afraid that my mother-in-law saw the best in me all too seldom, but she did on this visit encounter a more well disposed and attentive son-in-law than she was accustomed to. We took them both to Annapolis: I remember those two old ladies perched up on bar stools eating an icecream cone at the waterfront. Another time I remember them walking along and Ellie's mother seemed to have a bit more stamina than Auntie; maybe that was in the National Arboretum. Finally we took them to Williamsburg, stayed in a motel on US 60 a little east of town. That's about all I remember of that trip, except there is a dim memory of having both of them once at the C of S. Or was it Langley? or both?
I was especially grateful for that happy time for Mrs. Babylon, because that was her last trip to Virginia, and the last time I ever saw her (I'm not sure about Ellie).
By 1986 I was pretty well demoralized, living with a level of frustration primarily due to underemployment in a job that for my age and skill level seemed rather demeaning. It wasn't enough to reach depression, but may have come close. I needed change badly.
I didn't feel like I could give up a government job at age 60, but we could move--and that's what we did. I rationalized that we should take our 'over 55' one time capital gains exemption by selling the Arlington house, which we did at almost a 200% markup. (Economics was good to homeowners in those days!). We moved to the house at Falls Church, which we had owned for a number of years and rented to some good Christian young men for most of that time.
I'm sorry to say that I left most of the responsibility for the move to Ellie. Perhaps that was a significant beginning in leaving so much to her in the years ahead. I rationalized that laziness on my part by half convincing myself that she would thereby be more self reliant when the final parting was to come. (And in those days I often thought that it was not terribly far away!)
A 'new' house to live in was a refreshing change. The nicest thing about the house at Falls Church was the heat in the floors, delivered by a system of hot water under the floors. Rob's cat, Trumpkin, had a number of favorite places to lie. The bathroom floors were especially warm. The commute was pretty near equal to what it had been, although we were some 3 miles farther out.
Two years was long enough for that house, although after we left, Rob continued to live there with Mark and Tammy Jones. Mark and Tammy were very close to us and eventually came to seem almost like our own. Mark had been one of our Mark's roommates at Virginia Tech, also an architect. Tammy, also, had begun in Architecture, but switched to History before she got her degree. They were married about 1987 at Oak Ridge.
Ellie and I attended the wedding as well as our Mark. It was in a large Methodist Church, a gala event. I left the car lights on (one of innumerable such times!), we got pushed off finally whereupon I lost my glasses. Our Mark eventually found them on the street and mailed them back to me. A disaster for us, but a pleasant experience on the whole.
Mark Jones found a job in architecture in Northern Virginia, and they got an apartment in Arlington. Mark had lived with us for a while in the Arlington house. So it was convenient and natural that when we vacated the Falls Church house to move south, Mark and Tammy should move in to take our place---while Rob continued to live there. They stayed there for a year or so--probably a creative experience for all three young people.
I had very few regrets about leaving Northern Virginia, although once again it was something of a hardship for Ellie to be uprooted, a ubiquitous motif through the years: I carried her away from the house in New Orleans that she had lived in all her life. I took her from Louisiana to N.C. When she had become quite comfortable at Winston-Salem, I took her to the Washington area. And now that she had a good job with lots of friends there, I was ready to abandon that locale. She certainly was faithful and good to me through all those moves. She had lived with roots, while I had been (geographically) rootless my whole life. Arlington (ten years) was the longest I had ever lived anywhere.
One of our real regrets at leaving that area was to lose the use of the Arlington County Library--certainly the best public library we ever encountered. They had oodles of books--maybe twice as many books as shelf space, tremendous readership. An exciting place, we frequented that library for 14 years and had many happy hours in connection with it.
This was quite an adventure for Auntie. It went on for a number of months. Part of this time she was in a summer home on a lake in Canada with Marion, her daughter and family. The rest of the time they were in an apartment high up over Central Park. Marion's son-in-law, a psychiatrist, conducted group therapy sessions, charging each participant $50 per hour; he must have been bringing home about $1 million a year. His wife also worked as a therapist.
Auntie was fond of all of them and felt that they treated her well. However Marion eventually got to be more than she could handle. Marion was strong as a horse, even as her mind weakened. She was always trying to get away from Auntie. Once she started walking down the stairs, from the 14th floor. There was nothing Auntie could do but follow her. That did it, and Auntie resigned.
She went to Washington State and got into a Lutheran home for the elderly where she spent the rest of her life; she died in 1994. Vernon, Jr's widow and her grandchildren and great grandchildren lived there, apparently gifted people, but not at all like us. Although we went out to see her a number of times, we never saw them, except on one occasion when her grandson came by on some errand while we were in her apartment.
Ellie was always trying to get her mother, a widow in these years to come visit, but the old lady generally refused because she understood that Ellie was at work all day and felt there would be little for her to do. Through the years Auntie had visited us periodically. Before the end of our time in Northern Virginia Auntie had gotten herself well situated at the retirement center in Longview, WA. She became more and more resistant to traveling. But on her last visit, perhaps in 1986 or 87, she had the company of Ellie's mother.
That visit was a very good time for all of us. Auntie always brought out the best in me. Unfortunately I'm afraid that my mother-in-law saw the best in me all too seldom, but she did on this visit encounter a more well disposed and attentive son-in-law than she was accustomed to. We took them both to Annapolis: I remember those two old ladies perched up on bar stools eating an icecream cone at the waterfront. Another time I remember them walking along and Ellie's mother seemed to have a bit more stamina than Auntie; maybe that was in the National Arboretum. Finally we took them to Williamsburg, stayed in a motel on US 60 a little east of town. That's about all I remember of that trip, except there is a dim memory of having both of them once at the C of S. Or was it Langley? or both?
I was especially grateful for that happy time for Mrs. Babylon, because that was her last trip to Virginia, and the last time I ever saw her (I'm not sure about Ellie).
By 1986 I was pretty well demoralized, living with a level of frustration primarily due to underemployment in a job that for my age and skill level seemed rather demeaning. It wasn't enough to reach depression, but may have come close. I needed change badly.
I didn't feel like I could give up a government job at age 60, but we could move--and that's what we did. I rationalized that we should take our 'over 55' one time capital gains exemption by selling the Arlington house, which we did at almost a 200% markup. (Economics was good to homeowners in those days!). We moved to the house at Falls Church, which we had owned for a number of years and rented to some good Christian young men for most of that time.
I'm sorry to say that I left most of the responsibility for the move to Ellie. Perhaps that was a significant beginning in leaving so much to her in the years ahead. I rationalized that laziness on my part by half convincing myself that she would thereby be more self reliant when the final parting was to come. (And in those days I often thought that it was not terribly far away!)
A 'new' house to live in was a refreshing change. The nicest thing about the house at Falls Church was the heat in the floors, delivered by a system of hot water under the floors. Rob's cat, Trumpkin, had a number of favorite places to lie. The bathroom floors were especially warm. The commute was pretty near equal to what it had been, although we were some 3 miles farther out.
Two years was long enough for that house, although after we left, Rob continued to live there with Mark and Tammy Jones. Mark and Tammy were very close to us and eventually came to seem almost like our own. Mark had been one of our Mark's roommates at Virginia Tech, also an architect. Tammy, also, had begun in Architecture, but switched to History before she got her degree. They were married about 1987 at Oak Ridge.
Ellie and I attended the wedding as well as our Mark. It was in a large Methodist Church, a gala event. I left the car lights on (one of innumerable such times!), we got pushed off finally whereupon I lost my glasses. Our Mark eventually found them on the street and mailed them back to me. A disaster for us, but a pleasant experience on the whole.
Mark Jones found a job in architecture in Northern Virginia, and they got an apartment in Arlington. Mark had lived with us for a while in the Arlington house. So it was convenient and natural that when we vacated the Falls Church house to move south, Mark and Tammy should move in to take our place---while Rob continued to live there. They stayed there for a year or so--probably a creative experience for all three young people.
I had very few regrets about leaving Northern Virginia, although once again it was something of a hardship for Ellie to be uprooted, a ubiquitous motif through the years: I carried her away from the house in New Orleans that she had lived in all her life. I took her from Louisiana to N.C. When she had become quite comfortable at Winston-Salem, I took her to the Washington area. And now that she had a good job with lots of friends there, I was ready to abandon that locale. She certainly was faithful and good to me through all those moves. She had lived with roots, while I had been (geographically) rootless my whole life. Arlington (ten years) was the longest I had ever lived anywhere.
One of our real regrets at leaving that area was to lose the use of the Arlington County Library--certainly the best public library we ever encountered. They had oodles of books--maybe twice as many books as shelf space, tremendous readership. An exciting place, we frequented that library for 14 years and had many happy hours in connection with it.
Genealogy
A year or two before we retired I received an important letter from Clayton, La., which in effect influenced the way Ellie and I spent much of our time for the next few years. Clayton Gibson, my second cousin, had lived at Clayton all his life. About my age, he had gone to La. Tech briefly, as did his brother Dr. Herman Gibson. One or both of them were in fact there while I was there, although I did not know them.
Clayton, as all the world knows, had been named for our common great grandfather, John McBride Clayton. Locally he was known as 'Captain Clayton'. The place got its name when Capt. Clayton gave land for the right of way of the railroad. That may have been about 1880. And now 100 years later the railroad discontinued, and the property reverted to the heirs of Capt. Clayton.
Capt. John McBride Clayton, my great grandfather, was the family patriarch. He had come to Concordia Parish, across the river from Natchez, as a young man. The Civil War broke out when he was about 30. He organized a company of infantry. He was undoubdtedly a man of exceptional talent. In addition he was the second cousin of the commanding general of the Alabama forces. So he might have expected higher rank, and in fact he was offered promotion to major, which he declined.
He declined because, when recruiting his company, he had promised the mothers of his recruits that he would stay with them through the whole war. Promotion would have taken him away from the close relationship he had with them; hence he declined. One of his men, named Oscar Estell, had been entrusted with a special mission at the end of the war. Rather than surrendering the company flag, Oscar had wrapped it around himself under his shirt, and had smuggled it back to Louisiana. It resides today in the Howard Tilton Library at Tulane, and as late as 1987 staff at the library offered to exhibit it on the wall of the building---for a fee. Family members did not feel like spending money for such a purpose.
Capt. Clayton and his first wife, Lucinda Gahagan, had five sons: Robert, who became a planter, James, who became a doctor, Oren Henry, and John Elliott, my grandfather, a lawyer. A fifth son, named Oscar Estell, lived only briefly. After Lucinda's death Capt. Clayton married again, Eudora Gibson. By her he had uncle Shelley--the only one of these people I ever met.
My grandfather and his brother Oren Henry married sisters, daughters of Capt. Bright, a steamboat man. (Steamboats used to come up the Black River, upon which the Clayton property fronted.) These two girls did not fit in too well with the Clayton culture. I knew my grandmother by reputation as a difficult person. Her husband died long before I was born. In my childhood Grandmother stayed primarily with her daughter, Aunt Ethel and Uncle Maurice, a most saintly, though not particularly religious man. When some problem in that family arose, Grandmother came to live with us (I may have been about 12), but we soon found it necessary to send her back to Aunt Ethel.
Grandmother's sister must have been a more severe person. Her husband, my great uncle Oren Henry, found it necessary to desert her and flee to Texas. This lady apparently followed him because the last we heard of her she was running a boarding house somewhere in Texas. All the family accounts that I heard strongly intimated that Uncle Henry was fully justified in his action. We often have a choice to fight or fly, and, being a man he peace, he chose to fly.
Clayton Gibson had been trying to locate all of his second cousins (on his mother's side). He found my address through the Methodist Church (they knew that I had been a Methodist minister). So out of the blue one day I found a letter from this kinsman informing me of the reversion of the railroad property; I was one of the heirs.
I immediately replied to his kind letter, and we began a correspondence. Unhappily I had known nothing about these Clayton cousins and had no interest whatever in such matters. But Clayton Gibson's letter reawakened that interest: blood is thicker than water. Before much time had elapsed, Ellie and I visited our old family seat. I had a very dim recollection of the place, and it looked much the same.
The first time we went there I went into the Post Office to get directions and told the postmaster who I was looking for. He told me where Clayton lived and also where "Miss Carrie" lived--his mother. Miss Carrie was my first cousin, once removed. She was about Daddy's age and remembered him well. She soon got to be one of my favorite relations.
For some years I have been accustomed to saying a special goodbye to friends who were up in years (Miss Carrie was in her 90's). I would tell the person, "If you get up there before me, prepare a place for me." I would usually get a rather quizzical look, but Miss Carrie had an immediately and lovely reply. She said, "You will be very dear to me." Although she couldn't attend to society for very long at a time, her mind was as sharp as a tack.
Her house was right beside the old tracks--and the property which we now jointly owned. As we were walking back toward our car, I made a rather joking remark: "I think I'll get the heirs to let me have some land right over there and build a house and there I'll be." Like a flash came her reply. "Yes, and your phone will ring, and you'll hear me saying, 'Lawrence, get over here'". She had taken my kidding and trumped it, a characteristic Clayton trait. A lovely old lady! I always enjoyed being in her presence. She is up there now, and hopefully I am very dear to her as she said. We hoped to visit her again in 1995, but she died a few months before our trip.
A couple of years later Margaret had plans to go to Kentwood for her 40th class reunion. So she and Cousin Dorothy Tatum (and Dorothy's husband Maurice Tatum) made plans for a family reunion at Natchez. Quite a few people converged on the place. We organized several carloads of people to visit Miss Carrie. I had the pleasure of introducing a lot of the family to her. Of course she knew who they all were, but it had been many a year since she had seen most of us. The reunion was a great success.
I felt really good about these new relationships. As a person without family roots of much consequence it was good to discover family abiding where their (our) great, great grandfather had lived well over a hundred years ago. My grandfather had been born there, and my father had been reared nearby.
Clayton Gibson's letter also aroused in me an interest in the family history that led to a pretty extensive amount of research over the next several years. I discovered first that those Claytons had come west from Butts County, Ga. A while later I traced the Butts Co Claytons back to Craven, and then Hyde Co., N.C. with 1744 as the earliest date.
Then, after four or five years of study, I determined that the NC Claytons had come from Kent County Delaware, and before that, in 1682, from Cheshire Co. England. Ellie began by going with me and worked on her own family, and we had a lot of fun. We visited every state archive from Pennsylvania to Texas.
I also worked on my mother's family--the Leeches. They appear to have come from Strabane, Ireland early in the 18th Century, and passed through York County, SC, Tenn., Ala, Miss, and finally back to Memphis, where mother was born. One important link came when I researched the Confederate army records. James McGrady Leech had been in Virginia during the war. Near the end he was listed as a deserter, and his birthplace was given as Lawrence Co., Ala. We knew he had later lived and enlisted from Lafayette Co., Miss.
All this stuff may seem trivial, even puerile to most people, but at a certain age it will become important--if your mind works anything like mine. One of my happiest discoveries was to learn that James Clayton, my great, great, great grandfather, had been a Methodist minister. As far as I know my father, although something of a Methodist historian, had been ignorant of that.
Margaret Clayton Russell
Fairly early in that genealogical pursuit a research correspondent gave me the name of Margaret Clayton Russell of Watkinsville, Ga. I wrote to her and soon learned that we were cousins--distant cousins, perhaps 5th or 6th. But it turned out that we had done more or less the same research, and come up with the same conclusions. We were both descendants of the James Clayton, blacksmith, of Hyde and Craven Counties, who had left his will in 1783. He had four sons; she descended from son Thomas, while I descended from son, William.
Margaret had written a book on the family--beginning with the elder James Clayton, carpenter of Hyde County. She had tried and tried to trace him back further, and finally admitted defeat. Her Alabama branch of the family had distinguished themselves; her great grandfather had been Gen. Henry Delamar Clayton, in command of the Alabama forces of the Confederacy. And she had records that gave me further information about my Louisiana branch.
In particular she had, in her book, considerable mention of a man referred to as "Old Cousin James", the Methodist preacher. She wondered who he was. I wrote back and told her who he was: my great, great, great grandfather--the direct ancestor of all the Louisiana branch of the family.
Ellie and I stopped and met Margaret and her husband Russell one year as we passed on our way to New Orleans. They proved to be very nice people, and of course we had much to talk about. Her book was more or less written, but did not get published until several years later. I bought two copies and sent one to Clayton Gibson, who had started me on the family history quest. Her book actually had very little about our family until you went back five generations.
She had more or less convinced herself that James Clayton, Sr. of Hyde County was "no one in particular", but just an anonymous man with no prior history remaining. I spent about four years investigating James Claytons in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, N.C. and S.C. who might have tied up with the man who came to N.C. around 1745. And as stated above, I finally demonstrated to my own satisfaction that he came from the Delaware family. When I shared this with Margaret Russell, she fully agreed with me, but the material did not get in her book---supposedly too late to be included.
The genealogical quest has led to correspondence with quite a number of people and discovery of relations of varying degrees. A good hobby for an old man who has turned his back at last on the struggles of middle life.
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