April: A Month for Birthdays

My parents, a brother, and I all first saw the light of day during April

My surviving siblings have birthdays in February, March, and July. I am the only one left of the four members of our family who were born in April.

My parents had married on July 10 of that year. Annie Ellen Jennie Forbes and Graham Davies Wilcox Junior

April 25th this year (2025) marked the 110th anniversary of my mother’s birth (in 1915). She lived to be 85. Here she is, at the age of 61 (in a slightly stained photo), dancing with her eldest son at a wedding.

My brother Rick’s first wedding June 1976

My father was born on April 7th in 1916, and lived to be 80. He was 29 years old when I was born — my mother was 30. He had just returned from several years abroad, serving in the Army Air Corps during World War II.

An undated photo (probably 1942) from a studio in Tampa Florida

My brother Bruce was born on April 17, 1950. He died in 2019 at age 69.

The first [and, obviously the most important ;) ] birth day was the 4th.

The House of Mercy would later become Pittsfield General Hospital, and, after its merger with Saint Luke’s Hospital, the Berkshire Medical Center, its name today. The building where I was born is still in use, and I was recently examined by their pulmonary department, in a room that I suspect might have been the one in which I was born.

The markings on the back of this photo are very faded, but I think it is dated November 6, 1946 — I would have been 7 months old.

I will publish many more family photos and stories in the months and years to come. For now, I’d like to wrap up with some tributes to my father.

I have elsewhere (e.g. in this post) told the story of my leaving home at age 17. My father drifted away from his family at around that same time, eventually taking up residence (at the invitation of his friend Fred Mundy) in a room above the bar at the Silver City Saloon — more affectionately known as “Mundy’s”

My father was a Junior, and his family called him “Sonny” to distinguish him from his father, also named Graham. But most of his friends called him Gray. When he was in the Army, he published many poems in the Stars and Stripes newspaper, and now, many years later, he returned to his love of poetry (and jazz). He took on the nom de plume of Gray Fox.

This picture was featured in a long 1976 article about Gray Fox in The Berkshire Sampler of August 1st

Fred owned a racehorse — one that did well on the County Fair circuit. At that time, my sister Sarah lived in Slidell, just outside New Orleans, so our Dad went to visit her at opportune times, such as Mardi Gras, and when the Fairgrounds were open.

Below is a concluding poem that appeared in the same article in the August 1, 1976 The Berkshire Sampler (a weekly supplement published by the Berkshire Eagle). I expect to reproduce more from that article in future posts.