I have many stories about Uncle John.
He was our uncle because he was married to our father’s Aunt Belle.
John J. Weiss (1880-1971) was married to our Aunt Belle (Isabella Jane Bidwell) on November 27, 1934. He was a widower. It was her first marriage. He had a daughter whom I think I met one time, although I have no clear memory of that.
After they were married, Uncle John and Aunt Belle purchased a hillside plot of land on the south side of Main Road (route 23) in Monterey, and built a small white house above the highway. A large screen porch provided a view down the hill to the road. Wild thyme grew up among the grass they had planted, so they called their property Thyme Hill. In 1986, after John and Belle had gone to their eternal rest, I acquired a property in Alford that had a sloping lawn in which wild thyme grew. I named my place Thyme Hill, as much for sentimental reasons as for the presence of the sweet-smelling herb.
Once we had reached school age, during summer vacation Aunt Belle and Uncle John would invite one or more of us to stay for at least a week at their home. When it was my turn to go to Thyme Hill, Uncle John would come to pick me up at our house on Park Street in Stockbridge.
During the height of the war, consumer automobiles were not manufactured in this country, so most of the families I knew in town had pre-war models similar to the 1940 Buick shown below, or even earlier cars made in the 1930s, such as a Ford Model A. Uncle John’s car was black, with a rounded top, and I’m pretty sure it was a Buick.
One of my earliest memories of my infancy was of being in a basket in the back seat of our family car. The car came to a sudden stop (a crash, perhaps?) and the basket rolled forward onto the floor. Moments later, someone I didn’t know opened the car door and peered in. “The baby is all right,” she announced, very loudly, and placed me and the basket upright again. After that, the car disappeared from our driveway, and my family never again had a car. Many years later, if occurred to me that my father (who had a fondness for alcohol) was probably driving, and maybe had his license taken away, or was otherwise persuaded not to drive again.
In any case, my parents could not deliver me to Thyme Hill, so Uncle John came to Stockbridge. On the way back to Monterey, John would be talkative, telling me about any changes since the last time I had visited. Once we were in Monterey, he would pull over to a small roadside stand (later to become the Roadside Cafe) that served ice cream.
He swore me to secrecy, telling me he would buy me an ice cream cone only if I agreed not to tell Aunt Belle about our stop. His secret was safe with me. “I love ice cream,” he told me, “but your Aunt Belle’s ice cream is awful.” He was right. She made her own with a hand-cranked arrangement, and it was more ice than cream. Everyone hated it, but she made and offered it so lovingly that no one had the nerve to tell her so.
I was probably about eight years old when there was a cocktail party at their house. One elderly gentleman was chatting with me and he said something about my Uncle Jake. I interrupted him with a correction, “Uncle John” I insisted. He laughed. “I’ve known your uncle since long before you were born,” he told me, “and we have always called him Jake.” It was one of my first clues that Uncle John was Jewish. Aunt Belle later confirmed my suspicion.
I recently shared by email my scan (above) of John’s portrait with two of my siblings. My sister Terry wrote back:
I remember that picture. I always admired it as a true likeness of Uncle John. He was rather exceptional in my early memories. I loved how he paused in his violin practice and played lullabies as Aunt Belle took us upstairs to bed. Never too old for lullabies.
His kindness to me was probably never reciprocated. I know Aunt Belle was very disappointed that I was such a tom boy and would never be a lady. She told me as much. And she was irritated that I couldn't tie my own shoes! Uncle John sat me on the couch one day when I was perhaps 7 or 8 and said Aunt Belle wanted him to teach me something very important. Then he very patiently taught me how to tie my shoes. Took up most of a morning. And he would read to me. I fondly remember the terrifying tales of Bluebeard the pirate. Scary but so exciting. Aunt Belle insisted that they were not appropriate for a child, but I think he enjoyed them as much as I did.
Terry
I told Terry that these were great stories about Uncle John, and I asked her if I could include them in my post. I told her that “I'm going to add in stories about ice cream, chickens, and the colored chemicals we used to play with.”
Feel free to use the stories. I do remember the chemicals. Also being told not to play in the old chicken barn/coop. So of course where else would we play!
I had not heard the story about shoe-tying before. I had my own challenges with that, so I guess it ran in the family. I once gave a talk about my struggles with shoe laces; I was a panelist in a program on autism. I will (one day soon, I hope) dredge up a post describing that out of my archives and repost it, along with other autism-related posts (new and old).
Before telling about Uncle John’s chickens, I will pick up on his Jewishness and his violin playing. My Wilcox/Bidwell heritage was a strange combination of extreme tolerance and inclusion combined with a sense of exclusivity. My grandmother was very vocal (to me, at least) about her support of equal treatment of African-American people. Her daughter (and my Aunt) Jane once told me the “we were always told that we were no better than anyone else.”
My father, on the other hand, (by his telling) was stonewalled when he inquired as to whether his grandmother Josephine Souder (1860-1937) might have been French. “No one would talk about it,” he told me. The implication was that there might have been a reluctance to admit the poisoning of the family bloodlines with a Papist. His other (Welsh) grandmother, Sarah Davies was perfectly acceptable, as was his (Scottish) great-grandmother Isabella Calder Gibson (1833-1888), since they both came from Great Britain.
My mother’s parents were both of Scottish descent, and (since my father had a bit of Scottish in him, I am more Scottish than anything else. As a youngster, I made friends with people of all different national backgrounds, and I once asked my mother (since I got asked) “What are we?” She told me we were “Swamp Yankees,” and explained that meant we really didn’t know — a little of this and a little of that. An amusing label, but probably not accurate for my family. Other than the Souder name, I have never found a trace in my known ancestors (back at least to the sixteenth century) of anyone outside of England, Scotland, and Wales. And, as far as I know, they were all Preotestants.
I came to suspect that Aunt Belle marrying a Jew was probably pretty scandalous. By the time I came to this conclusion, most of my relatives who had been alive at the time (1934) were gone. Only one remained: our Aunt Jane (born March 10, 1923) my father’s youngest sibling.
In 2013, to honor her 90th birthday, my two brothers (and their wives) and I went to visit Aunt Jane. We had a wonderful visit (and well-timed, since she would not live to see her 91st birthday). When our conversation turned to family connections, I said to Jane, “It must have been a family scandal when Aunt Belle married a Jew.” She replied, “Oh, no — he was not Jewish, ‘Weiss’ is a German name.” I didn’t argue with her, though I was surprised that she clung to what was (to me) an obvious denial.
Richard Bidwell Wilcox, Jane Isabel Wilcox TenEyck, Bruce Davies Wilcox, Michael Forbes Wilcox
Terry mentioned John’s violin playing. In addition to being an accomplished criminal defense attorney, John was a very talented musician. I loved hearing how he made the violin sing, almost like a human voice. He practiced daily, usually the pieces that he would be playing later in the summer with the Berkshire Symphony Orchestra in their annual concert at Tanglewood. For many years, he and Aunt Jane had a seasonal house guest in the person of their friend Lukas Foss.
Foss continued his composition studies with Paul Hindemith at Yale (1939–40) and his conducting studies at the Berkshire Music Center (Tanglewood) during the summers of 1939–43 with Serge Koussevitzky, who engaged him in 1943 as the pianist for the Boston Symphony Orchestra, a position he held until 1949.
https://www.milkenarchive.org/artists/view/lukas-foss
Uncle John appreciated my interest in his music. Although I was too small to hold a full-sized violin, he sat me down at the piano and taught me to play Twinkle Twinkle Little Star, and we would then play it together — he on his violin and me on the piano. He explained to me the difference between the white and black keys, the concept of scale and octaves, and other exciting aspects of music. I was determined to learn to play the violin just like he did.
Well, I tried, but it never happened. I could tell stories of Sherm Hall, Oberlin, and my musical struggles, but this post is about Uncle John, so, another time…
Terry also mentioned the chicken coop. It was a very large structure that was no longer being used, up the hill from the house. Uncle John had built it in the late 1930s. My one memory of him taking me into that building was the time he bought a live chicken from a nearby farm for Aunt Belle to cook for dinner. I’m not sure why he wanted to educate me on his method of slaughter, but he brought me along to witness it.
There was a large metal funnel that hung by chains that came down from the ceiling. He stuck the chicken in it, head down, so that only the head was showing through the bottom of the funnel. He then took a sharp tool, cut open its head, and scraped out its brains. He removed the lifeless body, laid it on a large block of wood, and used a hatchet to cut the head off at the neck. He explained to me that if he had done that without the first procedure, the headless body might be still active — hence the expression, “running around like a chicken with its head cut off.”
As alluded to earlier, Terry and I were fascinated by the bags of colored chemicals that were stored in the multi-story chicken coop. We scooped samples from them and made patterns on the floor. After our artwork was discovered, we were lectured sternly that we were not to touch those bags, some of which contained poisons. The next time we snuck into the coop, the bags were all gone.
Aunt Belle once explained to me the origin story of the coop. Uncle John, she told me, had followed the wishes of his parents. In the period of his youth, it was common for Jewish parents to urge their sons to become professionals. John went to law school and had a successful career as an attorney. But after he retired, he told Aunt Belle that, now that he had pleased his parents, he had decided that he was going to do what he had always wanted to do.
“What’s that, Johnnie?” she asked him.
“I’m going to be a chicken farmer.”
He began his second career by returning to school. He attended the Stockbridge School of Agriculture at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst. Soon, he started selling eggs and chickens locally. In 1941, the United States entered the War, and suddenly the US Army had a need for vast quantities of food to provision the troops headed for Europe and North Africa. By supplying chickens to the Army, Uncle John’s modest business soon became a huge commercial success.
By the time I came to know him, a few years after the War had ended, John had retired from that occupation as well, and was focused on his music.
Uncle John was, at one time, the designated keeper of the Monterey silver cane, entrusted to the care of the oldest living person in Monterey. He was very proud of that. Not long after he received that honor, he had a completely disabling stroke. He was unable to speak or respond in any way. Aunt Belle placed him in the nursing home that existed then in Monterey, and she went to visit him faithfully, every day. She told me that at one point, the doctor there pulled her aside and advised her that she did not need to come every single day because his condition had not changed, and he did not know she was there. "Oh, yes he does!" she retorted, and she continued her daily visits and one-way conversations.
After he had been there for quite a while, his condition did begin to improve, to the point that he no longer needed medical care. The doctor told Aunt Belle she could take him home if she would like, although that would mean feeding him, bathing him, and managing the bed pan. She said yes, and had one of the twin beds in her guest room moved down into the living room so that she did not have to carry things up and down the stairs. Those twin beds now grace my guest room.
Rick will fondly (ha!) remember the times Aunt Belle asked me to come to visit and show my vacation slides. She had me set up the screen and slide projector in such a way that Uncle John, propped up in his bed, could see the pictures. "He really likes your pictures," she told me, although I could not tell that he was even aware of what we were doing.
At one point, however, he began to visibly respond. On one visit, he smiled at me, and pointed to the hallway between the kitchen and his bed. Aunt Belle went into the hallway and took down a framed certificate that had been awarded to him by the Governor of New York for his work as a public defender. "He is very proud of this," she told me, "and he wants you to see it."
On my next visit, Aunt Belle told me an astounding story. One morning, she had come downstairs, as she did every day, to make his breakfast. Much to her surprise, he was not in his bed. He had not been out of that bed for years. She panicked, thinking something bad had happened, and went to the other side of the bed, expecting that he had fallen off. Suddenly, she heard a loud noise in the kitchen. She turned to look down the hall and saw that Uncle John was standing in the kitchen with his back to her. She was flabbergasted, and started down the hallway. As she approached him, she called out, "Johnie, what are you doing?" He stepped sideways and turned his face to her. She could see that he had put a large iron skillet on the stove. "I'm making my breakfast," he said. Those were the first words he had spoken in many years. "I don't like the way you make my eggs."
He ate his eggs, returned to bed, and never left it again or said another word for the rest of his life.