After my great-aunts Mary Helen and Eloise graduated from Mount Saint Joseph Junior College near Owensboro, Kentucky, both secured jobs with the U.S. Department of Agriculture, working in one of its Kentucky offices. During World War II the federal government decentralized its operations by moving many offices out of Washington, D.C., and the headquarters of the Department of Agriculture moved to Cincinnati, Ohio. By the time the war began winding down and government agencies returned to Washington, my great-aunts worked in the Cincinnati headquarters, so when their jobs moved to Washington, they moved too.
After the war Eloise moved to New York with her husband, Ray Martinson, a returning soldier she had married before his three-year overseas assignment. Mary Helen stayed on in our nation’s capital.
One day Mary Helen called home and announced she was getting married. Naturally, her mother, my great-grandmother, began asking questions about her intended. Mary Helen explained his name was Charles Ferrara. He was Italian, a U.S. Army veteran, and a native of the Washington, D.C., area.
My great-grandmother listened to all Mary Helen said as best she could, given that her phone service was a party line shared with several other families. Chances were also excellent that she was not the only one hearing the conversation, because when the phone rang all the houses on the party line heard the ringing. Each house had its own ring—maybe two longs and one short, or two shorts and one long—with the idea that you would only pick up if you heard your ring, but in reality many folks picked up and listened to every phone call. So, that combination of multiple people listening in and poor phone lines to begin with made conversing by phone a challenge. Nevertheless, my great-grandmother persisted in learning all she could about the man her daughter was going to marry.
“What does he do for a living?” my great-grandmother asked.
“He’s an electrical engineer,” she heard Mary Helen reply. Now, my great-grandmother, like most folks in her rural community, had no idea what an electrical engineer did, but it sounded impressive. After she and Mary Helen completed their call, my great-grandmother began calling her friends, telling them about the electrical engineer Mary Helen was going to marry. Even her friends who shared her party line agreed with her assessment of the phone call.
So, you can imagine my great-grandmother’s surprise when Mary Helen came home with her husband who owned his own business—a store selling liquor and beer!
This is a family story—one that I had never heard until we had a Hamilton family reunion in 2009 at which the descendants of the great-grandmother in the story, including my great-aunt Mary Helen, gathered. One of my father’s first cousins, Charlie Hamilton, told the tale. If you doubt such confusion is possible, try saying aloud “he’s an electrical engineer” and then “he sells liquor and beer” and imagine hearing either phrase over a crackly phone line. Yep! You could confuse them too.
When I heard this tale, I realized there was a multi-generational thread in the family stories I had heard over the years—mistakes! We tell the stories that evoke laughter at our mistakes! “Jeff Rides the Rides” is another example of the same type of story. So is “A Place to Start,” about my Uncle Sammy’s sandwiches. Both of these were stories I had first heard from my father. I was aware that he told stories that had humorous mistakes as a common theme, but hearing the story of Mary Helen’s phone call at the reunion was the first time I realized that theme had begun before his generation.
For years I thought my daddy just took some sort of unnerving delight in retelling tales of funny errors made by his children and his brother, but then I was interviewed by Pamela Petro for her book Sitting Up with the Dead: A Storied Journey Through the American South.1 When Petro first contacted me to arrange the interview, she told me she wanted to talk with me about how I had grown up to become a storyteller. I insisted that if she wanted to understand, she needed to meet me at my parents’ Meade County farm, not at my home in Frankfort. During that meeting my father, mother, and I told her several stories. My father also commented that he knew that sometimes his kids got aggravated over his choice of stories to tell, but he figured if he could give us the gift of being able to laugh at ourselves, that would be a good gift to have. I was astonished. Until I heard him say that, I had no idea my father had ever thought about why he recounted the stories he chose. Although Petro did not include my father’s comment about his choice of story topics in her book, I remain grateful to her, for I might never have known my father’s storytelling intentions otherwise.2
Looking back, I’m a bit surprised I hadn’t noticed before the reunion that the thread of mistake stories extended well beyond my father and into other branches of the family. Several years earlier, Mike Jones, an uncle by marriage, from Elizabethtown, Hardin County, Kentucky, arrived at a family gathering along with his son Matt. As soon as they arrived, Mike announced, “Well, I’ve got one to tell you on Matt.”
Now Matt was a young teenager at the time, so he moaned in protest, “Daaaad!”
But Mike replied, “Matt, we’re at the Hamilton’s. We’ve got to tell it.” Immediately Matt relented. Here’s the story Mike told:
Matt and his younger brother Chad had each attended a week-long basketball camp, but because they were different ages they attended different weeks. At the basketball camp statistics were kept on every player in a variety of categories—field goal percentage, number of assists, free throw percentage, number of steals, and so forth. At the end of the week, the camper with the highest stats in each category won a basketball.
On his last day of basketball camp, Chad came home and Matt asked, “Did you win a basketball?”
“No, I came in second in everything.”
“But Chad, if you came in second in everything, it seems like you should have won a basketball, because last week when I went to camp, nobody could win more than one basketball.”
“But I didn’t win,” Chad repeated, “I came in second in everything.”
This made no sense to Matt, and he began insisting Chad could not possibly have come in second in everything and not won a basketball. Their father, Mike, overheard the conversation, so to help Chad out, he explained:
“Okay Matt, let’s say John Doe had the best field goal percentage, and Chad was second. John Doe wins the basketball. Then let’s say Jimmy Doe had the most assists, and Chad was second. Jimmy Doe wins the basketball. Then let’s say Jerry Doe had the best free throw percentage, and Chad was second. Jerry Doe wins the basketball. And then—”
Matt interrupted, “Okay, Dad, I get why Chad didn’t win a basketball, but who are these Doe kids anyway?”
At the time I thought: “Wow, we have a strong storytelling tradition in this family if a teenager will give up that easily.” Now I see that it was not just the telling of a story but also the type of story that was part of the tradition. At the time I thought humor was the thread, but now I see humorous mistakes as the thread. And thanks to the Hamilton family reunion, I can see that this story thread was woven into the Hamilton family fabric long before my father became a family storyteller.
Okay, in fairness, I should also tell you at least one tale on myself:
A few years ago I told stories for a gathering at Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana. I was living in Louisville at the time, so I decided to return home after the evening performance. When folks learned I was driving back to Louisville in the dark, several people warned, “Be careful. That road has lots of curves, and be sure you watch out for deer.”
I promised I would and set off. There I was, just driving along in the darkness, listening to the radio, when I thought: “Hmm, those people sure do have their deer statue close to the road. Why, it’s so close it could be a mailbox. And look, there’s a second one right behind it.”
Fortunately, that second deer statue moved, and my mind registered—“Deer! Brake!”—just in time.
That’s one of my favorite anecdotes to tell on myself. Of course, I told it many times before I realized it, too, fit within the Hamilton tradition of telling and retelling humorous tales of our mistakes.3
In March 2011, I was talking on the phone with my sister, Pat, when the conversation turned to family stories. She told me her favorite story to tell on herself was about the time the two of us were up in the silo pitching down silage for the cows while belting out songs from The Sound of Music. According to Pat, Daddy yelled at us to quit singing because we were scaring the cows—they were walking toward the barn to be fed, but upon hearing our singing they were running away! I was amazed. This was her favorite family story, and I had no memory of the incident. Sure, we did climb up into the silo, and we did have the chore of using a pitchfork to throw down silage for the cows. Acoustics inside the silo were great, so I have no doubt we sang while in there. To this day I know the lyrics of most of the songs in The Sound of Music, so I must have listened to and sung them repeatedly. But the specific incident of scaring the cows? I don’t recall it at all. Just because people grow up in the same family, it would be a mistake to assume they all share the same family stories.
So, these family stories are all true stories, right? Well, yes and no. When I began retelling the story about my great-aunt Mary Helen’s phone call home, I told my audiences she worked in Washington, D.C., because so many men were away fighting in World War II. I had always heard that Aunt Mary Helen and Aunt Eloise wound up in Washington because of the war. Over the years, I had also heard and read about women being hired to do men’s jobs during the war, so I assumed this was why Mary Helen and her sister Eloise, both high school graduates, moved from Kentucky to Washington, and I included that information as part of the story. It set the time period and included a bit of history for my listeners.
When another cousin, Dale Hamilton, told me Mary Helen and Eloise were college graduates, I decided I needed to do some fact-checking with Aunt Mary Helen. Oh, I knew she and Eloise had gone to Mount Saint Joseph, but I thought they went there for high school, not college.4 After all, my grandfather, their older brother, had graduated from eighth grade and not attended high school, so I thought graduating from high school was the added accomplishment by the daughters of the family. Through fact-checking with my great aunt, I not only learned about their going to college, but also learned that while World War II was indeed a factor in the move to D.C., they hadn’t moved because of a need for women to fill jobs formerly held by men. They had held their jobs before the war began. When the war wound down, the jobs they held then moved to Washington, so they moved with their jobs. I was wrong on several bits of information and changed the story accordingly.
However, I did not change everything. During the fact-checking Aunt Mary Helen also told me she is sure she never said, “sells liquor and beer.” Instead she told her mother he owned a “liquor store,” which her mother heard as “electric store.” In fact, Mary Helen first heard the reference to an electrical engineer when she heard the story retold at the family reunion! After learning that Aunt Mary Helen’s memory of the incident differed from how it had been told at the reunion, my father told me he remembers Mama Ham5 saying that Mary Helen was marrying a man who owns an electric store, and “she even added, ‘he sells all kinds of electrical appliances.’ ”6 My father went on to say that electricity was relatively new to our rural area at that time, so the idea of anyone selling a variety of electrical appliances was quite a novelty.
Obviously, I’ve chosen to keep “he’s an electrical engineer.” I think I would need to incorporate lots of additional detail to explain my great-grandmother’s excitement over an electric store, even though her contemporaries shared her feelings. In addition, I also suspect most of my audience members, like me, have no detailed idea what an electrical engineer does, but we’ve heard of such a profession, and it still sounds impressive, so my great-grandmother’s excitement in the story is a feeling we understand. Even more importantly to me as a storyteller, I liked the sound of “he’s an electrical engineer” and “he sells liquor and beer” when I heard my cousin tell it that way at the family reunion, and I like the sound of it now. Even after my fact-checking, I decided to keep that phrasing. I also began to wonder if Charlie had consciously changed the story because he liked the phrasing too. A phone conversation with him revealed he was telling the story just the way he recalled his father, Lamar Hamilton, telling it.7 Ah, the wonders of oral transmission!