White family partial memoir

Dear White family relations and friends,

These edited family remembrances started as emails I wrote across 2023-2025 for nephews John and Ted Fehskens. The first instalment— concerning A. Howard White, our most illustrious member—was composed last but here appears first. Other parts add details of his life and that of his wife Mary Elizabeth Barger White—my mother, their grandmother—as well as sister-aunts Karen, Connie, and Janet, our home life and other ancestors.

You all have busy lives, and reading’s obsolescent, so no expectations but please consider saving this file in case you or others someday feel curious about this branch of your family tree.

No pretensions to being comprehensive—I’ve repressed more words than anyone cares to imagine. Digressions provide images and flavors of middle-class life in North Carolina’s mid-20^th-century Piedmont, likely continuing here and there in your own lives.

Craig Howard White (1951 > 2026 >?)

Part 1: A. Howard White (1920-1976)

Hello once more, nephews. No offense taken if you shelve these avuncular confessions but please do conserve them. My previous instalment recalled your mother’s and my uncles—all but one within an hour’s drive, others minutes away.

Coming to terms with them did me good, but I later felt embarrassed for depicting men of whom you heard little and cared less. That feeling leads me here to describe more fully our ancestor who led the most prominent public life but so far has appeared only incidentally: your maternal grandfather A. Howard White.

Since others (incl. my generation) may read this, forgive detail and analysis beyond your interests that felt vital to a fair account of your grandfather’s exemplary life as well as its dismaying end.

Howard, as peers addressed him, waved off the initial A, for Arnold, even then unfashionable despite heroic etymology: Old German arn "eagle" + wald, "ruler". We children in town groaned over his siblings’ given names—Bertha Geneva, Annie Joybelle, Myrtle May, James Otis—symbolizing their generation’s one foot still in the country.

Of your generation only first-born Betsy White Small Huneycutt recalls your grandfather’s resonant voice, whose volume swelled like mine or your dad’s—pitch too, like a reporter questioning or an editor seeking agreement.

Speaking in person, Howard White advanced thoughts carefully, and paused before replying—otherwise not stereotypically Southern. Some pronunciations derived from northern Alamance County, where your great-grandmother White (née Mamie Mary Edna Beckom) grew up, e.g., “ain’t” for “aunt” (e.g., “Ask Ain’t Bertha”). Daddy dropped the “h” in phrases like “an ’umble man,” or Vice President Hubert Humphrey as “’Umphrey.” A residual Britishism?

Colloquially, he’d accept a gift by declaring “Looky there!”—a phrase I, working retail downtown, heard country folk exclaim over merchandise. Mother, taking my sisters shopping on Saturdays, sent preschool me upstairs to join Daddy’s nap—and squirm. “Pin down,” he’d say, an idiom I admired even then and now guess unique to his terroir. “Hello” rang out as “Hey-yo!” Like him I address male strangers as “buddy.”

Ethnically, I wanted our “White” surname to signify posh English, but more likely Scotch-Irish. Our American gene pool’s first bearer of that name arrived in 1776 at Baltimore from an unknown point of departure, I learned from a distant cousin who once buttonholed my attention as I do yours.

Your grandmother Mary Elizabeth Barger White’s grandparents, the Peelers, immigrated from the German Palatinate to the USA’s “Pennsylvania Dutch” country (Deutsch = German), then followed the Great Wagon Road down the Atlantic Piedmont to found the town of Faith NC, 60 miles N of South Carolina, 2020 population 819.

Aside from wary manners, emphatic speech, and Reformed Protestantism, your maternal grandmother’s birth family, the Bargers, had long assimilated to the inland Southern Scotch-Irish style and creed. Our only German-language inheritance was “snit pies,” apple turnovers so called by our maternal grandmother Mamie Martha Eleanor Peeler Barger (1889-1993) who baked them. (“Snit” from schnitz, Pennsylvania German for “pieces of fruit, esp. dried apple.”)

Rowan County’s proximity to South Carolina gave our “mother tongue” more melody than Alamance’s flatter tones. Peeler-Barger pronunciations might resemble Tidewater accents more than the Piedmont’s Scotch-Irish mutter. We pronounced “school” as /skoel/ and “hole” as /hoel/. A schoolmate on the next street peer-pressured me to conform, but until I say “Y’all” people sometimes guess my speech to be British Commonwealth. (My linguistics prof diagnosed mine as a “reading accent,” which is to say I talk like a book, as did your grandfather.)

Of Howard White’s descendants, your brother Matthew best embodies his ranginess—height 6’1”, weight 150. When in 1936 your maternal grandparents met as Catawba College’s youngest freshmen, Mary Eizabeth Barger beheld “the most stretched-out boy you’d ever see.”

Matthew, also like your grandfather, steps quick and lightly. Your grandmother again: “If you didn’t hear Howard talking or typing, you’d never know he was in the house.” He rose at six—credited by Mother to his Navy service, but he may always have started early. After his death I, employed at a downtown weekly in my mid-20s, emulated his morning skip from Fountain Place to Main Street. At that commute’s end, my day felt done. More often I slept in, then drove my VW to one of downtown’s many empty parking spaces.

Producing a newspaper every day but Sunday separated Editor White from men who golfed, fished, hunted, or drank, but his honest manners and modesty led them to respect his professional seriousness and decency. Women of all ages liked him and felt comfortable in his company, implicitly committed to Lib alone but attentive to their fair concerns.

Good looks helped. You remember his winning wife. His beauty too, especially as a young man, may surprise you. I’ll forward photos when I can. By our childhood he wore glasses, though his myopia was less severe than your grandmother’s, your mom’s, or mine. On beach vacations, he’d stash his specs in his shirt pocket and, following another practice from Navy days, strengthen his vision by looking out to sea.

Behind those glasses his steady clear eyes watched receptively over a long straight nose, plain cheeks, rosebud lips. His hair stayed dark, though its crown, like mine, retreated to Hippocratic baldness. At leisure outdoors he wore a white Ivy League cap; to work a dark fedora. He and other men in journalism wore a daily uniform of white shirt, tie, and dark suit, though reporters got by with blazers.

Our mother like yours was our family’s warm heart, but your sociable grandfather—who had standing invitations to service clubs like the Moose, Lions, Elks, Rotary, Civitan—preferred home cooking and his family’s company. He spoke affectionately and acted gently. His homebody ways may have originated from his birth family’s trials during the Great Depression, when unregulated financing evicted him and his parents from a home they thought they were purchasing, foreshadowing another unjust displacement near his life’s end.

As suggested elsewhere, that trauma may have most distressed his elder brother, who grew alienated and, as an adult, only occasionally visited Burlington. Their elder sisters married and lived independently. Our father, still a child with his social identity less formed, may have felt more protected as the baby of the family, though his resilience seemed inborn.

The rental home to which they moved stood a few blocks north from our two-storey saltbox house at 341 Fountain Place. Which house blurs, but Daddy, as our street turned into Trollinger Street, would mention it and gesture towards Askew Street in the Plaid Mills neighborhood near the railroad, proceeding east toward your sister Sally’s home. A reminiscence from his teens was spending a night eating peanuts and grapes and holding a flashlight under his bedsheets to read Gone with the Wind (1936).

Our paternal grandfather, George Otis White (1886-1948), died when Aunt Karen was a baby. His wife, our father’s mother Mamie Mary Beckom White (1887-1960), made a positive presence in our early years. One cold late-1950s morning Daddy carried me in a quilt to his mother’s apartment two streets east on 5^th Avenue at downtown’s edge, behind Hillcrest Elementary School (which educated all four little Whites). That day and night on her couch I ate animal crackers and read Sad Sack comics. Mornings at play with another little boy from the next apartment I marveled at moss instead of grass in her backyard. Later he and I never hung out, but our paths sometimes crossing, we remembered each other as playmates.

One day in third grade after walking home from Hillcrest, I found our house full of people dressed in Sunday clothes, speaking in low tones. Mother and Daddy walked me upstairs to explain that Mema White, who was staying in our downstairs guest room, died that morning. Her room later became mine, your mother taking full possession of the large upstairs bedroom we’d shared. (From its window one Christmas dawn I spied Daddy bringing from his car gifts soon said to be from Saint Nick, complicating family lore that Aunt Karen had sneaked partway down the stairs to glimpse “the shadow of Santa’s beard.”)

A strong, sweet, caring woman, your Great-Grandmother Mamie White gave security to her son and all his family. Late in life she worked as a practical nurse at Alamance Memorial Hospital, where we were born. Daddy mentioned patients sending her notes of gratitude; likewise to his sister Joy in the same job and looking much like her mother. After your grandfather’s diagnosis for diabetes in the early 1960s, he and I routinely visited Aunt Joy (and Uncle Henry) in northeast Burlington, where she taught Daddy himself to administer insulin.

Your great-grandfather George White faded from reference. As with you, we grandchildren never thought to ask. Our mother acknowledged him as a source for our sociability: “He never met a stranger.” Comparably, his son Howard liked to meet and remember everyone, repeating a new person’s name as he walked away, tapping his temple to make it stick.

George White’s only employment I heard of was delivering orders for C.B. Ellis Music Company downtown, where later I’d bike to hear new records by the Rolling Stones, Four Tops, etc. Our mother resented that her father-in-law late in life expected them to give him part of Daddy’s paycheck just as they were starting a family.

Some vagueness concerning your great-grandfather may result from his birth status. Our parents referred fondly to Howard’s maternal grandmother, Dolly Beckom, and her extended family, whose farms we visited. Only now do I learn the name of George White’s mother, my father’s paternal grandmother, born Priscilla Jane White. As for her partner, FamilySearch lists him as “White”—indicating his race, not his absent name. Rumor (via Mother) was that our paternal great-grandfather was a medical doctor. I’ve wondered if he, deep in that shadowy past, may have helped my father’s birth family in their better times.

Or a genealogical inheritance? Mother compared my bookishness to traits shared with Daddy, your Aunt Connie, and our Aunt Bertha, Daddy’s eldest sibling, whose graduation as a returning student from Elon College gave me an early image of higher education. At Christmas Aunt Bertha, a teacher and guidance counselor at Graham High, gave me books (e.g., William F. Buckley’s The Governor Listeth) and one Easter passed on her copy of The Passover Plot, a 1960s religious conspiracy fiction like The Da Vinci Code. As a widow between husbands, she joined us for meals and helped with homework. The only time I heard her raise her voice was when, sitting in our den, she yelped to find next to her on the couch a lizard I’d caught that escaped in the house.

Your grandfather’s somewhat unsettled family background, along with a journalist’s tight economies, made him wary to uproot. He mentioned offers of employment in Washington, likely from our U.S. Representative Horace Kornegay (served 1961-69) but hesitated to relocate his family for a risky job in politics.

Burlington was Howard White’s natural community. Until his final months, he lived elsewhere only from 1936 to 1945 (ages 16 through 25), first as an English major at Catawba College in Salisbury NC, where he edited the school newspaper and yearbook and reported for the Salisbury Post; then as a senior lieutenant for U.S. Navy intelligence in the Pacific during World War 2 (chiefly New Guinea and the Philippines). During training he and Mother lived in California and at Princeton in New Jersey. His closest friend, Jimmy May, died in the war.

Ex-Lieutenant White returned to his hometown married (as of 22 June 1940) and to the Daily Times-News, where he previously worked in circulation, in the mail room, and as a stringer (contract reporter). He soon rose to sports editor, city editor (per my 1951 birth certificate), then managing editor. In 1963—the year of the March on Washington and JFK’s assassination—longtime editor Staley A. Cook (1895-1966) retired. We children were called to the living room to learn our father was now editor-in-chief—at age 43, the same age as Kennedy when he became president three years earlier.

Mother later mentioned that Mr. Cook opposed Daddy’s promotion. His own father was a Presbyterian minister and president of Elon College. Any particulars of workplace conflict are beyond knowing, but I saw my first-ever dead person when, three years later, Daddy took me to Mr. Cook’s open-casket visitation, a scene rich in Oedipal innuendo.

Soon after your grandfather’s promotion, he and your mother caught bad flus. She recovered at home, but he, losing weight and strength, spent weeks at Duke Hospital, where X-rays found “a hole in his lung.” Recovery meant quitting cigarettes for pipes. Cans of Sir Walter Raleigh tobacco became fixtures on his desk, befitting his image as a thoughtful authority figure.

That health crisis was worsened by diabetes, only recently diagnosed and, as a chronic disease, an everyday challenge to be managed. Your vigilant grandmother used saccharine to sweeten our iced tea and improvised safe desserts to suit her husband’s sweet tooth.

Which returns us to the dinner table, the Whites’ exemplary domestic scene. The small formal dining room was reserved for holidays or grown-up dinners before bridge parties. Most mornings and nights we met in the kitchen’s adjacent breakfast room, whose round table expanded with extra leaves for friends, then boyfriends.

On the food front, some idiosyncrasies: If bread wasn’t on the table, Daddy noted the absence and Mother would put out slices of Sunbeam on a plate. A birth-family custom? An artifact of the Great Depression? Both rationales felt possible when a Hindu grad student told me her phone chats about meals with a maternal aunt led inevitably to, “Was there rice?”

An hour’s drive in mid-20^th century North Carolina encountered culinary variations, most famously barbecue. Mother’s family’s staple was rice, often cooked in milk, perhaps because Faith and Kannapolis were near South Carolina, a major exporter from colonial times owing to wetlands and enslaved people bringing expertise in rice cultivation from Africa.

Strong black coffee marked another paternal preference, perhaps again from military service. And hot! One night as we waited for Daddy to join us at dinner, Mother confided that that morning he had, for the first time in their married lives, burnt his mouth. (Tangential history: Pre-WW1 Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels, segregationist editor of the Raleigh News and Observer, banned alcohol on U.S. ships, making coffee the dram of choice and “Josephus” the eponym for a “cup of Joe.”)

Aside from Daddy’s standard blessing and expectation of good manners—no singing, shouting, reaching—dinners proceeded informally, with conversation encouraged. He brightened when all joined in. Our sole distraction, aside from the telephone, was the day’s news. At times of national crisis, he turned our den’s console television to face the table and leapt occasionally from his captain’s chair, where I now sit, to turn up the volume. (His family blessing: “God bless this food, / God bless us all, / and keep us safe, / whate’er befall, / for Jesus’ sake, / Amen.”)

The hallway phone rang often—a reporter in a jam or a subscriber missing their evening paper, which Daddy and I sometimes left the house to deliver. He spoke so loudly on the telephone that Mother said, “If he’d just open a window, they could hear him without the phone.”

We White kids thought about sodas, pop music, and peer-relations but grew up as ink-soaked as any in Alamance County. The Greensboro Daily News (where your Aunt Doris later worked for the editorial page) served as Burlington’s morning paper—and on Sundays its only paper, when the afternoon Times-News took a day off.

Sundays found us hurrying to Sunday school and church, then home for dinner and the long vacancy of Sunday afternoons. Not until the 1960s did we go to movies on the Lord’s Day. Sunday mornings too Daddy trekked downtown to the post office to retrieve the New York Times, the Charlotte Observer, the Durham Herald, and the Raleigh News and Observer (one of whose columnists, A.C. Snow, 1924-2022, sometimes dined with us, having written for the Times-News and become engaged for a time to Aunt Bertha’s daughter Bonnie, who married Byron Russell).

Before smartphones invaded, a home environment well-stocked with reading materials was claimed the best prep for a child to succeed. During 1956’s Hungarian Revolution, this five-year-old asked, “Where’s the place they hung Gary in?” After church, I consumed color comics (Prince Valiant! Grin & Bear It! Katzenjammer Kids!), later sports pages. Daddy’s bedroom bookshelves featured Walter Lippman’s The Cold War and Billy Graham’s World Aflame, while big sisters’ bookshelves held Little Women, Black Like Me, and of all things, Alexander Dumas’s The Companions of Jehu; in your mother’s room, among sheets of music lay Misty of Chincoteague.

Editor White’s home office in the upstairs master bedroom made no clear line between work and home. A teen-aged memory is leaving the house one evening with friends, hearing Daddy typing and glimpsing through the second-floor window his thin face intent under a fluorescent lamp’s bluish light.

Pardon digressions, but a media presence Americans easily forget is the early 20th century’s dependence on radio for news and entertainment. Assisting an American Humor course at Wisconsin made me wish I’d hearkened more to mass-market radio still surviving in the 1950s. A friend’s mother listened to stock car races. One summer I kept score for radio broadcasts of Alamance Senators baseball. I almost remember our family’s first TV; more definitely Captain Kangaroo’s first show, not in the “Treasure House” but on a maritime set, ergo “the captain.”

Daddy’s radio habits elicited a prodigious moment. Saturday nights our family watched Gunsmoke, the prestige western of TV’s Golden Age which began three years prior as a weekly radio drama that, with a different cast, co-existed with the TV version for several years. Knowing nought of that, I paused upstairs in the bedroom office one Saturday with my father typing away to hear the theme from Gunsmoke blaring from his bedside radio, followed by unfamiliar voices and a story unlike the one on TV that night. That day dawned the wonder I still feel as art morphs and multiplies on myriad platforms. As with nature—from quarks to quasars—virtual reality teems faster, vaster, more diverse than mind conceives.

Another such phenomenon: Sunday mornings from my first-floor bedroom I’d hear Daddy making coffee as the radio trumpeted, “Plain truths about the world today, and prophecies of THE WORLD TOMORROW,” a weekly program hosted by father-son evangelists Herbert and Garner Ted Armstrong from “Ambassador College of the Worldwide Church of God.” Silence ensued when he left for Sunday papers, returning to drive us a few blocks to First Reformed United Church of Christ, where discussing the End-Times was as unimaginable as running through the nave.

Back to that kitchen radio, at some point I learned that, thanks to some peculiar wiring, switching my bedroom’s overhead light off or on induced a noisy click of static. In 1966, when John Lennon said the Beatles were “more popular than Jesus now,” evangelicals burned records and tried to ban them from the airwaves. For several days at breakfast Daddy kept the radio on, turning up the volume at any anti-Beatles report. One morning when I could stand no more I sneaked back to my room and flipped the light switch rapidly up and down until he called out, “Somebody turn that radio off,” whereat I returned to the table.

Discovering this devious ploy would have hurt and puzzled my father. Personally and professionally he trusted others to reach fair agreements if only they shared feelings openly and honestly. On those terms we children might have met him better, but such is youth. Karen as first child heard more of “his lectures,” though each of us after some waywardness answered the summons to his home office in the parental bedroom. He would turn down the sound on his cubic metal black & white television but leave the picture on, seating us on the bed where our eyes shifted from him to the screen. At length he’d make the best of it and let us go. How little we rose to such moments was testified by the men or couples who visited our living room to seek Editor White’s counsel—as you likely saw others seek your parents’ company and consolation.

Aside from Mother’s disappointed looks, that was our harshest discipline. Once, at Mother’s urging, left-handed Daddy turned wicked me over his knee to spank, but his hand never came down. “I can’t,” he pled. My sisters may add grace notes, but our parents taught us chiefly by modeling patience, gentleness, and care.

Describing your grandfather’s professional life risks stacking a resumé, so perspective shifts from our home in Burlington’s original suburb, east seven blocks to the Times-News building on South Main Street. What my daft childmind didn’t perceive was Daddy prepping me potentially to follow his career, as many parents model for their offspring. Recognizing this fully only now testifies that your grandparents were gracious enough never to dictate their children’s futures.

An earlier instalment mentioned Saturday mornings Daddy taking me to join friends of his for breakfast at Southern Grill on North Main or Oscar’s in Glen Raven. Some Saturdays or school holidays he took pre-adolescent me to the Times-News plant to tour its daily production, most strikingly the enormous noisy press and its storeroom’s columnar rolls of paper.

Child-friendliest was the second-floor composing room—where typed words were cast and framed to pages for inking—where Editor White introduced me to middle-aged working men by name, all respectful and comfortable with him. Some grew up together at Elon’s Home for Children, supported by the Christian Church (another Scotch-Irish denomination formed after Kentucky’s 1802 Cane Creek Revival), which in the late 1800s founded Elon College and in the 1960s joined our family’s German-Swiss Evangelical and Reformed to become the United Church of Christ (UCC).

(Back to composing rooms, in the 1980s your Aunt Doris as editorial page associate editor and columnist spent much of any day in the Greensboro News and Record’s composing room, updated to phototypesetting, now as obsolete itself as the hot-metal typesetting of your grandfather’s prime.)

Those 1950s-early 60s visits to the Times-News composing room likely found me acting the little prince. Daddy resumed his first-floor duties filling the editorial page and supervising 15-20 writers and sub-editors, all polite to the boss’s son but chatting only briefly before turning back to typing.

So, on to the composing room, whose first stop atop the tall stairway was a row of smelters simmering molten lead, antimony, and tin for linotype machines. Across the room, men sat at organ-size keyboards transcribing paragraphs from copy paper to metal “lin[es] o’ type” to be “composed” in metal casings for the great press downstairs. (John Updike’s late-60s Rabbit novels’ protagonist is a linotypist, signaling his obsolescence.)

Louie, a composing room veteran from the Elon Home, came to your grandmother’s funeral. Another, “Inky” Owens, one college summer painted the upper storeys of 341 Fountain Place as I did the lower parts. Your mother’s and my favorite, Loomis “Tick” Parrish, hosted composing room tours and cast our names to reverse-3D metal images. Daddy and I attended his wedding (to Lettie) and visited their new house, which a worker’s salary could then buy.

The second floor’s fine old man, a Mr. Robertson, I knew only as the Times-News’s eagle-eyed proofreader until, as a Cub Scout, I saw him in senior Scout uniform for Memorial Day services at Pine Hill Cemetery. Also a coin collector: When a Sunday-School friend told me that my new penny with a D under Lincoln’s portrait was worth millions, Daddy showed it to Mr. Robertson, who answered, “A hundred of those will make a dollar.”

Adolescent employments with the Times-News trained me to work when otherwise I’d have stayed in my room reading comics. Minimal age for a paperboy was 12, but the summer of my 11^th year a son of Mother’s friend Mary Francis Elder dropped his delivery route and soon, every afternoon but Sunday, a van dropped stacks of the newspaper my father edited at the corner of Fountain Place and Kime, whence I pedaled them across Willowbrook Park to the neighborhood east of Williams High School.

The Elders, who lived in a house above a creek near the high school, make my earliest memory of Greek civilization’s influence on the Southern USA. Mary Frances’s husband and elder son were named Delos, the Greek island birthplace of Apollo and Artemis. Delos Senior, a.k.a. “Colonel Elder,” led Burlington’s Dixie-friendly Civil War Centennial observations, which occurred simultaneously with the 1960s Civil Rights Movement—previewing my later learning of Greek democracy’s and the Roman and the early American Republic’s presumption of slave labor. Among other Greek symbols, Burlington’s Western Electric defense plant manufactured Nike Zeus anti-ballistic missiles. My sisters in junior high were cheerleaders and I was a basketball bench-player for the Turrentine Trojans. Aside from Mr. Xanthos, ethnic Greek families named Touloupias, Ahladas, Pappas, and Christy owned the city’s several hot dog restaurants.

That fall Johnny Elder opted not to resume his route, so I continued another year before Burlington Rotary Boys Choir occupied more afternoons. The choir’s directors surprisingly elected me its president, only so Mother would organize other boys’ mothers. Two more paper routes ensued, one serving Dillard Circle, West Burlington’s one hidden dirt street where Negroes stayed—quite near Hillcrest School and Mema White’s old apartment.

More personal-professional interfaces: my 7^th-grade homeroom teacher was wife to Times-News associate editor; my young attractive 8^th-grade English teacher married a sharp young reporter named Jack, usually wearing a London Fog raincoat.

My last route downtown had me also deliver “tear sheets” (advertising mock-ups) to local businesses, interact with people who knew my parents, and meet Burlington’s two Jewish shop owners, Mrs. Goldman and Mr. Loeb. At 16 I “caught the press”: scooping up 25 issues at a time to bundle for distribution. Saturdays I counted subscription payments from newsboys.

Circulation’s periphery rarely intersected Daddy’s orbit upfront. Mornings he walked or drove to work; afternoons I rode my bike. Handling newspapers kept me familiar with headlines, and sometimes, as after Burlington’s race riots, his byline appeared over front-page editorials.

His daily output for the editorial page maintained the press’s mission as thought-leader, but even then that page drew the fewest readers. Daddy’s twice-weekly column, light and personal in tone, drew more Letters to the Editor.

Online (at a price) you may access the Times-News archive and read for yourself. Its production started with blank pages of paper rolled into manual typewriters. Like most male journalists of his cohort, your grand-dad joined forefinger to middle finger and pounded away hunt-and-peck style. Memory musters few specifics on content, but he always produced “clean copy,” scrupulously edited, its content as generous as all his being. On any topic he reviewed both sides, advocating and modeling good-faith deliberation as a way to move forward from conflict.

Similar attitudes characterized others’ work in your grandparents’ “Greatest Generation” who survived the Great Depression, won World War 2, and consolidated earlier immigrants in unprecedented prosperity. During their youth, Franklin Roosevelt campaigned for President by opposing “concentration of wealth and power . . . built upon . . . other people’s labor.”

Progressive taxation, cheap energy, low divorce rates, high fertility, consumer demand, plus World War 2’s expansion of Allied industry and reduction of German and Japanese competition—all produced the so-called “Great Compression,” a period unique in its general affluence, as laws kept people from being either too poor or too rich. For a generation political parties reached consensus on a future of unlimited growth that “lifts all boats.” In Burlington, a unionized Western Electric defense plant building Cold War missiles offered high wages and benefits, raising local families into the middle class and attracting engineers from northern states who voted for supplemental taxes so our city could have schools like the ones they left behind. (Such taxes ended in the Reagan 80s.)

News media supported and profited from this middle-class consensus in a way that helped your grandfather’s career but left him vulnerable when times changed. My email review two years ago of Allen Tullos’s Habits of Industry: White Culture and the Transformation of the Carolina Piedmont detailed how families who owned NC’s textile mills maintained White workers’ support for the status quo by supporting politicians who barred Black Americans from attending White schools, swimming in public pools, competing for skilled jobs, or voting—much less aspiring to elected office.

As with his graceful bearing toward women, in race relations your Grandfather White was by Southern standards at least a moderate. Along with other regional journalists of his generation, his newspaper’s prosperity trusted government, business, and media to play fairly—the post-World War 2 “consensus.” Such apparent unanimity came at a cost to outsiders, however. For those who worked in support of a system they couldn’t lead, the Times-News until the mid-sixties offered a weekly column titled “Negro News,” while daily pages headed “Women” featured weddings, household hints, and astrology.

That postwar era’s social and economic stability differed, however briefly, from the revolutionary change stimulated by capitalism and science. Soon enough, both those at the bottom (the systematically excluded) and those at the top (wealthy taxpayers) challenged the status quo. Republicans who resented the New Deal found new cards to play when President Johnson’s Great Society extended the social safety net to previously unprotected people. Ever since, our multiracial democracy struggles to reproduce the public-private cooperation achieved by an exclusive white men’s club.

Pardon history lessons, but what soon befell our father professionally shocked us so that only setting his loss in context with larger changes begins to explain it. By the 1970s, economic and political changes were overturning previous assumptions about communities and identities,

A shopping mall opened in Burlington’s western suburbs, where the city’s rising middle class was moving, leaving downtown a ghost district. The Burlington school system “consolidated” its segregated schools. Election of an all-white cheerleading squad at Williams High helped spark Burlington’s 1969 race riot. Girls began wearing pants and asking about women’s roles in literature and history.

Until the 1960s, your grandmother was a stay-at-home mom who made meals, sewed clothing, led the church women’s guild, and managed her children’s needs. As our adolescences multiplied our needs, Mother began teaching kindergarten (not then part of public education), first with her friend Mary Kukel at First Reformed UCC, then solo at a UCC mission church near Elon College. Two summers she taught in the Head Start program for poor children funded by President Johnson’s War on Poverty.

Your grandfather confided that he never wanted Mother to have to work, but she maintained her usual energy levels. She always sang, but now instead of hymns or old pop standards, her tunes were those she taught, one quaint lyric ending, ” . . . and scare away old Blackie Crow.”

Nationally, President Nixon established Affirmative Action programs to encourage diversity and equality in public schools, government, the military, and private corporations doing business with them, causing a business-class rebellion.

The corresponding change that most directly affected your grandfather took place in journalism. The Washington Post’s reporting on President Nixon’s Watergate scandal modeled an investigative journalism that soon overshadowed the community coverage Howard White championed. (Not to imply he censored content. When police charged with vehicular homicide the son of a prominent family with whom we were friendly, Daddy met them in person but nevertheless published the painful news.)

Popular use of the internet still a decade or two away, the Times-News remained profitable and your grandfather reached a peak in his career. In the years I studied at UNC (1970-74), he received an honorary doctorate from his alma mater, Catawba College, where he was a trustee, and became a leading member of the North Carolina Press Association (NCPA), whose annual summer meetings your mother and I attended.

As chairman of the NCPA’s legislative committee, Editor White frequently commuted to Raleigh, the state capital, to lobby the NC Legislature to pass its first “Sunshine Laws” authorizing public access to official meetings and records. The law’s nickname came from Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis's observation that "sunshine is said to be the best of disinfectants" (against corruption). In 1974, my last year at UNC, its School of Journalism hosted a panel where your grandfather discussed this civic advance, which I attended—a happy memory, as he spoke well and, at dinner afterward, beamed at my positive feedback.

Back in Burlington, though, generational change was undermining his professional foundation. A High Point family owned the Times-News and other mid-sized Piedmont newspapers. Its amiable patriarch gave our family rides to NCPA conventions and, once a summer, comped our family a week’s lodging on the ground floor of his family cottage at Ocean Drive, north of Myrtle Beach, SC. One summer his daughter-in-law, on English faculty at High Point College, inhabited the upper floor and mentored me to read D. H. Lawrence.

When that senior owner retired in favor of his middle-aged sons, they pressed for changes at the Times-News. New bosses prefer their own hires, and larger trends were disrupting postwar cooperation between business, government, and media. Instead of lifting all boats, two 1970s oil crises threatened corporate profits, which owners recouped by saving on labor. Your Uncle Larry excepted, textile executives moved factories overseas, hollowing out Alamance and other Carolinas counties where industries had earlier located for the same reasons: low wages, few regulations, no unions.

Concurrent changes in media disrupted your grandfather’s career on the way to ending his life. As a “Fourth Estate” monitoring and sustaining public life, his generation of journalists practiced what came to be called “community journalism.” Scandal and outrage fed public appetites and sharpened media’s adversarial edge, making it compete with any other interests save those of its owners, seeking fast profits through vulgar sensation and facile moralism to jump-start our era of growing inequality.

Across 1975-76, during these changes at the Times-News, I studied and taught at Appalachian State in the NC mountains, so my perspective is distanced and discontinuous. The paper’s new generation of owners evidently saw your grandfather as a relic and pressured him to resign. Their hand-picked general manager blocked his morning routine of retrieving the newspaper’s mail from the downtown post office, then demoted him from editor-in-chief to editor of the editorial page.

When I visited, Mother said her husband came home for lunch every day, baffled and deflated by such treatment. Years before, he told me, he was offered a chance to buy shares in the company, which might have protected his position. Left unspoken was that rearing four children on a journalist’s salary, even an editor’s, left little to invest.

Fairly all our family’s extras (Sunday papers, office supplies, a company car, Alamance Country Club membership) were Times-News perks. You as preachers’ kids know, as Abbey does, how a family’s assumed prestige can exceed their income when their head follows a calling to help rather than exploit others—practically amounting to long hours for short wages. Pre-adolescence, we children loved the Country Club swimming pool and its café’s ice cream pies, but kids we met there lived in that far neighborhood, took tennis lessons, and often vanished that fall to private schools. Our friends came more from the rising professional middle-class than from old or new money.

Daddy’s regrets over not buying stock in the company previewed the 1980s’ privileging of capital over labor, oligarchy over democracy, austerity over abundance. A joke he shared: “What would you do if you had all the money in the world?” Answer: “I’d put it as far as it would go to pay my debts.” Heroic irony warns me not to exaggerate our family’s struggles, especially since, as the only boy, I received extra support and indulgence. Our home was never bleak or desperate, owing to our parents carefully measuring out their paychecks, a pattern his grandchildren likely witnessed in their own homes.

There’s money, and there are manners. Our middle-class family practiced the genteel code recorded by Edith Wharton: “Never talk about money, and think of it as little as possible.” Your grandfather regularly recalled his mother saying, “We’ll find a way.” Your grandmother similarly advised, “Be glad your problems are money, because those can be worked out.” Like them and you, we showed up for classes and jobs, faced down despair, and either helped or got out of the way.

Your grandfather, under duress, explored other employments. UNC’s Journalism School offered a teaching position, but in early 1976 he resigned from the Times-News to become editor and publisher of the Daily Independent in your grandmother’s hometown of Kannapolis. From March he commuted or stayed the night at our Grandmother Barger’s. Hearing Bach recently reminded me that, on his commute, he taught himself to play “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring” on harmonica.

Our last time together in Burlington he showed me two copies of the Independent. An issue from before his hiring looked gray and text-heavy, a recent edition brighter and dynamic with photos, white space, and headlines of varying font-sizes. He seemed just what Kannapolis wanted and needed.

Meanwhile, his many Burlington friends organized a farewell “roast and toast” of dinner, testimonials, jokes and good wishes. Daddy’s farewell: “Lib and I won’t really be that far away.”

In spring 1976, a few months after paying off its mortgage, your grandparents sold their home of twenty-plus years and moved to an apartment in Kannapolis near a house they would buy upon vacancy.

Until 28 June 1976, my sisters, brothers-in-law and I looked forward to our family continuing intact and our father receiving an income equal to his labors. Late that night Uncle M.J. and Aunt Juanita phoned from Kannapolis that Daddy died of a heart attack. From Marion your parents in their Dodge Swinger picked me up in Boone to ride to Kannapolis. We found Mother, Karen, Larry, Connie, and Steve on couches in lamplight. As Howard’s nearest match, I held Mother’s hand.

Howard himself hadn’t felt well that day, Mother said. After work and dinner he took to bed early while Lib sat up in the next room. Some moments later she heard him gasp, then couldn’t rouse him. Medical attendants arrived, confirmed his heart had stopped, took him to Kannapolis hospital, there pronounced dead, age 55.

His survivors faced each other with shock and strength. Next morning Larry and I visited the morgue to confirm our new reality, but all relocated soon to Burlington. Karen and Larry opened their house facing Willowbrook Park, where as children we played and Daddy made kites from branches and newsprint. Our family’s friends, some I’d only heard of, shared stories and support.

Your grandfather’s death remains the worst day of my life, but grief leaves me cold and remote. The mourner who got to me was Hobart Steele, 20 years Daddy’s senior, both tall, lean, straight men. Him I remembered as founder and voice of Burlington’s Halloween fireworks, and seeing him exit I followed to tap at his car door, startling him to spill a bag of oranges he brushed away to seat and tell me how, when he moved to Burlington in mid-life, my father was the first man he knew he could trust.

Likewise John Xanthos, a lawyer we knew from First Reformed UCC: On moving to Burlington he visited the Times-News offices, met my father, and asked about local churches. A few minutes after exiting, Mr. Xanthos returned to ask, “Which church do you go to?”

North Carolina’s major newspapers responded to Howard White’s death with obituaries and commemorative editorials, which skated by the awkward fact of the NC Press Association president resigning from his hometown newspaper. UNC’s Journalism school created a fellowship in his name and hung in its main hall an oil portrait of Editor White.

At his funeral, church members, co-workers, friends, and representatives from local and state government (including two NC governors) filled First Reformed’s sanctuary. Our family followed the hearse to Shiloh UCC cemetery in Faith NC, our mother’s first church. A. Howard White was there interred, since joined by his wife’s ashes, under a stone cover engraved with a favorite passage from naturalist John Burroughs:

I still find each day too short for all the thoughts I want to think, all the walks I want to take, all the books I want to read, and all the friends I want to see.

We survivors felt his life too short and wondered how to live without him. Your grandmother, like other bereaved spouses, reported being visited at night by her husband, who caressed her face and told her everything would be alright. She explained decisions as “what Howard would want me to do.”

My father’s afterlife haunts my spirit, which I redeem by learning that, however exasperating myself, I inherit his yen to reconcile oppositions. Not long before he passed, as I gained confidence and he took pride in my academic career, we talked together more as two men, and I looked forward to learning more about him, his family, Catawba, the Navy, and other countless doings. For decades my dreams found him standing in his dark raincoat under a streetlight alone and mute to entreaties. Lately he appears in a crowd, beckoning me to follow. I wake recalling his voice but not his words.

Absent his living presence, events turn episodic. Our Aunt Willette, Mother’s elder sister, died in Kannapolis hospital five days after her brother-in-law. The following week the USA celebrated its bicentennial, which I spent house-sitting your parents’ home in Marion, then back to Boone to complete coursework and give up a faculty home I kept that summer.

My parents’ Kannapolis home purchase canceled, your grandmother bought a house in Burlington catty-corner from our former home, now filled by a thriving young family. I moved into 412 Fountain Place for moral support and to work for a weekly newspaper that former Times-News employees were founding to restore the community journalism their past employer now seemed to abandon.

With my father I had discussed jobs in journalism, though implicitly not in his employ. Reading Dickens, who started as a court reporter, made me hope deadlines would correct my diffidence toward publishing. After completing an independent study, I signed on for $120 a week (!) at the newly-founded City-County News as its only full-time writer and photographer.

The long recession from the 1970s oil crises left City-County to struggle. Wide internet use was a decade away, but newspapers already earned the irony of The Office’s slogan, “The future is paper.” Two years in, the editor resigned to sell insurance, and the business manager rebooted the publication as an advertising magazine.

An Elon College art-gallery reception in 1978 hosted Richard Wordsworth (1915-93), British character actor and great-great-grandson of poet William Wordsworth, in whose company I chanced to meet Elon College’s English chair. Was she impressed when I reminded Wordsworth of a role he’d forgotten, as an imprisoned beggar who fathers the title character in Hammer Films’ 1961 Curse of the Werewolf? The English chair asked me to teach freshman writing, opening a path back to academe.

My experiment as a hometown journalist confirmed all I like in such a job but also my incapacity to replicate my father’s regimen. As “press,” I entered free to events much as Editor White had (often bringing me along). I made the best of my asocial inclinations, scoping a scene, interviewing the interesting people, standing apart with my camera, then slipping away without further commitment. On circulation Wednesdays I traversed northern Alamance County, photographing its bleakness and delivering free copies to community stores, where I fished for feature stories, though most people never heard of our publication. My peak of vanity was learning that my Williams High English teacher urged her students to study my syntax.

My coverage of local beats in an increasingly left-behind industrial city witnessed a transition from the secure abundance of “the golden age of controlled capitalism” to freemarket neoliberalism’s headlong exploitation of shrinking resources, soon called “Reaganomics.” 1979 was the last year American workers’ income exceeded inflation, also the nation’s first budget deficit since World War 2. The public servants I interviewed could only play defense, and lifestyles that made local civilians newsworthy—mostly those inclined to self-promote or challenge authority—left me wishing to analyze their condition and tell them their truer interests. In contrast, your grandfather assumed everyone benefits if all voices are heard, though he filtered misinformation, moderated passions, and squelched vulgar language, all now rampant on social media.

As these professional changes transpired, your grandmother’s high school flame from Kannapolis, Roy Phillips—“Phil” or “Pop,” as you knew him— left his longtime home in Newport News VA for Burlington. They married at her brother P. A.’s house in Asheboro. After trekking across South Asia, I lucked into a lectureship at UNC-Greensboro only to find my high school flame Doris Hardie enrolled there for a Master of Fine Arts. My parents supported my scholarly career, but our moves to Wisconsin, Texas, and California inevitably distanced me from former expectations and new generations back home.

One 1990s Christmas returned me to that smaller world where people knew and cared who I was. While Doris, Abbey, and I stayed with your grandmother, I checked off a local oversight about which Renaissance architecture regularly reminded me: From childhood when we picked up Karen and Connie from Girl Scouts, I recognized downtown Burlington’s Christian Church, but I’d never viewed the interior of Alamance County’s only building crowned with a dome.

Women warm and cozy, I put on a tie and went there for Christmas Eve service. The sanctuary’s inner dome was lighted like early dawn, and overflow rooms, now shuttered, bespoke the denomination’s glory years. (Elon College and its Children’s Home were founded by this UCC tributary.)

I was still in my forties, but the congregation, like most Mainline Protestants, had largely gone gray. The ushers expressed friendly curiosity about my presence. After mentioning my out-of-town status and touristy mission, I acknowledged growing up in Burlington, my home church, and my parents’ names. While waiting for the service to begin, I heard a buzz across the pews behind me: “That’s Howard White’s son.”

Looking back over these events, I resist thinking my father was Times-News editor for only 13 years, so completely during our maturation was he identified with that occupation, the newspaper, and its community.

Six years ago marked a century since Howard White’s birth, this year a half-century since his death. My grief continues for his early passing, with frustrated desire to have been if not a worthier, then a more appreciative son. I must have sown as much confusion as I felt. But your grandfather was as generous to forgive failures as to welcome successes. If I regret being no better, I thank his and our mother’s love that I am no worse.

Mostly I’ve felt lucky. The longer I’ve prepared this remembrance, the more Daddy’s all too mortal being has shone with the goodness and light of Christian identity and action.

However much any of us inherits his (or her) grace, I assume serious conscience in all you do, but many of your generation find little opportunity to witness your grandfather’s vocation as an editor who mediates between content creators and a collective audience’s needs. Legacy publications, even television newscasts, still work to maintain professional standards in a changing market, but for the many who resent expertise and distrust institutions, social media dispenses with such middlemen, letting influencers appeal to natural human biases that algorithms exploit.

As during the industrial revolution, new tech billionaires both gratify and immiserate customers for exponential profits, advancing a Social-Darwinian system of winners and losers, setting financial elites and cultural populists against educated elites and organized labor. Amid earlier such upheavals, responsible writers and thinkers found ways to re-institute accountability and may yet again.

Like ever more local newspapers, the one your grandfather served most of his life no longer exists. Your Uncle Larry—who like his father-in-law always tied his fate to that of working and middle-class people in Piedmont North Carolina—now manufactures textiles in the old Times-News building, where he has hung the portrait of A. Howard White commissioned by the UNC School of Journalism.

NCPedia page on A. Howard White.

Addendum regarding your grandmother Mary Elizabeth Barger White

Your knowledge and love of your grandmother encourage these details of her life before your grandparents’ marriage.

Until school age Mary Elizabeth Barger lived in Faith NC, where her father was a stone mason and her mother ran their family’s boarding house, whose occupants your grandmother sometimes recalled. Your great-grandmother Mamie Martha Eleanor Peeler Barger (1889-1993) was second of five daughters born to Mary Lusetta Roseta Brown Peeler (1867-1949) and Paul Alexander Peeler (1864-1917), one of the brothers who migrated from Pennsylvania to found Faith. His wife, my maternal great-grandmother, descended from the Browns or Bruns, also from the south-German Palatinate. My grandmother Barger owned a book detailing their genealogy.

Mamie Barger in the early 1900s was crowned the first “Miss Faith” and attended Catawba College, then in Newton NC, which at its Salisbury campus your grandparents attended a generation later. Several accomplished paintings Mamie Peeler made as a young woman are held by our family.

The Peelers as merchants had the wherewithal to support a daughter’s higher education. They likely helped their son-in-law, Mamie’s husband Willie Samuel Barger (1881-1946), start a grocery store in the nearby textile city of Kannapolis, home of Cannon Mills, to which your grandmother’s birth family relocated. (Until the early 1960s our maternal uncles still operated that store, where my cousin Sammy and I bagged groceries.)

Your grandmother’s older sister, Willette Barger Faulkenberry (1914-1976), was a church organist and piano teacher; an older brother, Paul Alexander “P. A.” Barger (1918-1979); and a younger one, Moses Jeremiah “M. J.” Barger (1922-2017), who went by “Mason Jerry,” the name assigned him by the Navy when he claimed his initials were all there were to his name, are described in another instalment..

Before meeting your grandfather at Catawba, your grandmother attended J. W. Cannon High School, where she was starting guard for the girls’ basketball team and, by her testimony, “fouled out of every game.”

At Burlington’s Central News Stand, where I regularly hung out to browse war stories and magazines like Famous Monsters of Filmland, a middle-aged clerk once asked who I was, then recalled how “when your father brought his wife here after the war, she was just about the prettiest woman any of us had ever seen.”

Craig Howard White

May 2026

Back to contents

Part 2: Barger-White ethnic backgrounds (email 4)

Respect and thanks, dear John and Ted, for enduring these impositions. A previous instalment reviewed your grandmother’s ethno-religious background from her 1920 birth into the German Reformed Church in Faith NC, brought from Pennsylvania by, among others, her maternal grandparents from the Pennsylvania Dutch (i.e. Deutsch or German) settlements. In 1934 the German Reformed denomination on the Atlantic coast merged with the mostly-midwestern Evangelical Synod, becoming the Evangelical and Reformed Church (E&R), into which my sisters and I were born, and which by our adolescence became the United Church of Christ (UCC).

Today, more speculatively, a similar review of ethno-religious background for your posthumous grandfather Howard White—the finest man many people ever knew, sweetly partial to your mom, calling her “Jin-Jan” and staging father-daughter dates to, say, Mary Poppins (1964).

Starting with a small mystery, “How did Howard White’s family find their way to the Burlington church where your mother, maternal aunts and I were baptized and confirmed?” (and my sisters were married). On your behalf I asked your Uncle Larry Small, my brother-in-law who worked in UCC lay leadership with his father-in-law Howard White.

Worth wondering because Howard White told me his birth-family’s ethnicity—in diminishing shares our own—was Scotch-Irish, a people more commonly identified as backwoods Presbyterian, later Methodist, Baptist, and Pentecostal, but not . . . German Reformed? A distant cousin says our family’s first “White” landed in Baltimore in 1776, but no clue where he boarded. The name’s English, but unlike Highland Scots, Lowland Scots is a Germanic language descended from Old English. The more familiar Catholic Irish (speaking mostly English but some Gaelic Irish) immigrated in the early to mid-1800s, especially during the potato famine. In the previous century, many if not most immigrants to mid-1700s North America were Protestant Scotch-Irish like our forebear probably was. Beckom (variant of Beckham), the maiden name of my father’s mother, your paternal great-grandmother, is also English, Scottish, or Scotch-Irish, often distinctions without a difference in the northern British Isles.

The double-signifier “Scotch-Irish” challenges our expectations for naming immigrant ethnicities but this identity signally began under Queen Elizabeth I and King James I (late 1500s-early 1600s). When English families seized property from the folk of Eire, Scottish men and families crossed the Irish sea for jobs there as craftsmen, laborers, and managers on Anglo-Irish estates, especially in northern counties like Ulster. Since the Reformation, Presbyterianism prevails as Lowland Scotland’s ruling religion, incompatible with displaced Catholic families in Ireland. In Northern Ireland these “Ulster Scots” remain part of the United Kingdom, regularly renewing local quarrels by parading to celebrate Protestant victories over Catholic resistance.

Many “Ulster Scots” migrated to colonial North America, arriving at ports like Baltimore, then on to eastern North America’s interior, founding or joining homesteads, rural communities, and towns down the Atlantic colonies, especially the sparsely-populated Carolinas and beyond to Tennessee, first calling themselves “Irish” but later “Scotch-Irish” to distinguish themselves from the later-arriving Catholics. As in Ireland, our people often did dirty work beyond English communities on the frontier, fighting Indians, overseeing slaves, or buying their own—e.g., Thomas Sutpen in Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!

Double-designations like “Scotch-Irish” ask too much from most Americans, but the term sometimes crops up for hillbillies like Hatfields and McCoys, isolated if not incestuous rednecks; moonshiners, coal miners, snake-handlers. J.D. Vance used the term liberally in his Hillbilly Elegy (2016). In SE Texas many of my white evangelical students self-identified as “Irish” despite being Protestant, frequently with Tennessee forebears. Teaching Scotch-Irish identity meant starting from scratch to explain the “Three Kingdoms” of the British Isles, while “Irish” evoked Old Spice or Hallmark fantasies of quaint villages, green hills, and kindly priests—apparently preferable to angry preachers of sin and deliverance.

Former U.S. Senator (D-VA) James Webb’s book Born Fighting: How the Scots-Irish Shaped America labels them (us, also him) as America’s “base culture,” Scotch-Irish working-class families, especially Southern, provide more military recruits than any other ethnicity or region. Cultural traditions include bluegrass, country music, stock cars, personal firearms, professional wrestling, tractor pulls, monster trucks. Drink too much or not at all. Left-behind Rust Belt workers are often Scotch-Irish who migrated from Appalachia to Midwestern cities. In Greater Arkansas, Scotch-Irish workers process poultry, stock Wal-Mart shelves, and vote in favor of tax cuts for the people who own the factories, stores, and media.

No disrespect. When I taught Scotch-Irish literature, a student evaluation asked, “Why do you hate White people?” Answer: I like them more than they like me with my bookishness, nervous manners, lack of toughness and common sense. They make things; I think about things. Our people, absent meth or liquor, work hard at any job that leaves time for church and sports. They’re far more faithful to family and place than metropolitan elites, sometimes at a cost to prosperity.

Notable Scotch-Irish: Daniel Boone, Andrew Jackson, Sam Houston, John C. Calhoun, Nathan Bedford Forest, John Wayne, John McCain, Jimmy Stewart, Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, J.D. Vance, many more—genes and cultures cross over the generations. Frontier demographics often left American Indians with Scotch-Irish genes, usually through paternal lines. Scotch-Irish families like your Aunt Doris’s claim Indian inheritance through maternal lines. Elvis’s mother was Scotch-Irish with descent from the Cherokee “princess” Morning Dove White. America’s military makes fertile ground for interracial marriages: Scotch-Irish recruits may marry and bear children for a multicultural future.

Back at last to the question: How did your Scotch-Irish grandfather find himself at First E&R Church in Burlington NC? The likely answer, Larry and I inferred, was simple proximity. Our future father’s family home was only a few walkable blocks west in the city’s “Plaid Mills” neighborhood—so-called for its large textile plant at the railroad.

His family’s dedication to education may have helped the attraction. Like Lutherans and other denominations still connected to European theological origins, the Reformed tradition demands educated ministers, which corresponds (roughly) to congregational inclinations. Your grandfather’s eldest sister (Aunt Bertha) completed college and a graduate degree, becoming a teacher and school counselor, and estranged big brother Otis had at least some college and worked as a journalist. The Beckoms I met were responsible, industrious folk who stayed in the country except for one distant cousin, Margaret, who tailored alterations at Sellars Department Store when I sold boys’ clothes there. On another genetic line, rumor was that the otherwise anonymous father of your mother’s and my paternal grandfather George White was a medical doctor (reported, I think, by my mother).

From 1936, Burlington’s First E&R Church contributed $50 yearly for Howard White to attend its affiliate college, Catawba, in Salisbury near Kannapolis, home of Mary Elizabeth Barger, also new to Catawba, where your maternal grandparents met in the school’s chorus, at age 16 the youngest members of their class.

Next email: The UCC forms during your mom’s and my childhood. The E&R and smaller denominations join the larger, liberal Congregational Church, direct descendant of the New England Puritans (thus my interests in the 17^th century and those Puritan Johns, Milton and Bunyan). Rather than separate like other denominations in the ongoing Protestant Reformation, the UCC and other “mainline” denominations (United Methodist Church and Evangelical Lutheran Church in America) advance by uniting with each other. In our Burlington church, that UCC merger forced a schism that previewed culture wars already simmering and only hotter ever since.

Sorry for garrulity. Your grandfather’s early death precluded data necessary for efficiency. Also Scotch-Irish history proves both blessing and burden. At breakfast this morning the jukebox played our ethnic kinsman Johnny Cash singing “I Don’t Like It But I Guess Things Happen That Way”

Your chronically fraught Uncle Craig (whose evangelical students hated any denominational history)

Back to contents

Part 3: Growing up Liberal Protestant in the South (Email 5)

Previous instalments, dear nephews. reviewed ethnic and church backgrounds of your maternal family, which landed Karen, Connie, Craig and Janet in Burlington’s First Evangelical & Reformed Church, later First Reformed United Church of Christ.

Children see natal environments as a natural order. We thought little about church beyond friends in Sunday School and not fidgeting during service.

Your grandparents were among our congregation’s leaders, partly on account of your grandfather’s public profile but also your grandmother’s deep denominational roots. Her Pennsylvania-Dutch grandparents, the Peelers, founded the NC town of Faith and its German Reformed Church. Her mother’s family of five married sisters attracted clergymen husbands, including the memorably-named Uncle Odell. Lonnie Carpenter, pastor at Burlington’s E&R in our early childhood, was a distant cousin. My grandmother’s cousin and contemporary Banks Peeler, leader of the state’s E&R Synod, laid hands on my confirmation class.

Such names are now, like Keats’s, “writ on water,” but you knew your Grandmother White enough to picture her in middle age. A Sunday-evening talent show in the fellowship hall opened with her frontstage as a church-lady clutching a plastic purse, which contained a wet sponge that dropped fake tears as she lip-synced a ditty bewailing a lover in jail, then roller-skated offstage at song’s end. Another act staged a fistfight that sent your grandfather flying into a fellow actor’s everlasting arms. (At some such meetings, your grandmother accompanied hymns on piano.)

Post-war affluence, high birthrates, and support for public education sustained “Mainline” churches like the UCC, Lutherans, Methodists, Presbyterians, Episcopalians, and the culture they led, which we took too much for granted. You’ve seen your mother’s home church’s Italianate architecture. Inside, the proscenium arch over the altar upholds Burlington’s best sculpture, a stucco frieze of the Last Supper at eye-level from our balcony pew. Thence I fantasized swinging on chandeliers to pull out a pointed organ pipe to repel invaders coming through the stained-glass windows. Educators, professionals, and civil servants filled pews along with families born to the institution. Choir included trained performers. At Easter the director, a faculty member from Elon College, led excerpts from Handel’s Messiah.

Mother hosted guild and circle groups. Daddy and I attended Men’s Brotherhood breakfasts and stirred vats of Brunswick stew in the sheltered driveway tween church and parsonage, just outside the church kitchen, which packaged it for sale.

Christmas Eve pageants depicted the manger scene with shepherds and wise men strolling the nave. My extra-scriptural role was a little bespectacled boy carrying an artificial rose to Mary, played by your Aunt Karen’s best church friend, our local Audrey Hepburn, her father as Joseph. Evening ended with children back to Sunday School classrooms for bags of fruits, macadamia nuts, a toy (once a Wheel-O!), and, in separate jars, acclaimed mint candies homemade by the venerable Mrs. Glenn.

Postwar abundance and modest religiosity gave glimpses of finer things than small Southern cities otherwise assumed. Only now I adequately appreciate sermons calling us not to be saved from the world but to examine our conscience for ways to save it. Offerings were dedicated to charity rather than church growth or missionary work. Gospels took priority over epistles, with only the faintest thunder from Revelation or other apocalyptic scriptures. Hymns and creeds proclaimed salvation, but everyday behavior suggested more imitation of than salvation by Christ. One early-1960s Sunday our junior-high Sunday School teachers—one a downtown jeweler, one a county school administrator—drove us across town to see neighborhoods far different from our own.

A late-60s sermon defended the UCC’s support for the “Wilmington Ten,” Black civil rights activists framed in that coastal North Carolina city. When a nearby store burned down concurrently with a meeting the group at a United Church of Christ, the men were accused of conspiracy and arson, then sentenced to decades of prison—convictions later overturned with reparations. At the time I’d never heard of the Wilmington Massacre, the USA’s only successful coup d’etat when White supremacists in 1898 murdered dozens to hundreds and overthrew the city’s elected government of Lincoln-era Republicans and Black officials—naught of which our North Carolina history books mentioned.

Sociologically, the “Mainline” Protestant tradition in which our family grew up also defined my friends’ church scenes. Downtown Lutheran, Presbyterian, and Methodist churches hosted organ concerts, scout meetings, kindergartens, and scout troops. The Episcopal church offered an open gym. One day after basketball I wandered up to its Gothic Revival sanctuary, where stained-glass windows spilled colored light on dark wood and rich upholstery. During college I returned there to hear Rector Roderick Reinecke (d. 2022) accompany hymns on his acoustic guitar.

In contrast, I felt discomfited when a fine family on our street took me along to First Baptist Church downtown, an impressive Greek Revival edifice in whose Sunday School one child after another confidently declared how much Jesus loved them. A decade later several switched from “cool” Mainline rationalism to “hot” evangelical emotionalism, often in informal groups on a mission to save the world before time ran out. Mainline mission, on the other hand, felt like a never-concluding pilgrimage of self-examination and social uplift—a shared conscientious neurosis with rarely an ecstatic catharsis.

U.S. Armed Forces make a value-neutral distinction of Protestant chaplains as “liturgical” or “non-liturgical.” Mainline church services follow liturgies—regular sequences of ceremonial readings and devotional acts. Evangelical services trend less formal, improvising to varying degrees on order of worship with spontaneous speech including personal testimonies (which Mainliners leave to private conversations) or preacher-congregation exchanges.

Sociologists distinguish churches not only as “hot or cool” but as having “high or low walls.” High walls protect homogeneous evangelical churches from distractions of outside beliefs, while Mainline churches invite inter-faith ecumenism and worldly knowledge. Mainline churches remain largely white and aging, as new generations easily cross the low walls without returning.

Historically, Mainline Protestants maintain theologies inherited from European nations’ responses to the Reformation, while Evangelical churches rise or split from recent religious movements like the Second Great Awakening (early 1800s) and Pentecostalism’s Azusa Street Revival (1906). Exceptions include your family’s Missouri Synod’s roots in Lutheran origins and educated clergy. Likewise Conservative Reformed denominations uphold Calvinist doctrines. Mainline sermons sometimes minimize theology in favor of personal stories of hope and resilience, more Prairie Home Companion than scriptural exegesis.

As the 1950s became the Sixties, such divides vibrated painfully for our family and church. Our moderate E&R church merged with the larger, more liberal Congregational Church* (plus smaller denominations) to form the USA’s most liberal Trinitarian denomination, the United Church of Christ (UCC), part of the international United (or Uniting) Church movement among older Protestant denominations.

(*FYI Congregationalism and Unitarianism are the most direct ecclesiastical and ethnic descendants of the New England Puritans, whom popular culture depicts as conservative but who promoted literacy, women’s rights, abolition of slavery, defeat of the Confederacy’s propertied aristocracy, Reconstruction, and later Temperance, Civil Rights, and Just Peace.)

The UCC merger extended the denomination’s reach, but our home church fractured, much like Episcopalians and Methodists in recent years. True to Mainline tradition, our parents and other church leaders remained moderate, leaving my preteen memories little drama. UCC Sunday School lessons became a bone of contention by engaging familiar culture-war hot-points of race and sex, especially together. One church leader told Uncle Larry of a lesson with a photo of an interracial couple. My keenest memory recalls a church member I called “Uncle Castle,” who owned Castle Barber Shop a half-block from the Times-News: Snipping my hair, Uncle Castle told me of another lesson featuring a nude male figure “with his rod sticking out,” then asked, “Do you want your sisters to see that?”

Sidebar: when your mother was little, the same barber trimmed her hair—briefly. After one visit when Janet leapt from one barber’s chair to another, flopped down and looked upside down at everyone in the shop, Uncle Castle said, “Lib, I’d appreciate it if you wouldn’t bring her back.” (Poor Janet!) Also, at risk of ad hominem but FWIW, on a nearby street Mother once pointed out a house where lived a widow and, at some earlier time, the car of our married Uncle Castle sat parked there many nights.

Our church’s controversies coincided with the Civil Rights Movement, led by Black Christians and supported by liberal White Christians. Unlike Southern White churches largely defined by racial separation and individual salvation, Congregationalists advocated equality, education, and support across a wide community of believers (though the church’s worship style limits its appeal to ever-diminishing numbers of well-educated believers).

Those early 1960s also marked the centennial of the American Civil War of 1861-65. Churchmen dressed in gray to re-enact battles against blue-costumed Yankees. Correspondingly, many Southerners still remembered the U.S. government as their ancient enemy, now intervening again in Southern states to extend rights not to enslaved people but their descendants. Many in our church must have seen the Congregational Church as a fresh instance of outside institutions and people forcing the South to abandon its ways—with the concurrent threat of a sexual revolution further upsetting familiar identities and relations.

Our congregation’s reactionary faction lashed out at their nearest target, demanding a vote to fire our current minister, the earnest and intelligent Reverend Robert Roschy. He survived by a dozen votes but soon announced his resignation. I thought the issue had been settled in his favor, but your grandfather said that a minister couldn’t simply continue leading a congregation that grew so divided.

Dissident members abandoned the church regardless, many for a suburban start-up, First Associate Reformed Presbyterian Church (FARP), on Country Club Drive just beyond a UCC Mission Church where your grandmother taught kindergarten. Ironically, the theologically and socially conservative ARP denomination was founded by “Seceders,” Scots dissenters against the established church who self-exiled in the 1600s to North America. Like other 19^th-century churches, the ARP had split over slavery, with the Northern Synod joining other Presbyterians. Today’s ARP, like the Southern Baptist Convention, derives from a pro-slavery rump.

Driving to and from Elon College or Janet’s duties at the Saddle Club, we paid little notice when we passed the FARP church. My junior high music teacher joined the church and was said to have spoken in tongues—a minor scandal for the time, and my first acquaintance with glossolalia. (Added confusion: a fellow member of the Rotary Boys Choir, from whom I first learned the word “fart,” mispronounced it as “farp.”)

Burlington’s First Reformed UCC lacked a regular minister for months, during which our father sometimes donned ministerial robes, conducted services, and delivered a brief sermon or two. More often Catawba College’s chaplain, the Revd. Porter Siewell, took the pulpit, once leading a week of evening revival services. A wiry, loveable man of God, he looked like a stock character from Hollywood and may be the best preacher I ever heard. After services he visited our home for Sunday dinners, which included our widowed Aunt Bertha White Andrews and Uncle Bethel Carroll “Sonny” Burch, honored by your mother’s middle name Carol, and widower to our dad’s sister Myrtle.

Reverend Hiram E. Davis became FRUCC’s full-time minister for a decade plus, restoring stability despite diminished congregational resources. Professional choir masters, Handel’s Messiah, and Men’s Brotherhood selling Brunswick stew—all faded into 1950s abundance, shared unequally even then. Around the same time, Mother and her close church friend Mary Kukel began a kindergarten in one of our old high-windowed Sunday School rooms Memory bar the door.—Your glass-half-empty Uncle Craig

Back to contents

Email 6, 29 August 2024: Uncles! (& ministers?)

New generations throw out their elders’ bathwater, dirty with false assumptions. Fresh apologies, dear nephews, for gratuitously rebuilding a world that made some moiety of your genes but recedes farther every day.

Doris’s mother’s prayer for aging: “Make me not garrulous.” Religion overtalks. Literary, cultural, and religious studies swell the flood. Describing one’s family demands circumlocution. Would you better enjoy an intergenerational podcast of scattershot confessions and anecdotes? One dry advantage to print: you can conscientiously file these words away for if / when you or kin ponder origins or atavisms (God spare thee mine).

All’s vanity, but characters entertain, so after reviewing our line’s affinities for religious vocation, I introduce—for sentiment and justice—your mother’s and my uncles.

1. Should you or Uncle Craig have been ministers?

Did either of you consider the ministry or feel it pressed on you, however caringly? The question respects your father’s profession and our common gifts. A generation earlier, my big voice and bookish ways would default to clergy, which your Grandfather White considered. Your Grandmother White spoke of him early in their marriage subbing at a country church but saying on the drive home, “Lib, I don’t think I can be a preacher.”

Lack of promise for other vocations was the greatest pressure I felt, but also family inclinations. Your great-grandmother’s parents (the Peelers) founded the town of Faith NC and its Shiloh Reformed Church; at least one of their five daughters married a pastor, great-Uncle Odell. A previous instalment mentioned their cousin, Reverend Banks Peeler, the Southern Synod leader who confirmed my church class, and the minister who baptized me was a distant cousin of my mother.

Of your great-grandmother’s three grandsons, I alone gave hope for divine service, but by my teens Mema Barger observed, “That boy will never be a preacher.” I’d probably offered some gratuitous raillery, though I was more fussy klutz than enfant terrible, finding printed matter more attractive and edifying than conversation. I certainly played the know-it-all. Once when your grandmother alluded derisively to Hindus’ sacred cows, I replied that such believers might mock our claim that Christ rose from the dead.

The church’s grace to an unworthy child of God makes me thankful, as you may also feel, for presenting a puzzling yet wondrous world of words, symbols, and rituals. My better students in Texas could read and discuss books often because they were raised reading and discussing the Bible. Sitting quietly amid strangers in a sanctuary on Sundays trained one to process names and stories beyond the daily buzz. One 1950s Sunday as I sat on our front steps awaiting Daddy’s car for church, I noticed the bees at our flowering bushes, curiously oblivious to the Lord’s Day. When a Sunday School teacher asked, “Where did Jesus go to Sunday School?” I was the one who could answer, “a synagogue”—small potatoes, but that sunlit room made me imagine Jesus, once himself a child, in his own place of worship.

American Christianity’s golden age continued until the 1970s, when public school desegregation led evangelical churches to build “bible academies,” tax-free and now tax-supported. A quarter-century earlier the Scopes Monkey Trial had embarrassed Fundamentalists, and Russia’s 1957 launch of Sputnik vitalized American science. My high school biology teacher announced, “I don’t believe in evolution” but then she taught it anyway. For a generation Mainline churches like ours helped ancient stories meet a modernizing secular world. I never saw that UCC Sunday School lesson depicting an interracial couple that divided our church but recall a class handout describing “Process Theology,” which hypothesized an ongoing Creation supported by Christ’s Incarnation and mission—the liberal church’s book of scripture coexisting with its book of nature.

Not to resume culture wars, but the Evolution v. Creation dialectic raised questions I keep asking, as you may too. Spotty acquaintance can’t justify any projection to you of my ways. Besides, urging anyone to be like me is my least motive. Reluctance to regard myself as a model for imitation was part of what baffled any efforts on my part to join evangelical society, which appeared less to ask questions than desire an end to them.

Guilty conscience regarding your family motivates this outreach. Given my talent for offending your parents, I only guess how I may have appeared to you. As a less-than-ideal maternal uncle for the children of my little sister, I turn for company to your mother’s and my own avuncular figures, who may humanize this apology.

2. Your Mother’s and our birth-family uncles

Since Ted welcomed family lore, following are the figures your mother’s and my uncles presented in North Carolina’s insular but changing culture. As their data is only partly digitalized, please forgive spotty dates and incomplete names or titles. Like you, when among them I rarely inquired.

Your grandfather Howard White was his birth-family’s youngest child by several years. After marrying, he and Lib waited until after his World War 2 military service to have children. Therefore our cousins on his side were already grownups who looked more like youngish aunts and uncles. Our Aunt Bertha’s daughter Bonnie (Anna Bonds Andrews Russell, 1926-2008) came into the world only six years after our father. She was twenty when her younger brother’s first child Karen Elizabeth White was born. Karen and Connie in the 1950s dressed as flower girls at Bonnie’s wedding to Byron Russell, whom you knew—the first formal event I recall, aided by black and white photos on our walls. Your mom’s and my second cousins James Harris and Mary Ellen, children of Bonnie’s big brother Harris Andrews, were only a few years behind us, thus playmates at family reunions or Christmas Eve at Aunt Bertha’s, their grandmother’s house.

James Otis White (1913-1981), our lone paternal blood-uncle, an occasional presence, little known. He may have worked as a journalist, perhaps in the army; grew estranged from my father. Memory revives an early visit and his son Jimmy sharing my upstairs room (usually shared with little sister, your mother). During that visit Otis whipped Jimmy with his belt, and Mother made Daddy tell his brother he can’t do that in our home. Some years later, I rode with Daddy to East Burlington where Otis was visiting their sister Joy. Introduced, I did what I thought proper, offering him a hug, at which he raised his arms away: “Affectionate little fellow, isn’t he?”

Aunt Betty divorced and took Jimmy into hiding. Otis assumed my parents knew their whereabouts, but Mother corresponded with Betty via third party. In grade school some veiled threat led Mother and Daddy to warn of stranger-danger. Nothing came of it, but your grandmother despised him for menacing Betty, Jimmy, Howard, and me.

Much later, Otis and Betty’s son Jimmy, retired as an editor for The Wall Street Journal, visited his Aunt Lib and cousins in Burlington while I was in Texas. Two years ago, I found him by email and we briefly corresponded.

A generation’s distance invites compassion for Otis as a first son spoiled until his teenage years, when the Great Depression took their home. Your grandfather, whether by age or nature, showed more resilience, a trait he credited to his mother Mamie Mary Eleanor Beckom White (1887-1960), who facing crises said, “We’ll find a way.”

At least once I came upon my parents discussing whether my problematic nature resembled my uncle’s—much as Jimmy’s sharpness and drive resembled his Uncle Howard’s! My morph recalls Otis’s. Like him I read at meals and interact defensively or antisocially. Weak flesh or weaker spirit? Could my maternal-side neurological ailment compound a paternal-side infirmity?

Among paternal uncles-in-law, your grandfather’s first sibling, Bertha Geneva White Andrews Fidler, a teacher and counselor employed by Graham city schools, first married Cecil Andrews from a prosperous family of grocers, like the Peeler-Bargers. They and their children—Harris (communications technology), Bonnie (public health nurse), and Ronald (editor at New York’s Antiques magazine)—survived the Depression in a columned house on a hilltop in the town’s western woodlands, where we regularly spent Sunday afternoons and Christmas Eves.

By my childhood in the 1950s, Uncle Cecil was semi-retired and clerking near the Western Electric plant for Kirk’s Motor Court, a midcentury-modern motel with a glassy lobby like a car dealership’s, where your grandfather and I sometimes stopped to visit. His Andrews birth family (Scotch-Irish again) lived just over the railroad tracks from my father’s original neighborhood. My only memory-detail, aside from Uncle Cecil and Daddy remaining standing as they conversed, is his fine chevron moustache.

Did either of you meet Aunt Bertha’s second husband, Norman Fidler (1898-1985)? Born in Manchester UK, “Uncle Fidler” fought as a Royal Welch Fusilier in World War 1 Europe. Wounded there, he was helped back to British lines by a German soldier ready to surrender. England’s postwar depression led Fidler to cross the Atlantic to sell insurance in North Carolina. Wondrous that a fine old Englishman for a dozen years joined our family’s Christmas Eves, where he sang unfamiliar British ditties we strained to comprehend but laughed anyway.

The middle name of our favorite and closest uncle, Bethel Carroll “Sonny” Burch (1904-1982), became your mother’s (Janet) Carol. Widower to Daddy’s sister Myrtle May (1908-1960), their child Norma Jean (1930-36) died ten years before Aunt Karen was born, diagnosed “mongoloid,” a term for Down’s syndrome, though her symptoms sounded like cerebral palsy. We little Whites sometimes slept over at the Burches’ small, fine home on Alamance Road, site of our extended family’s first color television. Aunt Myrtle became bedridden and died, perhaps from autoimmune disease, leaving Uncle Sonny alone several years before he married widow Irene Webster Baldwin, who had children in Kannapolis and Burlington.

Tall, lean, quiet, attentive, with a handsome moustache, smoking unfiltered Camel cigarettes to no apparent harm, Uncle Sonny was besides our father the finest man I knew. His confident dexterity and strong common sense recalled his work as a “fixer” in textile mills. Eating popcorn with us at their kitchen table, he used thumb and forefinger to pluck two puffs at once. His backyard, like Doris’s father’s two blocks west, a vast vegetable garden. Sonny attended church occasionally but had open invitation to our Sunday dinners during his widower years. One Lord’s Day I slept in and waked to find water spilling everywhere just as everyone returned from church. Big sisters accused me of what was a burst pipe. Uncle Sonny arrived and showed himself the only one who knew how to shut off a water main.

Two quotes exemplify Uncle Sonny’s everyday grace and honesty: “I’ve been a lucky man to have married two such good women”; “When you were little and came over to our place, I’d never seen a boy like you—like you’d just break.” He took me for Sunday afternoon walks on his 31 acres of rural property (now submerged by Lake Mackintosh); to Elvis movies downtown, followed by hot dogs and Dr. Peppers at Boston Sandwich Shop; and once to Greensboro for livestock auctions, then again the Harlem Globetrotters, whose halftime show featured aging Black vaudevillians like Cab Calloway and Peg Leg Bates.

Our father’s second sister Annie Joybelle White (1911-1967) married Henry W. Grayson (1910-1981), owner of a motorcycle shop, starting in my Grandmother White’s downstairs garage on North Main Street, later on Maple Avenue near I-85 / I-40, in a space later Burlington’s first sub shop, Neba Heroes. Their child Edna Mae (1930-?) married Ronald of the Gammon Twins, with Arnold a local duet like the Everly Brothers. Uncle Henry, president of Alamance County’s Flying Rebel Motorcycle Club, led Burlington’s Christmas parades our family watched from the Times-News second storey over South Main Street.

Our maternal uncles lived mostly in your grandmother’s hometown Kannapolis. Willie and Mamie Barger’s first child, Willette (1914-1976, named for her father), married Ernest Faulkenberry (1912-1981). They lived with his mother (“Mema Faulkenberry”) on the side of the double house where your grandmother later lived with second husband Roy “Phil” Phillips (1918-1981); the other side was Mema Barger’s domicile. Ernest’s employment shifted. One wintry day Faulkenberry cousins Martha and Linda Sue walked me to a bread factory where Uncle Ernest opened a back door and handed us hot, unsliced loaves, memorably scrumptious. Phil later scoffed how Ernest bought an enormous black-and-white TV console long after color was standard, but I evaded my cousins’ contempt by joining him for pro wrestling and basketball as well as Tarzan Theater and films featuring Francis the Talking Mule—screen gems from Charlotte’s early superstation unavailable to home antennae. When little, we slept over, with Mother praising Kannapolis’s soft water at our baths. The Faulkenberrys’ spacious living room—site of Xmas Day gift exchanges—housed a baby grand piano where Aunt Willette, organist at St John's UCC, gave lessons, around which we cousins played cards or Monopoly. Left alone, I relished subscriptions to Life and Look magazines, especially the former’s 1963 photo essay on the Nation of Islam.

But hold! Henry James’s autobiographies regret his childhood memories associating freely but factually to others that must remain unique to one’s experience and alien to others’—so on to your maternal great-(blood-)uncles and collateral gene distributaries.

Mary Elizabeth Barger’s older brother Paul Alexander “P.A.” Barger (1918-1979) might remind you of your cousin Alex—a loveable soul, everyone’s friend. Whatever went wrong, no spiteful or envious thought spoiled his relations with others. A barrel-chested bull, his family’s early hero, a football star at Cannon High and starting center for a Catawba Indians team that won a Tangerine Bowl (now Citrus Bowl)—all ending with a fracture to his back. He married Peggy, a striking woman, possibly part-Latina. Together they made what your Aunt Doris calls “our good-looking family,” including daughter Sherry Barger Barlow (of Greensboro) and son Sammy, now of Mebane, where he taught martial arts. I haven’t seen Sammy since your grandmother’s funeral, but aside from Uncle Larry I love him more than any man alive, owing to his charismatic companionship when we were boys. Sammy in later life like his father might find himself without a next move, but he made and kept friends.

After WW2 service as an army sergeant, Uncle P.A. worked as a policeman, but I first remember him at the small grocery store a block from your grandmother’s Kannapolis home that he and brother M.J. managed, where Sammy and I bagged groceries. Near me as I type is a pyramidal polished green stone Aunt Peggy gave me from her gift shop next door.

Grand-daddy Barger, originally a stonecutter, started that grocery store in Faith where his wife’s family, the Peelers, were merchants, then re-opened it in Kannapolis. Your grandmother repeated a story of when the family was still in Faith though the store had moved: One night driving homeward with the day’s receipts, he saw a road obstruction he suspected was the work of hijackers and so gunned his truck forward, only later learning he somehow jumped a breach of several feet in the pavement.

Part of one summer in early adolescence I spent at P.A.’s and Peggy’s house two blocks behind the store, which closed when a Piggly Wiggly supermarket came to town, displacing mom-and-pop stores as Walmart would later vanquish supermarkets. Uncle P.A. now sold used cars at Olympic Motors, where Sammy and I washed cars or went to Marathon restaurant to buy burgers for the salesmen. At home Aunt Peggy seemed exotic, ordering delivery of Chinese food (unfamiliar to Burlington) and reading Twixt Twelve and Twenty, Pat Boone’s bestselling parental advice book (1958). When the 1952 John Wayne war movie Flying Tigers came on TV, talk was of P.A.’s friendship at Catawba with ace World War 2 fighter pilot Ed Rector (1916-2001), who before Pearl Harbor flew for the real Flying Tigers squadron in China against Japan.

Another early-60s summer P.A. and Sammy spent largely at our Burlington home, whence my uncle commuted to Duke Hospital for kidney treatments.* (Byron as administrator there may have helped.) On our backyard badminton court, Sammy organized neighborhood football games. P.A. took him and me to “Jalopy Races” at Alamance Speedway, betting on #7, his lucky number. (*Family health: I twice had attacks of kidney stones, first in a deserted high school bathroom during chemistry class; again returning from Chapel Hill to Burlington for one of your parents’ wedding parties, I had to leave the car and lie down in a vacant lot behind a service station,, where an EMT found me flailing and asked first if I was on LSD.)

P.A.’s and Sammy’s company initiated me to wider masculine pursuits. No ill reflection on my father, who worked night and day, as later I would, with little time for sports beyond what made local headlines. Saturday mornings he took me to breakfasts where he and his friends discussed current events, and sometimes to interviews with sources.

Otherwise I lived socially in a world of mother, sisters, domestic TV, school; on my own, comics and downtown movies, where Editor White’s status granted free admission. Sammy rebelled against going indoors on a play-day, as I remember when I re-encounter 1960’s Mania, based on Scotland’s 1828 Burke and Hare murders, which he sat through with me.

That summer passed and the Bargers back in Kannapolis, Daddy without bitterness mentioned loaning P.A. some hundreds of dollars: “I know I’ll never see that money again.” In the late 1970s Mother and I visited Uncle P.A.’s and Aunt Peggy’s rental home in Asheboro NC for a cookout. They’d reunited, he again selling cars. At the grill alone with me he said, “If you ever need anything, just call me.”

Our mother’s younger brother, M.J. Barger (1922-2017), whose initials stood for Moses Jeremiah—the name of his paternal grandfather, thus one of your great-great-great grandfathers. We cousins admired Uncle M.J. as a World War 2 Navy airman, which bonded him and former Lieutenant White among “the greatest generation.” At family gatherings Daddy called him “Jerry”: at enlistment, M.J. claimed his initials didn’t stand for anything, so the recruiter wrote down “Mason Jerry.” On my grandmother’s front porch Daddy used his interview techniques to discuss local affairs and M.J.’s job as an air traffic controller.

Your Grandmother White loved and trusted her little brother but worked around his wife Juanita Williams Barger (1920-2016), who could appear jealous of M.J.’s attentions and services to his mother, our Mema Barger, living in the same town. I kept my peace. Like me, Juanita never felt quite at home among the Bargers; correspondingly, she was the Kannapolis relative who most appeared to reserve judgment against me.

M.J.’s and Juanita’s graceful daughter Suzanne (b/w Karen and Connie in age) became Brown High’s homecoming queen, later an actor in Wilmington. Doris and I saw her (as Suzanne Nystrom) play a wedding coordinator in Domestic Disturbance (2001), a John Travolta vehicle from De Laurentiis Studios. Her brother Scott, between Sammy and me, was popular too, marrying the daughter of Kannapolis’s leading downtown jeweler, whose shop they inherited and he managed.

My earliest recollection of Scott is his riding my tricycle in our Fountain Place driveway. When I asked for a turn, he replied, “How would you like a knuckle sandwich?” At UNC we crossed paths once—we’d forgot each other was there. When I visited Mother in Kannapolis after Daddy’s death, Scott graciously took me swimming with his friends. Visiting again in the 1990s, I walked to Your Jewel Shoppe to chat with Scott, who wished I hadn’t.

From slightly different environments Scott and I constituted gene-adjacent antimatter. As insular and provincial as Burlington was, its textile-centric economy was leavened by a U.S. defense plant with northern engineers who expected better schools and civic standards. Kannapolis—the nation’s largest unincorporated city, owned and run by the deceitfully anti-union Cannon Mills—seemed a backwater even to us.

Peeler-Bargers present a wary reserve, so at risk of partisan sensitivities, some family history. Your grandmother’s birth family was Republican when Confederate states like North Carolina constituted the “Solid [Democratic] South,” which remained the status quo until Richard Nixon’s “Southern Strategy” started drawing racially-resentful Democrats to the modern GOP. Until my twenties Democrats won all NC elections—conservative Democrats in the rural east and west, moderates in the urban Piedmont. Both factions broadly supported a mixed economy that taxed the wealthy to support the middle class. While conservatives centered their social image on whiteness, moderates hoped segregation would somehow solve itself, as their ancestors had hoped for slavery.

The few Republican families I met in NC seemed such another breed of cat that I strain to represent fairly their embattled vibe that the modernizing world around them presented an ineffable enemy. Like many minority factions, they bore a secret-society sense that their day was coming—which dawned when Democrats (with northern Republican help) passed Civil Rights legislation, after which the Old Confederacy became the “Solid (Republican) South.”

Such descriptions seek not to blame but only to understand. People rarely change from the lanes they start in. Your grandfather’s career and Burlington’s brief renaissance benefited from the New Deal and from Progressive Democrats like the father-son NC Governors Kerr and Bob Scott of Alamance County. After Howard’s death your grandmother returned to the Republican fold. Daddy himself likely voted for Nixon but, after Watergate, graciously conceded my doubts.

Did our maternal ancestors bring from late-1800s Pennsylvania the Republicanism of Lincoln, Abolition, and Reconstruction? Regardless, the Peelers and Bargers assimilated to the South. Uncle M.J. shared n-word jokes like I heard at school but never at home. In 1972 he tore a McGovern sticker off your mother’s car. Later he exulted when President Reagan fired the air traffic controllers who, unlike him, supported their professional union (PATCO), an event that galvanized the resurgent right’s union-busting and further undermined the mid-20^th-century middle class.

Selective memories can’t play fair but provide explanations for a boy like me who was taught to respect his elders. At a distance I saw and still respect M.J.’s generous industry and acumen. After the death of a widowed neighbor he’d helped for years, he sent newlywed Doris and me a set of plates from her estate that I still use. Making a similar effort at compassion as I made for Uncle Otis, I’ve wondered if M.J. felt injustice that everyone loved his athletic older brother even as the younger one showed up for work. If I represent him partially and thus unfairly, I’ve reported mostly what was offered.

Like Uncle Sonny, M.J. didn’t know what to make of me—nor I of him. In contrast to Sonny, M.J. had less opportunity to know me and manage the challenges presented by my odd inadequacies. At length, conscientiously representing these men creates compassion for all, myself included. Their resemblances suggest that, if I’d lived more in M.J.’s orbit, he’d have included me in his network of care. At a men’s fellowship breakfast in our Burlington church, I learned to scramble eggs and started making them at home. When we subsequently visited Kannapolis and M.J. heard of my achievement, he offered advice I still hear when I crack an egg: “Cook ’em slow.”

—Craig White, 29 August 2024

[Anyone still reading, forgive my pressing on descendants detailed remembrances of deceased ancestors in faraway places that any generation practically leaves behind. Respect for vanished family may incline you to honor these efforts, but I’ll soon be past knowing or caring.

[Yet to plead: Writing teaches compassion for the entanglements of family none of us seeks yet cannot reject. One can’t love enough, but here duty pays long-ago intimates the tribute I withheld. Your genetic or customary natures may inherit our literate disposition, in which honest labor redeems karma. Intentionally or not, science and capitalism make a revolution every generation, if not decade. Glimpses of our scene witness another local-global transition before the one you’re going through—inevitable and unprepared for, like all before and since.

Back to contents

Three early emails leading to project

[In reverse order, the three shorter notes below started this project, intending only to recruit neglected nephews, English majors like me, to read together literature of the Seventeenth Century (1600s). They in the thick of family and career politely declined, but my spiels below reveal a little my preference for past centuries, complemented by absent-mindedness for recent ones.]

Email 3, 23 Jan. 2024

Dear John & Ted,

Thanks for any attention. Questions welcome, though they’d only invite more words! Congrats for your new niece, Sally and Anderson’s Ezel Jane.

The Seventeenth Century: My honors thesis and doctoral studies concentrated on 19^th-century American literature, but my favorite period is the 1600s, Shakespeare through Puritans to early Enlightenment, with stateside parallels from Jamestown through New England to the Founding— times like ours of change, reaction, continuity.

“Periods” annoy laypeople, but familiarity turns “the seventeenth century” (17c), the “Enlightenment,” or “Romantics” to shorthand or building blocks for memory over depths of time. Recent revisions magnify their span and inclusiveness; e.g., “the long Nineteenth Century” or “Early / Late Modernity” (divided by the French Revolution?) + diverse authors.

Mid-20^th-century curricula organized largely by periods. Within them, New Criticism analyzed individual texts, esp. lyric poetry as peak embodiment of conflict and resolution, rationalizing life’s complexities on a single page—convenient for big Boomer classrooms. T. S. Eliot celebrated conceits by “Metaphysical” poets” Donne, Herbert, Marvell, i.e. “concepts,” extended metaphors that formally unite the “dissociation of sensibility” between the Reformation’s devotional raptures and the Enlightenment’s rational empiricism. Such artifacts exercise science and faith at a time when educated clergy and laymen still found science comprehensible and faith traditions familiar and vital.

A century before the first modern English novel, Robinson Crusoe, lyric poetry and nonfiction performed dialogues between body and spirit, reason and feeling. At UHCL’s prison campus my “pre- and post-Enlightenment” seminar read the early 17c as a peak of both popular and classic religious expression: Baroque composers incl. Bach (1685-1750); Baroque sculpture in Rococo cathedrals; religious authors like Bunyan, Jeremy Taylor, Pascal, Fenelon, de Caussade, and William Law; at least four million deaths in the Thirty Years War between Lutherans v. Catholics (1618-48); the English Revolution (1639-51) between Puritan Parliamentarians and Anglican Royalists; the Rational Soul cultivated by minister and natural philosopher Jonathan Edwards in America and, for the Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge, Roberts Hooke and Boyle. New England promoted Massachusetts Bay as a utopian “city on a hill,” but two generations later came the Salem Witch Trials, much like my generation’s Child-Care Satanic Sex-Abuse Hysteria in the generation after Sputnik. Neo-feudal Virginia divided between High Church Episcopalians and chthonic evangelicals.

In the 1640s teenage John Bunyan, future author of Pilgrim’s Progress, served in Cromwell’s New Model Army, making him a Puritan Roundhead—commoners plus a rising middle class to challenge the Royalist-Anglican Cavaliers (most of the Metaphysical poets). Bunyan’s everyday syntax, rhythms, and diction resonate with language I heard growing up in NC, whose mountains and lack of ports long isolated the state from modern development. (English spoken on the 20c Outer Banks could still sound Elizabethan.) Since nearly everyone learns speech from their mother, your “mother tongue,” like Abbey’s, is only a generation removed, though varied by geographic mobility and exposure to national media.

Bunyan’s Puritanism relates also to your distaff’s churchly heritage. Denominational histories twist, turn, and split—from Jewish-Gentile divisions among the Apostles, to Eastern Orthodoxy’s Great Schism from Roman Catholicism, then the Protestant Reformation, which accelerates dissent ever since. Our church in Burlington that you visited, along with other United and Uniting Churches, makes an exception. In our childhood it was the First Reformed and Evangelical Church, “and” commemorating a 1930s merger of the Evangelical Synod of North America (mostly Midwestern), with the Reformed Church in the United States, mostly Pennsylvania and North Carolina. That latter geography follows our maternal ancestors’ journey from southern Germany’s Palatinate to”Pennsylvania Dutch” (really Deutsch, i.e. Germans, not “Dutch” as in the Netherlands), finally down the “Great Wagon Road” of Appalachian valleys to Faith and later Kannapolis in Piedmont NC.

Your Grandmother White joined Burlington’s First Reformed Church (as commonly known) by marriage to your grandfather A. Howard White. Another instalment explores how he may have joined that church despite descent from a separate ethnicity. That denomination in the 1950s-60s joined the newly-formed United Church of Christ, dominated by Congregationalists, themselves descendants of Puritans like Bunyan. My confirmation classes focused on the German Reformed tradition, esp. its major theologian Huldrych Zwingli (1484-1531) of Zurich, Switzerland (near the Browns’ and Bargers’ Palatinate).

To close, an apt Zwingli quote presaging United Churches’ disposition for union over schism: “Contention destroys charity, and all for the sake of external things on which the honor of God does not depend and by which purity and quietness of conscience are not advanced.” (Of Baptism, in Zwingli and Bullinger, ed. G. W. Bromley. Philadelphia: Westminster, 1953; p. 130)

Email 2 from 8 Jan. 2024 “Maternal Uncle to Innocent Nephews”

John, I'll reply to your last message but first Ted's reply which, you acknowledged, asked about Lonesome Dove. Of your parental generation, Uncle Larry’s the McMurtry fan, though his deeper devotion may be to Robert Duval. I read up on the saga while studying Cooper's Chingachgook as prototype for fictional stone-cold American Indian killers incl. Blue Duck—who may be noble savage by birth, but Great Snake earns that label more by chivalric behavior, with grimly amusing exceptions. Off-page in the Leatherstocking Tales, le Gros Serpent efficiently slays Iroquois or hapless colonials, returning with "reeking" scalps to Leatherstocking, who tells their horrified white companions (paraphrased), "If you want Chingachgook’s protection, you have to put up with the occasional scalping."

McMurtry reminds me to ask if either of you read Cormac McCarthy? So far not me, habitually b/c fiction published in my lifetime feels post facto, like I already know what it says and feel impatient with rehearsals. If I live long enough to finish Conrad, James, Cooper, and others on my conscience-list like Virginia Woolf, George Eliot, and Anthony Trollope, I may yet open All the Pretty Horses.

Pardon residual elitist prejudice. Mid-20c literary studies cultivated snobbery, instructing my cohort to scorn sentimentality like the easily-exploited instinct of nostalgia. Yet learning extends to others’ tastes, so for starters, reviews of McMurtry & McCarthy mention "masculine sentimentality" as a feature of their appeal. Is that description true? Defensibly? I'm charmed when sentiment sneaks up on me but recoil when films by Spielberg, Eastwood, or Costner telegraph it. My sources often associate sentimentality with fascism, as liberal democracy requires tragically compromised ideals, acceding to decisions contra one’s own. My inquiry doesn’t reject or reorient your own preferences but seeks to overcome my own inculcated aversions to fresh knowing and being.

Reply as inspired, as much or little as you like, or not at all. If you do, I'll eventually reply-all to what’s offered. If you wisely go silent, teaching accustomed me to surrender data and analysis to an apparent void.

My forthcoming reply to John rationalizes studying the 17c, from Milton and the Metaphysicals to the Commonwealth, Restoration, triumph of Whig history and Enlightenment with the Glorious Revolution—all linkable to our White family’s early modern British and Reformation German genealogy. 

Wishing happy birthday to your dad I apprised him of my intent and will continue copying unless he objects. I'm self-conscious enough of your mid-life status not to wish to distract you from more pressing demands, but opportunities soon vanish. I aspire not to change your minds but offer what you might otherwise never know.

Happy New Year, dear boys—your preposterous Uncle Craig

Email 3, 24 Dec. 2023

Ted, this message began for brother John but at least as onlooker you may be remotely interested. All pledges apply. No expectations, but welcome to reply. Exaltations to Erin.

John, this gratuitous reach-out recalls you characterized my intermittent emails as Olympian thunderbolts. I make no assumptions on your time or interest, but thought often of you recently as my anxious-to-melancholic attraction to the 17^th century led again to our shared (if probably unequal) fondness for Honest John Bunyan. More currently, reading this morning in a ranked survey of DC comics movies (10 of them seen last century) a mention of "sequel-itis," recalling your take on the longueurs of Pilgrim's Progress, Second Part.

An impulse purchase found an admirable collection of 17c spiritual autobiographies including Bunyan's definitive Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners, which I read in grad school and since, but third time's the charm. (Anthology includes Quakers, Ranters, and Muggletonians.) I'm part through Christopher Hill's A Turbulent, Seditious, and Factious People: John Bunyan and his Church, great, but . . .

Motive in writing you now: I recently acquired a 2008 Norton Critical Edition of Pilgrim's Progress, which I’ll start in the New Year with the criticism, since my Bunyan scholarship exceeded only that of former colleagues and of course poor students, only a few of whom relished the assignment. 

If you'd like to co-read again, I'll send you a copy. If not, would you mind if I report some findings?

Love and peace to you and all families. Composing this note on Christmas Eve as Aunt Doris and I are homebound with colds that at your age we’d have soldiered through, but retirement also avails leisure to impose on far-flung nephews welcome to roll eyes and raise palms at yet another intrusion on your innocent comfort. Tis the season. —Y'all's Uncle Craig