Excerpts

Chapter One Lucky and Nannie The British Colonial Office seldom hired missionaries or lawyers as diplomats, believing they followed either God or the law too closely for the comfort of other viewpoints. It might have rejected my mother, but I feel "Lucky," my father, would have been a star performer at some far-flung outpost of empire. I base this assumption on the evidence of his dealings with Brother Cedric Peel.     Almost annually Lucky and several of his fishing friends went for a try at the muskies said to swarm in Mazey Creek. This was a sixty-mile drive, the last half over dirt and gravel roads. The clear, cold stream flowed through sparsely populated Appalachian foothills, scenery excitingly different from the Bluegrass country of Dad's northern Kentucky homeland. The fishermen took pillows and blankets for their stay with Brother Cedric, but whether they slept in his little house or in his barn escapes my memory. As Cedric Peel, he ran a small grocery nearby, but as Brother Cedric he ministered to a congregation based in a typical "little white church in the wildwood." It was Protestant, but of what denomination, if any, I have no recall.     Charles "Lucky" Mathias was Catholic, and Catholics were instructed to avoid official Protestant services lest they seemed to sanction certain Reformation presumptions. Dad went along with this up to a point, but that point was reached on those fishing weekends at Brother Cedric's, for the proverbial "ox was in the ditch" for Lucky. The nearest Catholic church was over forty rough and rutted miles away. Lucky, never a quibbler, took the ox by the horns and joined his friends at Brother Cedric's Sunday service. Quite a few of the brethren stood outside near the open windows, smoking and chewing, refugees from Brother Cedric's lengthy hellfire sermons. Most, including Dad, seldom ventured inside to partake of the Lord's Supper.     One summer Sunday, after Brother Cedric had unleashed an exceptionally stirring sermon, he announced that he had run short of the fruit of the vine for the Lord's Supper: "I am substituting bourbon whiskey instead," he said. A quiet mumbling instantly ran through the outside crowd, followed by a hats-in-hands procession into the small church. Brother Cedric possibly marveled at the Lord's generosity in sending him a record number of communicants that day.     Once home, Lucky made a tactical error in telling Nannie what had happened. Mom's doctrinaire approach to Catholicism and Christianity in general would have terrified the British Colonial Office. "Why that's just terrible!" she said, with emphasis on terrible . "What a bunch of dumbbells, and you among them. Why, you couldn't even be a good Protestant!" My younger brother and I listened in and looked on as Dad took his lumps, but I sort of sensed that my traveling salesman and fishing-addicted father had done his best to be a friend and neighbor to everybody, including his own conscience.     Lucky seldom bragged about anything except Carlisle, his hometown. Often, when the noon whistle blew on the White Rose flour mill, he cocked an ear and smiled contentedly: "I've heard that whistle all my life and I hope to hear it to the end. They didn't nickname me `Lucky' for nothing." Mom called him Charlie, but the rest of the world knew him only as Lucky. He was a reasonably happy salesman and family man. Except for a visit with his brother in Dallas when he was seventy-two, he had been no farther than two-hundred miles from home. He never saw an ocean. And Dad's wishes were granted, for he lived seventy-seven years in Carlisle, dying at high noon on a June day in 1958. The old mill was shut down for some reason that day, and almost as if in his honor, the whistle was silent.     My schoolteacher mother, Nancy Furlong, did not share Dad's love for Carlisle; she was never quite certain about the place until late in life. "Charlie," she sometimes complained, "I never saw so many numbskulls gathered in one village of fifteen-hundred people in my life!" With this Nannie either started an argument or ended one. Dad was left mumbling about "river rats" in Maysville, her hometown thirty miles north on the Ohio River.     Nannie was correct insofar as Carlisle had endured more than its share of blunderers. Early on its leaders seldom set its sails in time to catch the winds of change. Something or someone was always around to spit in the soup. In 1816, when platting a county seat for Nicholas County, dumbbells anchored it on back roads three miles from the Maysville Road, the main area highway. Effectively dry-docked, it lost population and wealth and watched less isolated county seats leave it in their wakes. But worse was coming. State and local blockheads got politically busy in 1867 and carved most of tiny Robertson County out of Nicholas, sapping economic and political strength from both counties. But during the 1920s fair winds filled Carlisle's sails; it had become one of Kentucky's leading tobacco markets. Several million pounds of burley were auctioned annually from huge warehouses in and around the town. Then came ignoramuses who threatened corporate tobacco buyers with violence if they did not pay higher prices. The next season no buyers showed up. They had written the Carlisle market off their books forever.     Some said Nancy Browning Furlong was a natural-born teacher; dealing with the younger variety of "dunces" had long been her stock-in-trade. She was thirty-six and Lucky forty-three when they married, and although Nannie had earned a teaching certificate from what is now Eastern Kentucky University and done further work at Chicago's prestigious Gregg School of Business, she married a man with an eighth grade education. Lucky respected his dedicated wife's education and long years as a teacher, but he became touchy anytime his lack of advanced schooling came up. He eventually realized that her reference to some Carlislians as "dummies" was meant as more of an educational challenge demanding her attention than as an insult. After all, in her family of nine, just as in his of eight, most of the boys had gone little beyond the eighth grade. He loved her and she loved him, and this carried them through their thirty-four years together.     Nannie's thoughts about her origin differed mightily from Lucky's. Dad had a passive view of his past: "They were all a bunch of Black Forest clock carvers from a village named Endingen, not far from Freiburg in Baden. Old Joe [Joseph Anton Mathias], my grandpa, came to Chillicothe in 1834. My mother's gang of Harmeyers came over a little later from Freren village in Lower Saxony. I never met any of them that weren't damned glad to be here." Nannie, however, was aggressively Irish-American. She sang a lot, often accompanying herself on her mandolin. A song fastened as tightly as death itself to my memory is one she sang almost daily as she worked, a song aimed like a sword at the heart of England--"The Wearing of the Green": I met with Napper Tandy, and he took me by the hand, And he said, `How's poor old Ireland, and how does she stand?' She's the most distressful country that ever yet was seen, They are hanging men and women there for wearing of the green.     My mother was the oldest of six sisters and three brothers. Her father was tall, handsome John Benedict Furlong, the son of Irish immigrant parents. He was born in Mason County in 1862 and later represented it in the Kentucky legislature during the 1920s. J.B. was a farmer most of his life and he married a farmer's daughter, Elizabeth Browning, in 1887. The couple owned and farmed forty fertile acres on Tuckahoe Ridge, a plateau above the Ohio River named for Virginians--"Tuckahoes"--who settled the area in the 1780s. Nancy Browning Furlong was born in their small frame farmhouse in 1888 and as "big sister" would pick up a sense of command and presence that never deserted her throughout a long life.     The Browning side of Nannie's family were Protestant Mason County farmers of English descent. Elizabeth Browning converted to Catholicism when she married J.B., but her family worshiped at Mount Carmel Christian Church. Unlike the Furlongs, the Brownings had been in America a long time, branching off the Bramel family of Cheshire, England. My mother never fully accepted the fact that she was half-English, thus only half-Irish. The Furlong or Irish side of her nature invariably took precedent over the English or Browning side. She loved the Brownings--her mother was one--but somewhere along the line the English nation had fallen from favor from her having talked to many survivors of the English-induced Great Famine. She had very little good to say about the English nation for the rest of her life, yet when World War II's baleful shadow neared, she unhesitatingly backed the English people against the Nazis.     Just down the dusty road from the furlongs lived the Donovan family. Nancy and their son Herman became playmates and lifelong friends. Herman Lee Donovan later culminated a brilliant career in education by serving as president of the University of Kentucky from 1941 to 1956. Mom never tired of telling me that I could grow up to be as "fine a teacher as Herman Lee if you just show his gumption." Gumption meant initiative and common sense combined, as near as I ever understood it, but I knew she had me pegged wrong. Gumption or no gumption, my sights were set on becoming a danceband musician, like those I heard playing aboard the excursion steamboats that docked at Maysville. I became tired of hearing about Herman Lee, never dreaming the day would come when I could check on Mom's pedestaled playmate.     I entered the University of Kentucky under the GI Bill in 1946 and a few weeks later saw President Donovan standing nonchalantly alongside the library steps. I approached him, my mind swimming with tales Mom had told of Tuckahoe and Herman Lee. I almost called him Herman Lee but caught myself in time. "Dr. Donovan, didn't you grow up on Tuckahoe Ridge in Mason County?" I asked, almost apologetically.     "Why, yes I did," he replied. "How in the world did you know that?"     "Well, sir," I said, "my mother is Nancy Furlong, and she ..."     "Nancy Furlong! Your mother is Nancy Furlong! Is she all right? I haven't heard from her for some time. She's still in Carlisle?"     "Yes, sir, she's in Carlisle and she's just fine." I had not known what to expect, and his avid interest took me by surprise. He looked me over with a grin on his face. I told him my name.     "Frank," he said with elation-tinged nostalgia, "your mother and I were the best of playmates back there on Tuckahoe. We played up and down that dusty little road, chased butterflies across the fields, and got muddy wading in Lawrence Creek." We spent several minutes catching up on the Mason County Furlongs and Donovans and the Carlisle Mathiases. I left him with the feeling that a piece of life's jigsaw puzzle had finally been pressed firmly into place.     Nannie taught in the Mason County schools until she went west in 1916 to visit her sister Anna Martin, who, with her husband, Joseph Gilkey, had opened International Business College in El Paso, Texas, a successful venture. Nannie spent much of 1916 with them, absorbing the squally and exciting times along the U.S.-Mexican border. Her exceptional memory kept these times fresh for tales to her family. These tales appealed to my romantic nature, no matter how many times I heard them. She, my own mother, had seen and done these things in person, that is what impressed me. I had seen Mexicans, cowboys, and the Wild West in movies, but here she sat, a person who had really been there! Sometimes I brought in buddies--Joe Beatty, Spud Marshall, Louis Reibold, Joe Roundtree--to show Mom off. They came willingly, having passed favorable judgment on tales they had heard before. "Tell us about El Paso," I asked, showing off for my pals by saying that "El Paso means `the pass.'"     "Are you sure you want to hear it again?" she asked as we nodded that we did. "Pancho Villa, as you know, was running wild along the border in those days. He and his horsemen wore big sombreros [we all knew that this meant hats and shook our heads knowingly at each other] and had already shot up several American towns. Mexico was having a revolution." We were all ears now, waiting to hear about her and the railroad cars. "Well, boys, my sister and I and some friends went down to the tracks along the Rio Grande and sat on top of a freight car. We could see people running in the Juarez streets across the river and hear shooting going on. But we got a lot more than we bargained for--let me tell you! Suddenly we heard thumping sounds in and around our freight car. Bullets were coming our way! Soldiers ran up and shooed us off the cars. Weren't we the dumbest bunch you ever heard of?" My pals and I did not think dumbness had anything to do with it. Here we sat in dumb old Carlisle while daring people like my mother must still be out west somewhere living exciting and worthwhile lives.     Gilkey connections got Nannie a teaching job in Greeley, Colorado. She spent the next several years teaching commercial subjects there and in Longmont and Boulder. There was also a three-month stint in a tiny, mountain mining camp where she lived in a tent between the school and a student's home. "The tent was nice," she recalled, "with built-in floor and siding, but sometimes I had to push snow off the sagging canvas above my cot to see if it was daylight and time to go to work." Another three-month job ended one week after it started when a student helper burned Hudson's one-room school down by using highly flammable tumbleweed for kindling in the stove.     Nannie eventually realized that her Gregg School of Business degree could get her better paying jobs than those in Colorado. She applied for and won a job teaching at Mason City, Iowa, High School. The pay was a whopping $114 per month. While there she taught Meredith Willson, a student destined for fame as a musician and playwright. Willson's senior photo in Nannie's 1919 Masonian yearbook reveals a beetle-browed lad with pompadoured hair typical of the era, one whom classmates assigned this prophecy: "Great men are not always wise." Whether wise or not, one would expect the composer of The Music Man to have been active in "River City" high school music, and he was. The legend under the photo lists him in "orchestra, band, glee club, chorus, minstrel show and opera."     Willson, of course, was a noted American composer long before he wrote The Music Man . Mom never let me forget it: "If you don't practice your saxophone you'll never be as good a musician as Meredith Willson." "Lord have mercy," I thought, "if it isn't Herman Lee, it's Meredith."     A teacher Nannie had worked with at Mason City wrote her from North Carolina in 1921 of an attractive opening in her field at a Rocky Mount high school. She got the job. Earlier encounters with Herman Lee and Meredith had their counterpart in North Carolina. Kay Kyser was in her typing class, a lad later to win fame as a swing-era bandleader and radio maestro of his "College of Musical Knowledge." Mom of course turned this to her advantage: "Listen now, one of these days you might play in a band as good as Kay Kyser's if you practice hard; he was one of my students." I practiced, hoping Mom was correct this time. As it turned out, she was.     After a year in North Carolina Nannie returned home to teach at Maysville High School. She thought of herself as an "old maid" of thirty-four but had hardly started teaching when she met an attractive traveling salesman; a new world immediately opened for both of them.     Charles Lindsey Mathias was forty-one when he and Nancy Furlong met. Lucky, however, had never been lucky in love. He had courted many women but for various vague reasons had never been able to lead one to the bridal parlor. One reason was religion, for his was an era of harsh anti-Catholic sentiment. Carlisle was a thoroughly Protestant community, and the idea of one's daughter marrying a "papist" chilled the hearts of more than a few parents. This prejudice worked both ways of course, but Lucky's problems went beyond that. He was the nature boy of his family, forever tramping the woods and streams, fishing and messing himself up with mud, bait, and fish smells. He probably talked far too much about such things to women who were generally uninterested. He had traveled no farther than Louisville and Cincinnati, and at thirty-seven he missed the draft and "gay Paree." Finally, his eight years of education neither excited nor opened his imagination to wider vistas, as it had for most of his brothers. Married or not, Lucky was stuck with Carlisle and Carlisle with him.     One might wonder what a well-traveled woman like Nancy Furlong would see in Lucky. At the time it was said that there was not much left for either one of them to choose from. A tad of truth there, no doubt, but there was more to it than that. Lucky was physically attractive, with wavy brown hair, good masculine features, tanned complexion, a muscular 155 pounds, and a healthy and vigorous spring to his walk--a true outdoorsman. He was a good talker and a good listener, always able to spice conversation from his readings in various novels, magazines, and newspapers. And he was humble, deferring easily to anyone who might object or offer a better opinion. His gentle humor was usually directed toward himself. In other words, he was an excellent salesman. But in addition, he had a superb mind. He saw through much of the social, cultural, and economic clutter of his era, but he was unable to pin it down in educated discourse. This caused him to overvalue education yet be suspicious of it at the same time. Mom forever walked a tightrope on this issue. But she never had any problems with him regarding loyalty, honesty, or integrity, for his entire family was solidly grounded in those virtues. In today's world, I think, he would have become a successful mechanical engineer, for he loved all things mechanical; he invented several items that sold well but never won a patent.     Lucky and Nannie met at a farmhouse party during the summer of 1923. Within minutes they were earnestly talking to each other, ignoring the rest. There could be no thought of playing the waiting game. Courting proceeded full-time and culminated in their June 1924 marriage at Carlisle's Catholic church. They pooled their $5,000 in savings and built a two-bedroom bungalow on an East Main Street lot next to Grandma and Uncle Joe Mathias, the home I loved and lived in until I was drafted in 1943. Crooner Gene Austin's hit ballad "My Blue Heaven" might have been written with such a little Jazz Age bungalow in mind. It was painted pale yellow with dark brown trim, had a "veranda" with typically fat wooden pillars, a cozy fireplace framed by polished wooden bookcases, a small breakfast nook, stylish French doors connecting the front and living rooms, and a small unfinished basement with a coal furnace. A bright, airy interior was assured by banks of windows in each room. Finally, there was a floored but unfinished attic that would make a nice playroom for any children that might arrive, and one was soon on the way.     Two of Nannie's sisters, Alma, a registered nurse at Maysville's Hayswood Hospital, and Lillian, soon to be one, insisted that she do the "safe and modern thing: Have your baby at the Hayswood where we can be your nurses." It was an offer a happy Nannie could not refuse. I was born there on May 23, 1925, and named Francis Furlong, to me a sissy sounding name I later dropped for Frank. Copyright © 2000 The University Press of Kentucky. All rights reserved.