Transcript
Hi, I'm Dan Slone.
This is Dan's Tiki Bar. I'm going to share with you the story of Alice and Charles.
Alice was my aunt in that Southern relationship way. She was the daughter of my great aunt who passed away and was raised by another great aunt, my aunt Effie who also ended up raising my mom through much of her life, so Alice was actually a cousin. She married Charles, and they were one of the greatest couples I’ve ever known. They were almost a single entity. So to tell their story you kind of have to pry them apart, which I'm going to do. I'm going to tell the story in two parts. The first part is going to be about Charles and second part is going to be about Alice. I hope you enjoy it.
When I was a little, Charles was one of my favorite relatives. He had this raspy smoker's cough voice. He could throw his voice. He had lots of toys that he shared. He had magic tricks and marbles and slingshots and all sorts of stuff. He wasn’t a tall man. He was big shouldered. He loved his cat, and he hated the hold little babies. He looked about as awkward as he could be, but what I remember most about Charles was his humor. One of the gifts he gave me at one point was one of these leashes that you can hold and it looks like it's got an invisible dog and it, an invisible dog leash. I think that’s what it's called. And Charles claimed that he'd stand outside of bars and wait for people to come out and try to convince them that he really did have a dog in that leash. And one time he was with my mom and dad in a Stuckey's and he shouts, “Oh look! A quarter!” and he reaches down and he comes up shaking his hand going, “Who in here spits like a quarter?” Now, I know, redneck humor, but you gotta understand most of my family is good-humored, but they're not particularly funny. Charles was pretty funny and he told tales. When I was a little, I thought those tales were all true but along the way my dad explained that Charles told tall tales, which meant there was always some truth in them, but there was also often things that probably weren't true. And that not only was the fantasy blurred for me as a youngster, but even as an adult, my dad didn't really know which was which in many of the stories.
But when Charles was young, he’d been a member of the Civilian Conservation Corps and he saved, all of his life, this shirt that he had in the CCC. The other the other really significant thing he’d done when he was very young was he’d been a wrestler. So of course when I was young and you ask questions like this, I asked him if wrestling was real and he said, “Well, no, it's not in the sense that you're told who's going to win and if you didn't follow that instruction you wouldn't get to wrestle anymore. There were guys who made their reputation on winning and those who sort of went around losing to them all.” He said, “But when you put two big guys in a ring together, even though they know how it's supposed to come out, inevitably as they're bouncing around and pretending to throw punches and everything, one would accidentally hurt the other and make him angry and they would suddenly get real.”
He had been a bouncer at his brother’s restaurant. His brother had opened one of the first drive-ins. It was actually a gas station and drive-in restaurant that was in Greeneville, Tennessee. As a bouncer, Charles was responsible for breaking up fights and in Greenville, like some parts of the country, weekend recreation was fighting and so Charles would break them up. And if you fought, you’d get tossed out, but you could come back, but they did have a specific rule. If you got tossed out because you were fighting and it was fists or knives or brass knuckles or whatever, that was all okay, but if you pulled a gun, you were banned for life. I always thought that was wonderful, that that was the bright line, was pulling a gun.
The first time Charles saw my Aunt Alice he was about 18 and he’d gone over and was standing on the outside of the hedge and Alice was standing on the inside, and he was talking to her and he was smitten and Aunt Effie came boiling out of the house and said, “You can't talk to her! She's only 14 and you can't talk to her until she's 18!” And so he waited and when she turned 18, they talked, they dated, and after a while they got married.
Charles went off to fight in World War II. He went early and, besides marrying Alice, the thing that Charles was most proud of in the world was driving a tank for Patton. And that's how he always said it, driving a tank, not for the United States and of course, he loved the United States, but he drove a tank for Patton. And the other piece of clothing that he kept all his life was part of his uniform from World War II. Charles was in the Battle of the Bulge. The way he'd tell the story is the Sergeant's won the Battle of the Bulge despite the Captains, and Charles had led a battalion in that process. And it wasn't until many years later that I wondered how this dear sweet man who loved his cat and was one of the gentlest people I knew I wondered how many people he'd actually ended up killing in World War II.
When he came back from World War II, he stayed in Greenville a little while, but then he went back into the into the army and became a drill sergeant for a few years out in Hawai’i and then he came back to Greenville, Tennessee, and there was a connection between these. While he was a drill sergeant, he said his job was to train young men to keep them from dying. When he came back to Greenville, he helped open up a drive-in restaurant called the Igloo, and he said his job at the Igloo was to train young men - they mostly employed boys at the time - to go on into life and to be successes. And Charles had always read all of these early self-help folks, so Dale Carnegie, Charles Atlas, all of these sorts of things. Charles was always inspired to try to figure out ways to get better, and even long after it would have mattered, he got his high school diploma equivalent. He always said that he did spend 12 years in school, but he'd spent much of it in the sixth grade.
He built the house that he and Alice lived in. He built it himself and their primary social outlet was the Moose Lodge. They loved the Moose Lodge and everybody down there, and they spent a lot of years there.
When I was 12, and because of weird circumstances at my school, my mom asked Charles to teach me street fighting, and he did and that was very interesting. But it was also at the beginning of a period in which I grew a little estranged from Charles. I was a teenager, probably estranged from most of my relatives at that point, and Charles and I had very different political views, very different views on Vietnam, very different views on young people and what they were saying in the country. And I started college and we grew even further apart, and it was very sad to me because I really missed my friend, my Uncle Charles.
Out of college, my wife and I bought a small farm, 43 acres had a hundred year old farmhouse that really wasn't that good on the day it was built. So there were lots of projects to do there, and I also bought a VW bug with one of those hippie manuals that told you how to fix your own VW Bug. So all of a sudden I was doing all of these projects that I had never done anything like them before. I never worked with tools that much. I hadn't done most of these things, and the joke was that I could anything the second time I tried it but this actually created a really important bridge to my uncle because, now when I’d go up to visit him at Christmas, we could talk about projects, and he loved talking about projects. He loved talking to me about tools. He loved showing me the tools he had. Often he'd give me tools just because he was very excited to be able to share in this process of working on the farm and fixing things.
And he also found out that my wife and I loved breakfast. He’d fix these wonderful country breakfasts of biscuits and red-eye gravy and eggs and grits and everything. It was really great. And he'd tell stories. He’d tell stories to my daughters and lots of tall tales and we'd laugh at them. One of the ones he told was he was telling him that he was in the war, that he’d gone through all of the war driving this tank around for Patton and been just fine and then he'd stepped on a landmine and gotten injured that way. And we all laughed because remember Vietnam was occurring and then you didn't walk away from landmines. And yeah, another tall tale.
One Christmas I came and Charles had been working on breakfast all morning. He had to sit down every few minutes. I asked him if I could take him to the hospital. He said no but called later in the day and asked me to take him on over the hospital. I got him to the hospital, and this was back when I still believed that if you get somebody to the hospital, they’d be fine. But a few days later Charles died from pneumonia complicated by the fact that he'd smoked all of his life.
A year later as I was visiting Alice, and she was putting his medals away and he had all of these metals, and she was explaining what they all were and I asked, “Did he really earn them all?” It was Charles and I didn't know but of course he earned them all and she said, “Yeah, they were all his.”, and she recited what they were for, which campaigns and there were two purple hearts. And I said “Well, what are the two purple hearts for?”, and she said, “I don't know what this one's for, but this was for when he stepped on that mine and got blown up.”
And I thought when I was putting this story together that that's where it ended. Oh he’d tell these tales and something you thought that wasn't true, it turned out was true. But as I was going through Alice and Charles' photos and different things they'd saved Charles had saved a newspaper article in which they interviewed him regarding the Battle of the Bulge. And in this article, he's telling them how he was shot twice at the Battle of Bulge. First time he was shot, it wasn't so serious that he had to leave the field, so he stayed. But then later on he was shot again, and he had to leave at the Battle of the Bulge and so he didn't get to go on into Germany. He didn't say anything about any landmines and he’d never mentioned that he'd been shot. So I don't know to this day what stories are actually true and which ones aren’t.
I don't know if you have an Uncle Charles in your world or maybe you did have one. I have the impression there aren't so many of them these days as there used to be but if you had one or have one, you should treasure them because they are the real people. They are the tricksters, the protectors, the family members and they are the storytellers, and we love them.
I'll share a little of Alice's story in the next installment of Bits & Peaces.
Thanks!