Introduction

My family is unique, as is everyone's. We're not the cruelest, most vicious, odd or bizarre family you know, but we do have a lot of stories. Some interesting, some sad, some funny, some even tragic.

Saturday, October 6, 2012

Three Grandmothers, Part 1


The ‘Bentley’ problem.

Ivy Bentley, Inez Alexander, Mattie Adams, Era Blick.
Steve Bentley. Photo circa 1953.
Daniel  Efford Bentley was married three times. I say this only to point out an eery coincidence, in that myself and both my male siblings have also been married three times. Daniel's third marriage was to Ivy (or Iva) Cypress Burnam, whom I knew as Grandma Bentley.
She was already pretty old by the time I knew her. In fact when she died at the age of eighty six, I was only seven years old. But I do remember her. She watched over me from time to time while mom and dad worked right across the street from where she lived in Cadiz. Dad had a store called Bentley’s Maytag. Yeah, my dear dad was, for a while at least, a Maytag repairman.
Grandma’s place was half a house as I recall. I clearly remember the fireplace, roaring with burning coal chunks. Grandma, a wisp of an old woman always seemed frail and small, poking at the embers with an iron rod then leaning back and heaving forth a dirty brown and smelly spit of tobacco juice into a coffee can by the fireplace. Her voice was high, and a little raspy. I knew enough even then to know that she was from a very different time. I don’t recall a TV in her place at all, there might have been a radio, I just remember the fireplace. She once handed me a couple of D cell batteries, she called them ‘play-pretties’ and left me alone to amuse myself with them. I did. I stuck them to my tongue to feel that tiny ionizing tickle of a shock. This was of course a bad idea. In a few short years I’d graduated from D cells and was hooked on self-shocking with the vastly faster and more amp’ed up nine volt batteries. To this day, the mere sight of a battery, AA, D, or even the big one in my car makes me drool with anticipation.
We took her on a road trip to Evansville Indiana once, where one of her sons lived, ‘Uncle Tobe’ as he was known to us, ‘William Efford Bentley’ as he was known on paper. I don’t know exactly the story or origins of the ‘Tobe’ part.
We had a red, 1960 Ford Falcon station wagon. My sister and I were in the very back (long before such a thing was declared illegal), Grandma Bentley sat behind the driver’s seat. At some point she got uncomfortable and rolled down her window, stuck her head out and puked. I can in my mind, still see the streaking splatter on the back windows, it stayed there the whole trip.
Frankly that’s about all I recall about her. The memories are very vivid, though admittedly few. The next and last thing I recall about her was her funeral in 1964.
As I said she was the third wife of Daniel Efford Bentley. She bore him three sons, Uncle Tobe I mentioned, I also knew Uncle Bob in Russelville, Ky. There was one other, John, who died in 1944,  I do not recall at all. My own father was not one of the three boys.
You see the problem with Grandpa Bentley is that he died in 1918, nearly ten years before my father was born.
Grandma Bentley was born in 1878. She married Daniel while in her very early twenties, around 1901. Daniel was already in his late fifties by then, he was born in 1844, thus, thirty four years her senior. It was a different time.
Daniel and his younger brother had served in the war together, the Civil War. He was rostered with Company B, 13th Virginia Light Artillery Battalion, CSA. As best as we can tell, he was with his unit at the battle of, and subsequent Confederate surrender at, Appomattox. Daniel’s own grandfather, Peter Efford Bentley, had served three tours of duty during the Revolutionary war and his ancestry can be dated back in the U.S. to the 1600’s with an apparent direct line of kinship to Pocahontas. This connection is interesting, though hardly rare. Pocahontas’s descendants were quite prolific.
After the war of northern aggression ended, Daniel became an ordained minister. He served several rural churches in Trigg County. Because of the huge offset in their ages, Grandma Bentley was one of the last widows in Kentucky still receiving a Civil War pension when she died, ninety nine years after that war was over.
So, about my father and his relationship to the Bentley’s.
My dad was born in 1927. His birth parents were Henry Ray and Era Crabtree. By the time I was a kid Era had married another man and I always knew her as Grandma Blick. Yes, I knew her as well.  Grandma Blick’s birth name was Era Dennis.
That’s right, the source of my own first name was my grandmother’s maiden name. What, you thought it was something else?
Henry Crabtree was not by any account or measure I can come up with, an upstanding citizen. Put more plainly, he was a mean, violent drunk. I never met him. Being poor and nearly illiterate in Alabama in the late 1920’s is a pretty tough way to raise a family. Made even more desperate if the breadwinner drinks all the very few bread winnings that occasionally occurred. A couple of years into the great depression, Grandma put my dad and one of his sisters out for adoption. They ended up in the Kentucky Children’s Home in Lyndon (Louisville) Ky. Dad has only ever had scant memories of this period. He recalls looking through a fence at his sister, behind another fence. The children's home segregated kids by gender.
 KCH took part in a system that became known as ‘orphan trains’. They would put some of their ‘destitute’ kids on trains, or in my dad’s case, the rumble seat of a car, and take them to various county courthouses to try to find them new homes. Not at all unlike what my wife does with dogs now.
The Bentley boys, then adults with their own growing families and farms, were in the market for a young boy to live with their aging mother and help her out. At the Trigg County courthouse they came across my dad, around ten years old at the time.
Kentucky Children's Home
They paid the fee and signed the papers, adopting him into the family. Young, destitute Samuel Ray Crabtree became Sam Bentley and started a new life just outside Cadiz.
By every recollection I have heard from him, my dad never had a problem with this. In fact Grandma Bentley and her sons always treated him very well, even into adulthood. By the time I was a young kid I was closer to and more familiar with my Bentley cousins and aunts and uncles than my blood-relatives on my father’s side. That had a lot to do with geography though.
Grandma Blick with a couple
of my real cousins.
So I was raised with three grandmothers and for all practical purposes, no grandfather. Mr. Blick was, to put it mildly, not very ‘nurturing’. He barely tolerated our once per year or so visits to the small, state line-straddling, Adairville Ky. farm. Grandma Blick lived until 1985. I recall many visits to her home. The original house on the farm had no running water and only enough electricity to power a couple of light bulbs and the big TV, which was as I recall only capable of picking up professional wrestling.
Grandma Blick's mother
 Inez Alexander 1880-1961
Grandma Blick was easy to laugh, very kind and above all, quite chatty. A stereotypical barely-literate, hardscrabble woman. She made fresh eggs and biscuits (with lard) and sausage every morning and poured warm, fresh, whole milk for us. There was anything but animosity between her and the Bentley’s.
In my mind and heart it is hard to separate exactly who I am related to by blood and who I am related to in name only. This is not only true for my father’s situation, but for my own as well. My own daughter Leslye is adopted. Her oldest child is Ashton Bentley. I am not related by blood to my daughter or Ashton, but that’s only DNA. The topic of this series of essays is ‘family’, not bloodline, since family is much, much more than biology. If the goal of genealogy is the same as the role of ‘pedigree’ in dog breeds, then I simply have no use for it. Everybody knows we mutts are the best.






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