THE LIMBS ON MY DAD'S SIDE of the family tree are kind of bare. I remember seeing my grandfather (whom everyone called "Papa") about three times, and I have only four visual memories of him. My grandmother dies while my father was still in high school, so I knew only his stepmother, Anna, a pleasant lade about twenty years younger than Papa. Papa's name was Forest P. Newman (yes, with one "p," which has caused no end of misspelling over the years); he owned Sunset Dairies in Leaksville, NC. His family was Scottish in origin, and he was born and raised in the North Carolina mountains in the early 1880s.

MY GRANDMOTHER'S NAME was Eddy Glidwell (pronounced "Eddie Glide-wul") and she came from a family with the financial wherewithal to educate the children. Sadly, I know only three things about my grandmother: she loved her gardens---flower and vegetable---and she "Never got up out of her bed" after the birth of her youngest child. The third thing I know is that my father was her favorite, and kept up her gardens while she was bed-fast. All that information came to me from my mother, who had it from my oldest aunts; my father never talked about his mother. Grandmother also had a famous brother---famous in North Carolina, anyway---named P. T. Glidwell. His boast was that he never lost a client to the gas chamber, not even a woman who gruesomely murdered her husband, and was a huge scandal at the time.

PAPA, apparently was comfortable financially, and remained prosperous even during the Great Depression. He had a live-in cook, Pearl, who could not read. She could count, but not add or subtract, and wanted to be paid only in one-dollar bills. She paid for things by the dollar, and refused change, as that confused her. I believe my dad and his younger brothers collected those left-overs! Each of the children, as well as the hired hands, milked ten cows every morning and evening, as well as to do well in school. Which seems to give credence to the old story about farmers having large families to help with the work.

PAPA HAD A FEW little peculiarities, including the refusal to allow anyone under his purview to use black pepper. No pepper shaker on the table, no pepper box in the kitchen. He insisted that Pearl, an later Anna, prepare only one piece of chicken for each person at the table. Too bad for you if you got the neck and the gizzard (which counted as one piece.) He also gave long, long blessings before meals. Long enough for my cousin Penny to eat her piece of chicken, her sister's piece of chicken and half of her father's piece as well. Nope, she never lived that one down.

ON THE OTHER HAND, he was a good businessman, a good provider, devoutly southern Baptist and an extremely hard worker. One of my visual memories of him is finding him in the kitchen one early morning, making butter with an old-fashioned wooden church and dasher, the up-and-down ones like "Little House on the Prairie." He had produced all the butter his dairy sold for forty-some years, and continued to make it every few days into his eighties. Never smoked nor drank, never gambled nor beat his wife: Pap was a respectable and respected man who gave regularly to his church and charities. When Anna died twenty-five years after him there was still over seventy-five thousand dollars in his bank account.

WE ALSO HAVE HIM TO THANK for our Type II Familial Hyperlipidemia, and our generally rotten hearts. Really. For example, one of my nephews was found to have a cholesterol level of 335 at age twelve. Papa had "a bad heart," which precluded his ever buying life insurance. Despite that---and perhaps because of the nature of the work on a dairy farm---he lived to be ninety-two. None of his children were so long-lived. Five of them died of heart attacks before the age of fifty-five; my Aunt Merle, in fact, died at age twenty-three while delivering a cousin I've never met. Two of the three who lived longer had been through surgeries to ameliorate heart or circulatory problems. Those three twenty-years-longer lives, all three of them, were ended by Alzheimer's Disease. I am tempted to think that virtue must indeed be its own reward.
So I have three contacts and four mental pictures of my Newman grandparents. I also have one picture of them, the only photograph of my grandmother, and the only one I have of Papa. That doesn't seem rich enough, somehow. At least I can validate my aunts' claim that my father looked like his mother.

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