The Last of the Earles

This past Saturday my brother and I attended a reunion of the descendants of our paternal grandmother's parents--Whitmires who lived near Travelers Rest, SC. The Whitmire family home, built in 1883, served as a post office for the Whitehorse community. The tenants who now live in the house and farm the adjacent acreage, have done a great job preserving the old homeplace, and allow the family to celebrate our heritage on the wide front porch and in the tree-shaded front yard. Until this year, our cousin James Whitmire, paid for the whole gathering. Now, at age 92, his health is failing and he must spend his resources on personal care. Others in the family have taken the challenge and plan to continue the tradition of Whitmire reunions.

Our grandmother, Frances "Fannie" Whitmire, married a highly intelligent, creative ne'er-do-well, Elias Preston Earle, for whom our father and my brother were named. His family was socially prominent in Greenville, but poor financially. There is even a historical marker in Greenville erected to an early Elias Earle.

Fannie and Elias had seven children before she died at in 1925 at age 45 (of "acute indigestion" which was probably a heart attack). Their youngest child, Jimmy, was only 5 years old.

As a single father Elias, by then a travelling salesman, had great difficulty providing for his family. Had it not been for help from his late wife's more affluent brother Jim Whitmire, and the willingness of the older children to care for the younger ones, the children might have had to be dispersed among relatives, as was often the case with other families of that time. The family home, beside the campus of Clemson College, was saved and maintained until after Elias' death in 1935.

My father, nicknamed Buck, was the oldest of the 3 Earle boys. The second son, Sam, died at age 21 before his wife knew she was pregnant. She remarried and their son Timothy was adopted by her new husband, taking his last name of Bleck. The second oldest of the 7 Earle children, Antoinette ("Tony"), did not marry. Unlike some modern-day women she did not choose to become a single mother (which, of course, would have been unthinkable in her day, anyway).

Neither my brother Preston nor our cousin Jim Earle, have sired children, so the Earle family surname, as handed down from Elias Earle, will die out after this generation.

Of the twelve grandchildren of Elias and Fannie, eleven survive. Sam Earle's son, Tim Bleck, died at age 29. The rest of us range in age from late 50's to mid 70's. Though we got together in different groupings as we were growing up, we have all been together only once, thanks to each receiving an inheritance from Aunt Tony in 1997. Now that the Whitmire reunions are scheduled only once every two years, we are going to start to have our own Earle Cousins reunion. We want our children to know their heritage and know and enjoy their cousins as we enjoyed knowing each other when we were young.

Next year we'll meet in Clemson--75 years after our parents left there. It's still the Earle family home.

In Pursuit of Trivia

I don't know when or from where I got my love of what some people call "useless bits of information" or "trivia". I remember my dad listening to a radio show called Information Please and somewhere in the attic there is a copy of a letter he sent to them about something. (Now that's important but I don't remember what or exactly where it is!)

I have always read a lot. I spent a lot of time alone in my youth and often entertained myself with magazines and books. My grandfather was a teacher and school principal who took us traveling when we were young. He loved to know about everything. If there was a crop he did not recognize growing beside the road, he stopped and asked the farmer about it. I still look at the plantings in every field as I drive by--which is kind of hard going 70+mph. We stopped to read historical markers. We cruised around New York and Washington (many times going the wrong way on one-way streets) looking for landmarks and other "educational opportunities". This was made somewhat more tolerable by Grandpa's getting only about 100 miles to a milkshake.

As most people now know, I appeared on the show Jeopardy! in 1967. I won $1,510 (long spent, of course), a set of encyclopedias (which Cathy lost the G volume of, so I finally threw them away) and a Jeopardy! game which is still in the game closet. I'm looking for a gentleman friend like Alex Trebek, who broke my heart several years ago when he married a much younger woman so he could have children.

Grandson Will is carrying on the family interest in trivia. He likes to play my old Trivial Pursuit game. Most of the questions are about stuff that was relevant in the 1980's but quite outdated now. I pick out questions he should know or guess at--and darned if he doesn't beat me with his strategy! We had a great time playing the old game Go to the Head of the Class with friend Betsy Alden (also a Jeopardy! veteran) and her grandsons.

A number of us with connections to High Point Community Theatre are "trivia buffs" and several of us (Mickey Hyland, Charlie Waller and I) have our own Fun Trivia tournament sites in addition to the one Jennifer Blevins has for HPCT. There are a number of great players on each one of them. The champ is Lee Willard. He's amazing!

The knowledge of trivia also helps doing crossword puzzles (which I also love), since many clues require knowing or being able to figure out obscure references. It doesn't help solving Sudoku puzzles, though, which I am still struggling to master.

I hope the generation coming along will come to treasure trivia as much as I do.

Me and My OCD

As my family knows, I have some obsessive-compulsive behaviors. I go through phases with different matters. This spring when I started this blog I was continually thinking about--and having to write about--all sorts of subjects. After a while, though, I got that out of my system and it was on to something else.

For another while I played bridge on line almost every day. Some days, with nothing else on my schedule, I was at it all day and evening. That compulsion has subsided too.

Lately it's been Sudoku--you know those numbers-in-the-boxes puzzles that are in the newspaper and in cheap little booklets. I couldn't "figure" how to do them until Cathy showed me how. I mastered level one but still make enough mistakes on level 2--the medium difficulty ones--that I'm sticking with them for now. I print them out from the computer and keep them on a clipboard on my dinette table "desk". Sometimes I complete as many as ten a day. Big waste of time, but good for the brain.

For a few days this year it was "pootie" jokes. (Ask Kim or Clint Whitlow or Nicole McPhail about them!)

There are other on-going obsessions--like having to have the glasses lined up in groups in the cabinet. When I had blue and yellow bowls they had to be stacked in alternating colors both in the cabinet and the dishwasher. (Now everything's the same design and color.)

Currency in my wallet must all face the same way and be in descending order. I keep track of all income and expenses and balance my cash expenses list at least weekly and the rest monthly. It drives me crazy to see people throw away their credit and/or debit card receipts. I HAVE to save all mine to balance against the statements.

When I entertain for dinner I want the dishes, glassware and flatware to match, so I have services for 12 or more--including Christmas dishes. If there are more than 12 guests, and some sit at a different table, their place settings can be different from those on the main table, but they must "match" too.

Tchotchkes (decor items) have to be in just the "right" places--which was a problem when I had housekeeping help because they would always be moved for dusting and never put back where they belonged. (Guess it was to show she had dusted.) I solved that problem by not having help nor dusting now.

I don't fall apart when things aren't "right" but I "fix" them as soon as I can. I know I don't have really bad OCD that interferes with my ability to function as some people do, thank goodness. One old friend is a hoarder whose piles of possessions limit his movement around his house and keep him from having guests. I'm sure I have other friends or acquaintances whose obsessions are hidden as well.

Now that I've written this essay I don't feel any better, except that at least I've made another entry in my blog. I hope it inspires me to do more--but I'm not obsessed by it.