Segment 1 (Part 2)
Adril Brown and Garnette Mae Simpson
May
20, 1950.[36]
This would be the family home until all the children had moved out and Adril
had passed.
The
1950 census was taken just one month before Kent was born, so the record shows
just Adril, Garnette, two-year-old Dorothy, and Garnette’s mom, Lottie, then
62. Adril was a printer, while Garnette and Lottie were keeping house. Garnette
returned to her secretarial job around the first of July while Lottie cared for
the two children.
Cars
In
those early days after the war, Garnette did not drive. Either Adril would
drive her to work, or she would catch a city bus one street over from the house
and make one transfer in downtown Louisville. Adril owned a collection of
Packards in the 1950s (they ceased production in 1956). Then he bought one
Pontiac sedan (which he despised).[37]
In 1959, hating the tailfins on American cars, Adril bought a red, front wheel
drive Swedish-made Saab (the last year the doors opened ‘backwards’). They
owned the Saab when Nancy Jean was born on March 4, 1960, during a heavy snowfall.[38]
Adril would later joke that the front wheel drive was all that kept Nancy from
being born somewhere along the side of Preston Highway in a snowdrift. Putting
the whole family, plus Lottie, into the Saab was rather impossible, so Adril traded
the Saab in 1964 for a chocolate brown six-cylinder Studebaker Commander.[39]
It was compact compared to the typical Detroit behemoths of the day, but it
suited the young family’s needs.
By
1970, with miles piling up on the Studebaker, Adril began to look for a
replacement. I became aware that a former girlfriend had just traded her
like-new Ford Maverick for a sporty new Ford Mustang. We knew the car, how it
had been driven and how it had been maintained. Adril snatched it up
immediately. It would be his primary vehicle for the rest of his life.
[36] Kent
Wayne Brown, born May 20, 1950, married Michele Jo Owens Starks, January 13,
1979, in Knox Co., TN. Of that day in 1950, the Browns’ neighbor, George Mock,
would tell Kent that after leaving the hospital, Adril drove up and down Garden
Row blowing his horn and yelling, “It’s a boy!”
[37]
Based on photos, it appears to have been the Chieftan model. That car has
special memories for me. It was the first vehicle that I would go and sit in by
myself and pretend to drive. One evening, after playing for a while, I was
called to dinner. Some minutes later a neighbor knocked on the front door and
suggested to my Dad that he might want to pull his car out of the street before
it got hit. I had somehow shifted the car into neutral, and after I got out and
slammed the door, it slowly rolled down the minuscule grade into the street,
effectively blocking Garden Row. Needless to say, there were some restrictions
placed on my ‘driving’.
[38]
Nancy Jean Brown was born on March 4, 1960. She married Walter Andrew (Andy)
Henry on December 10, 1988, in Jefferson Co., KY.
[39]
The Studebaker is at the heart of one of my teenage embarrassments. Before I
had my own car, it was not unusual for me to borrow the car for use on a date.
It was not the usual, ‘Hey Dad, can I borrow the car?’. Because Adril was a
printer for the Louisville Courier Journal, he worked nights and slept days. I
would ride downtown with him about 7:00 pm and then take the car to use on the
date. Somewhere around 4:00 am, I’d get a call to come pick him up. On one
occasion I borrowed the car for a date with classmate Shirley Dennison. I
picked her up at her house in somewhat upscale Audubon Park. I walked to the
car and let her in, then went to the driver’s side and got in. Immediately, the
seatback hinge pin broke, and I found myself almost on the rear floor while
hanging onto the steering wheel. Having already bought our tickets, we went on
our date laughing like only kids can. When I picked up Dad early the next
morning, he sat down and landed on the rear floor. At that point, I suggested
that there was probably something that I should tell him. It became the source
of one-liners between us for the rest of his life.
Page -12-
Louisville, she depended upon city buses to get to her business college
classes and later to her job.[40]
By the late 1960s, the family had changed, and she wanted to drive. She bought
a used Chevy Corvair and used it to learn to drive. Driving was never easy,
given her vision issues. Once she felt competent, she got a used silver V8
Camaro.[41]
She loved the car, its color and its ‘sportiness’. In the 1980s, she
reluctantly replaced the Camaro with another silver car, this one a boxy Chevy
Citation.
Work and Family
Life
When
the recession of 1957-1958 hit the country, Fawcett-Dearing was hit hard as
they had also lost some of the lucrative large retail catalogs that were the
core of their business. These included Sears and Roebuck and Montgomery-Ward.
The reduced work meant shortened hours for the staff and eventually layoffs.
The Browns briefly considered relocating.[42]
That spring and summer, Adril worked for the Atlanta Constitution and Journal.
He rented an apartment over a garage and returned home every few weekends.
Garnette, Dorothy and Kent visited Adril once, taking an overnight train. The
reunion in Atlanta was epic. Kent and Dorothy spied Adril walking their way,
and both broke into an all-out sprint, oblivious to other passengers. Most spun
around to glare at the unruly urchins only to melt when they realized what was
going on. Memories of the visit have mostly slipped away except for that
reunion and a sheet cake that Dad had gotten to celebrate my birthday.
A
similar recession of lesser intensity struck in 1960-1961. Adril turned to
doing contract printing for the Kentucky Baptist Press at their offices in
Middletown, KY. The print runs were fairly small and were turned out on an
offset press. The setup used a linotype machine to produce the copy. Adril (and
others) would lock the rows of type into frames forming columns, headlines, and
all of the other attributes common to early low-volume publishing. The type
would be inked and pressed onto the paper. It was not so far removed from the Gutenberg
process, just faster. I had the privilege of ‘helping’ on a few weekends.[43]
Vacations with Dot and Kent typically meant going to the Smokies, to the Gulf, or to the Atlantic coast. One memorable vacation occurred in 1959. As I recall, there was some concern that Dot and I had no idea how blessed we were. So, they determined to take us on a driving tour of eastern KY. We loaded into the brand-new Saab and off we went. A few memories stand out. We had a car wreck. It wasn’t bad. I cannot recall how it was resolved, but it didn’t significantly impact the trip. I recall that we stayed at a Holiday Inn on a hilltop near Hazard, KY. I guess Hazard was supposed to have shown us the other side of life, but the hotel setting was nice (as was the pool), so I thought Hazard was just fine. We also drove across the border into the western edge of WV. The roads changed from asphalt to gravel and the calendar
[40]
When I turned 16, I showed minimal interest in getting licensed; after all,
there was only one car, and I didn’t have a need for one, yet. By about 17, my
parents were insistent that I get my license so I could become the chauffeur.
[41]
Believed to be a 1973 model.
[42] I
vividly recall that one of Dad’s cousins took a job in Alaska and tried to
entice Adril and Garnette to join him, even going so far as to identify job
openings at the local paper. The family made a trip to a downtown bookstore and
bought an Alaskan map. With both sets of parents entering their 60s, the option
was not seriously entertained. Garnette would later claim that it was just
‘talk’. As a little kid, I was ready to pack my bag.
[43] To
call what I did ‘helping’ is to be generous. I was fascinated with the linotype
machine and the different sentences that I could make (always with my name
somewhere in the line). If memory serves me right, Dad was printing the KY
Baptist periodical, The Western Recorder.
Page -13-
changed
from the late 1950s to the 1890s. It’s a memory that has never faded.[44]
Adril
did part-time work as a security guard in the early to mid-sixties when
business was slow at Fawcett. The social unrest that characterized the mid and
late 1960s made Adril decide that he was through with being a security guard.
He’s had his fill of combat in the Pacific. Instead, he worked at the KY
Baptist Press part-time, running a small offset press. At times, Kent would
‘tag along’. At some point in the 1960s, beginning to think of his old-age
years, he joined the Masons since they had decent retirement homes in the area.
Thankfully, this seemed to have been the extent of his interest as he was never
active in the Lodge.
After years of boom-and-bust cycles at Fawcett-Haynes, he switched to the Courier Journal, Louisville's morning paper.[45] It was during his pre-employment physical that Adril learned just how color blind he officially was.[46] So much so that the company Doctor attempted to have the offer rescinded, after all the paper did color ads, a color Sunday magazine (for several towns) and, of course, color Sunday funnies. Cooler heads prevailed when they considered that he had set up many color presses at Fawcett for years. It was also at the Courier that his speed-reading abilities became known and were immediately put to use. When the first copies rolled off of the presses, Adril was asked to get a cup of coffee and a pencil and become a proofreader (along with a team of folks reading at normal speeds). Along with his positive talents, he also had some that were less praiseworthy. For instance, Adril salted every other sentence with a curse. This was sometimes the source of tension with Garnette (who never let a bad word pass her lips). It was in such an environment that one evening at dinner, when I was probably 6 or 7 years old, I calmly remarked on something that had happened that day with multiple expletives. Having heard profanity all my life from my Dad, I am certain that the context and application were perfect.[47] Garnette immediately stopped me and told me to never use such language. Calmly, I replied, “He (meaning Adril) says that all of the time”. I was certain that I had scored a point. Garnette replied without a pause, “Well, I didn’t raise him, but young man, I am raising you”. Until the day she died, Garnette never heard a bad word from my mouth. Another sore point was my Dad’s unwillingness to attend Farmdale Baptist with the family very often. In part, it was his poor hearing. The war years in a Field Artillery Battalion, firing machine guns, and the decades operating high-speed printing presses (before hearing protection was widely used) left him fairly deaf. Testing revealed that his type of hearing loss would not be responsive to the hearing aid technologies of the day. In crowds, he simply could not tell what was going on. At home with people that he knew, he was able to get by with the help of lip reading. But hearing was not the only reason he avoided Farmdale. As a kid, he had been pressured by well-meaning but ignorant believers, and he became very defensive.[48] In contrast, Garnette was always active in church. When the family moved to Standiford Place, Garnette and Lottie would get Dorothy and Kent ready on Sundays, and they would ride the church bus to Farmdale Baptist on Preston Highway. Many times, she and the kids would walk the mile or so home after services.
[44]
For years, I would think of that trip into WV whenever the TV sitcom, The
Beverly Hillbillies, would come on. The opening with character Jed Clampett ‘shootin’
at some food' looked just like things that I’d seen out the car window. The
show’s characters were supposed to have come from the Ozarks, not WV, but it
was close enough.
[45]
Handling the heavy printing plates for years left Adril with larger, thick,
strong hands. In the 1970s, I discovered that a quarter would easily fit
through his wedding band. This means he wore at least a 15-1/2.
[46]
We’d learned of his color blindness on a vacation when we entered a town with
the streetlight placed horizontally. Adril could not tell the red from green.
At every intersection, Garnette had to call out the active color of the signal.
[47]
Adril never used obscenities, just profanities.
[48] In
his later years, he softened somewhat. He would attend a service periodically
and engage in discussions with Kent.
Page -14-
She was most active when Dorothy and Kent were young and served in various
leadership positions in their youth departments. In later years she served as the
church librarian at Farmdale.
Garnette
continued working for Jeffboat throughout the 1950s. She was one of several
young secretaries who had been with the company during the War. She developed
perhaps her best work-friendships of her career there. After the War, the
company shifted to the production of tugboats and barges. This was in support
of the post-war economic boom and in direct support of their parent company,
the American Barge Lines (ABL). When tugboats were built for ABL, employees
were asked to submit potential names for the new craft. In 1956, a 149’, 667
gross ton tugboat was fabricated for ABL. Garnette had suggested that the boat
be named in honor of ABL co-founder and Vice President, Andrew P. Calhoun, in
honor of his retirement following 33 years of service.[49]
When Jeffboat selected Garnette’s submission, she was honored in a small
ceremony at work and presented with a photo of the Calhoun.[50]
Garnette finally left Jeffboat in early 1960, just before giving birth to Nancy,
and remained at home until Nancy began first grade. She then took a job as a secretary
at C&I Girdler.[51]
The company designed and built various chemical plants around the world. The
job was fast-paced and stimulating, but she was already looking ahead to figure
out how she would put three kids through college. With Dorothy about to
graduate from high school, Garnette took a job in the acquisitions department
at the University of Louisville Library. As an employee, the kids would be
eligible for free tuition and discounts on books by just maintaining a ‘B’
average. At UL, she advanced to be the administrative assistant to the Dean of
Libraries.
Holidays
at Garnette’s were ‘over the top’. Christmas was her favorite. Her Christmas
trees were so over-decorated that you could hardly see the tree itself. She
loved giving gifts more than getting them, and if you could somehow make a gag
out of it, that was even better. Gifts were hidden; were placed in nested sets
of boxes; were secured with rolls of tape, making them impenetrable and so
forth. Gifts were not just under the tree; they extended out into the room and
changed traffic patterns. Holiday meals were always certain to match the excess
described above. Though she was never a great cook, these meals were Garnette
at her best.
At the Courier, Adril worked nights printing the morning paper. He would go in about 7:00 pm and get off by 4:30 am. His routine was to take his lunch break at about 11:00 pm and call home to chat with Garnette and the kids before they went to bed. Often Adril would stop at the White Castle restaurant when he got off work and get a bag of hamburgers. He’d arrive home around 5:00 am and proclaim a ‘party’. Such spontaneous ‘parties’ were common with Adril and Garnette. They also liked to go out on ‘dates’ to a Frisch’s Big Boy (similar to Shoney’s) where they’d share a lite meal, a piece of pie and endless coffee refills. Their favorite ‘fancy’ restaurant was Masterson’s. This they reserved for special occasions.[52] Garnette loved fast-food of any type. She enjoyed oriental, loved the Kingfish restaurant, and was a sucker for a milkshake at Erhler’s (a wonderful local dairy). Adril preferred home-cooked meals. I particularly recall that he liked foods that were ‘unusual’ to me, such as liver, hominy, and
[49] Calhoun,
a WW1 veteran, and Yale graduate was the great grandson of John C. Calhoun, a
two-time Vice President of the US and later arch defender of slavery and States
rights in the pre-Civil War South.
[50]
For years Garnette kept the photo on the dresser in her bedroom. The tugboat is
still in service though it has been sold several times and renamed with each
transition. It is now owned by the Tennessee Valley Towing Company of Paducah,
KY and known as the David R. Hill.
[51]
C&I Girdler was formed by a merger of the Chemical and Industrial
Corporation (of Cincinnati) and the Girdler Corporation (of Louisville, founded
by Walter Higgins Girdler).
[52]
They took me there to celebrate my graduation from the University of
Louisville.
Page -15-
prunes. He also
loved fresh coconuts, a direct result of his time in the South Pacific.
The
year 1976 was special for the family. With Kent in his last year in Switzerland
and scheduled to return stateside in November, Garnette and Nancy flew to Europe
to visit him for three weeks. Using his apartment in Turgi as their home base,
Garnette and Nancy played tourist during the day, and the three drove the
countryside in the late afternoons. After a week or so, the girls became bold
and rode the train into Zurich for a day of sightseeing. Weekends were spent on
the run in the Alps. The best Swiss trip took the three to the town of Grindelwald.
Arriving late one day, no mountains were visible due to the low clouds. The
next morning, as they ate breakfast in the hotel, Garnette mused that it was a
bad day as the clouds were so low. In contrast, Kent knew that 1500’ up, the
sky would be crystal clear. Garnette didn’t really want to take the train ride
in clouds until a small hole opened in the clouds, and she discovered with
amazement that to see the tops of the adjacent mountain, she had to look almost
straight up. The trip was on. They took the train to Kleine Scheidegg at the
foot of the mountain called Eiger. Later, they came down the east side of the
mountain to the town of Wengen, overlooking the Lauterbrunnen. In this
picturesque, carless town, they bought food and drinks at a small market. They
took their food to a bench overlooking the valley and had a priceless meal.
As
it happened, during Garnette’s and Nancy’s stay, Kent’s engineering job called
for him to test or inspect some large power transformers being built for the
Tennessee Valley Authority at the Elin Union plant in Weiz, in eastern Austria.
As Weiz is a small town with fewer than 9,000 residents at the time, he booked
a hotel in the nearby town of Graz (population 250,000 at the time). The trio
left Turgi on the 460-mile trip early Saturday morning. The afternoon was spent
in tiny Liechtenstein before driving to Innsbruck for the night. Sunday night
was spent in Salzburg. Tired, the trio arrived in Graz on Monday evening. The
girls were on their own just 20 miles from the Yugoslavian border in a
wonderful Austrian town for perhaps three days. Having taken a ’northern’ route
across Austria, the trio returned via a more southern path. The trip would be a
highlight for all three.
Decline and Death
In
the summer of 1977, Adril began to suffer some stomach distress. Tests
indicated that he may have had an ulcer, and he was put on a strict diet and
medication accordingly. But there was no improvement. Soon, Adril began to miss
work.[53]
This was something he had never done in his entire career, aside from his gall
bladder surgery in the 1950s. By early November, the doctors had discovered
cancer and rapidly performed surgery to remove a portion of his stomach.
Unfortunately, stomach cancers were then one of the hardest varieties to detect,
and by the time that the surgery was performed, the cancer had spread. Adril
returned home only briefly before his deteriorating condition forced his return
to Louisville's St Joseph's Hospital. His color had rapidly begun to change,
and the doctors informed the family that the cancer had attacked his liver.
After going to the brink of death during the night of the 22nd and
then recovering, he peacefully died early on the morning of December 24, 1977.[54]
He was buried in Evergreen Cemetery, Louisville, KY, on December 27th,
a cold, overcast, and snowy day. His passing was noted in the local press as
follows:[55]
[53]
Garnette told the story that late one night he woke her and said that he felt
like he, “had just begun to die.”
[54] Adril's
death certificate was number 33231, death volume 77.
[55] Courier
Journal, Louisville, KY, December 25, 1977, page B14.
Page -16-
Adril Brown, 58, of 1125 Garden Row, died at 6:40
am Saturday at St. Joseph Infirmary. He was a native of Ohio Co. and an Army
veteran of World War II. He was a member of the Aurora Masonic Lodge 633.
Survivors include his wife, the former Garnett Simpson; a son, Kent Brown of
Knoxville, Tenn; two daughters, Dorothy Buchanan and Nancy Brown; and a
grandchild. The funeral will be at 10 am Tuesday at Arch L. Heady Oakalona
Funeral Home, 8519 Preston Highway, with burial in Evergreen Cemetery. The body
will be at the home after 10 am Monday.
In
the late 1980s, the long-discussed (25 years?) Louisville airport expansion
finally became a reality. The Standiford Place subdivision, nestled between the
airport and a sweeping curve of Interstate 65, was taken. Garnette sold her
home of almost 40 years to the Urban Renewal Development Agency and moved to
the east side of town just off Hess Lane to 5303 Baywood Drive. Like all such
moves, she considered it both good and bad. It had taken her away from the site
of so many memories. But the move also meant that every time she left home she
didn’t have to drive right by the cemetery where Adril, her mom, and so many
others were buried. It also took her away from neighbors of 40 years and her
church of 40 years.[56]
Entreaties by Kent and Michele to get her to move to Tennessee were never
seriously considered.
Dorothy,
who had periods of estrangement from her Mom since her tumultuous high school
and college days, found herself the only child living nearby and by default
became the primary caregiver. Any gap that might have existed between mother
and daughter vaporized as Dorothy provided the best care that could have been
given. Garnette died July 16, 1991, in Louisville, KY, at a nursing home of
breast cancer which had spread.[57]
She was buried in Evergreen Cemetery, Louisville, KY,
End Notes and
References
- Garnette's SSN was
406-16-8905.
- Adril's SSN was
402-24-1792.
- Garnette's will
- Garnette's
"Autobiography of a Nut".
- Information on the
198th Field Artillery (some data taken from a History of the KY National
Guard)
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[56]
Michele and I (Kent) had tried to talk her into moving to TN where we lived but
she would have been cutting all the ties of a lifetime in the day before the
easy communications of the 2000s. She said “No” and never wavered.
[57] Garnette's
death certificate number was 18179, death volume 92.
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- 6. Passenger ships of the world, past and present, Eugene W. Smith.
LC Control Number: 79101044 Type of Material:
Book (Print, Microform, Electronic, etc.) Personal Name: Smith, Eugene Waldo,
1905- Main Title: Passenger ships of the
world, past and present by Eugene W. Smith. Edition Information: 2d. ed.
Published: Boston: G. H. Dean, c1978. Description: xxxx, 1097 p., [1] leaf of
plates: ill. ; 18 cm. Subjects: Ship registers. Ocean liners--Registers. LC
Classification: HE565.A3 S48 1978 Dewey Class No.: 387.2/43. Call Number:
HE565.A3 S48 1978 Copy 1
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