By WAYNE D. KING, InDepthNH.org
Broke and low in 1981, A Christmas gift to my Grandmother and Grandfather yielded a treasure trove of life memories. Here’s one of them.
A few weeks ago, as Kodi and I were cruising the “back 40” hayfield of my neighbor, I (figuratively) stumbled upon the memory of the demise of Bennie the Bear, [It Bears Repeating] as I randomly “paged” through the filing cabinet in my brain.
Note for those under 40: I know you are probably ready to move on to the next article, having been confronted with words like PAGE and FILING CABINET – to say nothing of BRAIN. Stick with me a little longer, you’ll have fun. . . and please forgive the snarky brain reference.
In the story of Bennie, I introduced you to my uncle Franklin George, a renowned North Country story-teller from Bartlett.
In that column, I warned you that I had some “doosies” to share from the family history. so sit back and enjoy this story of a Christmas gift that opened the floodgates.
The pathway to most of these memories was a long and winding road that eventually led my grandmother Charlotte and her second husband, Alexander Gottig, to live in the renovated cabin on my parents’ land; Ostensibly, so my mom and dad would be nearby to assist them in their elder years.
Interestingly, this renovated cabin began life as a shed on the MacDonald Farm in Campton, NH and was the subject of one of my very first InDepthNH.org columns some years ago when I described our family of five moving into a one-room camp after the farmhouse they had just purchased collapsed as they were attempting to put a foundation under it [Drumbeats from my Father].
My Native American grandfather, Fred King, had died in 1951, four years before I was born. It would be years before I found out the secret of his heritage that he had asked my dad to respect to protect the family.
Al Gottig was my grandfather Fred’s best friend. An itinerant machinist who found great demand for his skills despite the fact that his highest academic achievement was that he finished 6th grade. Grampa Al deserves a separate column, so I’ll reserve space for him in a future column.
After they were married, Al and Charlotte had eventually settled into a very independent life together, along with a lady we all referred to as “Aunt Carrie” Macrae; a matron with whom my Grandpa Al shared familial ties. Carrie was somehow woven into their new family – the three of them traveling 9-10 months a year with a group of Airstream camper owners called “Wally Byam’s Caravaners.”
For most of this time, they maintained their family homestead in Bartlett, where they would spend their summers.
Even back in the early 80’s, after they had moved into our family cabin and sold the Airstream, giving up their road-warrior days, they quietly held onto the family homestead. More about that in a future column. . .
That first winter, 1981, I believe, was a tough time for me personally. I was broke, newly divorced after a less than two-year marriage and struggling that Christmas to come up with unique gifts for my family that I could afford.
That Christmas, I gave my grandparents a card that declared I would cook breakfast for them every Monday morning for a year.
In hindsight, it was the greatest gift I ever gave myself. I showed up on the second breakfast armed with a cassette recorder, and for the next 6 months, I was never without the recorder and plenty of spare tapes.
Now, I need to say that mine is a family where nicknames are abundant. Almost everyone has a nickname, and it can be confusing when any of us are telling a story.
One of the very first challenges that I faced as I sought to document these family tales was to be able to identify who was who. When my grandmother spoke of Gummy, or Gundear, I needed to realize that she was speaking of her grandmother and grandfather. So I began to go through the list of family members first to match up names and nicknames but also to learn more about them individually.
When I came to Winn and Abby – her aunt and uncle – my grandmother got this deer in the headlights look on her face.
“What did Winn do for a living?” I asked.
Her response was that Winn was a “country gentleman.”
I asked her to clarify what that meant. She replied that Winn (short for Winfield) never really worked a day in his life, he simply sold off portions of the family land holdings.
His was the third generation of a family that had received large land grants from the first Colonial grantors.
The first grants were awarded by the British King and the Royal Governor of New Hampshire to individuals who would likely never actually set foot on the land. The land grants were simply apportioned to them as a part of their financial portfolio. They would then sell or lease portions of their holdings to local families and receive income from the rents and transactions.
My grandfather Fred (Roi) – Charlotte’s first husband, who, upon leaving his Native American family, had taken the anglicized name “King”. GG Emilia had 24 children, with 19 surviving to adulthood,of the 19 surviving “Roi” children, most – as far as we can determine – chose to make the change to “Roy”.
One great uncle – the only one I actually knew personally – lived most of his adult life in Guildhall, Vermont. It was only years later that I would discover that half the people of Guildhall knew him by the surname King and half as Roy. A real-life version of the cultural bipolarity with which many Native families lived.
All of this came long before my tearful father’s revelation of his native American ancestry.
Are you catching on to the tangled mess of trying to piece together my heritage and ancestry, yet?
I regret that I only spent a few afternoons with my great Uncle, so I never had the opportunity to explore how and why this was even possible.
I mention all this mostly because of the irony you will surely see, of living with one foot in one culture and the other in another.
“The earth does not belong to man; man belongs to the earth. All things are connected like the blood which unites one family. Man did not weave the web of life; he is merely a strand in it. Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself.” —Chief Seattle, Suquamish and Duwamish
For Native American peoples, the notion of “land ownership” is fundamentally different from the Western concept of private property. The land is not a commodity to be bought, sold, or controlled by individuals, but rather a communal resource, sacred partner, and the foundation of our culture, spirituality, and identity.
Now, these breakfasts with my grandparents happened long before I knew of my Native American heritage. Yet, even then, I found myself thinking with the spirit of my Native ancestry. Feeling that “something was wrong with this picture”. I was witnessing – second hand through Grandma Charlotte – the tipping point at which a massive transfer of wealth occurred as land (the principal source of wealth) was transferred from a community asset to individual assets.
Aha! But Uncle Winn and the colonial takeover are not the point of this piece, that was just my ramblings to come upon the real gem. . . Aunt Abby.
For this you have to trust my memory and honesty because when I asked my Grandmother to tell me about Abby she pointed at the tape recorder and asked me to turn it off . . .
As near as I can remember, here is what she told me:
“Abby had a taste for the finer things in life but she was not much on paying for them – Even though she could have.”
“She would make frequent shopping trips to North Conway and she would visit many of the local shops on those trips. “
“All of the local proprietors knew Abby, and they knew that her light fingered inclinations would be a real problem if they involved the authorities. After all Uncle Winn was from a very prominent family. “
At this point, Grandma Charlotte was half-smiling and half-horrified, keeping her eyes on the tape recorder and glancing up at me from time to time.
“She was a shoplifter! “ I exclaimed.
Grandma patted my hand and discreetly moved it a bit further from the “record” button. “Oh she was that alright,” Grandma said. “in spades as they say.”
“But don’t you worry, dear,” she said (my grandmother’s North Country accent made the last word come out more. like “dee-yuh” – it was one of the sweetest things about listening to her.)
“Uncle Winn figured all this out early on. He met discreetly with each of those proprietors and developed a strategy. When Abby went into the store, the proprietor and their employees knew they were to simply keep track of everything she stole and send an invoice to Uncle Winn at the end of the month.”
“Uncle Winn would then pay them and everyone was happy.”
At this point, I sat back and laughed – “The family honor is restored!” I announce.
“Well,” Grandma Charlotte said sheepishly – though I could see the touch of an impish grin on her face. “Of course, that doesn’t account for the boxes and boxes of new kid gloves, pretty undergarments – never opened – and other finery that we discovered in her attic after she died. “
It appears she also had a penchant for mail-order. The packages would arrive, go straight up to the attic and Abby would then write to the company to say she had not received them.
No one knew if Uncle Winn was privy to this secret too . . .
About Wayne King
Wayne is a North American “mutt” with a family heritage that winds through his Native American, Canadian and US Colonial roots. His love for the philosophical founding documents and sacred stories and dreams of both the Abenaki and the Iroquois, the US Founders, and the sacred artists, musicans, writers and poets whose works and images are a celebration of the circle of life continue to be the source of his inspiration.
An author, podcaster, artist, activist, and recovering politician, including three terms as a State Senator and 1994 Democratic nominee for Governor. His art (WayneDKing.com) is exhibited nationally in galleries and he has published five books of his images, most recently, “New Hampshire – a Love Story”. His novel “Sacred Trust” – a vicarious, high-voltage adventure to stop a private power line – as well as the photographic books are available at most local bookstores or on Amazon.
Wayne lives on the “Narrows” in Bath, NH at the confluence of the Connecticut and Ammonoosuc Rivers and proudly flies the American, Iroquois and Abenaki Flags, attesting to both his ancestry and his spiritual ties. Anamaki is a derivative of an Algonquin word meaning “abiding hope”.
Art, Columns, and Podcasts are produced at Anamaki Productions, Winter Warrior Studios in Bath, NH. Join the mailing list and be first to see new images and to receive special offers on cards, prints, limited editions and more at his Anamaki Chronicles Substack
Wayne D. King
64 Monroe Rd., Bath, NH 03740
603-530-4460 Cell
waynedking9278@gmail.com
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