happy birthday

 

May 7, 1912, my mother, Louise Gentry Weller, was born 113 years ago, near Bluff Springs, Florida, a country place north of Pensacola, out near the Alabama line. To be exact, Gina may have told me it was Century. Where is it? You drive out Palafox and just keep going.

Mama's parents were both from Bluff Springs. Her father, Walter Henry Gentry, was a partner with his brothers in Gentry Bros., Loans & Pawns, est. 1909; her mother, Mamie McClammy Gentry, a home person and star cook of the family. 

Mama was the second of five children born to Walter and Mamie Gentry: Brother Wilbur, mama, brother Charles, sister Edna, sister Mildred. The family grew up in the house pictured above, at 1317 E. Strong Street, a block north of Cervantes Street in East Hill, Pensacola. My memories are of visiting there often as a child, even during WW2, when gasoline was rationed, learning to roller skate on the sidewalks there, big family gatherings for holidays and for summer visits, and for dinner. As a child, I ate with the other children at the kitchen table, graduating to the dining room with the grownups when I was 13 or so. Any number of Times I've recalled here, my grandfather Gentry always driving Chrysler products. First a blue Maxwell touring car, then Chryslers, 

Plymouths, a Desoto or two, Imperials. My memories include summer evenings when our grandparents went out to friends' homes to play cards, my first cousin Bill Gentry and I used to take the car they left behind out and drive the 7734 out of it all over East Hill. Bill's mother died July 1939 when he was two and his sister four; and my grandparents raised them.

Mama's birthday always came about the same Time as Mothers Day, and I remember as a boy and teen, rationing my money to be sure I could buy her a gift for both days. What does a boy buy for his mother? My best memory is handkerchiefs, eh?

My mother looked after me and took up for me all my growing up days, went to every parents' event at Cove School and Bay High. My freshman year, she came home from Parents Night at Bay High, steaming hot because American History teacher Bill Weeks had told her, "He's average." She lit into him, "He is NOT average," and created a raging scene as other parents looked on and waited their turn. In class the next day, Mr. Weeks came to my desk and said, "Man alive, did your mama light into me last night." The next report card my grade was up from C+ to A, with the note, "He really has improved." 

After graduating college and leaving home in 1957, I phoned mama every year on her birthday, except the years we were stationed in Japan. Maybe the call I remember best was from Ann Arbor, Michigan in May 1962, her fiftieth birthday. 

Summer 1984 we moved from Pennsylvania to Florida via Apalachicola, home for home's sake, home at last, home at last, thank God Almighty, home at last; and also so I could be near my parents as they aged. Mama died on Sunday morning, July 17, 2011, two months and ten days past her 99th birthday.

Exactly per her instructions, when mama died, Walt mixed her ashes with our father's ashes, and on a bitter cold rainy day, a passel of us took them out in John Carroll's boat and scattered them in various places on the Bay in front of the Old Place; on the bayou in front of the house where we grew up; as close as we could get to the Old Pass, where our father's brother Alfred drowned when the twin-masted fishing schooner Annie & Jennie broke up while transiting the Pass during a violent squall in January 1918. All of us on the boat that day owe our lives and beings to that tragedy that had so desolated our family nearly a century earlier. 

A few years after Alfred's death, my grandparents A D Weller and Carrie Godfrey Weller sold out and moved away, to several places, ultimately back home to Pensacola, where Alfred had been born, and where my mother and father met as neighbors and students at Pensacola High School. There, those years, many, many stories. Maybe in due course I'll tell some of them again here on +Time. You have to keep telling the stories, or they're lost.   

You only live the present moment. As from one second ago all the way back, your life is memories, all memories, only memories, nothing but memories and stories. Most of mine are good, happy. As I age into antiquity I learn that you never stop missing your mother.

T89&c

pics: 1317 E. Strong Street, Pensacola

1942 Chrysler Windsor sedan, identical, exact same color my grandmother Gentry drove all through WW2. I remember it well!