I look so comfortable leaning into my grandmother. Nannie was 71. It was almost back to school time. One more year ahead at McMicheal Junior High for me. Right now I’m wishing I could go back there again, even for just one of those Saturdays in my grandparents backyard.
On the back of the photograph is says “A Merry Xmas to you all. Here are some roses for your (faded words – if you can read them let me know!) Your little niece, Theresa P. Reed.” “Hugh’s daughter.”
Theresa was my grandmother Pearl’s brother Hugh’s youngest daughter. She was born in Indianapolis, IN in 1914. There are several other photographs of her as she grew up to about the age of 12 or 13. Unfortunately I cannot find the family in the 1930 census, although I do find her father later on. Hoping I can find them in the 1940 census and back track.
You can read about Theresa’s father, Hugh Marion Reed by clicking HERE.
You can see more fascinating Sepia Saturday posts by clicking HERE.
Yesterday after talking on the phone with my cousin Jacqui and posting the identities of the people in the formerly mystery photo, I decided to look online for a photograph of Ubert Conrad Vincent as an adult. Instead I found a newspaper article in The New York Age from Saturday, May 7, 1927 with a photograph of him as a three year old. As soon as I saw it I realized it was the same small boy in another photograph I had from my grandmother’s collection. It wasn’t labeled or dated, but my mother had written on the back “I don’t know who he is but he’s too pretty to throw away!” I hope this doesn’t mean she was tossing photos of those who weren’t all that pretty.
There was also an unidentified photograph of a little girl that is clearly the same little girl in the family portrait, Sylvia Vincent.
To tie this in with this Sepia Saturday’s theme, corner grocery stores, Conrad and Sylvia’s maternal grandfather was Victor Tulane who, among other businesses, owned a corner grocery store housed in the Tulane building on the corner of High and Ripley streets in Montgomery, AL. I offer several photos of the store from 1919 to 2004 below. For other fine photographs and stories about stores of all kinds and who knows what else click SepiaSaturday.
Usually I do not post photos from the present but, when I saw the theme for this week’s Sepia Saturday was a Georgia live oak and I had just returned from a trip to Jekell Island, GA with photos of Georgia live oaks with Spanish Moss dripping off of them it was too good to pass up.
To finish up, here is a postcard from my collection. We actually visited this 1,500+ year old oak in 1975 but did not get a photograph! Hard to believe. Click this link to learn all you ever wanted to know about the Angel Oak. For other posts of trees of all types click SepiaSaturday.
Doris Graham Cleage and Albert B. Cleage, Jr at the Meadows in Michigan.
To see more exciting photos about cows, expositions and other facinating topics, click Sepia Saturday.
Jeanette was born on February 18, 1897 in Montgomery, Alabama. She was the youngest of the six children of Edward and Mary (Allen) McCall. Her oldest brother, James McCall was the blind poet in She was owned before the war by…. Her father, Edward McCall, was the cook and turn-key at the city jail. Her mother, Mary Allen McCall, was a seamstress. Jeanette attended Alabama State Normal school, a primary through high school for African Americans in Montgomery that all of her siblings and cousins attended.
Jeanette’s best friend was Stella Brown, who later married her older brother Roscoe McCall. Jeanette attended Rust College in Holly Springs, Mississippi and met her husband, Robert Anderson McEwen there. By 1920 Robert and Jeanette were married and living in Chicago as roomers. On January 2, 1920 she gave birth to her first son, Robert Jr. Robert Sr. worked at the post office. By the time their second son, Raymond, was born on December 16, 1923, Robert was a dental student. Jeanette did not work outside of the home.
By 1930 Robert was a dentist. Jeanette died December 22, 1931. I do not know the cause of death yet. You may see another photograph of Jeanette here. Robert remarried before 1938 to Ethel, last name unknown at this time. He died June 29, 1938. You can see more car related (or not) Sepia Saturday offerings here.
My father, Rev. Albert B. Cleage & me.I wrote this after the Detroit riot in July of 1967. I was 20. I had been in Idlewild, MI at my Uncle Louis’ cottage with my Aunt Gladys and some of my cousins when it started. I ended up at my Grandmother Cleage’s house where my father, several uncles and cousins were also gathered. Her house was on Atkinson, about three blocks from the 12th street corner where the riot started. Aside from a little editing for clarity, these are my memories from 1967.
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The fire siren that night in Idlewild went on and on and on. Gladys got a phone call that a riot had started. We left that morning. The sky was pink with smoke as we drove into the city.
During the riot, when it got dark, we turned off the lights, put on black clothes and waited. The shots that had been going all day got louder, closer, smashed together. We sat on the porch and watched the tanks go up and down the street full of white boys wearing glasses, aiming their guns at us.
One during the day went by in a yellow telephone repair truck. He rode in the elevated stand, pointing his rifle. We looked back at him.
Lights from helicopters whirred over us. Troops went down 12th, down 14th. The street shook. Afraid to sleep because somebody might shoot through the window, we stayed up until the sky got light. My cousins cleared out the furniture in front of the windows, so they could shoot.
Should they let them get in or shoot before they reach the porch? They lay there on quilts, looking out the window. Seeing soldiers and armored trucks in flowerpots and dump trucks. Dale asked how the gun worked. Ernie shows him by the hall light.
The guns sounded like they were in the alley. I sat on the landing. Thorough the window it was dark and unreal outside. Blair came up, scared, so we went in the basement and turned on a program about Vietnam, but then off to a horror movie nobody watched.
Daddy came down, with a drink, to use the phone and dictate demands to the papers. Ernie showed us how to bolt doors if someone tried to come in the window.
They tried to get Grandmother down to watch TV, but she wouldn’t. She stayed upstairs, watched TV and came out only at times to turn lights on and silhouette everybody hiding guns as the soldiers were pulled back.
On the police radio: Fifty policemen wounded in one hour. They were run out of the Clairmont Square again. A woman turns in her sniper husband.
Dale was left on the porch when they flashed light on the porch and summer-salted in. Bullets were so close I was afraid and went back inside.
Grandmother turning on lights with armed flower pots aiming at us.
Turning Vietnamese guns up loud to drown out theirs. Jan and I, sleeping on the hard scratchy rug. Ernie wanting just a ring to show he was there. Dale taping, taking pictures to show his children. Jesus painted Black.
All that Sunday cars full of white folks went down Linwood past the Church. Windows rolled up. Sightseeing. Long, slow lines, car after car, windows shut tight. Troop Jeeps going by pointing guns.
For other Sepia Saturday offerings click HERE.
This is a photograph of the congregation of Witherspoon United Presbyterian Church in Indianapolis, IN in 1909, two years after they organized. This photograph is from the personal collection of my cousin Vivian Vaughn McDonald. My grandmother Pearl Reed Cleage is the third person on the top right. My grandfather, Albert Cleage is next to her. They wouldn’t be married for two more years. Next to Albert is his brother Jacob and next to him is their brother Henry. Directly in front of my grandfather Albert is Jacob’s wife, Gertrude. Three people over from Henry is James Cleage, their sister Josephine’s husband. He was from a different Cleage branch. In the second row, second from the right is Henrietta Cleage, oldest daughter of James and Josephine. Although the woman 4th from the left, front row, looks like Josephine to me, I’m told Josephine was not there for the photo but was home pregnant with Hattie Ruth, the youngest of her five children.
In the 1909 Indianapolis City Directory Witherspoon United Presbyterian Church is listed as located in Realty Hall with Rev. David White as Pastor.
Here is another photograph in front of the church. Also from my cousin Vivian’s collection. Josephine Cleage is on the far right, wearing a dark dress. The history below if from the Witherspoon web page, however they seem to have taken the history section down.
On April 30, 1907 the Presbytery of Indiana of the United Presbyterian Church held a called meeting at Realty Hall in response to a petition signed by 31 persons asking to be organized into a United Presbyterian congregation.
Begins With 31 Members
Prof. David Graham of Rushville was moderator and Rev. W. W. McCall of Greensburg was secretary. Other members present were Rev. Fred W. Schmuch of Milroy, Rev. N. B. McClung of Vevay, Rev. Mr. McDill of Madison, and Dr. Cowan of Indianapolis.
The petition was discussed at some length. By unanimous vote an organization was decided upon. The 31 members who signed the petition were as follows: Henry W. Cleage, Mrs. Carrie Perkins, Mrs. Emma Moore, A. T. Roney, Mrs. Cora Donann, Mrs. Cathern Crenshaw, Mrs. Daisy L. Brabham, Albert Cleage, Mrs. Gertrude Cleage, James Myers, Mrs. A. L. McElrath, O. F. Dennis, Mrs. Hattie Mitchell, H. M. Mitchell, Mrs. Theresa Finley, Othello Finley, Miss Edith Finley, Miss Luell E. Hibbett, Mrs. Mary Peterson, Mrs. Anna Bowman, John T. Fox, Miss Pearl Reed, Thomas H. Bransford, Mrs. O. F. Dennis, Miss Alice Mathews, Miss Hilda Reeder, W. J. Perkins, Henry Moore and H. L. Hummons.
For other fine Sepia Saturday photographs dealing with windows or lights or who knows click here. My family seems to have a habit of starting churches. To see a photograph of the congregation of a church started by the maternal branch of the family click Plymouth Congregational Church.
Here are my mother’s memories of her great Aunt Abbie, who lived with my grandparents until I was twenty. Aunt Abbie became very frail and was no longer mobile. My aging grandparents were unable to care for her and she was sent to a nursing home where she died several months later.
Abigail Allen Brown
By Doris Graham Cleage
Aunt Abbie married a Mississippi Riverboat gambler, swarthy and handsome and no good, who stayed home on two visits long enough to give her two sons and then sent her trunks of fine clothes to wear or to sell to take care of herself and the boys. Whenever she talked about him she sounded like she hated him. She resented the lack of money. Said once the oldest boy Earl (named for his father) screamed for days with toothache and she could not take him to the dentist, who didn’t want any fancy clothes or jewelry. She resented raising the children alone. I got the feeling she hated them and they hated her and she resented him being off having a good time while she stayed home with the problems.
She talked about him in a completely different way than she talked about her Jewish policeman, who bought her a house on Ripley St. Spent much time there, for whom she loved to cook and keep house. She came to live with Mother to take care of Daddy(!) so Mother could come to Springfield and help me when Kris was born. In later years when they lived on Fairfield, Mother and Daddy used to argue about this and they would call me in to referee. He’d say he took Aunt Abbie in out of the goodness of his heart like all the rest of her family. And she was not supposed to stay on (!) them forever but was to go to live with Aunt Margaret. Mother would say Aunt Abbie came to take care of him because (here she would make a mouth at me) he could not take care of himself and work even though he could cook better than she and do everything else in the house too. (I think we are always angered at the way men can say this is the limit. I can’t or I won’t do this or that and we seem to have lives where you do what is to be done since you have no one who will hear you if you say you can’t or won’t. Hold my hand Charlie Brown!) And that he knew very well she was going to live with them and visit Margaret occasionally. Mother was right. He said Aunt Abbie came to have cataracts operated on and to be taken care of. He was wrong. Her eye operations came years later. He said to me once that he had always taken care of Mother’s people and she would have nothing to do with his. I know how Grandmother depended on him to fix things around their house. And he was most agreeable and I always thought he loved it. They made over him when he came with his box of tools. I was always there as helper, but he got very tired and mistreated about having both Alice and Aunt Abbie to take care of. He didn’t like either one. But I never could get him to send them to a nursing or residence home to live. He always said “What would people say if I did that?” When people talk like that I give up because they are obviously making the choice they prefer.
Back to Aunt Abbie. She loved to cook and do everything else about the house. Mother would not let her do anything except clean her own room and do her own washing and ironing…..and Mother hated everything about housekeeping except cooking; but she said her husband expected her to take care of him and his house and (she didn’t say this,) she’d be damned it she’d let anyone else do it as long; as she could. I couldn’t talk to her about it.. Aunt Abbie tried to get her sons to let her come to NY and live with them. They wouldn’t even answer her letters. Sad.
Note: I remember her son Alphonso visiting several times. Aunt Abbie was fixing him tongue because he really like it. KCW
