Uncle Bo's school picture

By: GEORGIA GREEN STAMPER

My Uncle Nevel, whom I wrote about last year when he turned 100, marked his 101st birthday on December 10th. He’s Daddy’s brother, the oldest of Frank and Rushia Green’s seven children who lived to adulthood. His younger siblings always called him Bo, short for “brother,” and so I do, too.
Uncle Bo and one sister are the only survivors of that vivacious clan, and he misses the others. I miss them, too, I tell him, and we both let ourselves cry a little. But just a little. He and I believe in laughing more than we believe in crying.
All things considered, Uncle Bo is doing well. Last Friday night, for example, he attended my cousin’s wedding, although to his regret, he had to pass on dancing at the reception because his bones have slowed down. The next day, Saturday, he joined us for our annual New Year’s weekend family potluck at the lodge hall.
He doesn’t get around with speed on his walker and bad knees, but he does get around, and eschews a wheelchair. He lives with his wife at his longtime Florence home, keeps up with politics and current events, and always has a quick comeback or quip that makes me smile when we talk. I think he’s a marvel, and pray that I inherited a smidge of whatever he pulled out of the DNA bag of possibilities.
Uncle Bo celebrated his 101st birthday a few weeks ago, he told me, by going out to eat at the Red Lobster with his minister and a group of friends. He had a good meal and a good time, he said. Then he asked, “Does your paper keep track of Owen Countians who are centenarians?”
I had to admit that I didn’t know. I told him I would appeal to my readers, however, and ask them to contact News-Herald editor Laura Hagan with names of other native Owen Countians who are now 100 or older. Such a rarified club needs some recognition.
Uncle Bo would especially like to know if any of his grammar school classmates are still living. He gave me the school group picture (reproduced here) taken around 1912 when he was in the first grade at Poplar Grove School. He is sitting in the front row, third from the left. Unfortunately, his vision is not good enough to identify the other students by sight in the faded photograph, but he began to tell me who was in the picture. He just couldn’t tell where they were standing.
These are the names he gave me, but to be honest, I have no idea who is who. Can anyone help? He thinks that Charlie Dorsey and a girl named Shirley something are in the photo along with Dorothy and Nellie Rogers, Ernest Rogers, Lucien Kelly, Kirby and Bradford Wright (sons of Ed Wright), and two of the Stewart sisters, perhaps Mabel.
Old photographs fascinate me even when I have no connection to the people. The other day I spent several minutes staring at a vintage family portrait of a serious 19th century couple and their three children, a girl of six or so with long, blond, sausage curls, a boy of about ten squeezed into a too-small, buttoned-up jacket, and a baby of indeterminate gender sitting on the mother’s lap. Plucked from a flea market bin or a garage sale box, it was hanging on the wall beside my table at the Cracker Barrel Restaurant.
Frozen in a moment of time, their eyes met mine, and held them. Life is short, they cautioned me, even when it’s long. And how in the world, they asked, did we end up in this noisy place, dressed in our Sunday best, watching strangers wolf down biscuits and cornbread, eggs and bacon?
They deserve better, I think, if not an honored place in an heirloom family album, at least a name scrawled in pencil across the back.

Click Here to Go Back to Community