The G.I. Generation

The G.I. Generation, also called the Greatest Generation, represented the final confluence of my bloodline into the conditions that created my immediate family. All eight of my great-grandparents, most of whom were born in this generation, died in Tennessee, the state of my birth. Only four of them had been born there; the others came from Kentucky, Texas, and Wisconsin. A massive leap in quality of life attended to this generation; seven of the eight lived beyond the age of eighty, whereas just six of their sixteen parents did. Two served in the Second World War; all, for the first time in any generation, were literate.

FREDRIC EDWARD BELL. 1916–2000.     My paternal great-granduncle. Ed Bell was a salesman and veteran born in Beech Bluff, Tennessee, on April 18^th, 1918, as the elder child of Hattie Lou May and Fred Bell (“Mom and Pop”). From a young age, he eschewed violence; as a child, he shot a .22 rifle he was given hit the porch of his aunt Mary Lee “Mamie” May Wood (1889–1967); he immediately gave the gun away. On June 5^th, 1938, he married Hazel Marie Brady, also of Beech Bluff; together, they had five sons, of which the eldest, Donald Edward “Don” Bell (1941–2025), I interviewed about his upbringing in Beech Bluff and whose accounts have informed me of the details of the Bells and Blankenships.

Despite his inclination to non-violence, Ed enlisted in the Army at Camp Shelby on March 12^th, 1944, and was in a three-man 60mm mortar group. He aimed the mortar itself and served in Germany and Belgium, but never talked about it. During his service, carried an M1911 pistol; “… he carried a .45 automatic,” Don Bell reflected laughingly, “and I can’t imagine Daddy carrying a pistol!” He generally abstained from hunting; he went once with Rafe Blankenship, shot one squirrel, “and that,” Don remarked, amused, “was his squirrel-hunting career.”

After returning from the war, he worked, as did his father, as a traveling fertilizer salesman for the Federal Chemical Company, and at one time had an office in Humboldt. Don recalls travelling toCorinth, Tupelo, and elsewhere with his father on such trips. Ed was also an active Freemason, Ruritan, and general community man. He died of pneumonia at Jackson–Madison County General Hospital on February 29^th (leap day), 2000.

MARY LOU “KITTY” BELL. 1918–2017.     My great-grandmother, the mother of my maternal grandmother. Kitty Bell Blankenship was a Beech Bluff matriarch born on August 13^th, 1918, as the younger child of Hattie Lou May and Fred Bell (“Mom and Pop”). Her nickname, “Kitty”, came from a childhood episode wherein she was rolling around on a hill with her brother, Ed Bell, and sliced her finger on a metal tube of toothpaste, after which Ed said she cried like a kitten. She played basketball in high school under the strict regimen of Rafe Blankenship, who mandated abstention from coke (soda) and candy, and set her sights on him—eight years her senior—though he was dating a fellow teacher at the time. She cheerfully threatened to displace her, and did; while dating years after the graduated, the two often played checkers in the store where Kitty worked, and she once jokingly wrote him a bill for $1,000 that he kept with him as a memento. They married at the Beech Bluff parsonage under Brother D. W. Anderson on June 2^nd, 1941, at 7PM, and lived full lives happily wedded.

Kitty went to beauty school (cosmetology school) in Jackson, where she stayed with her aunt Katie Diamond May Gilliam and took the city bus to lessons. The Gilliams were amazed to hear of her country breakfasts of ham and biscuits—since Kitty’s family had grown up around animals—which they did not enjoy in the city. Not long after her marriage to Rafe in 1941, Rafe went overseas to serve in the Second World War, returning with seashells from Italy in 1945. During that time, Kitty gave birth to their eldest daughter, whose earliest years were spent with her maternal grandparents, Mom and Pop Bell. Rafe stayed with them on their return, and the couple only moved out when Rafe paid in cash for the construction of a home on his family’s property around Beech Bluff Road in 1952. The house stood where the area’s first post office, called Thomas Creek, once was. It was there that Rafe and Kitty raised their four children.

It was as a mother and grandmother that Kitty was most fondly remembered by those that knew her. She suffered two miscarriages during her life and focused on her children, for whom she cooked and cared thoroughly. Her signature dish was homemade rolls of a clover-leaf type that consisted of three dough-balls baked in a muffin tin. Also famous was her lemon ice box pie—particularly beloved by Rafe—as well as coconut cake and three-tier pineapple cakes. Her roast beef, boiled in water on a stove with carrots and potatoes, was striking, as was her homemade gravy. Above all others, though, Kitty’s favorite time of year was Christmas. She was an adamant sender of Christmas cards and loved the process of buying and wrapping presents. A Christmas table under her command was a feast to behold—the pièce de résistance was a large bone-in ham, sliced with cloves atop. Brown sugar and mustard were mixed and spread on it before baking. It was accompanied by a turkey or chicken with dressing as well as mashed potatoes, corn, lima beans, green beans, deviled eggs with paprika, and buttered homemade rolls. Dessert was an involved process—Rafe would nail a coconut, drain the liquid, and crack it open for Kitty to grate for a cake with seven-minute icing made of egg whites and sugar. A Coca-Cola congealed salad of cherry jello with pineapple and nuts was served, and Mom Bell might have made ambrosia fruit salad to boot. Scratch-made fruitcakes were made with Mom from candied fruit; they were wrapped in cloth and soaked in whiskey for several days for flavor. Aunt Ruby May Birdong and uncle William Aaron Birdsong (“Uncle Aaron”) were somehow always able to supply the alcohol for this exercise, though alcohol was uncommon in Beech Bluff at the time. Thanksgiving, too, was a sight, including many of the above items as well as canned cranberry slices, creamed corn, potato salad, sweet potato casserole, and cornbread. Drinks included iced tea and Dr. Pepper and were followed by coffee and some wine.

Outside of her home life, Kitty was a community fixture; a pleasant conversationalist, undemanding friend and relative and excellent host, she frequently hosted for dinner, including visiting preachers, Rafe’s business partners, and family friends. She gardened and was known for a love of aromatic hyacinths. A high school education in Latin had left her a keen enjoyer of related trivia. In her later life, Kitty was a Red Cross volunteer at Jackson–Madison County General Hospital for eighteen years, which was therapeutic for her after Rafe’s passing and enabled her to meet several friends. She lived independently until she broke her hip at 87, after which she was enrolled in a nursing home. As her own mother had suffered from loneliness and insisted on living with her children after Pop’s death, Kitty did not wish to do the same with her own. She scarcely asked people to do things for her and was intent on living contentedly with her fellow seniors in her final years.

RAFE ELCO BLANKENSHIP. 1910–1983.     My great-grandfather, the father of my maternal grandmother. Rafe Blankenship was an educator, veteran, and public official from Beech Bluff, Tennessee, born on April 19^th, 1910, to Homer Blankenship and Maude Bowman, as the youngest of three siblings. His older brother, Curtis Orbra Blankenship (1908–1993), was a school bus driver in Beech Bluff; his sister, Merdie Wilma Blankenship (c. 1907–1909), died in childhood. Known for his “no-nonsense” leadership and upright character, Rafe served his community as a mathematics teacher, the first “official” basketball coach for Beech Bluff High School (1933–1941), and later as a rural mail carrier. After being named salutatorian of Beech Bluff School, he became the first in his immediate lineage to obtain a college education, graduating with a teaching degree from Union University. He was married to Kitty Bell, with whom he had four children, at the Beech Bluff parsonage by Brother D. W. Anderson on June 2^nd, 1941, and enjoyed a happy lifelong marriage with her. He died of complications of a heart attack at Jackson–Madison County General Hospital on May 29^th, 1983.

Rafe was deeply invested in his place. After the Second World War, during which he served as a corporal attached to the 7^th Replacement Depot in North Africa and Italy, he did not travel outside of day trips, which usually included cattle auctions. Little is known about his service; one anecdote tells that, while in Italy, he declined to go up to a village to go drinking with his fellow-soldiers one evening (as he seldom drank), and so was preserved from the massacre of those soldiers by partisans that night. After his return to the United States, which was hampered by an injury to his knee incurred while jumping onto an Army truck, he kept to Beech Bluff, where he owned five hundred acres at the intersection of Beech Bluff and Willoughby Roads. There, he became known as a shrewd farmer, producing cotton, corn, and animal products. Able to tally and figure faster than an adding machine and deeply abstemious in spending, he devoted himself to enterprise, sometimes buying whole herds at a time for trading. He could guess cattle weights with fantastic precision and, during the wintertime, his farmstead was home to nearly 150 head of cattle and 100–125 head of hogs. Unwilling to overspend on equipment, he managed his farm with teams of mules and a wagon. Much of this carefully accumulated wealth was drained in Rafe’s later life by an arduous but ultimately successful seven-year legal battle with his nephew, Joe Curtis Blankenship (1935–2021), who had been stealing from Rafe’s land and later claimed to own a strip of it.

Outside of his work, Rafe was a well-known community man and horseman. With the wealth he derived from his business, he was known to give interest-free loans on mere handshakes. He gave no heed to the divisions between the White and Black members of his community, befriended and supported members of both, and, in his later years, took up work as a mail carrier in a retrofitted red Datsun and stopped to read the mail of the elderly illiterate to them. He was elected as his district’s magistrate in 1948, but had to resign when he took up mail-carrying, as federal and state employees were not allowed to be elected officials. (Madison County Clerk Fred W. Birmingham wrote to me in September 2020 that, prior to the 1972 revision of the Tennessee Constitution, which abolished the county courts Rafe would have served in favor of a county commission, positions such as his “were more of a local justice of the peace in their civil district. They performed marriages, managed road maintenance groups and oversaw other county functions.”) His personal passion was horse-riding; his prize horse, Sun, offspring of the famed walking horse Midnight Sun, was the only thing he ever devoted much money to. He also spent time bird-hunting and playing Rook with his friends, including Clois Duke, L. T. Bowman, and Grady Fowler. “He didn’t talk much,” Clois told me in January 2019, “but when he did, he told you like it was.”

His unusual middle name remains unexplained. It was later the middle name of Beech Bluff local Cloys Fowler (1917–2008), brother-in-law of Rafe’s paternal cousin Sherman Blankenship (1909–1973). The family featured several eclectic middle names; Rafe’s brother Curtis was middle-named Orbra (perhaps an alteration of Aubrey), and Sherman himself was middle-named Ozier (possibly from osier). Elco bears some surface resemblance to the Dutch name Eelco; Merdie had the Dutch name Wilma for her middle name.

EUGENE LINCOLN CHASE. 1919–2004.     My great-grandfather, the father of my maternal grandfather. Eugene Chase was born in Marshfield, Wisconsin, on February 23^rd, 1919, to Arthur Morgan Chase and Grace Lupient, as the first of eight children. Middle-named for Abraham Lincoln, whom his father admired and with whom his mother shared her birthday, he received a letter from Lincoln’s son Robert in April 1924 urging him to education and success. Differences with his controlling and disciplinarian parents, however, led him to flee his hometown of Kenosha at age thirteen. He hitchhiked across the United States, herding sheep, appearing as an extra in Hollywood, working in a grocery store, and, in 1935, attempting unsuccessfully to join the Navy, which rejected him for his “flat feet”. These experiences were the subject of the first of his two short memoirs: My Adventures as a Wanderer. (His account of his early life differs markedly from his father’s account thereof; in a Kenosha News update his parents submitted to mark his lieutenant commission in January 1943, he is listed as having been a bookkeeper, typist, riveter, graduate of Mary D. Bradford High School, and student at LaSalle extension university.) He made it into the Army in 1941 and, while stationed at Camp Barkeley near Abilene, Texas, met his future wife—Dorothy Earnest—as she worked at a soda fountain nearby; two months later, they were married.

Eugene served in Western Europe during the Second World War as an administrative medical officer, working at the Battle of the Bulge in the deep winter of 1944–1945. During his service, while in Belgium, he actually encountered his sister—Lois “Kayle” Chase, who was working as a nurse—by chance. It was the first time they had seen each other in over a decade, as Kayle had also fled home to escape their parents. Of his wartime service, Eugene authored the second of his short memoirs in 1945: One Man’s Story. These two works were the first complete autobiographical materials written by any of my immediately traceable ancestors. His religion is also of interest, having entered the war as an atheist and been persuaded to agnosticism by a chaplain. He is hence the family’s earliest documented nontheist.

After the war, Eugene worked in various positions, including as a groundskeeper at Washington University in St. Louis. He and Dorothy had three children; they saw much of the world at a young age as Eugene’s military postings took him to Japan, Germany, and elsewhere. He was a harsh father to his son, but reconciled with both his father and his son by his older age. He sailed to Kenosha on a house-boat he and Dorothy owned, much to the delight of Arthur and Grace.

JEWELL CHURCHWELL. 1916–2007.     My great-grandmother, the mother of my paternal grandfather. Jewell Churchwell was born in Alamo, Tennessee, on January 5^th, 1916, to Burley Churchwell and Sadie Smith (1897–1950), as the third of fourteen children. Her mother was a relatively short-lived farmwife with type 1 diabetes, a disease Jewell herself transmitted to her youngest son and a great-granddaughter. Their large agrarian family lived in a one-room home in the Alamo community of rural Crockett County; Jewell picked cotton in her childhood and youth.

After meeting W. J. Via at a baseball game and marrying on December 22^nd, 1934, Jewell became a mother to three children born in 1938, 1945, and 1954. As the family matriarch, Jewell was known as stern, blunt, and hard-working. She gardened with her husband and was a cafeteria lady at the school in Bells. Her forbidding demeanor was suggested by her grandchildren to have been inherited from her excessively disciplinarian father. She died in Alamo on December 16^th, 2007, aged 91, and was buried with her husband at Nance Church of Christ two days later.

Her name, Jewell, was used more than half a dozen times as a unisex given name among the cousins of my direct ancestors in the early 20^th century. Contrary to Jewel, a feminine name taken from the designation for gemstones, Jewell appears to be linked to the surname Jewell, itself from the Devon–Cornwall surname Jewell, linked to the Old Breton name Iudhael, from Old Breton iudd (“lord, ruler, prince”) + Old Breton cael (“generous, noble”), source of Judicael.

DUELL CRESTON VIA. 1910–1969.     My paternal great-granduncle. Duell Via was born in Fulton County, Kentucky, on August 8^th, 1910, to Lonnie Smith Via and Elizabeth Sullivan (about which couple little is known) as the third of four siblings; the youngest was his brother W. J. Via. Together with the rest of his family, Duell moved as a boy to Weakley County, Tennessee, and then to Crockett County as a young man. There, he married Ruby Lee Waldron (“Little Mama” to her grandchildren for her short stature compared with her own mother, “Big Mama”, and “Aunt Ruby” to the rest of the family) on November 25^th, 1933; Ruby, born in 1917, was just sixteen at the time she married the twenty-three-year-old Duell. She lived to be 95 and was known for her humor, congeniality, mental acuity, and sheer energy deep into old age. The pair had two daughters.

Duell served with the Air Force during the Second World War and was afterward employed as a maintenance engineer by Tunica Manufacturing Company, a Mississippi pillows and bedding maker that closed in 2002. He lived in Memphis, where he attended and bowled for Bellevue Baptist Church. A lifelong cigarette smoker, he contracted lung cancer in his fifties and expressed deep regret for the habit. He died of the disease in Memphis on August 22^nd, 1969, aged 59.

Duell’s unusual middle name was long a mystery, but, studying his lineage in the winter of 2025–26, I noticed the resemblance between the cursive form of Creston and the cursive form of Overton, the name of his great-grandfather Overton Via (1806–1878). I believe it possible that Duell’s father Lonnie, who was just two years old when Overton died, saw Overton’s name in a family bible, misread it as “Creston”, and then gave it to Duell. An example of Overton in cursive, taken from his entry in an 1878 death register, follows:

WILLIAM JAMES VIA. 1914–2001.     My great-grandfather, the father of my paternal grandfather. W. J. Via was born in rural Graves County, Kentucky, on August 28^th, 1914, to Lonnie Smith Via and Elizabeth Sullivan (about which couple little is known) as the youngest of four siblings; Ruth Rebecca (1905–2001), Roy Curtis (1907–1997) and Duell Creston (1910–1969) preceded him. When W. J. was a young boy, his family moved to Weakley County, Tennessee; in Tennessee, he met Jewell Churchwell at a baseball game. The two married in Crockett County on December 22^nd, 1934, and settled in Bells, Tennessee, where they had three children.

W. J. grew up farming tobacco, the predominant cash crop of the area. In middle age, he sold air conditioning and appears in related news articles; in July 1970, The Jackson Sun reported that he had “completed a thorough course in air conditioning theory and procedures conducted by Day & Night Manufacturing Company at its new $8 million plant” in Collierville. He had a large and diverse home garden that he loved showing off, enjoyed watching wrestling, and was described as a gentle father by his children, who recognized him for forgoing physical discipline in an time when it was prevalent. He died in Bells on September 4^th, 2001, and was—as his wife later was—buried at Nance Church of Christ in the Nance community of Crockett County.

In his time, W. J. pronounced his surname as [væɛ], a homophone with vie, a helpful hint toward the original surname borne by Amor Via.