Kitchen stories: Little Crow

My father, one of three boys and two girls, had a bit of a different name and I never did find out where the name came from. His full name was Dorus Eugene Eley but everyone called him Dory. That's all I remember him being called but when we left Indiana to come to California in 1957 he changed his name to Gene. I guess he never liked the name.

This photo is of Daddy at about three-years-old and I love that you can see the shadow of the photographer to the left. My Grandfather Howard did take photos and developed and printed them himself so I would assume that was him taking this photo. This is unmistakable as Gene.

His older brother was named Gayle, yet another odd name for a boy but get this, his sisters were Harriet and Bernadette. The last boy, Roger. Whew, the cycle of odd names was broken. I never asked my grandmother, Lavon just what she was thinking when she named the kids but then her name was odd, Lavon Sumaria.

My uncle Gayle had a nickname and I only remember hearing it a few times as a kid. He really took after his father Howard and had a lot of his traits, a quick temper being one of them. His first wife Margaret was a good match for him because her temper was as bad as his.

Margaret was dear to me, she would babysit me from time to time and showered me with attention. She had three boys and would have loved a daughter. I was only about five when I remembered a particularly bad argument of theirs. They'd scream at each other like crazy and this time Gayle must have really made Aunt Margaret mad because as he was leaving she threw a kitchen chair at him, it hit the wall and one leg stuck. When he came back they patched things up but that did leave quite an impression of me not to mention a hole in the wall.

At times my dad, especially when he wanted to make his older brother mad, called him Crow. The nickname would make him furious so it wasn't used often. I never knew what it meant until years later, when my Uncle Roger moved to California. Roger was a great story teller and I have most of the family history from him. He was relating the story of Doggie Votaw to me and then asked if I'd remembered they called his brother Crow. He then related the following.

When Gayle was just a little kid he'd drop his pants and pee just anywhere. His mom would scold him but this didn't make him stop. One day he decided it would be fun to pee through a knothole in the fence. He dropped his pants and poked his little penis through the hole. There was a big old crow on the other side and it decided that was one great worm and grabbed a hold. Gayle ran home without his pants screaming bloody murder the whole way and from then on they called him Crow. You can see why, as an adult, he hated that name.

Kitchen stories: Nicknames

My Great Grandpa Votaw, on my Dad's side, was a character. They called him "Doggie". His true name was Charles D. Votaw, born in 1878. Grandpa's wife died in 1941 and he and his "housekeeper" lived in a little house in Berne, Indiana for as long as I can remember. He called this woman his housekeeper but when I was older my mom told me it was his live-in girlfriend. She was with him until the day he died in 1968. I saw him just three years before that and he had not changed a bit from when I was a kid.

His house didn't have indoor plumbing because he'd say, "No one's gonna crap in my house." Us kids though it was funny though my Grandmother Lavon, his daughter, didn't like that sort of talk at all. He also had a little red pump in the kitchen sink. I guess he washed up there but he never seemed to clean to me.

There was always a garden and when we'd visit we'd sit outside this tiny house under the shade of a huge tree. I can't remember if he chewed or smoked but he always smelled of tobacco. Grandpa would always have a story to tell and how he got his nickname was pretty funny.

Before motorized trucks hauled goods around the country the teamsters did and when Charles was young he was pretty good with a team of horses so he became a teamster for the local railroad station. He was a tall skinny kid but strong as an ox and would sometimes stand in the wagon, a whip in one hand, and the reins in the other. He never wore much of a heavy coat, no, they worked to hard to get cold but he did fancy a cap with ear flaps. You could tie up the flaps when it was warmer but he said, "It was a damn waste of time 'cuz they'd always fall down, so most of the time they'd be flappin' in the wind."

One spring day he was late with a delivery and was "urging" the team on down the road at a good clip, standing up on the wagon with his ear flaps blowing in the wind. When he got to the station he was met by his boss and a few other teamsters. "Votaw, his boss bellowed, you look like a damn fool dog in that cap." The other men laughed, so did Grandpa, and the name stuck. From then he was called Doggie Votaw.