Relativities

The 2008 photo of Bob Chamberlin and me in front of the Oscoda, Michigan Lumberman’s Monument is the End of Our Line. Bob, born 23 August 1926, is six months older than me. His Mother, Lilian Fitzpatrick Chamberlin, is my Mother’s sister—the youngest of the siblings of Edward Fitzpatrick (1853-1928) and Catherine Kennedy (1855-1928). The Fitzes had eight children, when Ed wasn’t being a lumberman in Oscoda, having immigrated from Ireland with his bride in the 1880’s. Uncle Will was the most successful, having been appointed general counsel of the Detroit Street Railways, the Motor City’s mass trans. And he had the Grosse Pointe villa to prove it.

Thanksgiving and Christmas were special for Bob and my generation because we got to traipse about the mansion with the other cousins of a snoopy age. Edward (Uncle Ned) was a salesman at Hudson’s, with a cranky wife who never let him forget how high he hadn’t risen, and Uncle Leo who inherited Grandpa’s retail lumber business in a Detroit suburb, and Uncle Vic who became a Bell Tel veep in Richmond, Va and lost contact with the family, and Uncle Al who thrilled the old Micks, Edward and Catherine, when they proudly took an Atlantic steamer to Rome to see him ordained in St. Peter’s.

And the there were three girls, Loretta, Lil and May (so called because this Catholic girl was born in May, the month of Mary). Loretta, whose marital prospects were blocked by a withered hand, compensated by becoming the first female principal of a Detroit middle school. Lil married an auto worker, and Uncle Don moved them to Ferndale, just North of 8 Mile Road, Detroit’s northern boundary. I spent a lot of vacation time with Bob in Ferndale, until our adult lives, when he became a designer for General Motors and I, a history of literature professor. The last time we were buddies was the Summer of 1944, as we both awaited call up to the Navy, he as a radioman at sea, me as a radar tech at a Naval Air Station. Note that both grandparents died the year I was born, the real end of the line! Smartass family lore contends Catherine took one look at me and packed it in. Edward was denied that drama.

It happens that Loretta, Lil, and May began summering in Tawas in 1938. And we fell into the custom of a Fourth of July visit to the Lumberman’s Monument in nearby Ausable where they had spent their youngest years. The story developed that Grandpa Fitz was the man in the middle, as indeed he had been a boss in that lumber operation. Having been abandoned at age three by my father, Harry E. Hazard (1893-1971), I was eager to brag about my recently encountered grandfather. I could hardly wait to get back to Holy Rosary Academy to spread the Good News: I had a famous grandfather!

To my dismay another boy angrily disputed my claim! It was his grandfather in the middle! I had been taught what “historical revisionism” was long before Graduate School. There the significance of my famous relative was diminished even further when I crossed U.S.23 which separated our summer cottage from the Mainland and then discovered five foot across pine stumps rotting away in the white birch second forest. From heroic winner I discovered he had been a destructive loser—the destroyer of Michigan’s great virgin pine forests! My views of the past had turned complex, but not for the last!

By the way, on that last Oscoda Visit, we should not be smiling. We did the math on newly installed plaques. Granpa Fitz didn’t fit!