James A. McClure

Note to readers: This exploration of my family history is primarily for my kids and kinfolk. I’m posting it in my blog because I’m too cheap to set up a separate website. If you are not among my relatives you probably won’t be interested in this stuff, and that’s fine with me.

The house was within earshot of the railroad, and whenever we heard a train my grandfather would pull out his pocket watch and note whether it was on time. An old habit after working for the Illinois Central for 50 years.

My grandparents

Virgil Allan McClure went by “Mac” and I never heard anyone use his first name. He spent most of his career as railroad’s telegraph operator in Corinth, Mississippi. My grandfather had lied about his age when he went to work for the Illinois Central and never corrected the employee record. He was pleased with himself when he retired at age 64 instead of 65. Put one over on them.

His job as a telegraph operator was a step into the middle class for a farm kid from Kentucky. Mac taught Sunday school at the Baptist church and was a big wheel in the Masons. He served on the draft board and the housing authority.

Mamoo with her first great-grandson

My grandmother, Ethel Holderman McClure, was always known to me as Mamoo. She was tiny, gentle and always smiling. She, too, was active in church and Masonic activities. On a visit to Corinth many years later, a woman at the local history museum remembered her: “She inducted me into Eastern Star. Little bitty thing.”

Mac was taciturn and Mamoo was quiet, especially in her later years when she was hard of hearing but too vain to wear a hearing aid.

My grandfather was notoriously frugal, a trait my father inherited. He once decided to make some extra money raising and selling chickens, and bought at least 100 day-old baby chicks. Unfortunately, many others had the same idea and the chicken market collapsed. Since selling the chickens would be a losing proposition, my grandfather decided the family would eat them. Mamoo tried every known chicken recipe for breakfast, lunch and dinner for months, and my father disliked chicken until his dying day.

1967: four generations

Mac and Mamoo visited us in Chicago occasionally because they rode the Illinois Central for free. On one visit my folks took us to Chinatown and introduced my grandparents to Chinese food. My grandfather loved the food and, best of all, it was cheap! On every visit thereafter, Mac took us all to Chinatown for dinner.

Mac was a creature of habit and went to bed every night on the stroke of 9 p.m. Guests who overstayed their welcome got the hint when he would stand up, announce that he was going to bed and leave the room.

In all the years I knew him my grandfather had only two cars, a 1940’s-vintage Ford and a 1953 Chevrolet. Whoever bought the Chevy after he passed away in 1973 probably got a good deal: Since Mac only drove to church and around town, the car was in mint condition with less than 20,000 miles. On one visit, my teenaged brother borrowed the car and quickly came back to report that the Chevy had no brakes. My grandfather had never noticed because he drove at a sedate 15 mph and coasted to a stop.

I credit my grandfather with some of the robust genes that allow me to stay active. After my grandmother died in 1968, Mac lived on his own until he passed away at the age of 89. In his later years he used a cane but occasionally walked off without it. We once found the cane hanging from a tree in the backyard.

Note to readers: This exploration of my family history is primarily for my kids and kinfolk. I’m posting it in my blog because I’m too cheap to set up a separate website. If you are not among my relatives you probably won’t be interested in this stuff, and that’s fine with me.

The house is still there, at 1421 Bunch Street in Corinth, Mississippi. (I found it on Google Street View.) One story, painted white, modest yet gracious with a wide front porch, set back from the street on a slight rise with a concrete-block retaining wall along the sidewalk. The big oak trees my grandfather planted are gone and the house shows its century of age, but it’s pretty much as I remember it.

I’m not sure if my grandfather actually built the house, but I was told he finished the interior walls with beaverboard. It was a step up from the farmhouse in Kentucky he left when he was in his teens.

My grandfather (left) at work

Virgil Allan McClure spent a long career as a telegraph operator for the Illinois Central Railroad. He married my grandmother, Ethel Holderman, in 1910 in Covington, Tennessee, and my father, Marvin Allan, was born there in 1911. The family moved to Corinth by 1913.

Corinth, in the northeast corner of Mississippi, is a railroad crossroads that attracted a Civil War battle in 1862 and my grandfather half a century later. My father dug minie balls out of the old fortifications as a kid, and was one of the Boy Scouts who helped elderly Confederate veterans during the annual parade. Outside the county courthouse, generations of old men sat on a park bench next to the Confederate monument and whittled pieces of wood (not to make anything, just whittle to pass the time). The town’s population was more than 5,000 when my grandparents moved there and is around 15,000 today.

Whittling by the courthouse

Tornadoes used to be a problem there. Some of the neighbors had dug storm shelters in their yards. My father claimed a tornado once tore off roofs in the neighborhood and turned a nearby house sideways on its foundation.

According to my father, every so often a visitor to Corinth would stop by the post office and ask if they’d received any letters from Paul lately. People got the joke because practically everyone attended church. My grandparents attended the Baptist church, largest church in town. My grandfather was a big shot in the Masons and my grandmother was a leader in the Masonic Eastern Star.

My father went by Allan and never used his first name. The family had a Negro housekeeper (as most middle-class families probably did) and as a toddler my father thought the dark-skinned woman was his mother. He was a big kid, recruited for the high school football team when he was in eighth grade. He had a younger brother, Jimmy (after whom I am named), who died of appendicitis in his teens.

My father graduated from Corinth High School in 1930, where he was senior class president and participated in the typewriting club, theater and the Masonic DeMolay organization. After high school he knocked around, because his graduation would have coincided with the beginning of the Depression. He told stories about running moonshine in a Model T Ford to a friend who was attending the University of Mississippi in Oxford. And an improbable story about meeting a young William Faulkner in an Oxford drugstore, getting drunk on moonshine and shooting rifles in the backyard.

He got involved in labor organizing, probably through working in the textile plants that were industrializing the South. He told of attending a camp for union organizers that he later realized was run by Communists. My father probably was involved in a series of textile workers’ strikes in Alabama in 1934 and said he landed in jail briefly for union agitation.

At some point he got interested in music and singing. And in the late 1930s my father went to Chicago on a scholarship to study opera.

Note to readers: This exploration of my family history is primarily for my kids and kinfolk. I’m posting it in my blog because I’m too cheap to set up a separate website. If you are not among my relatives you probably won’t be interested in this stuff, and that’s fine with me.

My grandfather spent a night in jail once.

Grandpa in 1903

Joseph Gasperik was a butcher, sausage maker and businessman on Chicago’s South Side. He also had a quick temper and got into business disputes. One business disagreement wound up in court, and when the judge ruled against him Grandpa lost his temper and called the judge a “grafter” among other things. The judge promptly clapped him in jail for contempt of court.

My grandmother initially wanted to bail him out. But another relative said: “Leave him in jail to teach him a lesson.” My grandmother quickly agreed. Whether the experience made Grandpa a kinder, gentler person is debatable.

I just heard another story that my grandfather took his sister-in-law, Mary Nemeth, to court and accused her of going after him with a knife. The judge dismissed the case when he noted that my grandfather was very large and Great-Aunt Mary was less than five feet tall. No one ever suggested that she had not threatened him with a knife (and he probably had it coming).

One of his principal rivals in the Burnside neighborhood was a better-connected businessman named DeHaan. Years later, when I was a freshman at Northwestern University, one of the guys in my dorm was named DeHaan and turned out to be a scion of the same family. We got along just fine.

Grandpa was loyal to the old country and blamed President Woodrow Wilson for the breakup of the Austro-Hungarian Empire after World War I. Whenever he was reminded of this, he would pound his fist on the table, shout “Voodrow Veelson” and curse in a couple of languages.

He was a man of property and would-be tycoon. In his old age, when my parents would drive him around the city, Grandpa would point out a substantial commercial building and say: “I could have bought that property in 1925.” When asked why he didn’t buy it, he would say that it was too expensive, or didn’t think it was a good investment. When he passed away the only property he owned was a few acres of vacant land in the suburb of New Lenox, which is developed today but was practically off the grid in the 1950s.

In his old age Grandpa would drop by our apartment on the West Side, often bringing us some sort of toy (which he had found in some alley, my mother said). He lived alone in the old neighborhood, in an eccentric basement apartment with a ladder through a trap door to his bedroom.

Grandma in the 1960s

My grandfather’s funeral in 1954 was at the Hungarian funeral home in Burnside. It featured dirge-like Hungarian hymns in a minor key. There also were professional mourners, women who would show up and cry whether or not they knew the deceased. Those Burnside Hungarians did grief up right.

My grandmother, Julia Nemeth Gasperik Kristof, grew up in Hungary but her parents settled on a farm just outside Chicago near 127^th St. and Cicero Ave. Today the Tri-State Tollway occupies most of that site. My mother used to talk about spending time at her grandmother’s farm.

I did not know my grandmother well because she lived with my uncle and aunt in California when I was growing up and I did not see her often. She and my mother apparently got along better when they were in different time zones. Whenever they were together they mostly argued. My grandmother was hard of hearing, and often turned her hearing aid off because she enjoyed talking more than listening.

She wore her long, auburn hair in braids on top of her head. “Our family doesn’t get grey hair,” I was told. When someone asked if she had her own teeth, Grandma assured them she did. “Of course they’re mine,” she remarked later. “I paid for them.”

My grandmother was the source of much of the culinary heritage that my mother passed along. According to my mother, the only way to make strudel properly was to get three generations of women stretching dough paper-thin across a large dining table. When Grandma came to visit my mother made a special effort to capture the family recipes that had never been written down. She would watch my grandmother preparing something, and would grab her hand to measure the pinch, dab or smidgen of each ingredient.

Grandma came back to Chicago to live with my folks a year or two before she passed away in 1973. By that time the old funeral home in Burnside was closed and the professional mourners were long gone. We held a quiet funeral in Oak Park… not very Hungarian.

Note to readers: This exploration of my family history is primarily for my kids and kinfolk. I’m posting it in my blog because I’m too cheap to set up a separate website. If you are not among my relatives you probably won’t be interested in this stuff, and that’s fine with me.

In the 1890s the newest immigrants to arrive in Chicago – Hungarians, Italians, Ukrainians and Poles — settled on the Southeast Side because that’s where the factories were. Thousands were employed at the Illinois Central Railroad repair shops, the Pullman Car Works and others. The neighborhood where they lived was called Burnside because a nearby railroad station was named for a Civil War general.

l-r: Uncle Frank Nemeth, Elmer Novak and my grandmother

They made good money and worked up an appetite, those factory guys, and some of their groceries came from my grandfather. Joseph (Jozsef) Hajdu Gasperik trained in Hungary as a butcher and sausage maker, and arrived in Chicago around the turn of the century.

His shop was at 9349-51 S. Cottage Grove Avenue. He arrived in the U.S. in 1903 and married my grandmother, Julia Nemeth, in 1904. The family lived over the store. My mother, Vilma, youngest of three children, was born in 1916.

The Gasperiks in 1910 with sons Frank and Joe

The family prospered: My grandfather owned rental property and an automobile. They spoke Hungarian at home, and my mother did not learn English until she started school. Although most Hungarians were Catholic, the Gasperiks attended a Hungarian Reformed church. (My mother told me she was christened Wilhelmina because the minister did not believe Vilma was a proper Hungarian name.)

The Hungarian community in Chicago stayed fairly small: not for lack of immigrants, but because Hungarians assimilated quickly and were more inclined to intermarry with other ethnic groups than did the Italians, Poles and Lithuanians. So the Hungarian community in Burnside that thrived in my mother’s childhood is largely a memory today.

And they had a car around 1910.

My mother’s oldest brother, Joe, was 13 years older. She was closest to her brother Frank, who was seven years older but died when he was 18. There were relatives nearby, Gasperik and Nemeth cousins whose families had migrated to Chicago.

And there was drama: My grandparents divorced at some point and my grandmother remarried in 1935. Her second husband, John Kristof, died three years later. The store on Cottage Grove Avenue was a casualty of the Depression, and brother Joe married and moved to California. My mother graduated from Fenger High School.

Note to readers: This exploration of my family history is primarily for my kids and kinfolk. I’m posting it in my blog because I’m too cheap to set up a separate website. If you are not among my relatives you probably won’t be interested in this stuff, and that’s fine with me.

My daughter the semi-famous author is researching her mother’s family history. It’s a rich heritage: My wife’s paternal grandfather was a science-fiction writer in the 1940s, and there are boxes of letters, journals and newspaper clippings spanning several generations. It’s fascinating stuff and I hope she makes a book out of it.

My side of the family didn’t leave much of a paper trail. My paternal grandfather only made it through the third grade, and my mother’s folks spoke English in bits and pieces. So my family history is a series of passed-down stories that undoubtedly evolved in the telling.

As the story goes, my father’s ancestors originated in Scotland as part of Clan McLeod. (I have a necktie in the McLeod tartan.) The British moved a bunch of Scots to Ireland beginning in 1610, in the hope that Scots Calvinists would counterbalance the troublesome Irish Catholics. But the Scots were just as unmanageable as the Irish and some made their way to America in the 1700s. There are lots of McClures, and some consider themselves Irish because their ancestors stayed in Ireland for another century or so.

English gentry had already settled the American coast, so the arriving Scots-Irish headed for the hills and pushed the frontier through western Virginia, Pennsylvania, Kentucky and so on. Jim Webb’s book Born Fighting traces this Celtic diaspora and his account matches the stories I’ve heard. Including the debatable one that my ancestors came over the mountains with Daniel Boone.

I’ve begun doing some research on Ancestry.com that supports this overall narrative. So far I’ve found a Thomas McClure who was born in Ireland and died in Kentucky, Samuel McClure who served in the War of 1812, Mathew McClure and my great-grandfather, Winfrey McClure.

My grandfather, Virgil Allan McClure, was born in Kentucky in 1884 and grew up on a farm in Sherburne. There’s a photo of my grandfather, his parents and five siblings, in their Sunday best outside a white farmhouse. He spent his career as a telegraph operator for the Illinois Central Railroad and married my grandmother, Ethel Holderman, in Covington, TN, in 1910. My grandmother was born in Cave-in-Rock, Illinois, on the Ohio River (where there actually is a cave but I’m certain Grandmother never lived in it). They moved to Corinth, Mississippi a few years later.

Meanwhile, my mother’s parents emigrated from Hungary around 1900 in the second wave of Hungarian immigrants. The first significant immigration from Hungary followed an unsuccessful revolution against the Austrian Empire in 1848-49. My grandparents were in a larger group of Hungarians who were economic migrants between 1890 and World War I.

My grandfather, Joseph Gasperik, hailed from Budapest and was born in 1874. My grandmother, Julia Nemeth, was born in 1885 in Oroshaza. Unlike the laborers and peasants who made up most of the Hungarians who came to the U.S. during that period, Grandfather was a middle-class tradesman. He was a butcher and sausage maker (and won a prize for it in Europe). I have a photo of the shop he opened on the South Side of Chicago (meat market, cigars, fancy groceries, the sign says) with several people posed in front with white aprons.

My parents met when my father came to Chicago in the 1930s on a scholarship to study opera. But that’s another story.