MY FATHER’S SIDE
The Alfords of Many, Louisiana
NOTE: Alford is pronounced ALL-ford. Daddy used to say, “There’s no Al in Alford.”
▲ My grandmother, Mollie Ann Smith (1873-1959), about age 18, before she married my grandfather, Christopher Columbus Alford, around 1891. She bore ten children in the swampy woods near Many, Louisiana, a place called “Middle Creek,” with no electricity, air conditioning, running water, flushing toilet, automobile, paved roads, or other modern conveniences. Nine of the ten survived to adulthood.
When I look at this photo, all I can do is shake my head at the life that lay ahead of her. Her face suggests that she knew it would be tough.
Daddy and his siblings called her something that sounded like “Mom” with an r at the end: “Momr.” Everyone in my generation of cousins called her “Grandma Alford.”
▲ My father Truman Alford (1911-1996), curiously dressed in a sailor suit and shiny boots, holding a feather duster. Makes me suspect that dusting was one of his assigned chores.
The back of this photo is marked “in Middle Creek,” which means that’s probably the house where he and all his siblings were born and raised. My guess is that the shot was made around 1917, since Daddy looks to be about six.
▲ This studio portrait shows Daddy in his early 20s, during the Great Depression of the early 1930s. By now, he was an electrical engineering student at Louisiana State University.
▲ My grandmother, Mollie Smith Alford (“Grandma Alford”), with Daddy and me at her house in Many, 1948.
My grandfather, Christopher Alford, had been struck by a car and killed in 1947, less than a year after I was born. Getting to Many for his funeral, by plane from Iowa, was my first flight, but I was too young to remember it. You can tell from Daddy’s and Grandma’s expressions that this was a sad time for them.
▲ Seven Alford cousins in 1950. I’m the little girl goofing off in front.
Two in this group left us much too young. Nancy Carolyn Alford (in yellow shorts and white top) would die of leukemia five days before her 21st birthday. Arthur Leigh Fowler (the little boy goofing off beside me) also died in his twenties.
▲ This photo shows me on the same day with Arthur Leigh, who was the cousin closest to me in age. Neither of us lived in Many, but as we grew into our teens, whenever we visited there at the same time, we were friends who hung out together. I mourned when he was violently killed as a young man.
▲ The Alford clan: Grandma Alford (front right, holding a fan) and seven of her ten children in 1950. My father, Truman, is in the blue shirt in the center back.
Grandpa Alford died before he and I could “meet,” and I have no photos of him now. But this array of his sons’ faces gives me a pretty good idea of what he must have looked like.
▲ Grandma Alford with my father, Truman, her youngest child, in 1950. She died nine years later.
▲ In 1948-1949, Daddy — by now Major Truman Alford — taught on the faculty of the Norwich Military Academy in Northfield, Vermont. (It’s now Norwich University.) Mama made this sweet B&W photo of him and me one autumn day in Vermont. I must have just turned three.
▼ My cousin Oscar Alford of Many was a young soldier serving in Germany in the early ’50s when Mama photographed him and me in our apartment in Heidelberg.
