The World War II Memories Project caused me to write “Lillie,” an essay about my mother. So now I thought I’d say something about my father.
He and I share our names. His parents, an immigrant Irish couple named William Meredith Carr and Susan Dent Carr gave my father a Hebrew name (Ezra) and an English name (Edgar). He wasn’t Hebrew or English. He wasn’t even a cut glass Irishman. In Ireland, I suppose he would be called a bog trotter after the people who cut peat for a living and to heat their homes. He had no pretensions at greatness. He was just trying to get from one day to the next.
He passed on his name to me without great ceremony. A physician, Dr. Leon, delivered all eight of the Carr children. All were born at home in the “Big House” on the Lilac Roost Farm in Clayton, Missouri. I was the seventh child. Apparently, there had been no advance planning on the name to be given to me. I suppose with six children ahead of me, they began to run out of names.
At the time of my birth, my father was out in the fields supervising the harvesting of alfalfa. Dr. Leon had to move on to his next patient, so he apparently suggested, to save time, that I be named after my father. I guess when my father came in from the fields, he said these names would be satisfactory and so another Irishman sports a Hebrew name and an English name. Now, what could be fairer than that?
Rural people from the place of my father’s birth almost always called him Ezree. He was born in the most southern part of Illinois not far from the Ohio River. I believe there were six or seven other children in that family. William Meredith moved his family often as his main occupation was “farming on shares.” In later days, we would call this “share cropping.”
There was little opportunity for my father to get an education. He once told me that by the time he was 16 or 17 years of age, he had completed the “second reader.” I suppose the “second reader” was part of the old McGuffey Reader series for grade school children. In effect, my father only finished the second grade through no fault of his own. As years went on he taught himself to read quite well. However, his main source of reading material was the Bible.
His penmanship was excellent. On Sunday when he wore his only suit to church, he placed a gold pen and pencil set in the outside pocket of his coat. I think maybe that he was proud of his ability to read and write.
Ezree was not a big man. He stood perhaps at 5’-8” and weighed maybe 160 pounds. Not a heavyweight at all. But man, he could work! Ten or twelve hour days were common for him. He had always worked that hard – and couldn’t understand why other people would knock off after eight hours.
When I worked in service stations, the hours were about eight to nine hours per day with a six day workweek. When I came home, my clothes were dirty from changing tires and lubricating car chassis. My father thought I was on the right track. He thought that I was doing a man’s work.
Then in September of 1941, I got a job as a draftsman for AT&T in St. Louis. The hours were from nine to five (35 hours per week) with Saturday and Sunday off. Ezree thought there was a catch to it. No body would hire a 19 year old boy to work 35 hours and pay him $17 per week. He mourned the fact that I wore a white shirt to work. “Too sissy” he said. He liked me better when I had a dirty service station uniform on and told him how tough it was to drain a radiator on my back during the anti freeze season.
Now a sobering thought even though both of my parents are long since dead. They were married more than 50 years. In point of fact, they should never have married. My brothers and even my sister Verna said they were an unhappy couple. When all the older children married and moved out of my parent’s home, the youngest child, namely me, was left to deal with this unhappiness. I will only say that people who ask or demand that marriages not be broken are, in a word, nuts.
Well back to Ezree. True to his country upbringing he deliberately mispronounced words to show that he was not given in to the ways of city life. The word “ought” was rendered as “ort.” California became “Californee.” There were dozens of other mispronunciations which my sister Verna attempted to correct. I stayed out of that effort because he responded to Verna by producing more mispronunciations than before. He was an intelligent man. I don’t know why he did that.
Shortly before I left to enlist in the Army, he took me aside. I wondered what he had in mind. We more or less got along but we were never big buddies. He came from the country. I grew up in a city. On this occasion, he took an 1881 silver dollar out of his pocket. That of course, was the year of his birth. He told me that as long I carried the silver dollar, I would never be broke. Being broke was a calamitous event for him. He wanted me to avoid that fate while I was in the Army. I believe he told me that if I were “up against it,” he would give me a hand. I carried that dollar until December 8, 1943 when German authorities decided they needed it more than I did.
One other incident stands out in my mind. Ezree suffered from glaucoma. By 1945 or 1946 his eyes had been operated on several times by Dr. Lawrence Post at Barnes Hospital in St. Louis. At the time, surgical procedures were the only way to relieve the pressure in the eyeballs. His eyes were scarred and he was approaching blindness. Yet every day, he went to work. He cut trees, he shoveled snow, he did everything his helpers did.
But he couldn’t see any more. At one point he almost hit a city bus with his car. He said the bus was hidden from his view by a bush or hedge. He just couldn’t see it. In the spring of 1947, he climbed a tree to trim its top branches. Mind you he was approaching 66 years of age. Somehow he fell from the tree and fractured his skull. He was taken to St. Mary’s Hospital on Clayton Road where he spent several weeks. He never worked again.
At the time of my father’s accident, the first national telephone strike was taking place. I was the Vice President of the Local in St. Louis so I was deeply involved in the strike. There were no benefits for the strikers. And obviously, the Company was not paying any one.
The strike went on for six weeks. Some of us really struggled to make ends meet. I had no children at the time, so I had an easier time of it. I went to see my father at St. Mary’s in the afternoon because I had strike duties from 4PM until after midnight. On many occasions, my father would say to me, “Son, you have been without a payday for a long time.” Then he’d say, “I’ve got a little money and I have no place to spend it here in the hospital. Why don’t you take some?”
There he was nearly 66 years of age with a severely fractured skull. He was largely blind and I am sure he knew his working days were over. He probably was never paid more than $50 a week in his life for six long days of heavy labor. Obviously, he was not a man of wealth but whatever he had he wanted to share with me.
I told my father that I was getting along pretty good financially. I told him I deeply appreciated his offer and that if I got in financial trouble, I’d come see him. He said whatever he had, he would help me.
My father died some 43 years ago. Whatever his shortcomings might have been, I will always remember his generosity of spirit. He was a good, decent man who took care of his own.
My memories of the 1940’s have, of course, faded with the passage of time. However, I suspect that I will always remember the gift of the 1881 silver dollar and the offer to help me when I had been “without a payday for a long time.”
I hope my grandsons inherit his generosity of spirit.
E. E. Carr
June 24, 2001
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It’s mind-boggling how much things change over the course of so few generations. My great-grandfather was born in 1881! I have friends who grew up knowing their great grandparents, but both Shepherds and Carrs take generations at a leisurely clip. Nevertheless he — and his father — both seem like folks who I should be proud to be related to.  I’d imagine both of them would consider my current occupation (working on software for a makeup company) to be sissy work, and I’d be hard-pressed to contradict them. But it’s the hard work they put in to incrementally make life better for the next generation which made it happen, and I’d thank them nonetheless.
Also, I share Ezra Sr.’s opinion on people who just run off after their eight hours is up. Tons of people at my company feel that 5:00 is the time that work just stops, regardless of how much left there is to do. If anything this is way less excusable at a corporate job than it is for people doing hard labor like farming or tree trimming.