G'Don

  Lived in his hometown his whole life. He worked at the local newspaper and sometimes wrote articles for motorcycle magazines.

He was kind of a blow hard.

He thought his family were Jewish poles because the rabbi in Florida would bring his animals to be slaughtered at his grandparents hog farm outside the town. 

He and his wife did extensive traveling through the south looking for records of his great grandfather who had left his great grandmother when she got rheumatoid arthritis. Supposedly he was also a drinker. The story was he got mad and left because there was no butter at dinner one night.

His dad and his aunt hated the father, destroyed every record of him and would never speak of him.

Don and Lorry found a record of him in an orphanage in Georgia but there was another orphan with exactly the same name. William Napoleon Norris. Two of them. With the same name. At the same orphanage. Sounds like a Dickens novel.

He told me when he was eighteen he went to visit his aunt, his dad's sister, at her home in Florida. The grandmother lived with them and wheeled herself around the house in a cart. He said it freaked him out a little.

We have pictures of her in a model T somewhere in the snow. Snow in Florida? Not likely. 

He said his uncle Carl was a building inspector who was given bottles of liquor by folks needing inspections but he and his wife, Don's aunt Gladys, were teatotallers and they had a giant cabinet filled with unopened bottles. 

Uncle Carl's real name was Carlos and was Spanish by descent. Carl and Gladys lived in the Florida Keys, in Marathon, and Carl had a nice big fishing boat. He kept a Winchester on the boat in case of the negros he said, but he didn't use that word which seemed unlike him. He always seemed like a decent guy. I guess that's the South. 

When my dad's mom died (she lived in the same town as Don) he went back and negotiated with Don about things from the estate. They worked it out and Don said he'd send Dads share. But when it arrived many things were missing. Don said he felt he'd negotiated poorly so he kept some things. That was it for Dad. His brother was a blowhard and now a cheat. He cut him off. Didn't want anything to do with him.