As American as Apple Pie

Auntie Annie and Aunt Faye raising little John Wesley Goodsell while his mother dances, sings and plays the piano in New York.

You Can't Tell a Book by it's Cover

Are you in favor of ending the practice of tatooing or marring the body in any way to end the practice of war (except ear piercing and small pox vaccination) . I will explain what I think Frost meant by "the way less traveled" which makes "all the difference".

Robert Frost: The Road Not Taken (1915)

"I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I--
I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference."

Thank you to http://www.wsu.edu:8080/~wldciv/world_civ_reader/world_civ_reader_2/frost_road.html

I'm sorry I don't have a picture of Aunt Gayle. I remember her the year that James was born. We were there on Christmas a couple of years after his birth and the bubbling glass tubes mimicking candle lights on the tree were mesmerizing.

She had moved to Hendersonville with one of the Italian men Granddad had imported to work on the trains and tracks. Grandad found that the horses were not as efficient as trains in moving timber off the mountains, so Grandad and company helped the horse teamsters he had hired get started in Chicago. Have you ever heard of the Teamsters Union. The C&O railroad ran from Durbin WV to Chicago and to New York. You have to belong to the Teamsters to work at Rockefeller Center.

Gayle's husband was named Latt and with Grandad's help he built a timber operation in the mountains of North Carolina near Hendersonville. Along with the lumber he also operated a hardware store and his son, John G. was a contractor, building homes in the area. You can see these old homes on Realtor.com.

The point is Aunt Gayle told us they had built a home for Robert Frost in the mountains of North Carolina. You won't find this anywhere on the internet. But even as a child I clearly remember that name, Frost.

I have pondered that important poem above and the world needs to know about this.

If you take the road from Staunton, Virginia,(birthplace of Woodrow Wilson, and near the home of Thomas Jefferson) which is Route 250 towards West Virginia, you will end up, after a rigorous drive thru the woods and mountains, at an intersection where you will see a row of giant evergreen trees, the type they used to tan leather. These trees are awe inspirting.

Route 250 ends there at the Hemlock Trees. You can either go right or left. If you go left you will go past Bartow on to Cass where you will find the Cass railroad up the unusually steep grade of Cheat Mountain. Continue on around and you will find Route 66 which follows a mountain stream leading to Snow Shoe ski resort.

If you go to the right, you will go to Frank and into Durbin. Very small towns, but monumental in what they have contributed to this country. Were it not for the durable thick soled shoes produced by the Pocahontas Shoe Sole Company in Durbin, the USA might have lost the First and Second World Wars. (The South lost the Civil War because of their lack of good shoes.)

But of more interest to poets, there is something poetically extraordinary in the town of Durbin. If you stand on the steps of the Methodist Church in the middle of the tiny town of Durbin, WV and look at the mountain in front of you, you will see an extraordinary resemblance to the pyramid on the dollar bill, revered by the Masons (American Revolutionary Masonic Lodge). At that magical location (remember John Wesley was named for the founder of Methodism) you will see this pyramid shape with a ridge going straight over to the apex of the pyramid mountain.

That is why they named the mountain Cheat Mountain. The founding fathers followed the concepts of the Masons, which gave their members steps of the pyramid that they had to progress to make it to the top. These steps represented the troubles in life that you have to transcend to get to the top where you have the wisdom to oversee the world below you.

They were so fanatical about these steps, that the early Masonic carpenters that built houses in Virginia, put hints into their staircases and houses. It is a treat to study such old 1700's houses to find the hints that these prerevolutionary men left behind for posterity. I found one such house that had thirteen steps to get upstairs and on the ninth step there was a small defect cut into the stair.

In other words, the stairs were a representations of the trials and tribulations that mankind has to undergo thru life to achieve wisdom. The point of Cheat Mountain, is that there is another way. Just walk the ridgeline and you'll get to the top without all the pain and suffering life has to offer. The American Way. Cheat pain and suffering. Cure diseases, save lives and take something for pain. (This is not a advertisment for drug addition.)

When Grandad John Wesley came to America, he was the child of one of the inventors of aspirin, one of the first drugs to relieve pain, and he was seen as a hero, to such men of insight. So John Wesley's Methodist Church was built on the site where cheating pain and suffering is commemorated.

To get there you had to turn towards the tiny town of Durbin, the road less traveled by, not towards the relatively bigger timbering town of Cass which had the giant country store with millions in sales per year and where they hired 2000 men to timber the mountains in the early 1900's.

Someday, it will come out that Robert Frost had a home built in Hendersonville, NC in appreciation for what our family did for them and you will remember what I have told you here. You will find out this concept has made all the difference for many people. Ideas, philosophies make a difference in people's lives.

The very best designer genes.

Uncle Jamie (below) was very beloved to my family. When we came to visit him on his dairy farm in Mississippi the tame dairy cows would walk up to greet us when we got out of our car. They had such big brown eyes and long lashes, but the large creatures were a little scary. They just stood there looking at us, chewing their cudd.

Jamie used to tell us stories about the old days, when granddaddy used to work for granddaddy John Wesley in West Virginia. He retold the Hatfield and McCoy stories he heard from his father James. We would sit at the dinner table with a very large, really delicious country meal made by Aunt Cora Gates and her daughters with all fresh ingredients from their farm place on a lazy suzan so we wouldn't have to interrupt his stories to ask for something. The milk used to be so fresh it was warm selling like cow in the refrigerator. Eventually the cream would rise and you could make butter.

Uncle Jamie's and Granny Pearl's mother was kin to Aaron Burr associated to Princeton. You can see the relationship to William I of Orange. I know, that and a dime... Pardon me but, you need proof (genes) when you say you descended from Aaron Burr, because his only American offspring died in a shipwreck. So Burr never told anyone about his European children.

Uncle Jamie (Pearl's brother) Silent Never!

Grandmother Pearl's sister, Aunt Faye was very talented in her own right as a concert pianist. When the family moved away from West Virginia, taking young John Wesley with them, they bought 300 acres of prime Mississippi bottom land. Now granddad being such a famous character with the newspapers, having informed them about the Hatfield's and the McCoys, he found himself in a revolutionary hotbed of rural dissent in Okolona, Mississippi.

In the decades before, there had been a famous newspaper published for farmers in this small town. It led farmers to unite against something or other. I guess economic fluctuations were a major problem for farmers. Anyway, with the revolutionary power generated by this Okolona newspaper, the Federal government decided to subsidize farms to make things more stable for the farmer, so economic fluctuations didn't hurt them that much.

I don't think granddaddy James Darnell did much writing that I know of, but he strung barbed wire and raised John and some dairy cows. Oh, yes, that picture above is of Aunt Faye, made famous by Al Capp as Sadie Hawkins. She had a hawk like nose. She also was a very accomplished concert pianist. She played her baby grand piano faster and more accurate than any famous pianists I heard during my college career. What a waste in rural Mississippi!
Loved Aunt Faye is on the right. You can see her hawkish nose. That is our beloved Auntie Annie, Granny Pearl's best friend. She was no kin, but she took a major roll in raising John, and never married, devoting her life to Daddy John Wesley. As American as apple pie.
That's Aunt Faye after having some work done, in the silk dress with the orchid. She was being solicitous to casually dressed John Wesley. One book said she took John out behind the wood shed for photos, because she treasured her beautiful brick house, built with the money sent to her by Pearl's estate for John Wesley implying she was concerned that the house would be taken away from her. I guess she was showing off her skills as a manipulator, because she has the kittens for youthful John to abuse, so she could keep the house for herself. Bad, bad little boy didn't deserve a house, I guess. How clever!

When I met her, I was in college some 40 years later, her beautiful brick home was frozen in the 1920's, never having recieved any more funds for John's care after this photo. There was the baby grand piano in the large living room and a bright red velvet 1920's couch straight out of an old movie. I guess she was not as clever as she thought. She was a brilliant pianist and it is ashamed that talent went to waste, when her sister, Pearl, did well even though she wasn't half as talented or accomplished as Faye. Faye never even had any children of her own but she kept her house spotless, but John Wesley never learned to play the piano. True love is always stronger than a broom.

James Clarence--What me Worry? Not at all Mad