Big Shoes To Fill

I bet my grandpa is getting a fine chuckle out of this. We spent the morning at the Smith Creek cemetery where Major's side of the Langston family is buried. That is his mother, Fannie, behind my son Sam in this photo. My daughter Sara thought it was so neat to see the graves of all the folks she has only heard about in stories since I started my ancestry project. She even fussed at me for not giving her a "cool" name like Esther or NoraLee. Really? The name of the mother of Isaac, the prophet of the Lord, is not cool enough?

My mother began to call Sam "Little Major" quite some time ago as he is so much like grandpa and Sam now refers to himself that way. He listens to all the Major tales quite intently and even uses him against me sometimes. When Sam got a small pocketknife a while back he insisted on carrying it around in his pocket, even to school. When I told him that he had to leave it in the car he got really upset with me and emphatically told me that "Major would always have a knife in his pocket, mama...always!" Well. He left the knife in the car.

Major Lee Langston was born in 1904 and raised with a heap of other Langstons down in Smith Creek, Florida. He was a jack-of-all trades. He built a swinging bridge and several other projects around the sloughs in the forest and he built the big house on the homestead for his mama and lived there with Margaret and the kids until my mom was a year old and they moved to Tallahassee. He worked as a barber for a while, but never got it out if his system because he was forever combing our hair. Poor Pat had to endure grandpa's fine toothed comb just about every time we visited until he was too big to sit in Major's lap. Grandpa also worked as a ship builder, carpenter, wood turner, inventor, hunter, and whatever you call the person who washes a body for laying out before burial. When I was really young, he worked for the Florida Fish and Game Commission as a nighttime security guard. Sometimes my mom would drop me off there to visit and grandpa would take me with him on his rounds. He showed me the mail room and the big boss's office and even where one of the clerks had a pet tarantula in an aquarium in his office. It was amazing. I loved going to grandpa's work.

Sam has a lot of Major's personality traits. He had a sunny disposition and loved to talk. He could talk to customer sales representatives and before they hung up he'd know where they were from, who their people were and might even be relatives. Mom gave Sam grandpa's office telephone and it is perched proudly atop my coffee table. I halfway expect it to ring. He also loved to find out how things worked and preferred to watch animals rather than kill them. My older cousins told me about how grandpa took them turkey hunting one afternoon and made them watch and watch a whole flock of turkeys until they all flew away. He didn't ever give them the signal to shoot. They were furious and wanted to know why he did that. Grandpa simply answered, "wasn't it more fun to watch them than to kill them?" Major was also quite particular in his attire. Grandma Margaret had trained him to never leave the house looking sloppy. He took that to heart one afternoon before going to the bank. He was dirty from working in his shop so he put on a clean pair of paints over the soiled ones. When he reached the teller at the bank, he had forgotten that his wallet was in the first pair of pants so he unzipped them and proceeded to pull them down. The teller hit the alarm, the police were called and another Major story was born. Sam has been known to get to school and have on his pajama bottoms under his jeans. And he loves button-down madras shirts.

Some parts of Major's life seem almost legendary. It is no wonder my son idolizes him. The photos Sam has seen of his great-grandfather involve alligators and bears and guns. My mother has one of his inventions (the Major Masher) in her workshop. Our house is full of items he made while fiddling with his lathe. His memory is alive and well and his footprints are all around. Eventually Sam will hear the story of grandpa's 1965 murder conviction, but that is another story...