The Passing of a Generation, Part 1

The last child of Ulyss and Pearl Caine Holliman has Passed, and the Greatest Generation comes to an End

By Glenn N. Holliman

My father, Homer Bishop Holliman, left picture 2002, born December 17, 1919, breathed his last at 3:10 p.m. on Saturday, June 9, 2018.  He was surrounded at his Cookeville, Tennessee hospital bed by his three children – Becky, Alice and yours truly.  And my two children, Grace and Chris and Becky’s son, Bryan.  His last illness was only a few days and mercifully largely free of pain and discomfort.

My Dad lived through 40% of the history of the United States, his days largely spent in the 2oth Century America.  A prolific writer, he recorded stories of his family, his growing up in Alabama and his observations on the time and culture in which he moved and had his being.

His parents, Ulyss and Pearl, born respectively in 1884 and 1888 in rural Fayette County, Alabama, were descendants of 17^th century immigrants from the British Isles.  In 1836, my branch of the Hollimans migrated to west Alabama from the Carolina's.

Dad’s grandfather, John Thomas Holliman, 1844-1930, photo right 1900, fought in seven major battles for the Confederacy in the 1860s serving under Braxton Bragg, James Longstreet and Robert E. Lee.  He returned home in 1865, became a ‘dirt farmer’, had six sons, the last being Ulyss.  My father knew his grandfather and remembered him as a tall ancient man, thin with a long white beard.  John Thomas Holliman was almost illiterate and died a year before his wife, Martha Jane Walker.  My great grandmother’s father, Samuel Walker, experienced the three days at Gettysburg and the siege of Petersburg, including the tragedy at the Crater.

Ulyss married Pearl Elmer Caine, a neighboring girl, when she was 18 around 1906.  (Pictured below in 1945.) He is listed in the 1910 census as a farmer.  Soon the children began to appear – Melton in 1908, Vena in 1909, Euhal in 1912 and Loudelle in 1914.  Some time in those years, the family left the farm and moved to the village of Fayette.  There Ulyss found employment in the local lumber mill.

Their world was rapidly changing – oil lamps were giving way to electric lights and horses to motorized carriages.  And 50 or so miles away by railroad, a ‘magic’ city, powered by coal, limestone, iron ore and northern capital, was growing rapidly offering economic opportunity and a way for a father to better support his four children.  So in 1917, this Holliman family moved to a suburb of Birmingham – Irondale -  a railroad switching yard for a growing number of freight and passenger trains that tied an emerging southern economy to a more financially robust America.

Before long, three additional children came along – Bishop in 1919, Virginia in 1922 and Ralph in 1925.  Pearl was 37 and Ulyss 41, when their family was complete.  Ulyss, good with his hands, took employment as a carpenter with the Birmingham Electric Company, a corporation which ran the municipal street car line.  When my grandfather was born, there were no street cars in Birmingham and when he died in 1965, there were no street cars.  But in between these technological eras, he worked 32 years repairing the wooden cars and supporting a family of nine persons.

That move from the land, where countless ancestors had toiled, to a newly industrialized urban area changed everything for my father’s generation.  As President Franklin Roosevelt remarked in the 1930s, this generation had a rendezvous with destiny, and so it was to be.

Continued soon to Part 2….