After 46 Years...a Trip Back in Time, Part 2

by Glenn N. Holliman

Day One, March 5, 2015 continued....

We have left Chicago....headed west on my emotional return to Asia.  My mind drifts back to the summer of 1968....the summer I joined the U.S. Army, the summer the family gathered in Alabama....and Vietnam loomed darkly in my mind.

Below, at the home of E.C. and Mary Daly Herrin in Irondale, Alabama, many of the siblings and my cousins gathered. Three years had passed since Ulyss Holliman had died; ten since Pearl Caine Holliman (Grandmother Holliman) had died of a heart attack at age 67.

Left, Robert and Vena Holliman Daly had built their 'white house' in 1946 and there Mary and Bob Daly, their children finished growing up.  A few months after the group photograph (see below), the house was sold and demolished.  A business park now occupies this space along Highway US 70.

The photograph to the left was made in 1946 of Vena and Robert in front of their new home.  Robert was manager of a bank in Woodlawn.  The home has three large bedrooms, a huge kitchen, two baths, a long combination living and dinning room and a screened in porch over an underground garage.  The 'lot' must have been at least two acres or so.

In the 1950s, their daughter, Mary and her husband, E.C. Herrin would build a second house on the property and begin raising four children: Clayton, Linda, Suzanne and David Herrin.  Robert died early of heart disease in 1959.  In the 1960s, Vena became a sorority mother at the Universities of Alabama and Mississippi, and the Herrins with their large family moved to the 'white house', a home my immediate family and cousins visited often through the years.

Our thanks to Susan Cornelius Williams for the color photograph of this reunion in July 1968.

Back row: Holly, George and Patti Holliman Hairston

Next row, left to right: Glenn and the girl cousins: Jean, Tommie, Alice, Linda, Becky, Kathy Holliman and Susan Cornelius

Next row, left to right: Euhal Holliman, Lynn Draper Holliman, Ralph and Motie Holliman, Vena Daly, Clayton Herrin, Loudelle Holliman Ferrell, Charles Ferrell and Bishop Holliman

Next row, left to right: Walter Cornelius, Virginia Cornelius, E.C. Herrin with David on his lap, Mary Daly Herrin, Suzanne Herrin on her Uncle Bob Daly's lap, his wife, Carol behind him, Carol Cornelius in front and her husband, Carl and behind her Gerry Holliman, Bishop's wife.

Our flight drones over Canada into a long day light....a day which began 4 am in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, travel with my second cousins, Dr. Jim and Karen Holliman and daughter (we spent the night at their house) to the airport, several inches of snow.  Several hours to Chicago; a 3 ½ hour layover and now a long day and night to Japan.

A few days later my daughter, Grace and her Dad, all of 68 years, no longer 22 as in the photo above, in Hanoi, Vietnam.

On the plane, Grace,  chats with her seatmate, a 40 year old Chinese lady, who looks 25, unhappily married to a Chinese husband in Florida, heading home to take a ‘break’.  The world has changed in half a century.  China was the proxy enemy in 1968, the reason America feared, wrongly we now know, the spread of Chinese communism through Asia. Unfortunately our national leaders in the 1960s were not historians; they did not recognize the ancient enmity between the two nations of China and Vietnam.

A few months after the family reunion photograph in Irondale, it was graduation from Basic Training, an ordeal experienced by millions since World War II.  Below, October 1968, I shake hands with a fellow platoon mate.  The M-14 rifles, helmets and gear are stacked and soon I am off from Ft. Benning, Columbus, Georgia to Fort Dix, New Jersey by train for advanced training.  

I am to be an Army clerk thanks to my ability to type 44 words a minute!

Below, another place and time, Jim and Karen Holliman who kindly arranged the trip to Vietnam where Jim was to speak at a medical conference.  This photograph taken 2014 at my home in Pennsylvania.

 Forty five years since I left Asia….we shall see….

Right, "We Were Soldiers Once and Young", published 1992 and later a major movie on Vietnam.  Sad, tragic reading of an American regiment almost wiped out in one of the first battles in 1965. From the book this quotation '...the first major battle of a conflict that would drag on for ten long years and come as near to destroying America as it did to destroying Vietnam'.

Next posting, more the war of my generation and my emotional trip back to Asia.

 Have questions about Holliman family history? You are invited to join the Hollyman Email List at Hollyman-Subscribe@yahoogroups.com and the Hollyman Family Facebook Page located on Facebook at "Hollyman Family". Post your questions and perhaps one of the dozens Holyman cousins on the list will have an answer. For more information contact Tina Peddie at desabla1@yahoo.com, the list and Facebook manager for Hollyman (and all our various spellings!).

There is also a massive Ancestry.com Holyman and Associated Families Tree available for review.  For an invitation to this collection of over 20,000 individuals, please write glennhistory@gmail.com.  

Also one will find additional Holliman history at http://hollimanfamilyhistory.blogspot.com/ .

I also have a collection of associated family manuscripts and research collected by the late Walt Holliman, Cecil Holliman and Rhodes Holliman.  Happy to send these materials by email and to insure their research is available.  The surnames: Alexander, Baldwin, Barham, Bass, Beall, Blakeney,  Baker, Bond, Bostick, Brewer, Bryan, Bryant, Bullock, Calvert, Carter, Champion, Chew,Cofer, Cole, Crafford, Crockett, Curtis, Dale, Daniel, Davidson, Davies, De Mallpas, Douglas, Duckett, Edwards, Edgerton, Emerson, Fitzhugh, Fowlehurst, Fox, Gains, Garrison, Gonson, Graves, Gray, Guyton, Guins, Hall, Hamby, Hawkins,Hendrix, Hill, Hogg, Holliman, Holt, Howard, Jackson, Jones, Judkins, Love, Lucas, Maget, Mansfield, Manwaring, McBee, McComas, McCurdy, McNewsome, Nicholson, Norsworthy, Noyall, O'dell, Oliver, Pearce, Peerce, Pettigrew, Petway, Pitman, Plow, Plyler, Porten, Prather, Petite, Ridgely, Riggan, Roberts, Smith, Spencer, Sprigg, Standley, Stanyard, Swan, Strother, Thompson, Thornton, Thrope, Trelawney, Turpin, Underhill, Underwood, Wallace, Walters, Weedon, Whitherspoon, Whitten,Williams,Wilmot,Wilson, Whitaker and Yerby.  These are mainly Alabama families and their ancestors from the Carolinas and Virginia. Materials vary from one page to 200. - GNH at glennhistory@gmail.com. 

E.C. Herrin, Jr., a Celebration in Words

by Glenn N. Holliman

Alabama and this family lost a good man last week.  Elliott Clayton (E.C.) Herrin, Jr. (1930-2015) who married my first cousin, Mary Daly in 1951, served his community, church and family as would become a Southern gentlemen.  He died of complications of heart disease and aging.

In 2010, with my retirement, I was able to sit down with Mary and E.C. in their home, and discuss family history, picking their memories of their growing up in a different Alabama, and learning more about Irondale, my aunts and uncles and their own stories. Later I posted an article on E.C. at http://hollimanfamilyhistory.blogspot.com/, a May 16, 2011 article.

 Below, the 1951 wedding of Mary Daly and E.C.Herrin

E.C. was always kind and patient with me, perhaps because we could talk politics, books and history.  E.C. and my Father, Bishop Holliman, had a teasing relationship, kidding about this or that and bringing forth the humorous, dry humor both had in abundance.

 Left, E.C. and Bishop Holliman share a beverage and jests in 1989 while on a trip to Ireland  with Mary and Virginia Cornelius.
 



Right, E.C. in 1972 at one of many wedding receptions.

The picture below I took in 1970 at a family reunion at Mary and E.C.'s home, a home they opened countless times to Dalys, Herrins, Hollimans, Ferrells, Cornelius and other associated families.  This is one of my favorite photos of E.C., catching a bit of bemusement and wisdom in his expression.

At his funeral on April 14, 2015, his four children spoke, all eloquently - Clayton, Linda, Suzanne and David.  I will let Linda Herrin Bradley's loving biography of her Father speak for all of them.

"Daddy was an amazing man. His parents were hard workers in the 1930’s and he learned well from them. When he was 12 years old, his Mother died from breast cancer. Since Daddy had no brothers or sisters, his Father took him to live temporarily with his Mother’s sister and their 5 children, but 3 months later his Father was killed in a car accident. 

After that Daddy always worked to support himself – starting with a paper route on his bicycle, and later at Sears Roebuck as he put himself through college. He was working for TCI when they told he would be transferred to Pittsburgh, and he needed to take metallurgy classes. Daddy said if he was going back to school it would be law school, so he did. His cousin, our Aunt Lola, gave him $100 to start his tuition, because his Mother had given her $100 years before so she could go to business school. So for 5 years Daddy worked all day, then went to law school at night, with 3 children and 1 on the way. But he never complained and he loved every minute of his work, for 50 years, as a lawyer and a municipal judge.

Then in 1989, Daddy started losing his eyesight to macular degeneration. Gone were the books he so loved to read, but thankfully he had books on tape to help. Mother became his eyes – driving, reading, writing, and sitting by him as a judge – so justice truly was blind. Most people didn’t know he couldn’t see, because he managed and again, never complained. 

Mother and Daddy married 64 years ago this June, and Daddy would always say they were still trying to work it out. When Mother went to work for him in 1972, we thought divorce was eminent! But Daddy said they couldn’t divorce because they couldn’t agree on who had take the kids. Daddy would grin and say his list started with his books, hunting rifles, the dog, the car – he laughed and said we were way down on his list!

In the past few years, Daddy’s health really started to decline. But still, even to the end, he managed and he never complained. 

I used to get upset when I was growing up about whatever little stuff was happening to me, and I would tell Daddy “it’s not fair.” Daddy would always say, “I can promise you a lot of things, but I never promised you fair.” Certainly a lot of things in his life weren’t fair, but he never complained and you would never know about it.

Daddy has always been there, to encourage us, to help us learn from our mistakes, to wipe away our tears, to tell us to be careful when we would leave, and to tell us he loved us and how proud he was of us. His only regret was that his parents were not able to know us. He slept well every night – because he said he had a 'clear conscience'.  And he did." - Linda Herrin Bradley

May Mary, their children and grandchildren be comforted by the example E.C. Herrin's life has set for us all. - GNH

How a World War Changed an Alabama Family, Part 27

by Glenn N. Holliman

A World War II Train Ride and Another in 1989....

In January 1943, while waiting assignment to a radio school in Maine, my father, H. Bishop Holliman, was granted seven days leave from his destroyer, the USS Barker DD-213, then tied up in the Brooklyn Navy Yard. 

 In his 1988 hand written memoirs, he wrote of rushing to his Irondale, Alabama home by train.  Recently he expanded his story of that twenty hour train ride in which he shared a coach seat with a little girl from Brooklyn. He entitled the article 'The Girl from Brooklyn' which he sold for $25 to the Good Old Days magazine.  After decades of writing, this is his first payment ever for a published article.   You can find the expanded story in thus month's publication, the cover of which is pictured below. Not bad for a 95 year old!

 In case you can't find a copy at your newstand or on line, from his memoirs, we have this:

"One experience I recall.  In New York, a young girl and her mother were in the coach I was in.  The girl sat by me and her mother in front of us.  All the time I thought the girl was 14 or 15 (I was 23 at the time).  Just before getting to Birmingham, the girl went back to the ladies room and soon reappeared and was an 18 year old beauty.  She had passed for a child to save on fare.  She and I laughed about 'lost opportunities' and I wanted to bang my head against the side of the train."

Alas, my father also failed to obtain her phone number!  But that is my Dad....

After his leave was up, he was off to the Navy Station at Cosco Bay, Maine for five months, but that is another story.

The 1989 Excursion

My father has had always a love of trains and with the collapse of the passenger train after World war II, he had precious few times to indulge his passion.  However, in 1989 the opportunity came to travel on an excusion from Birmingham to Chattanooga.  Several of the children of his niece, Mary Daly Herrin, traveled with him. Here he sits with his great-nephew David Herrin, forty-five years after the train ride with the pretty girl from Brooklyn.

 

Clayton Herrin, brother of David, and son of E.C. and Mary Daly Herrin, took pictures from the train that day as did Mary from the ground when the train rolled through Irondale headed north.  Here are a few phtographs of that April day in 1989.

Mary Herrin took the first picture as the train roaring through Irondale.  The second picture, Clayton took from the train window looking toward the Irondale Cafe and the VFW Hall.  The store fronts of Irondale have changed a bit in the past quarter century.

Below, Bishop and his great niece and nephew, Phyllis and Clayton Herrin in April 1989.
 

 The train drives north in these two dramatic pictures.

Next posting, more of World War II and perhaps some more pictures of the Alabama family after the War.

Have questions about Holliman family history? You are invited to join the Hollyman Email List at Hollyman-Subscribe@yahoogroups.com and the Hollyman Family Facebook Page located on Facebook at "Hollyman Family". Post your questions and perhaps one of the dozens Holyman cousins on the list will have an answer. For more information contact Tina Peddie at desabla1@yahoo.com, the list and Facebook manager for Hollyman (and all our various spellings!).

There is also a massive Ancestry.com Holyman and Associated Families Tree available for review.  For an invitation to this collection of over 20,000 individuals, please write glennhistory@gmail.com.  

Also one will find additional Holliman history at http://hollimanfamilyhistory.blogspot.com/ .

I also have a collection of associated family manuscripts and research collected by the late Walt Holliman, Cecil Holliman and Rhodes Holliman.  Happy to send these materials by email and to insure their research is available.  The surnames: Alexander, Baldwin, Barham, Bass, Beall, Blakeney,  Baker, Bond, Bostick, Brewer, Bryan, Bryant, Bullock, Calvert, Carter, Champion, Chew,Cofer, Cole, Crafford, Crockett, Curtis, Dale, Daniel, Davidson, Davies, De Mallpas, Douglas, Duckett, Edwards, Edgerton, Emerson, Fitzhugh, Fowlehurst, Fox, Gains, Garrison, Gonson, Graves, Gray, Guyton, Guins, Hall, Hamby, Hawkins,Hendrix, Hill, Hogg, Holliman, Holt, Howard, Jackson, Jones, Judkins, Love, Lucas, Maget, Mansfield, Manwaring, McBee, McComas, McCurdy, McNewsome, Nicholson, Norsworthy, Noyall, O'dell, Oliver, Pearce, Peerce, Pettigrew, Petway, Pitman, Plow, Plyler, Porten, Prather, Petite, Ridgely, Riggan, Roberts, Smith, Spencer, Sprigg, Standley, Stanyard, Swan, Strother, Thompson, Thornton, Thrope, Trelawney, Turpin, Underhill, Underwood, Wallace, Walters, Weedon, Whitherspoon, Whitten,Williams,Wilmot,Wilson, Whitaker and Yerby.  These are mainly Alabama families and their ancestors from the Carolinas and Virginia. Materials vary from one page to 200. - GNH at glennhistory@gmail.com.

How a World War Changed an Alabama Family, Part 15

by Glenn N. Holliman

From Subchaser to Flight School...and the Home Front....


In the spring of 1942, the wave of Japanese conquest in the Pacific rolled on.  General Douglas MacArthur was ordered out of the Philippines, but he vowed to return.  The embattled American army and Filipino troops were pushed from Bataan to Corregidor for a last stand. Australia, deeply worried about the Nipponese juggernaut bearing down on the nation, welcomed the arrival of 30,000 U.S. troops in March of that year.  The Japanese navy even penetrated the Indian Ocean to Ceylon (Sri Lanka) and sank the British carrier Hermes.  

In those dark days, the United States rushed to build weapons and train young men for war on many fronts.  One of the millions mobilized was my father, H. Bishop Holliman, of Irondale, Alabama, a suburb of the steel city of Birmingham.


After his  first leave ended, he reported back 5 April 1942 to his duty station in Algiers, Louisiana, home of a U.S. Navy training base.  Bishop took a physical and joined as a trainee in the Navy Air Corps. 


Letters from home remained important to the boys in the service.  Bishop's Mother, Pearl Caine Holliman wrote often and filled her letters with news of relatives and friends in the close-knit community of Irondale.  What follows are exerts from letters written in March and April of 1942.  These comments about persons at home are undoubtedly typical of millions of other epistles in that era.  She writes of other young men whose lives were disrupted by the war.

"Mother is better for the last few days and she may make it after all.  Dr. Odom thinks she will get better when the weather gets warm."  Mother was Lula Hocutt Caine, 1861-1957, Grandma Caine to the generations that remember her.  Her father, Manassas Hocutt, died at the Battle of Stones River in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, January 1863. Lula married William Lee Caine of Fayette County, Alabama and had four children to grow to maturity - Floyd, Pearl, Maude  and Vista. 



Below, this photograph is from the early 1920s, probably taken in Irondale.  The writing of the identifications of Vista, Maude and Pearl is that of H. Bishop Holliman.

 

Below, an earlier photograph, perhaps 1904 and taken in Fayette County, Alabama - back row, left to right are Maude (1893-1940), Floyd (1883-1966) and Pearl (1887-1955).  Front row, Lula's mother-in-law, Melissa C. Anthony Caine, 1829-1913.  Vista (1898-1986), Lula and William Lee Caine (1862-1938).  In the 1910s, William took a job as a railroad guard in Irondale.  His children, two of them married, soon followed with their families.  With this move, the Caines and Hollimans left their farms and took jobs in transportation.   This may be the only known photograph of my great, great grandmother, Melissa Anthony Caine.

  

"Vista is worse; I don't know what Ralph will do with her."  Her younger sister, Vista Caine Humber, lived in Irondale and may have been having marital issues with her first husband, Ralph.  Cousin E.C. Herrin believes the never-seen character, Vista, in the movie Fried Green Tomatoes may have been inspired by the real Aunt Vista.  The book, "Fried Green Tomatoes" by Alabamian Fannie Flagg, was based on the life and work of Flagg's great aunt, Bess Fortenberry who owned the hot dog stand, later Irondale Cafe of the 1930s. Bess's brother, Ed Fortenberry, owned a local grocery store. Below Vista, her daughter Dorthy and her niece, Vena Holliman Daly, in the early 1930s at Lookout Mountain, Chattanooga, Tennessee.  Note they are touring wearing formal clothes and heels!

"Your Uncle Lee Cooke has not married yet."  Lee Cooke was the husband of Pearl's sister, Maude Caine.  Maude had the misfortune to contract polio as a child.  Her family moved to Irondale from Fayette, Alabama and lived in the house on the hill just above the Ulyss and Peal Hollimans.  In the 1930s, Lee and Maude moved to St. Claire County, Alabama.  After Maude's death in 1940, Lee remarried. 

"Charles Ferrell has a call to Fairfax, $200 a year more and a larger church."  A Methodist minister with a Yale Divinity degree, Charles was an up and comer in the North Alabama Conference.  His wife, Loudelle, was Pearl's second daughter.  Below, Charles Halford, Charles T. Ferrell, Carolyn Ferrell Tatum, John Melton and Loudelle in 1942.  Actually in 1942, Charles was assigned to Huntsville, Alabama. 

"The Jones have moved into the house with Runyans while the parsonage is built."  The Rev. L.L.  Jones was the Irondale Methodist minister, age 52.  The Runyans were members of his congregation.  Renfro Runyan, age 53, ran the local water plant.

"The Hamiltons went to see Drayton, who is assigned to a subchaser."  John W. Hamilton of Irondale was a county tax collector, an elected position and one that paid a salary of $5,000 a year, a princely sum in 1942.  Their son Drayton (1916-1990) became an attorney in Montgomery, Alabama after serving in the Navy from 1940 to 1948.  His wife was Hilda Sims (1914-2001).  Drayton's sister, Mary Virginia Hamilton, was a good friend of Virginia Holliman Cornelius (1922-2011).

"Ralph Byram left Sunday for Atlanta." Ralph, headed to Ft. McPherson for Army induction, was the son of Joseph and Lena Byram who lived at 2223 3rd Avenue North in Irondale. Joe in 1940 worked for the Works Progress Administration (W.P.A.), a New Deal agency created to provide employment and public works.

"Ralph has a new suit; trying to get him ready for his speeches."  Ralph Holliman, b. 1924, was the last of seven children of Pearl and Ulyss Holliman's children to leave home.  After graduation from Shades Cahaba in May of 1942, he would be drafted into the U.S. Army in 1943 and serve in England and France.

Ralph, b 1924, visiting his brother, H. Bishop Holliman, b 1919, in Key West, Florida, February 1942.

Next the Philippines Fall and a Sailor begins flight training....


 Have questions about Holliman family history? You are invited to join the Hollyman Email List at Hollyman-Subscribe@yahoogroups.com and the Hollyman Family Facebook Page located on Facebook at "Hollyman Family". Post your questions and perhaps one of the dozens Holyman cousins on the list will have an answer. For more information contact Tina Peddie at desabla1@yahoo.com, the list and Facebook manager for Hollyman (and all our various spellings!).

Or join your many cousins at MyFamily.com and view an expanded Holliman family tree and many files on the history of the family. Just write to glennhistory@gmail.com for an invitation.