When My Grandfather was Young, Part 2

by Glenn N. Holliman

 Some More Revealing Facts on my Grandfather's Younger Years!

Above, early 1900s, my grandfather, Ulyss S. Holliman

with one of his brothers, right, Lealand Holliman.

The Singing Barber

The next two clippings are from the same front page of the Fayette Banner in 1906.  The first one describes my grandfather performing in front of his brother James Monroe Holliman's clothing store in downtown Fayette.  Were they paid to sing and perhaps dance a twostep?!

 Was the performance to drum up business for Ulyss's new enterprise, a barber shop?  Goodness, Grand Dad was a singing barber!  I remember my father speaking often that his father used to cut his hair (and his brothers).  I thought it was to save 25 cents but obviously I underestimated my Grandfather's skills!

1906

The Barber Marries and Returns to Farming

How long did the barber shop last?  Not past 1910 when the census recorded Ulyss as a farmer, married to Pearl Caine Holliman and father of two babies, Melton and Vena. That marriage occurred in November 1907 as the next clipping attests.  Martin Creek was a crossroads south of Fayette.

1907

A Republican in a Democratic South

Farmer Ulyss became the father of a son in 1908 (Melton) and a daughter (Vena) in 1909. In 1910, he had some status in the community, an election manager in an off-year contest.  This is the first public mention of my Grandfather interested in politics. In later years, he would be engaged along with his brother James Monroe Holliman and his sons Cecil R. and Charles B. Holliman (and even my father, Bishop, in 1946) as Republican nominees for state offices.   

 Above 1898 James Monroe and Elizabeth Baker Holliman; below their sons Cecil Rhodes and Charles Baker Holliman, 1911.

The Holliman family was Republican when 90% of the white population in Alabama voted Democratic after Reconstruction from the Civil War.  Brother James Monroe Holliman served as probate judge in Fayette County for many years, elected and reelected as a Republican.  Why did the family embrace the minority party that in the generation after the Civil War, the party of Reconstruction that included Black elected officials and civil rights for former slaves?

I have long speculated on this question and asked my Father and the late Rhodes B. Holliman, Cecil R. Holliman's son, that question.  Several answers might be that Fayette County was in the region of Alabama with few slaves and little of the plantation wealth that developed in areas of the state with more fertile soil. As with the neighboring counties of Walker and Winston, pro-Union or 'Tory' sentiment was not uncommon.  Uriah Holliman (1817-1862), the grandfather of Ulyss, was a prosperous farmer who by 1860 owned 900 acres and managed the enterprise with numerous children and no servants.  Caught up in the initial enthusiasm of secession, Uriah, age, 42, enlisted and tragically died of 'camp fever' along with his son, Charles (1842-1862), after the 1862 Battle of Shiloh.

Mary 'Polly' Lucas Holliman (18...-1911) mother John Thomas Holliman. We have no photograph of her husband, Uriah (1820- 1862) 

Another Uriah son, my great grandfather, John Thomas Holliman (1844-1930), joined the Confederate Army in May 1862, the same month his father died.  The Confederate government already faced a manpower shortage just one year into the war and offered young men either $50 and service with lads from their community or be drafted into the general army and no bonus.  Eighteen years old, a farm hand and poorly educated, John joined with his friends.

John Thomas Holliman, Ulyss' father

In February 1865 after seven major battles and never a leave home, he and two other Fayette County young men, hungry and cold, crossed over from Robert E. Lee's lines in Petersburg, Virginia and gave themselves up to the Union Army.  There is evidence they even joined the Union Army, but John seemed to have slipped between enlistment and being a prisoner of war.  He was sent to work on a farm in Indiana, stayed until the crop harvest and then walked home to Alabama in September 1865, barefoot, carrying his precious shoes.

James Franklin Holliman, an uncle of Ulyss

John is quoted as saying the conflict was 'A rich man's war and a poor man's fight'.  My great grandfather probably suffered from what today we call Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.  He attended his brother James Franklin Holliman's school for less than a week that autumn of 1865, settled into farming, lost his first wife in childbirth, who bore a son, William. 

He remarried Martha Jane Walker, a daughter of a Civil War veteran, and they had five sons, the last being Ulyss. In their old age, the sons (those that could) helped support their parents.  Five of the six sons would eventually leave Fayette County seeking livelihoods in other Alabama towns and cities.  While they lived into their 80s, both parents died in poverty there being no Social Security or government safety net for the elderly until the arrival of the Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal in the 1930s.

Below in 1928, John Thomas and Martha Jane Walker Holliman

Next article Ulyss leaves the farm and makes the first of two moves fundamental to the lives of his children. - GNH

When my Grandfather was Young

by Glenn N. Holliman 

Some Revealing Facts on my Grandfather's Younger Years, Part 1

Not many people living today remember Ulyss S. Holliman, 1884-1965.  He was my paternal grandfather who died when I was 18.  Below are two photographs which I believe the first and last taken of him.  The first may have been snapped in 1899 or slightly earlier, a formal portrait taken in Fayette, Alabama.  

The second was taken by me in the front yard of our home in Gadsden, Alabama in 1964, not long before he passed away.  Here he is age 80, still thin as a rail.  He died of emphysema and rests beside Pearl Caine Holliman in Forest Hills Cemetery near the Birmingham airport.

 

In neither photograph is he smiling which reinforces my memory that I never saw him smile or laugh.

But he did have a youth; I found it in the Fayette Banner, Fayette County, Alabama between the years 1900 to 1918. And he must have smiled and laughed, because he sang!

Ulyss went to Texas at age 17!

1901

Ulyss stopped formal education in the sixth grade, and probably was tired of working on the farm of his parents.  Manervia, Texas is half way between Waco and Austin, and founded in 1891 when the railroad came through the area.  The town boomed when oil gushed from the ground in the 1920s but the wells played out.  Today the town with a population of 200 or more is composed of only a few buildings. 

No doubt at the time some Holliman cousins, the children of his Uncle Cornelius Holliman (1849-1924), lived there, not far from Rockdale where numerous of our distant relatives still live today. Cornelius married a woman from Texas and had moved there ca 1890. 

Grandfather returned to Alabama

Evidently, Texas did not pan out because the next time Ulyss appears in the local Fayette press, he is once again a farm hand preparing for spring planting with his brother, Eck Holliman (1882-1926).

March 1904

My Grandfather, the Singer!

A few months later the Banner records that Ulyss would sing at the Oak Grove Church near Sardis, Fayette County!  This is extraordinary as I never heard my grandfather sing or any mention within the family, that given his taciturn personality, of one ever suggesting such a talent.  Reading between the lines, this was not the first time young Ulyss had performed religious songs in public.  Nor the last as additional clippings reveal.

July 1904

The clipping below further describes Ulyss's talent as a singer and song leader.  The occasion was an all day signing at the Caine's Ridge Baptist Church south of Fayette.  His father, John Thomas Holliman (1844-1930), seems to have been proud of his youngest son that day, John's 61st birthday.

1905

My Grandfather, the Suiter

Notice if you will, the second paragraph of the clipping.  Ulyss had joined the Odd Fellows, one of the many 'secret societies' for men a century or so ago.  But there is a hint of another attraction near Caine's Ridge.  That would be an 18 year old girl, named Pearl Caine (It was her family who gave the land on which the church had been built).

The portrait below, provided by the late Rhodes B. Holliman, shows an attractive young lady with penetrating eyes and strength of character in her demeaner. 

We will leave it here for this article and pick up the story of my grandfather's younger days in the next blog. - GNH

From My Sister's Attic, Part 2

 by Glenn N. Holliman

Letters from the Past

Recently my sister Becky Holliman Payne forwarded a box of letters, pictures and memorabilia saved by our late mother, Geraldine Stansbery Holliman Feick (1923-2015).  While I have a computer folder of letters from our Holliman grandmother, Pearl Elmer Caine Holliman (1887-1955), I found four not seen before.  Written between December 1944 and May 1945, they capture the feelings of a mother (Pearl) whose family has been in rapid transition since her third born son, Bishop (1919-2018), shipped off to the Navy in November 1941, a few weeks before Pearl Harbor.

There would be three war time marriages from her seven children - Virginia and Walter Cornelius (1942), Ralph and Motie Chism (1943) and Bishop and Gerry (1945).  

Between 1942 and 1945 additional grandchildren for Ulyss and Pearl joined the family, They were John Ferrell (1942), Patti Holliman (1942), Anne (1942) and Jean Holliman (1944), Robert W. Daly, Jr. (1943) and Carol Cornelius (1945). These offspring joined five earlier grandchildren, Mary Daly (1931), Charles H. Ferrell (1936), Carolyn Ferrell (1938) and Jerry and Terry Holliman (1940).  

Pearl did her best with letters to keep up with this expanding flock.  The one examined below and others in next posts welcomed my mother into the growing family.  The warmth, care and worries of a mother and grandmother come through to us again, more than 75 years after they were penned.

Ulyss S. (1884-1965) and Pearl Caine Holliman (1887-1955), Christmas 1946 at their home at 2300 3rd Avenue North, Irondale, Alabama.

 

Bishop and Melton Holliman, 1942.  Bishop Holliman,  a young seaman,  and Melton age 34, the year before he was drafted into the Army.

Page 1, December 3, 1944, Pearl Holliman to Geraldine Stanberry, fiancée of Bishop Holliman.

This letter contains additional information on my Uncle Melton Holliman's (1908-1958) sudden evacuation in November 1944 from a medical unit near Metz, France to England.  After finishing 17 weeks of training at Camp Barkeley, Texas in February 1944, it took until September 1944 before he reached his assignment with General George Patton's 3rd Army.  After only two months of duty as a medic, his health broke down. He left England and arrived at an Army hospital on Long Island, NY shortly after Christmas.  His wife Ida and daughter Patti joined him.  Later he transferred to light hospital duty in Jackson, Mississippi and returned to civilian life, a pharmaceutical salesman in the summer of 1945. 

Ralph Holliman (1924-2017) served as a clerk in the US Army Air Corp stationed first in England in late 1943 and later in France by the late summer of 1944 at a transport base near Paris.

Above Ralph and Motie (1925 - 2003)

Page 2 above contains information on Virginia (1922-2011), Loudelle Holliman Ferrell (1914-1998) and Robert W. Daly, Sr. (1903-1959).

 "Come one of these days all the boys will be home and we will be one big happy family again." 

- Pearl Caine Holliman, 1944

The Whistle Stop Cafe in Irondale and did you Know Bess Fortenberry?

 by Glenn N. Holliman

Return to Irondale, Alabama

This Christmas my wife, Barb, gave me Fannie Flagg's latest book, The Wonder Boy of Whistle Stop which I read in only two sittings.  Ms. Flagg (original name was Patricia Neal but an actress from Tennessee already had that sobriquet) as a budding actress in the late 1960s adopted a southern girl's name, Fannie, and a friend suggested Flagg.  For my English friends reading this I am quite aware that in the Queen's English Ms. Flagg's first 'stage' name means something, well, impolite.

In real life the town of Whistle Stop (see her earlier book, Fried Green Tomatoes) is Irondale, Alabama, a suburb on the western edge of Birmingham. Ms. Flagg's great aunt, Bess Fortenberry, for forty some years ran the Fortenberry Cafe on 1st Avenue facing the multi-track rail road.  The  business section of Irondale until 1960 was one block of 1st Avenue.  Next door to the Fortenberry Cafe, my Uncle Robert Daly and his brother, George, purchased the hardware store in 1944 which operated until 1960.

Above, H. Bishop Holliman (1919-2018) in 2011 in front of the Irondale Cafe. My father wrote extensively on his boyhood in Irondale in the 1920s and 30s.  These writings can be found at the virtual archive of the family, www.bholliman.com. 

Several times in the 2010's when I took him back to Irondale, he would point out where the Fortenberry's lived on 2nd Avenue South.  Below is the way the house looks today.  In 1940 this imposing home was listed in value at $4,000 a sizeable sum before World War II.  

The 1940 census recorded that Bess Fortenberry, age 32, lived in the house with her brother, James H. Fortenberry and his wife and child. Brother Jim sold insurance and evidently did well in his profession.

 A lodger in the house was a 28 year old single female, Chris Griffin, born in Mississippi.  The census records Bess owned a cafe, worked 70 hours a week, 52 weeks a year!  The lodger, Chris, served as a waitress at the cafe, and earned $720 in 1939.  

If you follow the plot of Fried Green Tomatoes and again in The Wonder Boy of Whistle Stop, one surmises that Fanny Flagg, Bess's niece, based her characters on the two women.  

Wonder Boy is a nostalgic read, southern in tone and written with a warm heart.  A fine Christmas gift for a husband who spent the first two weeks of his life in Irondale, and has visited often through out his long life.  Full disclosure, I am not the wonder boy in the book!

Christmas Past - The WWII Generation at Christmas

 by Glenn N. Holliman

Christmas 2020, a Reflection on 70 Years Past

I have posted the below photographs in previous years, but as this Christmas season is a very different one for many of us, I feel moved to share for the younger folks reading this what a Christmas past was like for my generation.  Extended families will be separated due to the Covid-19 virus, an unexpected and deadly visitor to the Year 2020. 

So as my late father often did, I step back in time and through old photographs rekindle  warm feelings when families could gather and celebrate the rituals that sustain us as human beings.

Below is one of the last pictures of the complete family of Ulyss and Pearl Caine Holliman of 2300 Avenue North in Irondale, Alabama in December 1950. To my knowledge, never again would so many relations gather for a photograph with the grandparents present.

World War II had been over for five years but that winter America was in a new conflict known as the Korean War. We were living under the shadow of the new atomic bomb and experiencing a Cold War with the Soviet Union, a former ally, now an adversary. Four the men in picture, Melton, Bishop, Ralph and Walter, were veterans of WWII.  Uncle Sam did not call any of them back to service in Korea.  However, one of those pictured below, moi, did do service in a later war in the late 1960s.  Jerry and Terry Holliman were in the U.S. Army prior to the Viet Nam War.

Back row left to right: Euhal and Edna Holliman, Vena Holliman Daly, Mary Daly Herrin, Robert Daly, Charles Ferrell, Loudelle Holliman Ferrell, Ralph and in front wife, Motie Holliman, Melton and Ida Holliman, Gerry and Bishop Holliman, and in between them Walter Cornelius.  Middle row: Charles H. Ferrell, Susan Cornelius Williams in her mother, Virginia Holliman Cornelius' lap, Ulyss and Pearl Holliman holding Becky Holliman Payne, Carolyn Ferrell holding Pam Holliman, Patti Holliman, and John Ferrell. Front row: Bob Daly, Jerry and Terry Holliman, Anne and Jean Holliman, Nancy Carol Cornelius Morton and Glenn N. Holliman.  Yet to be born were Kathy Holliman, Tommie Holliman Allen and Bill Holliman and Alice Holliman Murphy.

Gathered above are the seven children of Ulyss and Pearl all with their spouses and their own children.  In this picture, there are 15 first cousins, which by 1956 would grow to 19 cousins.  

Remarkably eighteen cousins are still living, but we sadly lost Jerry Holliman in 2003 to heart disease.  Jerry is kneeling on the floor next to his identical twin, Terry.  I could never tell them apart.  Now all of the cousins are age 64 and older, most of us in our 70s, and several in their 80s.  Three of us are dressed as cowboys, the fad of the day for youngsters, most of us trying to look like Hopalong Cassidy or Roy Rogers. Bob Daly on the front row, far right, seemed to have come armed with a toy rifle!  

With the passing of my father, H. Bishop Holliman in 2018, the seven siblings and their partners now are gone.  My grandparents, Pearl and Ulyss died in 1955 and 1965.

I believe the hand written identification of the seven children and grandparents is that of cousin Charles Ferrell. This generation dressed formally for important family gathers.  The men are in suits and ties and the ladies dressed elegantly .  Note the large Christmas tree on the left.  As a child I was amazed by the then very modern electric lights, some that bubbled some type of oil.  Electric Christmas tree lights only appeared in the 1910s.

These Christmas gatherings at the Holliman household, I remember as very festive occasions when we children would play together and feverishly open our presents.  There were so many that the packages under the tree spilled over into the living room.  

Three new generations have appeared since this family gathered in what had been the childhood home of the seven siblings.  Seventy years on, these aunts, uncles and cousins still live in my memories of yesteryear Christmas's.  I suspect I am not the only cousin who cherishes the time past. - GNH

PS - Cousin Dr. Bob Daly, who has been experiencing health problems, would enjoy hearing from his cousins.  He asked me to pass along his email address which is humbander1943@yahoo.com.  Bob is Alabama's premier biologist on the plant life and birds of the Southeast United States.  Each summer over 400 hummingbirds are attracted to his feeder!

From My Grandmother's Album

 by Glenn N. Holliman

 'Almost No One Looked at the Camera'!

The above is not from my sister's Becky Holliman Payne's attic but evidently one passed along to me from my great grandmother, 'Lulu' Hocutt Caine, center with the black collar, and then to my grandmother, Pearl Caine Holliman (1888-1955) who is in the upper right corner.  The year is possibly 1905 ca and taken evidently on the front porch of the William Lee Roy Caine family of Caine's Ridge south of Fayette, Alabama.  William  Caine (1862-1938) is sporting a mustache and looking in the opposite direction of his wife, who I have always known as 'Grandma Caine.'  Her full name is Ruth Lougena "Lula' Hocutt Caine (1861-1957).

The toothless lady in polka dots on the far left is evidently Lula's mother in law, Melissa Chandler Anthony Caine (1829-1913), my generation's great, great grandmother.  If she appears a bit worn, she did give birth to eight children.  Melissa was born in Jackson County, Georgia.  This is the only known photograph I know of her.  

Front row, between her grandmother and mother, is Vista Caine Gumpp (1898-1986), who according to my  father Bishop Holliman (1919-2018) had a lively social life, much to the chagrin of her oldest sister Pearl.  Pearl remembered a childhood Christmas morning with no presents as her father had 'drunk up' whatever financial surplus the struggling farm family had accumulated.  My grandmother became a (1893-1955) harsh opponent of alcohol consumption, supported Prohibition and embraced a fundamentalist Christian faith that condemned whisky, beer, dancing and card playing. Smoking and chewing tobacco, however, were accepted.  Several of my cousins remember Granda Ma Caine's empty coffee can that served as a make-do spittoon.

The young girl in the upper left is Maude Caine Cook (1893-1941).  Maude's family moved to Irondale, Alabama in the 1910s as did the Caine and Ulyss Holliman families seeking economic opportunities in Birmingham, the Magic City, that exploded in growth in the late 19th Century due to the development of the steel industry.  Maude, stricken with polio as a child, was wheel chair bound and died early on the family farm in Leeds, Alabama.

Pictured in the second row, center, is my Great Uncle Floyd Caine (1883-1966).  He became a druggist and employed his nephew Melton Holliman (1908-1958) as an assistant.  Melton would become a successful pharmaceutical salesman before his succumbing to an early heart attack. My belief is his premature death was due to his World War II service in France during the cold, rainy autumn of 1944 when attached as a medic in General George Patton's 3rd Army. He was invalided back to first England, then Long Island, New York before finishing his service in a Jackson, Mississippi military hospital in the spring of 1945.

Part of the Movement from Farm to City  

The Caines, Cooks and Hollimans were part of the great migration of Americans from farms to cities as part of the late 19th and early 20th century industrial and technological revolution in the United States and Europe. The USA census of 1920 for the first time revealed more persons living in urban areas rather than the rural farms or small villages. This move to cities opened up educational opportunities and lucrative careers for the descendants of Lula, Pearl, Maude and Vista undreamed by the immediate post Civil War generation in the Deep South. My parents, aunts, uncles, cousins, siblings and I are beneficiaries of this legacy. - GNH

 

From my Sister's Attic, Part 1

by Glenn N. Holliman

The First of a Number of Photographs from an Attic - 

Three Generations in 1952

First row, left to right, Glenn, Pam and Becky Holliman.  Second row, Motie, Ulyss, Pearl and Gerry Holliman.  Back row, Ralph holding Kathy.

Recently my two sisters, Rebecca L. Holliman Payne and Alice Holliman Murphy found the above photograph in one of my late father's scrapbooks.  Bishop and Ralph, two sons,  of Ulyss and Pearl Caine Holliman posed with their parents, wives and children at Bishop and Gerry Stansbery Holliman's house in Trussville, Alabama. The time may have been early spring on a Sunday afternoon judging by the formality of the clothing.

Both Ralph and Bishop, my father, World War II veterans, took advantage of the G.I. Bill for college education and by 1952 were launched on careers in business and government.  Both would do well, and unlike so many in the 21st Century stayed with one company (Ralph - American Bakeries and Bishop - the Social Security Administration) their entire working careers. Both men moved their families many times as promotions and more responsibilities came.  

The families enjoyed the incredible economic post-war boom that pushed the American standard of living to record heights.

The four children pictured above all attended college and graduate school in the 1960s and 70s and developed careers in education, social services, publications and church.  The girls, unlike their mothers and their grandmother, worked outside of the home as did the majority of women in the latter part of the 20th Century.

Presaging his son's experiences, Ulyss moved his family for economic reasons during World War I from Fayette, Alabama to Birmingham.  Raised on a farm, Ulyss married Pearl in 1906, farmed and later worked in a lumber yard.  By 1914 with four children to feed (Melton, Vena, Euhal and Loudelle), Ulyss move his family to Irondale and found employment with the Birmingham Electric Company repairing street cars.  Three more children were born: Bishop 1919, Virignia 1922 and Ralph 1924.  Ulyss retired in 1949 and died in 1965. 

When Ulyss was born in 1884, there were no automobiles, telephones, electricity, radio, television or airplanes.  When he passed away men circled the earth in spacecraft and computers were crunching numbers.  Never in human history had there been so much technological change as during the life time of my grandfather.

More on Trussville, a suburb of Birmingham

The Bishop and Gerry Holliman house in Trussville, Alabama, built 1937, purchased by in 1950 was sold in 1952 when my father's new employment in the Social Security system resulted in a transfer to Johnson City, Tennessee.  The address is 207 Oak Street and the neighborhood is today a National Historical District. The house sold in 1952 for $8,000.

The City of Trussville web site records that 287 residential units were built between 1936 and 1938 as part of the New Deal federal programs to provide housing, employment and stimulate the economy still suffering from the Great Depression.  The 615 acre suburban development was constructed on land unsuitable for farming, the former 'Slag Heap Village' taking its unpleasant name from the metal waste from a former iron furnace.  

"The homes were sturdily built with indoor plumbing, running water, electricity and amenities rare at the time in much of Alabama" records the city web site.  Parks, paved streets and sidewalks were the norm.  "Trussville children in the 50s enjoyed an uncomplicated, small-town life. Children entertained themselves by walking up and down the street playing on the Mall, and swimming in the Cahaba.  Most of families has only one car or no vehicle, but a bus went daily into Birmingham in the morning and came back that afternoon."

Trussville incorporated in 1947, absorbing both the Cahaba Village (the development) and 'Old Trussville.  The next year, the government deeded all park property to the town.