27 Lutha

Lutha

By Rick Bein with edits from Jeanie, Elly and Alex Bein

My grandfather Luther William (Luke) Holloway grew up in the “cracker” culture of north Florida; more specifically, in Alachua County, north of the town of Gainesville. I don’t know much about his youthful years, but I do know he graduated from the University of Florida and went on to Medical School at Tulane in New Orleans. He married my grandmother, Jean O’Leary, a native of New Orleans and returned to Florida to become the first pediatrician in Florida.  Everyone called his wife Sister Jean, reminiscent of southern names.  Because she was a devout Catholic, she was horrified that he came from a Lutheran home and was named after Martin Luther.  Therefore, she renamed him Luke.  We always knew him as Daddy Luke.  During WWI he served as a medic and when he returned they lived for a short time in Carrabelle, Florida, where my mother was born in 1920, and where he practiced as a general practitioner.  He aspired to focus in pediatrics and found a position in Jacksonville, the largest town in the State in the early 1920s.

I knew him as an easy going grandfather whom I remember seeing about four times, only in my early life. During the 2nd world war while my father was moving around with the Navy, my mother and I spent some time at their big house at 1516 Seminole Road. My sister Jeanie was born there in 1945, right after the war ended. I was too young to remember much about that time, but when I was old enough to remember there was already a strong comfort level established with Daddy Luke who would hold me on his lap for hours at a time and tell me rhymes.

He was a beloved man in Jacksonville and served a large clientele throughout the city. He practiced his pediatrics to the extent that he and Sister Jean, my grandmother, had eleven children.  Mom was the second of the lot. My mother and Father met at the Jacksonville Naval Air base at an officers’ club party which my mother was attending with other Jacksonville debutantes. They were married in 1942 and I was born a year later.

We lived in Colorado where Dad’s family was from, a whole bunch of uncles, aunts, cousins and Gramma (Ellen Bunyan Bein) and Pop Bein (Louis Ferdinand Bein); I gave them those names since I was the first grandchild.  I got to see a lot of the Bein relatives, but Dad and Mom managed to drive me and my siblings to Florida every other summer starting in the late 1940s.

These were four day trips in those days before interstate highways. These trips were fascinating as Dad managed to find a different route each time. We passed through scores of small towns; some of them even had stoplights. Further south, we found that the gasoline stations always had three restrooms, women, men and N……..

I became familiar with road maps at an early age and was navigating the trips by the time I was eight. I think that my love for maps made me into a geographer.

We routed through Kansas and Illinois, Kentucky, Tennessee and Georgia one time.  Another time we went through Oklahoma, Arkansas, Mississippi and Alabama.  The one I became tired of was the route through Texas.  We never seemed to get out of Texas. The first day we arrived in Texas; the next day was still in Texas and finally on the third day we left Texas.  From there the trip through coastal parts of Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama was rather quick. The Panhandle of Florida was rather tedious.

We stayed in motels or with friends or relatives along the way.  We stayed with Uncle Jack in Houston, the O’Leary’s in New Orleans and with Dad’s Navy buddy “Rip” and family in Tennessee.  One time we stopped for lunch in a forested area of the Ozarks. I was fascinated with the woods and went exploring. Meanwhile back at the car, the local men came to check us out. They seemed troubled by our presence.   “What are you doin’ here?” one man asked Dad.

“Just having lunch” Dad told him. The man disappeared down the road.

Soon, another man appeared out of nowhere and asked “How long are you going to be here?” He asked.

Dad was getting nervous, with this interrogation. “There was something going here that the locals did not want discovered,” he was thinking.

Dad and Mom started packing the car and loading up kids.

“Ready to go?” No, someone is missing. It was me; I was still enjoying the woods.

I heard Dad calling, “Rick, we have to go!”

“Darn, just when I’m finding all kinds of neat things” A giant ant hill and a palliated woodpecker had captured my attention.

I ran back to the picnic area:  no one was there. Panic!

Dad sounded the horn from the parking lot.  The engine was running and my door was open, ready for me to jump in. I did just that, not knowing what the hurry was.

Dad explained about the strange behavior of the locals. That did not seem so strange at first, particularly at the expense of not getting to watch the wood pecker.

“I think they had an illegal still around here somewhere and your running around in the woods was not making them very comfortable,” said Dad.

I guess my not being there to experience the interaction with those men kept me from feeling the same urgency.  And what made it worse, I hadn’t eaten yet!  I had my sandwich in the car.

On another trip to Florida, I fell out of the old Studebaker in Tennessee when the car was going around a curve. We had put down a mattress in the back seat that covered up some of our bags that were placed on the floor. Somehow I pushed the door handle with my foot, opening it and with the force of the curve; I slid out onto the ground.

Fortunately we were not going more than 20 miles per hour and I landed on my hands and knees.  As I slid along in the pavement, I saw our car continuing on down the road. I was afraid that they did not know that I had fallen out and I would be left behind on this strange road in Tennessee.  I jumped up and screamed, “Wait for me!” I ran headlong after the car. The semi-trailer truck that had been following us backed off and allowed me to give chase.

It did not occur to me that I might have been injured as I ran after the car. Maybe I would never see my family again.  About 50 yards down the road, the car came to a stop; my Mom had noticed that the car door was open and I was gone. Dad got the message and brought the car to a stop.

I caught up and jumped into the same door from which moments before I had disappeared into the oblivion of concrete and asphalt.  Now, I looked at myself. My hands were all bloody and the knees of my blue jeans were in shreds. Under the shreds were gashes on my knee.

My mother got out the first aid kit and began bandaging me up.  Of course nothing was broken, but I walked very gingerly for a while with the pain from the wounds in my knee.  One scar still remains on my right knee from that accident.

Arriving in Jacksonville was a cause for celebration. After four long days it was a relief to get out of that car and away from everyone’s tempers. The relatives were always very excited to see us and we had a lot of fun.  It was on these occasions that I got to know Daddy Luke a little better.  My younger sister, Ellen remembers that he took my sister Jeanie and me fishing in the Saint Johns River where we caught a half bath tube full of crabs. Ruefully, our three year old Ellen was not allowed take part in this adventure.

One summer, Daddy Luke, Sister Jean and my two youngest uncles Mike and Sam, (only 6 and 8 years older than me) Aunt Catherine drove out to Colorado to visit. That was a great time. For one summer at a time were visited by my mother’s siblings, Uncles Luke, Sam, and Mike. My Aunt Catherine came also.

With great sadness Daddy Luke was not long for this world. In 1954 he died suddenly at home in Jacksonville.  It was either a heart attack that got him.  My mother was the only one who could attend the funeral, and flew there for a few days. He had visited us in June that year to tend to my newborn sister Cathy, who had spinal meningitis.  However, he spent most of that time at the hospital without much time to interact with us.

I remember hearing many stories about Daddy Luke, but the details are a little blurry, so I won’t try to repeat any of these.

One story that I know firsthand came years later in 1970 while I was in graduate school at the University of Florida. This was Daddy Luke’s old stomping ground.  I was writing my master’s thesis on the geographic shift of citrus cultivation down the Florida peninsula and I was in the Agricultural Library on campus.  There were very few people in there as I began searching for references.

I found a few and was sitting at one of tables between the stacks and was going through them taking notes.  The librarian was not used to seeing me there and came up and asked what I was researching. She was quite elderly and she began telling me what she knew about citrus.

“There used to be a lot of o’rnge groves here in Gainesville when ah was a young’un” she related to me.  “But, they’s all gone now.”

“You grew up here?” I asked.

“Yea, born n bred,” she said.

“My grandfather grew up here” I told her.

“What was ‘is name? She asked.

I said “Holloway”.

With much surprise she exclaimed, “You mean Lutha?” (Local pronunciation for Luther.)

Wow, that was quite a co-incidence. She did not tell me too much about my grandfather, but after that she really looked after me.  A few days later when I came back to the library to continue my research, she had collected everything on citrus and had it sitting on the table waiting for me. I don’t know in what way she knew Daddy Luke, but he must have made a great impression because she was determined to do the best she could for me. Each time there were more references for me to go through.