Life Down Here

Buddy's Story

Prologue

My dad was the man I admired most.  Not an unusual desire for a son to look up to and want to be like his father, particularly a father who cared for his sons and daughters and did all the things fathers do to earn such love and respect.  Growing up in the 50’s and 60’s there were plenty of heroes of all kinds for young boys to take as role models and to desire to be like.  You talked about it at school.  “Boy, I want to be like Micky Mantle when I grow up!” a young school mate would say, and another would exclaim about his sports idol (who was inevitably better than Micky Mantle in that kid’s eyes).  The movies and television (if you had a TV or could afford to go to a movie) offered an array of fictional heroes.  All these, real and imagined, were laid out in black and white for the public to see.  I’m not talking about the format of the media either, but of the qualities of the persons.  That was a period in our cultural time when the good guys were good and the bad guys were bad, and both aspects were never allowed to appear in one person; something that could only be found in novels.  We were raised on such naivety.  Only later in life do we see the shades of gray.  Very little is hidden these days.  Our culture thrives on destruction.  It does not want clean heroes.  It will take a morally modest man and turn a mole hill of a flaw into a mountain; hold up the most amoral person there is and swear he is the Messiah.

This is why I want to tell you about my dad, and why he and many fathers like him are the most admired men by their sons.  My father had a strong sense of what was right, and what was wrong, and lived by what he thought was right.  I believe he had been raised to be too honest even for his own good at times.  (Quite remarkable since his father was too much a product of his own times.) Buddy did his best to instill that attribute in me.  Yet, had I had to endure the hard knocks he did in coming of age, I might be writing this from a jail cell somewhere, or not at all, for having passed beyond the pall to young.  He was the man I wanted to be most like in most ways. My aim is to give some of those reasons in these pages.

A Naming

My father’s name was Quitman Williams, no middle name.   He was the sixth child born to Leslie and Lillie Holloway Williams.  The story is that Mother Lillie declared that she had had enough and that he would be her last child, so she was going to name him Quit.  The attending physician who filled out the birth certificate (someone who had probably heard this same declaration before from other mothers in the aftermath of the pain of child birth) advised Mother Lillie to give it a little time and think about a name before saddling the little fellow with the name of Quit; something he would have to carry and explain for the rest of his life.  However, if she was dead set on Quit, he suggested she name him Quitman. 

Quitman is a somewhat famous name, though not often mentioned.  There are several towns and at least one county in America, maybe more, that carry that name.  Most if not all pay tribute to John Anthony Quitman (September 1, 1798 – July 17, 1858) who was a brigadier general under Zachary Taylor in the Mexican-American War.  He also served as governor of Mississippi twice, from 1835 to 1836 and again from 1850 to 1851.  I guess for the times it would have been a good namesake.

So, the good doctor, A. H. Montgomery, M. D., at the time of filing the birth certificate put down for Full Name of Child “unnamed.”  So, for at least twenty years until he was drafted into the army in February 1953, or either later when he went to work for Crown Zellerbach Corp. in 1962, his official name was unnamed Williams. One official copy of his reissued birth certificate I have seen with the name change, is dated October 2, 1964.  I believe that one of these two life changing events required him to go through the process of changing the birth certificate to read Quitman Williams.  Unnamed Williams just did not fly in our bureaucratically-developing nation.

Mother Lillie apparently relented on naming him Quit and his name became Quitman.  But nobody in the family used that name.  He was always known as Buddy.  Just when and who started calling him Buddy is not remembered.  When I asked him, Dad did not even know for sure.  Some people never knew him as Quitman, only as Buddy.  When he was in the hospital after the surgery that found his cancer one of the local ministers came to visit, but since the hospital did not have a record for a Buddy Williams the minister went back home without seeing Dad.  For thirty-six years he worked at a paper mill where everyone knew him as Quitman but referred to him as Willie.  (I was known as Little Willie when I spent the summers during my college years working there as a labor/utility operator.)  Few if any coworkers ever heard him called Buddy.

According to his birth certificate it was 7:00 AM on the 28th of September 1932.  I do not know if it was a hot day or a cold day, a rainy day or one of sunshine, or if it was exactly seven in the morning or just a close guess, but our father had arrived.  However, he was not aptly named.  Mother Lillie did not quit.  She went on to have four more children with Leslie Lee Williams.  The last one was born sixteen years later in 1948!  That is for another story.

(to be continued)