MY UNCLE JIM HUFFSTUTTER

MY UNCLE JIM HUFFSTUTTER
Originally uploaded by roberthuffstutter

Sometime around 1944, I remember my younger sister and I living in a large room with many other children. Why we were tjere, why we were put in an orphanage is a question my dad or mom never told me.

Eventually, my Uncle Jim came to my rescue. My sister was returned to our mom and had the unique experience of living with a step dad and a lot of new half brothers. I was spared that gregarious part of childhood, a subject we start to discuss on occasions and then change the subject. Domestic problems are not new; they have been around since the Garden epoch.

To avoid a lot of verbs and nouns, let me simply say that uncle JIm was the father i remember best. He was a great provider of food, shelter and clothing and there are many fond memories I cherish of his unique way of raising an only son, a nephew, me.

My memories of the man who was my dad's older brother are fond and seem to become more intense as I grow older. It is, I suppose, natural for a man to compare himself to his father in greatness; it is only normal for a male to want to know if he has measured up to his dad.Looking back, I see few men who were greater than Uncle Jim. He had a unique greatness about him that I will never atttain; he had a character I admired and still respect. My uncle's greatness was born from his early independence as a youth and his desire to educate himself beyond the level of his last class in the Laredo, Missouri school he attended. Seven years older than my dad, Jim knew early in life that he would be on his own and that if he wanted to succeed in life it would depend on his ability to use his mind and hands. There were no child welfare programs in the early twentieth century; there was nodbody checking on who was going to school and filling out reports on home conditions. If there had been, my Uncle and my dad would have been seperated and parted by welfare agencies forever.

Having lost his mother shortly after she gave birth to my dad, Jim used to talk about how much he had loved his mother; he told me how he last remembered her laying in state in the home with a filmy netting covery her in canopied fashion. In 1912, embalming was not mandantory and the deceased had to be be kept cool. There was usually a speedy burial of the relative that passed away back then. He told me how the undertaker had driven up to the house with the horses and how the casket with his mother remained in his memory forever, always riding in the wagon toward Black Oak Cemetery. He said it was a rainy day when they laid his mother, Sarah Jane Rooks Huffstutter to rest. He mentioned, time and again, the rain and the color of the grey in the sky, the sound of the horses as the wagon headed toward the old cemetery where relatives who fought for the Union are still buried.

Nobody in our family ever owned slaves or dealt in the business of slavery, a fact that makes me free from paternal and personal guilt, though it is God's law that we are not punished for the sins of our fathers. There were thousands who were punished. That is an unfortunate part of history. I take comfort in the fact that I did not choose my parents based on political correctness or prejudice. Life is what it is and who gets what soul is not mine to discuss, thus I prefer to leave this to those who continue to be preoccupied with the negative history of a great nation.

Uncle Jim was proud he had uncles who fought for the preservation of this nation. He told me stories about the loss of those relatives, stories passed down by his father, a relatively elderly gentleman when he began what was his second family in 1898 with the birth of his first son, Frank, three daughters, Jim and finally my dad. Their dad, Robert Levi Huffstutter, born in 1856, had a prior family he left back in Indiana when his first wife refused to move to Texas in the 1890s. He simply hitched up his wagon, so the story goes, asked her one last time to join him, and headed west. Two of his former children got in the wagon with him for the drive to Texas in the area he wanted to settle. Eventually, he moved to Missouri. Family histories get really complex. I have never been one to spend time climbing family trees, but the fact that my grandfather, my dad's dad was born in 1856 while Lincoln was alive and President has always held a certain fascination for me. It has, in some ways I feel, given me a link to the past that makes me feel closer to that era in our nation's history.

My uncle told me many stories about Union veterans who had been wounded in the fight to preserve this nation. My uncle was a patriotic man; he knew the history of this nation because he had taken it upon himself to read. As a little child, I recall how much time he spent reading the Kansas CIty Star and newspapers he found on the train. When the train run ended, he and the other railroad crew would divide the magazines and newspapers. But I could go on and on about my admiration for my uncle and I will, at a future time. For the moment, let me say that my Uncle's greatness was, in my opinion, a sincere greatness he created as a small lad and continued adding to it as time passed.
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