Because of his deafness, my maternal grandfather was not a one-on-one grandparent. I knew him to be a gentle, kind man, but we had little to say to each other because he could not hear me. However, according to my mother, his youngest child, Granddaddy Leigh was very much of a hands-on father when she was growing up. Even then he was gentle and kind. He had been a bookkeeper who lost his job, pre-depression, because of his hearing loss, so he took several jobs beneath his education and intelligence to support his family.
My mother told me that there were only two times that she ever saw her father weep, and they were both during World War II. One was when he was trying to listen to the old radio in the parlor the night that Paris fell to the Nazis. None of them could believe that beautiful Paris had fallen. Somber orchestral music played after the announcement, interspersed with the popular song, “The Last Time I Saw Paris,” which became like a dirge given the circumstances.
The other was when he and my mother went to the movies and he saw the newsreels from London, showing the children of that ravaged city being separated from their parents when they were being sent to the English countryside for safety. My grandfather had left his mother and family in Granada, Mississippi, to go to Bowling Green College in Kentucky when he was a very young man. While he was in school, his mother died, and he never returned home. It seems that J. Lane Leigh, my great grandfather, remarried very soon after my great grandmother, Antoinette Crowder Leigh, died. In fact, family lore has it that my great grandfather had several marriages before he himself died, or as it was actually said, “He made a habit of marrying the only daughter of doctors!”
My grandfather moved from the Mississippi Delta to south Mississippi, met my grandmother, married and fathered seven children. Thankfully, his kindness and sensitivity were passed on to his children, to his grandchildren, and, hopefully, to his other descendants.
Let's hope so!!
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