My Father Gave Me the Tools to Find Truth
While my mother laid the foundation for my politics and writing, my father gave me my spirituality and taught me how to sort fact from falsehood.
Dear Dad,
Before we have the annual father’s day phone call, I felt a public note of appreciation was in order. And as I expressed this year how I felt mom had instilled key values in shaping who I have become, I thought I’d do the same for you, and offer a small research present since you insisted I not purchase for you some new trinket. (Though next year I will take some time and find something surprising and special for you!)
So, I thought this morning I might take a moment and seek to confirm or verify a bit of family lore. Something that I remember grandpa telling me when I was young, or mentioning in a conversation which I overheard: he claimed that of the dozen or so kids sired by my great-grandfather, he was the only one to “escape” Texas. I thought this morning I’d see if I could verify that. While, of course, grandpa’s siblings may very well have lived outside of Texas at various points in their life, I’m going to say for the sake of this experiment that if their body ended up buried in Texas dirt then they certainly did not “escape” the state.
My hypothesis: I am going to assume that Grandpa was telling the truth to the best of his knowledge, and was likely right.
So I’m going to guess that he was the only one of his siblings whose remains we both know were spread somewhere other than Texas — since you were the one who did it! It seems sort of special to me knowing that only a handful of people are in on the secret of where grandpa and grandma’s ashes were spread.
Anyway, let’s see what can be discovered via “Find A Grave,” which I certainly acknowledge might not be correct but for the sake of this experiment I’ll regard as mostly reliable data. Here’s great-grandpa’s grave, listed with the incorrect middle name, as we know he was Joseph Oxley Swindle, not Oscar.
Born 1861 in Alabama, died 1939 in Texas - very much a frontier, Wild West period of life, beginning the year the Civil War started (born just 15 days after it was declared!) and ending the year World War II started (dying just 3 months after it began!)
It’s sort of strange to me to think of a life bookended by such events. Beginning life in an age in which men had to pack powder and shot into a primitive gun, and ending in the age in which his youngest son only 6 years later would be involved on a mission related to the dropping of a nuclear bomb by an airplane, a device which did not exist for most of his life. Just bizarre to think about such change in one life - 78 years.
Now, correct me if I’m wrong, but grandpa was the last of a total of 12 children? (Interestingly, at the Geni website, whoever created the family tree only lists 11, not including grandpa. I wonder what that’s about? Is grandpa not even known to parts of his own extended family? What could that mean? I have an idea…)
There were 8 with the first wife Barbara Ann Swindle (1861-1904) and 4 with the second wife Dura Emma Swindle (1882-1971), my great-grandmother? That sounds right according to my memory, which,
has been noticing, seems to be growing more unreliable already. In the evenings when the PTSD returns it seems I sometimes don’t remember the next day all that was said and done.Let’s get down to the experiment now:
How many of them are buried in Texas? EVERY SINGLE ONE EXCEPT GRANDPA, the only one with no image of his resting place and the descriptor “Cremated, Location of ashes is unknown.”
I will also note something else: Grandpa fuckin’ lived the longest! He died at 94, in 2011, the only one to see the 2000s. The only other sibling who made it into their 90s was Ruth Amazon Swindle, who became Ruth Amazon Howington and got to 93, marrying James Wiley Howington who apparently died almost half a century before she did, in 1939. It does not appear that she ever remarried. And it looks like - reflecting how the children of the first wife and the second were basically two separate families - two of her children were even older than grandpa by a few years, Wilford born in 1913 and Bertie in 1915. I guess that was just how olden times were! People were having so many kids that the older ones might even have kids of their old while more were still coming from their parents!
What’s up with that middle name? Amazon? Was that something popular to name girls in the 1890s or something? Was it a time of recent discoveries in the Amazon, perhaps? I’m not sure I care enough to research it and find out.
And I must say: given what we know about how grandpa was treating his body for decades, it’s especially incredible that he lived the longest. (Though, of course, I will concede that he had that advantage of more advanced medical technology. But still! Something to be admired and celebrated!)
From what I can tell, Joseph Oxley was having children from when he was 19 when Edward Eltirey was born in 1880 until he was 55 when grandpa was born in 1916. I guess that makes sense biologically.
Oh, and something else I suppose worth pointing out too: of the 11 siblings buried in Texas, it looks like 9 are at the family cemetery in Indian Gap. The only ones at other Texas cemeteries are Arthur Clifford Swindle (1890-1969) in Hitchcock, Texas (300 miles away from Indian Gap), and John Aquila Swindle (1886-1958) in Plano, Texas (161 miles away).
So what’s the bigger point that I’m trying to make with this Sunday morning research?
Well, as you know from some of our disagreements over the last year and a half, I’ve grown a bit frustrated that growing up - and even today - I never really learned almost anything about our family history beyond my grandparents on both sides. (And even then, I don’t feel like I’ve really gotten anything near the whole story.)
Now, I’ve had to ponder for awhile, why is that? At least specifically as it involves my paternal grandfather? Why does my family knowledge largely just stop with him? And what might this have to do with who I am and how I became who I am? With how you and mom raised me?
I think it simply comes down to this: grandpa was the fuckin’ black sheep of the family. He was the “weird” one. He was the one who decided to leave Texas, and pursue his fortune further west in California. And what happened? He succeeded. In spite of the tragedies of grandpa’s final decades, you and now our family are the proof that he was successful in “escaping” the culture of his origins, and providing a foundation that his children and descendants could then utilize to lift themselves up even further.
So why am I so different? Why is our family so quirky? Because that’s where we literally come from - the child who thought he’d do something different with his life and then made it happen.
And as I look back now on nearly 40 years, I can see with greater clarity the foundation which you were most responsible for establishing for me so that I could thrive. I thought it appropriate to start this little appreciation to you with the above family research and hypothesis-testing for a bigger purpose of course: to make clear that the life I now live, of professional research and daily journalism which can support me and the new family which I’m now growing, began with what you taught and instilled within me.
I didn’t realize until not long ago the extent to which your career as a research scientist imprinted on me. I thought that since I was going into a career not in hard science that I was going down such a different path than you and now my sister the nurse, future anesthesiologist. But now it’s very clear that my training in political science, research, and years of professional practice in journalism provided for me a similar more rigorous truth-testing and pursuing than many in my field.
Honestly, often times it’s been clear to me how the scientific method and scientific skepticism which you instilled in me and that I then developed academically and professionally has been more of a hindrance on the activism side of my career. If I did not know how to pursue truth and test claims then I could very well have been swept up in the Trump movement. If I was not so militant about the value of science then the disinformation spread throughout right-wing media might not have been a career-shifting moment for me, propelling me away from right-left warmongering and into the Zionist writing which I focus on today. I realized how unusual and ill-fitting it was for me to be one who tried to find the truth first and apply ideological principles second, while most of my colleagues for years did the opposite. Being a trained researcher/journalist does not make one an effective and loyal ideological foot soldier!
But you also provided me with the most important method for coping with these frequent difficulties professionally and in how I’ve come to see such a warlike world. You were the one who encouraged me and mentored me spiritually, inspiring a love of the Bible which I still have today, and being ultimately the most influential person in how I’ve come to read it.
Even though at times I’ve argued with you about how I’ve sometimes resented some of what I now see as the shortcomings of the more liberal Christianity which you taught me, I do still largely embrace its ethos. It taught me to read the Bible and engage with the Christian tradition in all its complexity - that there are always multiple ways to interpret the same scriptures. The same approach which you taught me with science, you taught me with faith too - that we must always dig deeper for the truth, and not just go along with our initial assumptions and strong feelings.
Well, that’s probably enough. You get what I’m saying - I’ve probably said variations of this to you before at times. But thought it just best to spell it out for the historical record and so that everyone can know a bit better how much you were responsible for who I’ve become today, and how deeply I appreciate and respect you for it.
Happy Father’s Day, Pop. I love you so much,
David