This is part of my "52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks" blog challenge.
Melvin Leroy Cole - My Father
Biographical Sketch:
Melvin Leroy "Lee" Cole was born 20 February 1926 in Huntington, Sebastian Co, Arkansas, youngest of eight children born to Fred Clint & Elizabeth Dosia (Harrison) Cole, who were married in 1909.
He attended elementary school in Barling, Arkansas and high school in Fort Smith, Arkansas, served in the Navy during World War II (1942-1946), graduated from Seattle University (1951), served in the Air Force during the Korean War (1952), worked for the Social Security Administration (1955-1958), and worked as a part-time teacher and self-employed entrepreneur the years following, both in Mexico and United States, until his retirement in about 1990. He died at 88 years of age in San Bernardino, San Bernardino Co, California on 22 May 2014 from complications of a falling injury sustained six months earlier near his home.
Lee was married three times, first to Barbara Anderson in Seattle, Washington (1947), second to Irmgard Schoennauer in Ellensburg, Washington (1955), and third to Olga Garza in Monclova, Mexico (1964).
Family members who survived at his death were his son Robert Cole (Maria), Angier, NC, and son Arthur Cole (Yvonne), Huntsville, AL from his marriage to Irma; Jacqueline Cortez, Grand Prairie, TX, and Walter Cole, Grand Prairie, TX from his marriage to Olga. He was also survived by his three grandchildren, Jennifer Cole, Appleton, WI; Stephanie Cortez, Grand Prairie, TX; and Kimberly Cole, Grand Prairie, TX.
He was preceded in death by his parents, Fred (1888-1970) and Dosie (1892-1928); sisters, Neva Ethridge (1912-1989), Virginia Irene Kral (1921-2008), and Vivian Eileen Smith (1924-1997); and brothers, Lloyd Cole (1914-1974), Clint Cole (1917-1917), Everett Ray Cole (1917-1982), and James Murl Cole (1919-1993).
At his wish, Lee's body was cremated shortly after his death, and his cremains were interred with Navy Honors at Dallas-Fort Worth National Veterans Cemetery in Grand Prairie, Texas on 24 June 2014.
Other Life Details about my father he either relayed to me or that I discovered independently in my research:
Although many of my father's records show his year of birth as 1925, he was actually born in 1926, and was the youngest child of Fred and Dosie Cole. I remember hearing from someone in the family that because Dosie died within two years of his birth that Fred, most of his life, blamed Lee for her death and was never really close to him. Lee and a few of the other younger siblings (Virginia & Vivian, I think) were raised for many years in a notorious orphanage, the Tilles Children’s Home in Fort Smith, Arkansas. Shortly after the attack on Pearl Harbor, his oldest sister, Neva helped create a false birth certificate (in the form of a "Delayed Birth Certificate" showing Oklahoma as his place of birth) that showed Lee was a year older than he was, and he was able to leave the orphanage and enlist into the Navy a year sooner than he could have done without it. I have both his real birth certificate showing his birth in Arkansas and the illegitimate one showing that he was born in 1925 in Oklahoma.
In about 1947, Lee headed to Seattle to attend college there at Seattle University, and met and married his first wife, Barbara Jean Anderson. I have very little information about the woman, and even though I had asked Lee several times while he was living about her, he provided nothing in the way of substantive information. It was a short relationship, and apparently no children came from this union. As shown in the picture attached, she looks to be an attractive young woman. Even Lee admitted personally to me when we reconnected years later that he was a pretty shallow person in his romantic life, so I could see that her good looks were his primary attraction to her. Obviously, the relationship based on attraction would soon wear off for both of them. I would love to find out more about her, what really caused their break-up, and where she ended up later in life. In my genealogy research in King County, Washington records, I have not been able to find a divorce document for the couple or any positive record of her after their separation. But I have identified several possible women in genealogical records who may have been her in later life, but can't put those names into the public realm without more details or better confirmation.
Many of us have probably heard of some family member, in possibly our own family or another person's family, who uses the tragic term, “He's dead to me,” referring to a relative who caused such severe emotional injury or hurt that they were rejected from the family. In an email correspondence with one of my father's nieces, she had relayed to me that she had been told that my father had been killed by either a motorcycle accident or died from a drowning accident. I suspect that the "death story" may have been a convenient way one of the other slighted family members may have resolved an argument between themselves and my father. The story of his motorcycle accident and drowning may have been created to banish him from family circles, much the same way that politically incorrect conservatives are blacklisted or "cancelled" in today's liberal social media outlets.
On a family research visit I made to Arkansas in 1983, my father's older brother, Murl and his wife, Vera, told me many interesting family stories about relatives, near and distant, and provided me contact information to follow-up on later. I took an abundant amount of hand-written notes that I felt I could save, review, compare and sort out after I returned home. During the night, one of them got my notebook left on the kitchen table and tore out about three or more of the controversial pages of notes from my conversation with them which I didn't notice until after I returned home. So my memory alone had to suffice to recollect some of the details and stories they relayed to me.
One of the stories they told me about my father may have resulted in this “premature death” tale. I have no way to verify or validate the truth of the story, and have never really shared it with anyone, not only because my father passed away less than ten years ago, but it's also one of those things that really are a proverbial “skeleton in the closet” as far as family history is concerned, which can make people that may have been too close to the story not only uncomfortable but emotionally heart-wrenching. My father was a pretty wild and happy-go-lucky young man. He never really had a father image as a role model to guide and ground him into maturity and responsibility, and his religious upbringing was more disciplinarian in nature, and as a result, rejected all organized religion as an adult. I think his sense of morality never really developed, and he showed that in many aspects of his life.
After he was separated from the Navy at the end of World War II, he lived with one of his older sisters and her family. The story, as related to me by Murl & Vera, was that he had an inappropriate relationship and had sexual contact with either one of his nieces or a niece’s friend who was in the house during his visit. When discovered, his sister kicked him out of the house. I suspect that kind of behavior forever separated him from that family, and the "accidental death" tale may have been created to explain his absence from the family thereafter. Like I said, this was just a story that was told to me, and I have no grounds beyond conjecture and a potentially "knowledgeable third-party recollection" to believe it actually happened, but it might explain the story of his “accidental death.”
Other stories I remember from my visit with Murl and Vera relate to other family members, so will be recorded in the narratives I write under their subject headings.
In the mid-1950s, Lee was working for Social Security in Seattle and met my mother, Irma Schoennauer, who was also working there. This relationship seemed to be fairly superficial for both of them. My mother had admitted to me, possibly as a lesson for me to learn from as a young adult, that she went after him because "he was the catch of the office." My mother was a very competitive young lady, which, along with her drive and natural talent, had made her into one of the foremost swimmers in the Pacific Northwest a decade earlier. So I think she looked at Lee and the attention he was getting from other young women in the office as a competitive challenge for her. My father too told me that he was enamored with the attention she gave him.
So what came next? Obviously, a jump in the sack! As soon as she discovered she was pregnant and told him, he decided to do "the right thing" and offered to marry her. They married in June 1955, primarily because she was pregnant with me. But that had a negative side effect at their government jobs, something they were little prepared for at the time and apparently didn't have the foresight to see prior to their romantic tryst. Due to the government rules at the time of married couples not being allowed in the same office (referred to as the policy of “anti-nepotism”), as soon as they married they were forced to relocate to different Social Security offices. That is why I was born eight months later in Long Beach, California and three years later my brother was born in Baltimore, Maryland in 1959, where we lived until 1966. That marriage, if you can call it that -- because they rarely lived together -- ended in divorce about 1963.
Although I have very few memories as a child of my father, I still recall their final goodbyes when I was about four or five years old. We were somewhere in downtown Baltimore a little before sunset in my father's old yellow pick-up truck. I remember quick hugs and kisses were exchanged, my mother and I got out of the truck, and he drove away while we watched from the sidewalk. Little did I understand at the time it would be my last sight of him for about twenty years. I guess what I did remember was impetus enough for me to search for him as a young adult to try to get some answers and get reacquainted. My younger brother had no such recollection of him and never had any interest in ever meeting or talking with him, not really out of any anger, at least from what he's told me, but primarily out of disinterest and lack of wanting to complicate his life.
Jumping back a few years to shortly after I was born, Lee's employment at Social Security was fairly short-lived, not only because he was frustrated at trying to follow my mother from Washington State to Long Beach, California in the fall of 1955 prior to my birth, then to Kansas City, Kansas where we moved about a year later, and finally to Baltimore, Maryland before my brother was born in 1959, but also because he found himself staying one step ahead of disciplinary action. Lee's father, my grandfather, Fred Cole had turned 65 in the mid-1950s and apparently did not qualify for social security benefits, so my father, as a Social Security Claims Representative, was in the position to enable his father to be "qualified" for benefits, which he did, but apparently not legitimately. Once discovered and investigated, I believe Lee was given the choice of resigning from his position or face punishment and dismissal, and he chose the path of lesser consequence.
When he left Social Security, with his second marriage going down the drain, he continued to wander, apparently alternating short visits with us wherever we were living and visiting with relatives and doing odd jobs to make a living. After he left us for the final time in about 1960, he ended up in Mexico, living an entrepreneurial life transporting vehicles back and forth across the border, along with purchasing vehicles, clothing, appliances and local products that he could buy cheaply on one side of the border and sell for profit on the other side of the border. Shortly before I located him in about 1983 or 1984, he was teaching English grammar to Mexican school children as a teacher’s aide and assisting Mexican adults prepare documentation for worker visas and applications for the American nationalization process.
During the early 1960s, my father met Olga Garza, a Mexican woman from the state of Coahuila in Mexico. Together they bore two children, Jacqueline and Walter, and he built a home for the family there, but having a family still didn’t end his transient life. Because of his knowledge and foresight, even though they lived in Mexico, Lee ensured both children were born in Texas to guarantee their U.S. citizenship.
I met Walter as a teenager, shortly before he enlisted into the Navy, exchanged letters back and forth with him for a few years, and as the direct contact with him faded, I kept up with him through my visits and phone calls with our father. During those years Walter seemed to have so much promise for a prosperous adult life, but as my father relayed to me through the years, that promise didn't materialize for him. I didn't see Walter again until our father's funeral, where I met Jacqueline for the first time. As much as I had previously imagined renewing a relationship with both of them, it took seeing them and talking with them at our father's funeral to realize I have no interest in maintaining any further contact with them now that our father is gone. Yes, I would like to share my thoughts and reasons for that, but I won't go into those reasons publicly here.
Despite some health problems that plagued my father his entire adult life, I can vouch for his longevity into his late 80s. After being separated from him from age 5 until about 25, when I finally located him -- with the aid and assistance of two local congressmen from Wisconsin who opened a few locked bureaucratic doors to provide valuable information on his employment history, and with somewhat helpful relatives who provided possible location details, although, as I learned later, conveniently withheld key information that may have hastened the outcome of my search -- we reunited in the mid-1980s. From that point, he and I were able to get together two or three times every decade until he passed away in 2014. Fortunately, my job while in the military enabled me to make short visits with him every few years. I visited him once or twice when he lived in San Antonio, Texas, and he visited me two or three times when I lived in the Appleton, Wisconsin area.
His last home was in a senior residence housing facility in San Bernardino, California where he maintained his own apartment and lived quite independently despite his mobility restrictions. I was able to visit him two or three times there as well. But unfortunately, primarily because of certain unpleasant dynamics within our families, both his (because of his daughter) and mine (because of my daughter), and secondarily because of my military assignment obligations the two years before I retired, we didn't really stay connected during his last couple years of his life. Thankfully though, I was able to help plan, coordinate and attend the small military funeral we had with the immediate family at the VA cemetery in Grand Prairie, Texas for him in 2014. It was a bittersweet but honorable farewell for me to give to him in his memory. I was able to visit the columbarium where his remains lay at rest a second time earlier this year to see and take pictures of the gravesite marker on our camping trip to the Dallas area which was not mounted in time for the funeral. It also offered me one last chance to say goodbye.
While I cannot judge fully his soul at the time of his death, I grieve that there seemed to be no sign him recognizing and acknowledging Jesus Christ as his personal Savior any time I knew him as an adult. He was so resentful at the priests and nuns that provided him authoritarian guidance and stringent supervision at the Tilles Children's Home in Fort Smith, Arkansas where he and two of his sisters were raised, that over his lifetime he developed his own brand of spirituality based on a mix of religious concepts I can only describe as New Age Hinduism with positive social interaction (i.e. a Karma-type "consideration for others" thinking).
Being concerned with his lack of acceptance of my own spiritual beliefs and Christian example, on my first visit to San Antonio, Texas to see him shortly after locating him I brought him a "God's Word to the Nations" Bible, which was a relatively modern biblical translation I thought would divinely inspire him, and gave it to him as a hopeful, soul-stirring gift. While he seemed appreciative of my effort, he kindly but earnestly rejected my offer, trying to explain to me his own spiritual beliefs, viewpoints and thinking, joking with me when I tried to explain our afterlives that he believed his soul would never completely die but be "recycled" into some other living thing. At other times when I tried to witness to him my Christian faith to varying degrees, he ardently avoided any discussion of after-life spirituality. So, yes, I have a feeling we won't be seeing each other in eternity.
Well, that's it on my father. Thanks for taking this walk with me down Memory Lane!
Bob
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