My father's store

My father, G.L. (Bud) Dryden, Jr., in 1929.
From the Central Wesleyan College yearbook.

My father died in 1966. He was 58. I was 14.  

He didn’t see me graduate from high school or college. He never met my wife or six of his nine grandchildren. Sometimes I go for days without thinking about him. It’s not that I don’t hold him in the highest regard. I do. It’s just that he’s been gone so long, and that I became accustomed at a young age to not having him around.  

But there’s one place I always miss him so badly it hurts  – and that is when I go to a superstore like Target or Costco.

My father ran a general store in Auxvasse, Missouri. Dryden’s Store sold everything from milk and meat to canned goods and kerosene, from hosiery and overalls to boots, blankets and toys. It was housed in a redbrick building at the north end of the town’s block-long business district.

Customers entered through a covered tiled porch sandwiched between two raised display windows. The first floor had two rooms – a large retail space for groceries, dry goods and housewares, and a back room to store wooden cases of soda, barrels of vinegar, blocks of salt, and chicken feed. The back room also contained a kerosene pump for those customers who didn’t have electricity and depended on the fuel to light their homes.

The dark, moldy-smelling basement, accessible from the back room, contained a cast iron furnace, along with a giant pile of coal to keep it stoked in winter, and was used to store cases of canned and bottled goods. 

A staircase on the right side of the first floor led to a mezzanine with two rooms -- one for shoes, boots and ladies’ hats, and a second my father used as his office and to store boxes of cereal and crackers. He arranged his desk overlooking the floor below so that, when he was doing paperwork, he could keep an eye on his store.

A small room on the third floor was used for storage. This floor also contained several apartments. One was rented to the local phone company whose operator connected calls using an old-fashioned switchboard. 

A wooden platform freight elevator ran from the basement to the top floor. Dad never used it – he found it quicker to carry whatever he needed from one floor to the next -- but his children, nieces and nephews played with it on Sundays when the store was closed and he could allow them to yank themselves between floors to their hearts’ content without every other child in town begging for a ride.

The ceiling of the first floor was made of stamped tin. The floors were wide pine planks that, every Saturday night after closing, were mopped with kerosene to keep the dust down, giving the store a distinctive but not unpleasant scent of oil.

Groceries were displayed on the the left side of the store. Upon entering, customers passed two racks of bread, wooden bins of potatoes and onions, oversized glass jars of cookies, shelves of crackers and boxed foods, and a rack of candy. There was an open coffin-like cold case for produce and dairy products, a meat case, and, behind that, a metal cold box for soda. A butcher block table contained an array of knives, a meat saw, and alongside was a stand with an electric meat slicer. The little finger of my left hand is proof positive children shouldn’t be allowed to operate meat slicers. 

There were three orange and green-trimmed counters where customers' merchandise was placed as they shopped, and two aisles.  One of them, for most of its length, contained shelves displaying cans and jars of vegetables, condiments, jellies and fruits. Cereal boxes were kept on the top shelf.  

Shoppers didn’t have a choice of brands. If you didn't want Del Monte green beans or Eagle Brand Condensed Milk, you were out of luck, but nobody ever complained.   

Dryden’s wasn’t a self-service store. There were no shopping carts or baskets. Customers stood in front of the counters, rattling off their shopping lists to dad; to his children, who worked after school and on Saturdays; or to one of the middle-aged lady clerks who wore flowery aprons. As each item was located, it was placed on the counter until everything on the customer's list had been found. At that point purchases were placed in brown paper bags or cardboard boxes which, for ladies, dad always carried out to the car. 

A metal stand containing rolls of white and brown kraft wrapping paper separated two of the counters. Tucked behind the rocket-shaped gum ball machine at the end of the counters was a candler. Clerks held eggs against its light to determine if a fetus was inside, in which case the egg was thrown away.

The far left aisle was accessible only to employees because it contained the cash register and sensitive financial information, including a cabinet full of invoice booklets on which charges were recorded. My father never hesitated to extend credit to those who needed it. He knew that, for some of his customers, it was the difference between feeding their families and not feeding them.

Dad happily took phone orders and, regardless of whether the order was for $1 or $50, faithfully delivered them in his trusty 1954 red Chrysler our family affectionally called "Old Red."  When the delivery included a case of soda, he placed it on Old Red's right front fender. Many who called in their orders were elderly and unable to get out of their homes.  My father was, for some, the only human they saw all week and they kept talking, long after they had paid for their groceries. Dad always made time for them though I could tell, when he took me along, that he was antsy to get back to the store. I remember one octogenarian showed us a tumor that had been removed from her stomach which, for some reason, the doctor had allowed her to bring home in a jar. 

The dry goods section of Dryden's Store was on the right side of the building. It consisted of two aisles containing shelves of paper goods, grooming products, hosiery, toys, school supplies, bolts of fabric, jeans, and other items of clothing. Coats and jackets were kept in an upright wooden closet. A short counter held a circular tin container of thread; dress patterns; and wooden boxes of rick-rack, buttons, elastic, eye hooks and other sewing accessories dad referred to as “notions.” In the spring and summer, there was a spinning rack of Burpee seeds for gardeners.

Among the best-selling items in the dry goods department were the hand leathers, special gloves made from goat skin. Men who worked in the refractories in nearby Mexico and Fulton needed them to keep their hands safe from the hot-from-the-kiln bricks they had to handle.

Tampax, Kotex and Modess boxes were wrapped in plain brown paper, the price was noted in the upper right corner, and placed on a shelf where customers could reach them without having to embarrass themselves by asking for them by name. All the women in town knew what they were and could tell which product they were buying by the shape of its box. 

The dry goods counter had an old-fashioned crank-style cash register that emitted a "ka-ching" when the drawer was opened but, because most folks who shopped that side of the store also purchased groceries, dry goods were usually rung up on the left side.

The store’s back wall contained paints, floor waxes, furniture polish, varnishes, enameled pots and pans, plates, saucers, bowls, cups, pyrex dishes, and other household items. A Facebook friend wrote recently that, when she married in the late 1950s, she and her husband purchased everything they needed to set up housekeeping from Dryden’s Store, and that she still has most of it today.

The busiest day of the week, by far, was Saturday, when farmers and their families came to town to shop for the provisions they needed for the coming week. The brick plants closed at noon on Saturdays, the same time as the bank, leaving workers with paychecks they were unable to cash. They didn’t have to wait. Dad kept in his back pocket a fat leather wallet stuffed with hundreds of dollars in tens and twenties. Everyone in town knew Mr. Dryden was happy to cash their paychecks. And Mr. Dryden, a good merchant, knew that most all those men would be spending much of their paychecks on groceries and dry goods. 

At Dryden’s Store, you didn’t need a plastic bar-coded loyalty card to identify yourself. When you walked through the door, everyone already knew everything they needed to know about you. Whether you had gone to church on Sunday. How your crops were doing. The state of your family’s health. Whether you were a little pressed for money. If you needed an encouraging word. Customers and clerks (not dad but all the others including me) exchanged gossip and talked about the news of the day. Some customers, particularly the elderly ones, spent hours in the store meeting, greeting and conversing with every shopper who came in. Everyone knew everyone else and for many, Dryden’s was the center of their universe.

My father was diagnosed with cancer in December, 1964, and, for much of 1965, was in and out of hospitals, unable to work in his store. My mother, who knew what was about to happen but didn’t tell anyone, ran the store for most of that year. 

Two weeks before his death, dad came to an arrangement with a local couple who had told him years before that if he ever wanted to sell his store, they would be interested in buying it. The deal was sealed in our living room, on a Sunday afternoon. That night, I rode with dad in Old Red to the store for his final visit. Mom had mentioned as we left that we needed milk. Dad picked up a carton of Sky-Go Farms, reached into his pocket, and dropped a quarter in the cash register. “It’s their store now,” he said quietly. 

That is my most vivid memory of him.

Every time I go to a superstore, I like to imagine my father is with me and that I’m showing him around. He would be amazed to learn that stores sell ready-made meals, that customers are checked out within seconds by clerks who sometimes don’t even acknowledge their presence, that paper money rarely changes hands, and that stores are open Sundays and sometimes 24/365. He would marvel at the choice of brands (seven brands of green beans at my local Target!), at the prices (red and white potatoes cost two and three cents per pound at Dryden’s Store, they’re 99 cents and $1.09 at Publix today), at the sophisticated merchandising techniques, and at the sheer quantity of products, most of which didn’t exist in his day, that today’s consumers apparently can’t live without.

I wouldn’t have to explain to him that stores like his are gone forever. He was smart. He would pick up on that instantly and understand why. Having left college in 1929, fifteen hours short of the credits needed for his degree, he landed a job as a management trainee for a chain of variety stores and was sent to a store in Arkansas where he learned to become a first-class merchant. He threw himself into the job, kept notebooks detailing the lessons he had learned (I have them) and was making big plans to grow with the company. The Great Depression ended those plans. The store he was working in closed its doors. Try as he might, he couldn't find another job. There weren't any.

I am convinced that, more than anything, the time he spent in that Arkansas variety store shaped my father's career and character. When, three years later, he opened his own store, he put 110 percent of himself into making it the best it could possibly be so nobody could take it away from him. It was his pride, his joy, his passion.

My imaginary shopping trips with dad are my way of staying connected with him.  I like to think he would be pleased to know the influence he and his store had on my life and to know I learned from observing him many of the lessons that have defined me not only as a businessperson but as a man. 

Most of all, I'd like him to know that, every single time I set foot in one of those mega-stores, I miss him like crazy.



Post Script: 

Below are some photos my cousin Tom Tate sent after reading this post.  Years ago he and his wife were visiting Auxvasse and went by the store building. lt's no longer being used as a store -- I don't know what if, anything, it is being used for these days -- but Tom was able to get inside and shoot these photos. My parents never owned a camera so we have no photos of the store when it was operational, but these shots show some of the incredible details of the building -- the freight elevator, the tin ceiling and the railing across the front of the mezzanine where dad kept his desk (the mezzanine has apparently been sealed up), the tile on the front porch and the entrance. Note the decorative glass that runs the full width of the storefront. I'd guess it's worth more than the building itself. The building was built in (if I remember correctly) 1911. 

An Auxvasse story: Alice Scott

I grew up in Auxvasse, Mo., population 507 as of the 1950 census, and was born in November of the following year. Next month I’ll turn 66.

Over the years I’ve written dozens of stories about Auxvasse and I could easily write dozens more. In fact, I could and should and someday just may write a book about growing up in a place whose residents even today don't know whether they're Midwestern or Southern. While central Missouri is geographically the former, it is sociologically very much the latter.

Auxvasse is in Callaway County, one of four counties comprising an area known as Little Dixie. The area was settled in the 1820s by tobacco farmers from Virginia and North Carolina. Thanks to the Missouri Compromise of 1819, perhaps the most ill-advised bill ever passed by Congress, Missouri was a slave state so many of the farmers brought slaves with them.

Growing up in rural Missouri, seeing on the map that my home state was smack-dab in the center of the country, I thought of myself as a Midwesterner. Once I left for northern cities, I was surprised to learn that people I met assumed I was a Southerner, not only because of where I was from but because of my accent, which I immediately made a conscious effort to lose but lapse back into when I've had a couple of drinks. I still don't know what the hell I am. At this point it doesn't matter but it would be nice to know for sure. But I digress.

When I was a boy, Auxvasse was split almost in two by the Gulf, Mobile & Ohio railroad tracks. White folks lived east of the tracks. African-American residents lived west of the tracks. 

I'm telling you all this because it's germane to the story you are about to read.

Alice Scott was our next-door neighbor. She died in 1955 when I was three, so I don’t remember a whole lot about her. I recall sitting with her as she was working in her garden and handing her clothespins as she was hanging laundry on her clothesline. My most vivid memory of Alice is going to visit her in the hospital shortly before she died, a white-haired old lady in a wheelchair.

Most of what I know about Alice I learned from my mother. Mom had a photographic memory and, up to the day she died at 102, could describe in astonishing detail events and people from fifty, sixty, even ninety years ago, and the tales she had heard them tell. While I take pride in my ability to remember things friends say they have forgotten, I certainly didn't inherit the kind of memory mom had. That’s why I want to write down the story of Alice now, before time takes it away from me, because it’s a tale that needs to be told.

Like most whites in Auxvasse, my family lived on the east side of the tracks. So did Alice, the only black person in the white part of town.

Alice thought she was born in the 1870s – she was never sure how old she was so it might have been the late 1860s – near McCredie, a small farming community south of Auxvasse. Her mother had almost certainly been a slave. She never knew her father..

One day when Alice was about four her mother was walking down a country road with her six or seven children when a Doctor Tate rode up and swooped Alice up onto his horse.

“Can I have this one?” he asked Alice’s mother.

Alice’s mother said yes. Unmarried and dirt poor as she was, that would be one less mouth for her to feed. So off the doctor rode with Alice, leaving her family – she never saw them again – in the dust.

That night, the doctor’s wife – the “old missus” Alice called her – placed Alice, who was crying for her mama, on a pallet next to her bed and held her hand.

For the next 60 or so years, Alice waited on the Tates hand and foot. She cleaned their house, hoed their garden, washed their clothes, cooked their meals and, on Sunday, attended their church where she always sat in the back row by herself – she wouldn’t dare sit with white folks who wouldn’t have allowed her to anyway. Alice never socialized with other black people. Working and living in the Tate household, she never had the chance to meet any.

One by one the Tates died off until only Miss Sally, who never married, was left. Sally sold the farm, bought a house on the east side of Auxvasse, and moved there with Alice.

When Miss Sally died, she willed the house to the Auxvasse Presbyterian Church, which she had joined and Alice attended, sitting alone in the back row as she always had, but directed that Alice should be allowed to live in it until her death. To support herself, Alice, who had never learned to read or write, took in laundry, dressed chickens, baked cakes and, on Sundays, made dinner for the Presbyterian preacher, a young man just out of seminary named Joe Mullen.

In 1955, when Alice died of cancer, Joe Mullen, by now a prominent figure in the church, returned to Auxvasse to preach her funeral.

Church elders had planned to bury Alice in the town’s black cemetery but, not wanting to anger Joe, who knew as well as they did that Alice had never been exposed to her own people and wouldn’t have felt comfortable spending eternity in that unfamiliar turf, buried her in the white cemetery instead. It seemed like the Christian thing to do. At the time, Alice was the only black person in the cemetery. I don't know if that is still the case today. Her gravestone, shown above, lists only the date of her death.

For years afterward, my mother made Alice’s orange cake recipe every Christmas. It was dense like a fruitcake, with a gooey orange glaze that, to my unsophisticated palette, tasted bitter. Mom never served it without retelling the story of Alice. As a boy, I thought it was just about the saddest story I had ever heard.

Sixty-some years later, it still is.

Small town

The entire third grade class of the Auxvasse School, 1959-60.
That's yours truly, third from left in the middle row

People who don’t know better think John Cougar Mellencamp’s “Small Town” is an accurate portrayal of life in a rural town. While it is accurate to some extent, it all depends on how one defines "small" because, when it comes to little towns, "small" is a relative term.

When Mellencamp was born in Seymour, Ind., in October 1951, his small town had a population of 9,629 according to the 1950 census. When, a month later, I made my grand entrance, my hometown, Auxvasse, Mo., had a population of 507, one-nineteenth the size of his. I wasn’t even born in my small town; it didn’t have a hospital.

Just how small is a town of 507? Perhaps the easiest way to put things into context for those who can’t begin to imagine a town that small is to start with the school. And no, I don't mean the schools. I mean the one and only school.

Last weekend while staying at my sister’s, I ran across the Auxvasse School yearbook from 1959-60, the year she graduated from high school and I was in the third grade.

The yearbook covered grades 1-12, which were housed in the same building. There were 20 high school graduates that year. The entire student body – I counted – consisted of 292 students. Most didn’t live in town; they lived on the farms that surrounded it.

The Auxvasse School had 13 teachers – seven for students in grades seven through 12. Going through the yearbook, I was amazed at how many teaching hats they wore.

Doyle Wood taught American problems, world history, as well as English and PE to seventh and eighth graders. Elizabeth Novinger taught journalism, speech, and English 1,2 and 3. (There was no English 4.) Don Foster taught citizenship, American history, physiology, health, high school PE and coached the boys’ and girls’ basketball teams. Agnes Ferguson taught algebra, geometry, general math, seventh grade math, and eighth grade math. Bessie Gottschalk taught seventh and eighth grade science, biology, home ec 1, and home ec 2. Virginia Carter taught typing, bookkeeping, seventh and eighth grade chorus, high school boys’ and girls’ chorus, high school band and elementary band. James Breen taught seventh and eighth grade social studies, general shop, advanced woodworking, mechanical drawing and driver’s education.

There were six elementary teachers, one for each grade. According to the yearbook, five graduated from Northeast Missouri State Teachers College in Kirksville and one from the University of Missouri.  

The year before, Auxvasse School had undergone a growth spurt in terms of enrollment. Up until then, African-American elementary pupils attended a one-room school on the west side of the GM&O tracks that separated the black part of town from the white. Black high school students were bussed 35 miles to Jefferson City to a school run by Lincoln University, a teacher’s college for African-Americans. The year I started second grade, the schools were integrated. Of the 20 pupils in my third grade class, five were African-American. 

The 1959-60 yearbook was made possible by local businesses whose ads appeared on the final pages. Most were purchased by businesses in nearby Mexico and Fulton, the county seat. The only ads from Auxvasse merchants were placed by the Security Bank (“Capital & Surplus of $75,000 and Undivided Profits of $450,000”), Divers Food Store & Elevator, the Chalet (“Your Favorite Eating Spot”), Dryden’s General Merchandise, Hunt & Moser Chrysler-Plymouth, LaCrosse Lumber Co., Maupin Funeral Home, Welch’s Tavern, Wilbur Foster Trucking & Ice, the Kingdom Telephone Co., Hape’s Locker (“Custom Slaughtering & Meat Processing”), Baumgartner’s Furniture & Appliances, the Auxvasse Review, Andy Briggs Real Estate, Bill’s Garage and Dr. A.H. Domann. There were a handful of other businesses – three gas stations, a café, hardware store, drug store, grocery store and a lawyer that, for some reason – probably economic – didn’t buy ads.

Auxvasse was so small it didn’t even have a conventional traffic signal. There was a blinking red light suspended above the intersection of U.S. 54 and the farm-to-market road, to keep travelers from speeding through the mile-long town in under a minute.

The Auxvasse I grew up in had no movie theater – it still doesn’t – though my brother and sister remember one that lasted a short time in the late 1940s. There was no bowling alley, community pool or skating rink either. Kids’ activities consisted of Girl and Boy Scout troops and two 4-H clubs, the Advancers and Crusaders. Most of the churches had youth groups. My church was so small that its youth fellowship group had to join up with two other Methodist churches from neighboring communities even smaller than Auxvasse.

Athletics were a big – make that huge – part of life in our small town. There was Little League in summer (I was relegated to right field and missed both pop flies that came my way during my short career), high school basketball in winter, and baseball and track in spring, even through the school didn’t have a track. Heck, the school didn’t even have a gymnasium until 1954. Before then, basketball games were played outside and there were no physical education classes.

There were no police in Auxvasse, but there was a night watchman who rode through town in his own vehicle, keeping an eye out for crime, but there rarely was any to be found.

Nor was there a fire department but there was a fire truck, a vintage model from the late twenties or early thirties that had been purchased third-hand from another small town. It had wooden-spoke wheels. Whenever there was fire in or around town, the siren went off and all the able-bodied men within earshot were expected to show up at the firehouse and follow the truck to the fire to fight it. One day when the alarm sounded, the men of Auxvasse rushed to the firehouse and found that someone had stolen the battery from the truck. Needless to say, the house they had hoped to save burned to the ground and the thief was never caught by the police because there weren’t any police.

The unequivocal highlight of my childhood was the day the Presbyterian Church at the end of our street burned down despite the best efforts of amateur firefighters from Auxvasse and the professionals from Mexico and Fulton. There were no fire hydrants, so the firemen quickly used up the water they had brought to the scene on their trucks.

Sometime around 1960, Tippy Cowan, the wife of the local hardware store owner, decided Auxvasse needed some culture and started a town library in a 10’ x 10’ room in the concrete block structure where the fire truck was garaged. My mother and Mrs. Cowan donated most of the books, the majority of which were from the Reader’s Digest Condensed series. The library was open one afternoon a week and I rarely encountered anyone other than Mrs. Cowan when I went to check out one of mom’s condensed books. Every two weeks the bookmobile from the Daniel Boone Library in Columbia came to town for an hour or so, but few people took advantage of it.

Auxvasse had five churches – the aforementioned Methodist, one Disciples of Christ, one Presbyterian and two Baptist, one for whites, one for blacks. The ladies of the African-American Second Baptist Church served a fund-raising lunch one Saturday every month and my father always bought plates of fried chicken, vinegary greens and slices of meringue-topped pies and brought them back to his store. The Disciples of Christ ladies were famous for the chicken potpie they served with raspberry Jell-O salad every Halloween.

The morning after Halloween, Auxvasse residents invariably woke up to find half a dozen or so outhouses – not everyone had indoor plumbing even in the 1960s – pranksters had hoisted onto pick-up flatbeds, brought to Main Street and set afire.

The highlight of Auxvasse’s social calendar year was the Lion’s Club Fair held in July. A carnival set up five or six rusty rides in the town park which wasn’t really a park – it was nothing more than a couple of acres of vacant land next to a smelly feed lot. Members of Callaway County’s many 4-H clubs brought cows, horses and hogs (which were always referred to as “swine”) to the fair for judging. Those deemed “best of show” were sold to the local slaughterhouse and the kids who raised them posed proudly for pictures that would appear in the Auxvasse Review just before the animal was led away to its doom. Woodworking, home canning and baking projects completed by 4-H members were displayed on the bleachers of the gym for all to admire and for judges to award ribbons of merit. The window box I made during my brief stint as a Crusader -- I’ll come clean here, my dad built it in about five minutes and he, if possible, was even worse at carpentry than I am today -- won a white ribbon, the lowest possible award.

The fair culminated on Saturday night with a dance at which some folks drank too much, wound up dancing with people who weren’t their significant others and/or got into fistfights, providing gossip fodder for months afterward.

My sister and I drove through Auxvasse last weekend. The only businesses remaining on the town’s block and a half business district are the bank, tavern and phone company. The rest of Main Street’s buildings are empty. Even though it was a Saturday afternoon which, when I was a kid, was the day farmers and their families came to town to stock up on provisions for the coming week, there wasn’t a soul to be seen. As we were looking into the window of what was once our father’s store, a car stopped at the stop light and the driver waved but we didn’t know him and he didn't he know us. That’s just the way folks are in small towns.

Wal-Mart pretty much destroyed businesses in Auxvasse and other small towns throughout rural America. There are Wal-Marts in both Fulton and Mexico, which, like Auxvasse, once had thriving commercial districts, businesses run by local merchants that provided good jobs for residents. Those businesses have shuttered their doors in large part due to the chain founded by Sam Walton who grew up in Shelbina, another small town about sixty miles north of Auxvasse. Most small town Missourians are proud one of their own founded Wal-Mart. I am not among them because Wal-Mart, more than anything, is the reason so many small towns in the Midwest and south have fallen on hard times. 

I spent 30 years in Wilton, Conn., a leafy, affluent, stuffy suburb of 17,000 an hour northeast of Manhattan. Its residents like to claim in letters to the editor of the local paper that they live in a small town, something this guy from an honest-to-God small town always found hilarious. Wilton has some of the highest-rated public schools in the United States and almost every student not only goes on to college but to graduate school. Whereas the bank in my small town had capital of $75,000, the town my kids grew up in was home of AIG Financial Products whose greed-induced downfall  – the US government had to put up $180 billion to enable the company to unwind its positions -- contributed mightily to the 2008 global financial crash.

Real small towns don’t have companies like that, nor do their residents work for hedge funds or investment banks as many folks in Wilton do. Real small towners don’t sip coffee at Starbucks, dine in Japanese restaurants, or hang out at wine bars eating tapas. Real small towners don’t have to visit a town-owned “farm” to see pigs and cows that are brought in for kids to pet once a year; they raise their own. Real small town high schools don't have ski teams or lacrosse teams nor will you ever sit next to anyone famous at your kid's school concert, sporting event or theater production.

Wilton is by no stretch of the imagination a small town – at least not to me. But, I suppose, to someone who grew up in Brooklyn or Long Island, as many of its residents did, it might be.

Like I said, small is a relative term when it comes to towns.

The DNA test results are in. And I’m legit!

One of the more gratifying aspects of writing this blog is that I’ve been contacted by far-flung Dryden relatives I never heard of, who have tracked me down to say they enjoy reading tomdryden.com.

Some are amateur genealogists who have taken the time to determine how we are related. Apparently we are all descended from a common ancestor, Beowulf Dryden (or something like that), who lived near Edinburgh, Scotland, in the 1400s in a forest known as Dredden's Wood.

Funny but, for most of my childhood I didn’t think I was a legitimate Dryden.

When I was five or so, my older sister told me I was adopted. She said our parents wanted another child, so the entire family went to a St. Louis orphanage to pick one out. She said mom and dad had their hearts set on a different baby but that she, after seeing me in a line-up, prevailed upon them to choose me.

She said I should be grateful because, if it weren’t for her, God knows where I would have wound up. (Even then I realized it wouldn’t have been the end of the world had I been adopted by a family who lived somewhere other than Auxvasse, Mo., a place so remote from civilization residents could only pick up signals from NBC and CBS stations. I grew up ABC-deprived, which has always put me at a disadvantage playing Trivial Pursuit. But I digress.)  

She ordered me not to mention any of this to my parents, saying they didn’t want me to know. Fearing I might be taken back to the orphanage, I didn’t.

When I was ten or eleven I blurted out to the woman who cooked my meals that I knew the truth and appreciated all she and her husband had done for me. She showed me my birth certificate, which listed her and my father as my real parents. But, after all those years of doubting, I never quite believed it.

Anyway, one of the Dryden relatives I’ve met through this blog is participating in a DNA test in which male Drydens rub the inside of their cheeks with a brush to dislodge cells, collect the cells on giant Q-tips, and mail them to a lab for analysis. The purpose? Beats the hell out of me – I had to take Biology 101 twice – but I agreed to join in.

The results of my test came yesterday and, other than proving I’m an honest-to-God Dryden who is blood-related to other Drydens worldwide, the scientific explanation that arrived with it was gobbledygook. So I emailed another distant relative who’s overseeing the tests. She wrote back that, “We are on the road to being able to identify where the ancient ancestors of the Drydens were before they made their way to Britain. Someday, we'll be able to say whether they were ancient Celts (not likely), or Goths (not likely) or something like the Bell-Beaker tribes (somewhat quite likely) who spread out in the European continent some 5,000+ years ago.”

For all I know it will prove we were Neanderthals.

Whatever, I’m proud I can now say with 100 percent certainty that I’m a blood-relative of some accomplished Drydens, including John, England’s first poet laureate. (That’s where my penchant for words must come from. Though I’m sure he would have never ended a sentence with a preposition as I just did.) And Hugh, a rocket scientist for whom NASA’s flight research center is named. Not to mention Virginia, the original Beverly Hills Housewife, who married the founder of Robinson’s department store in L.A. and built Beverly Hills’ first mansion whose opulent grounds are now open to the public.

That said, I’ve got to take the good relatives with the bad.

In addition to being related to cousins Johnnie, Hughie and Ginnie (that’s how I think of them now that I’m sure we’re kinfolk), I now know I’m definitely related to Henry Dryden, my grandfather’s half-brother whose mule, while pulling a wagon, balked crossing train tracks in High Hill, Mo., early in the last century. After trying unsuccessfully to get the mule to move and becoming increasingly enraged, Henry took his axe, split the mule’s head, then burned down his wagon and its contents. 

Another not-too-distant relative is Nathaniel Dryden, a lawyer known for his courtroom eloquence. He was the first attorney to gain the conviction, and hanging, of a white man for killing a black, a crime that inspired the song Stagger Lee. An alcoholic and morphine addict, Nat was known as the "wickedest man in Missouri." An unsolicited love note from an infatuated shop girl forced cousin Nat to admit to a second secret marriage which came as a surprise to his wife and four daughters. 

From relatives I’ve met through this blog, I’ve learned of other Drydens who were equally – how to put this? – "special."

My favorite line from The Godfather was uttered by Mama Corleone, who told Michael, “You can never lose your family.” And now that I know I’m a legit Dryden, I can’t … even if I want to lose some of them.

My oldest son got married two weeks ago. It’s up to him to carry our particular branch of the Dryden family tree forward.

A little grandson – perhaps he and his wife could name him Beowulf Thomas – would be a nice addition one of these days. 

But then, they just got married, so I'm not going to pressure them.

Saturday's child

Inexplicably, there remains outside the Audrain Medical Center in Mexico, Mo., no appropriate obelisk commemorating the birth of yours truly on November 17, 1951 – sixty-one years ago tomorrow.

The family into which I was born lived eleven miles down the road in Auxvasse (population 507 as of the 1950 census), where my father ran a general store.

November 17 fell on a Saturday, the one day of the week farm families came to town to load up on provisions. Thanksgiving was five days away, so business was sure to be extra brisk. Not wanting to miss a moment of mercantile action, my father, when my mother called the store late that morning to tell him her time had come, dispatched my 16-year-old brother to drive her to the hospital.

It was snowing. My mother, the world’s most skittish passenger under the best of circumstances, reacts to riding in a car while it's snowing as if balls of fire were falling from the sky. Her screams of terror (from the snow), pain (from the contractions), and fury (at her husband for his cavalier dismissal of her distress) made the drive miserable for my brother, who dropped her off and returned to the store, where dad put him to work. 

Around six o’clock that evening, the doctor called to inform my father I had arrived. Dad announced the news to a store full of customers. One of his clerks was wrapping sausages he tossed up in the air and let plop to the floor, declaring, “I’ll be goddamned – a boy!”

My mother, to this day, is still angry that my father didn’t drive her to the hospital and hang around the waiting room, but I understand. 

Things were different back then. Men weren’t expected to “participate” in the births of their children as were men of my generation who, after weeks of Lamaze classes, learned our role was limited to handing out ice chips wrapped in gauze while encouraging our wives to breathe “he-he-he" as they struggled to expel creatures with heads the size of cantaloupes. 

My father couldn't have done anything, other than smoke cigarettes and pace back and forth, had he gone to the hospital. So he elected to stay behind and do something useful: He worked. 

This past summer, when my brother, sister and I were cleaning out our mother’s house – she sold it after moving into assisted living -- we ran across our father’s leather-bound ledger, in which he carefully recorded each day’s receipts. On Nov. 17, 1951, Dryden's General Store rang up nearly $400. That was huge. 

After he closed up shop that night, my father drove through the snow to visit his wife and new son. 

Wish I could have been there to see his reaction as he stood there in his overcoat, hat in hand, peering through the nursery window.

Come to think of it, I was. But I don't remember a thing.