How did Charles become "Bill"?

When I was young, I asked my grandmother (Bill's mother) why people called my dad Bill when his name was Charles. When someone did call him Charles, the name sounded like someone else, not my dad.

My Grandmother did have an answer, as I suspected sho would. It seems that when Bill was born, his older brother, Walter, then three years old, liked the song "Billie Boy" and proceeded to greet his baby brother with a, "Hi, Billie Boy, how are you doin?" The novelty of that stuck and very soon Charles became Bill for all time. I must have been five years old before I knew that my dad was Charles and not Bill by legal name.

The Charles "Bill" or C. "Bill" came into use in the telephone directory as many people would hunt for my parents telephone number by looking under William Smith, which was certainly a dead end search.

Thus the mystery of the name "Bill" has been solved.

The Brothers - Introduction to the "Bill" stories

Walter, Bill, Tom and Bob--
the four Smith brothers you see,
Tall and handsome, strong and witty,
are father and uncles to me.

The tales of growing up they remember
and tell.
Are entertaining and wholesome
as well.

Walter, Bill, Tom and Bob,
your parents did a marvelous job.

mc 10/00

Grandpa Stories

1. A name like Bill

He was a big joker. If we asked him what’s your name, he’d say, Pudd’n Tane, ask me again, I’ll tell you the same. His initials were CBS, like the television network, but better: they stood for Charles Brown Smith. Hey, we said, fingering his ring or the golden Cross pen on which his initials were engraved, you’re Charlie Brown! The REAL LIVE Charlie Brown!

He had so many names: Grandpa, Dad, Bill, Uncle Bill, Smitty, Professor Smith….Our cousins called him Uncle Bill.

Why do they call you Uncle Bill?

That’s my name, he’d say.

This puzzled us. How could Bill be his name when Bill wasn’t his name?

It’s just what people call him, Mom explained.

Does that make it a nickname? I wondered. We all wanted to have nicknames too. I tried going by Laura for awhile, but nobody else wanted to call me that.

Bill. Where did the name Bill come from?

2. Calculators

He was the first person we knew who had a calculator—one of those black wedge-shaped Texas Instruments implements with all sorts of strange function keys: cos, sin, log…I liked to find square roots. Grandpa would get me to figure out a problem—what’s the square root of 6? Then I could use the calculator to see if I’d been right. And he taught me to use a slide rule. His was grooved and worn with use; I have it now. It sits on my desk in its sturdy leather case—an authentic antique calculator. Sometimes I get it out and handle it, slide the moveable parts back and forth when I’m thinking. I like its smoothness; its heft; the precision of its markings. Who will show me how to use it again now that he’s gone?

3. More Number Games

1914. I have forever remembered the date of the onset of World War One because that was the year Grandpa was born. In that year, the last passenger pigeon died in captivity in the Cincinnati Zoo, the Ford Motor Company moved to the now standard eight-hour workday, the very first stainless steel household implements were fabricated, Charlie Chaplin made his first film, Babe Ruth was signed into the major leagues, Mother’s Day was established, the US Federal Reserve Bank opened for business, the Signal Corps of the US Army was formed, giving the US an Air Service, the Panama Canal welcomed its first ship, the Dow Jones registered its largest single day drop—a fall of 24.39% , the British established Irish Home Rule and the Irish Troubles began, the Mexican Revolution continued to rage, and between June and December 2, when Grandpa was born, just about every nation in the world was drawn into the conflict we know as World War I. A time, in short, like this one, of convulsive crisis, fear, sorrow, change, and joy.

Since I was born too, in a year ending with the number 4, the last digits of our ages staggered along together. You’re catching up to me! he’d exclaim on my birthday when I turned 11 rather than 10 and he remained 60. Then on his birthday I’d cry out, oh no! you’re getting ahead of me again!

4. Word play

Like many of his generation, Grandpa had memorized quite a bit of poetry and could recite, from memory, all sorts of rhymes and speeches and bits of doggerel. On rainy days, he’d sit with me and make up silly verses, which I wrote down and then practiced until I could recite them from memory. Here’s one:

The barefoot boy with shoes on

Stood sitting on the ceiling

Eating popcorn by the peck

Filled him up way past the neck.

By heck!

5. Midnight Snacks (Lisa’s story)

We all loved to stay over at Grandpa and Grandma’s. Whenever we spent the night, Lisa and Karin slept in Mom’s old room and Les slept in the old den. It was hard to sleep; the house was hauntingly quiet, except for the ticking, striking clocks. And it was dark. There were no powerful streetlights on Kirkham Road, no blaring glare filtered through the heavy curtains. At some point in the middle of the night, unable to sleep, Lisa would get up and sneak out to the kitchen. Grandpa, a fellow sweet-tooth, always seemed to hear when she’d gotten up, and always joined her. Together they’d concoct a midnight snack—ice cream smothered in crushed candy with cookies, Christmas cookies with milk, a selection of chocolates and the gooey soft mints he always kept in store. It was hard to keep from giggling then, and giving the secret away: everything was so tasty!

6. His ring

7. Fishing

8. Games Badminton and croquet; card games, the longest cribbage score; mah jong

9. Playing by ear

Grandpa could pick out any tune on any instrument—this was like the magic tricks he liked to play (pulling quarters from our ears) but better, because we knew it was real. Not illusion. He had a little electric keyboard in the den to which you could add chorded harmony or a wheezy sort of bass. We found the music strange though; children of the 1970s, we didn’t recognize Smoke Gets in Your Eyes or I Dream of Jeannie. So we’d compromise and sing a crazy version of “On Top of Old Smokey:”

On top of Old Smokey

All covered in cheese,
I lost my old meatball

Cuz somebody sneezed.

10.Taking pictures

11.Going to the trailer (the money tree)

12.Talking on the CB

13.Lazy-Boy

14.Fire works

15.Box of wood

16.Building things

17.Things in the drawers (the hula girl)

18.Woodworking

19.Telephoning

Every day when we were young, Grandpa telephoned to say hello. Later, when he retired from Ohio State and found it hard to fill the days he called every few hours. The conversation was always the same:

Hi how are you?

Okay.

How’s your mom?

Okay.

How’s your dad?

Okay.

How’s your brother?

Okay.

How’s your sister? (This was in the days before Becca, so there was just one sister.)

Okay.

Okay then. I’ll talk to you later.

A teenager, I was at once too old and too young to respond in a sensible way, to ask him and how are you Grandpa? What would you like to do? Shall I come and visit? For so much of what we really need to say, we never quite manage to find words. Perhaps because, often enough, a conversation isn’t really about words; it is a way of sounding out something more fundamental than words, a matter of being with or being there: Hello, hello, I’m here, are you there?

Lisa and Mom revived and kept up the practice of daily calls to Grandpa at Friendship Village. Often, especially as both hearing and speech became more difficult for him, he simply stayed on the phone, not talking, just keeping the space of contact open, “touching base” he called it. For in the end, that’s what mattered. It’s what he treasured, and what he and grandma provided for us over the years: a space to be in touch, to play, to make contact with friends and relatives, a space of great civility, generosity, and kindness, a place where the small details and minute gestures of relationship were scrupulously observed and preserved. They liked to meet our friends and partners, Jules, Marike, Don and Clay; they adored their first great-grandchild, Rachael, Becca and Clay’s daughter, and these last three years, Grandpa was delighted and enlivened by Jack and Zoe, Leslie and Jules’ twins. They trusted us to love well, and welcomed those we loved into their hearts.

When Grandpa died Monday, I was driving in a snowstorm from the airport to Halifax. I did not yet know he had died. My flight to Columbus had been cancelled and rescheduled for the next day. And the weather had turned brutal, nasty. All of a sudden, as I rounded a corner into the driving snow, I felt utterly stricken, bereft. But I also felt that my grandfather was very near to me. I began to speak to him, to talk aloud as I went down the highway. I regretted that I’d been so far away these last years, and so much at a loss before his decline. I told him that I wished I’d been as generous with him as he had always been with me, as careful of the connections that mattered. I still had so much to learn from him.

Later, when Becca called to tell me that Grandpa had died—I learned that he’d died just then, while I was on the road talking to him. It is strange the things that we know without knowing that we know when we love each other. I felt glad to have been visited once again.

Hello hello?

Grandpa. Dad. Prof Smith. Smitty. Bill. Uncle Bill?

You made our world a better place; you showed us how to reach out, how to “touch base,” how to hold on.

We love you so much, and we miss you more every day.