Dad Learns About His Father

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1

The hotel room's telephone rang after he'd returned from dinner.

"Hello?"

"Is this Dr. Derrick?"

"Yes!"

"The same Dr. Derrick giving a speech at the University tomorrow, who was mentioned in the newspaper today?"

"The very same."

"I think your father was Warren N. Derrick.  Is that true?"

"Well, yes, that was his name. The 'N' was for Nathaniel."

"My name is Phyllis Anderson Derrick.  Your father was my second husband.  I was his third wife.  He died here in 1950.  We were married in 1941."

"Oh.  Yes?"

"I just thought you would want to know.  He is buried in the Pinewoods Cemetery here.  He talked about you, and your brother.  I don't know how but he knew that you were at the University in Austin... And he talked about you with pride and hoped your mother and his two boys had gotten along all right."

"Actually, she died when I was thirteen years old.  My brother Warren Nolan Derrick was fifteen.  We were orphans at that point."

"Ah, he didn't say anything about that."

"I'm afraid I will be leaving right after my talk tomorrow..."

"I just thought you ought to know.  So, now I have told you...  So, goodbye then."

She hung up while he was still saying, "And goodbye to you too."

2

Dad told me about this conversation from 1965 or so several months afterwards, when I was home on a two-week vacation a year or so after I'd graduated from college.  Although I have made up the words, the gist of it was just what he reported it to me. 

He'd never seemed comfortable talking about his father, and he didn't now either.

"You never met him, did you, your father?"

"Just the one time, when I was six.  Haven't I told you about that?"

"No."

"He showed up one day in 1910 before our mother had gotten us off to school and before she'd left for work.  He wanted to take us with him for that morning, before his trade conference was going to start in the city adjacent to ours.  By that time, he was some kind of officer in the professional organization having the conference."

"Did you go with him?"

"I remember that he took your uncle Warren and me to a big barber shop in the next city.  He bought each of us a manicure.  The only one I ever had.  That's all I remember."

"And he had left your family just after you were born?"

"Yes.  We never heard from him except that one time...  And he evidently ended up in this big city way up in the Northwest."

That was the end of that conversation.

3

Four or five years later, Dad retired from his University job.  I had gotten married, and was living near the coast in the mid-Atlantic region.  Dad wrote us that he and Mom were planning a trip to the city on the Atlantic coast 600 miles to the south of us, where his mother had told him he was born, just a few months before she and the two sons moved out to Texas about 1905 where his father had found a good job.

As far as I knew, for the first time in his life, after retiring Dad had become interested in learning about his origins.  He well remembered his grandmother, who'd lived with the family all during his childhood until she died a year before his Mom.  And from her he knew the name of his grandfather.  But that was just about all.

Dad wrote to ask us to join Mom and him in his birth city.  We worked out the dates when we could join them.

When we arrived, Mom and Dad had already spent a couple of days looking for records.  One thing Dad had tried was to just look up "Derrick" in the phone book.  He called the first five or six listed there (there were at least a dozen).  Dad had a Texas accent, but it was certainly that of a white Texan.  Everyone on the phone said right away there was no chance they were related.  Dad figured they just didn't want to be bothered by a distant cousin whom they had never heard of.

His last call was different.  The woman who answered seemed very pleasant - keep in mind this was deep in the Old South - so he was able to pose a question, when she positively said, like all the rest, that he and she were not related.

"You know, ma'am," he said, "I've called a lot of folks here in town with my last name and everyone seems to know without even thinking that we're not related.  I'm wondering why that is."

"Honey," she said with a good humor, "we is all colored folks!"

Dad and she had a good laugh together, and he stopped making those calls.

4

They'd had some success looking through the records in the local historical society.  He found his parents' 1900 marriage listed in an index of marriages in the state, and there was even a clue where the wedding had taken place.

While Mom and my wife went back to the historical society to look through other records, Dad and I went to the church downtown, where his parents had apparently gotten married.  That seemed to be the most likely place to find a formal record.

And sure enough, after we'd hung around in this church by ourselves for a while, a member of the staff asked if he could help... and they did have records from 1900.  We looked together.  Yes, there was the record in a large old book.  Dad arranged to have what he called a "photostatic" copy made and sent to him at home.

Flushed with this success, we went to join the others at the historical society, where they were looking through some old city directories, which list the names of current residents, their home addresses, and their occupations.  With help from the staff, they'd found a listing from 1900.  Dad's mother and father were living with his grandmother on Henry Street.  Dad's grandfather had been a "ship's carpenter."  Dad's father was described as a "ruler" at a bookbindery, and his mother was said to be a "seamstress."

This kind of directory lists names alphabetically, but you can then look up the address to learn what other streets are nearby and whether or not there were other residents in the same building, as in a boarding house, for instance.  Grandma had apparently owned a single-family home, which was at the corner of their street and another, which was also named - Montgomery.  (Before my wife and I left to return home, we all drove by this location.)

Dad's grandfather was not listed in the 1901 city directory, though the others were, at the same address.  He seemed to have died by then.

There was an old cemetery right downtown, not far from the wedding church, so we all tramped around there too, looking at grave markers.  It turned out those buried there were all from the 18th century!  But back at the historical society, there were indexes of those buried in the other various old cemeteries. 

We had to leave Mom and Dad at that point.  Their own plan was to go down to the Florida coast to see if they could find traces of Dad's father's family.  He vaguely remembered his mother saying that his father had been living there before moving a little to the north.

5

Six or eight months later, Dad had gotten me an invitation to give a talk to a professional organization there in my hometown.  Just by coincidence, I suppose, while I was there a small package came in the mail.

Mom had written after they'd returned from their family history tour that while in northern Florida, somebody at the historical society there had put Dad in touch with a woman named Derrick about their age.  She turned out to be the widow of one of Dad's relatives...

Not from his father's parents, but from his father's second marriage.

Kellie Cochran Derrick had married Dad's half-brother, who after a brief career in vaudeville in the 1920s had settled down in Florida.  By the way, her husband's name was Warren Robert Derrick.  Mom had written about how pleasant Kellie was and how graciously she had treated them at her little home.  She was a little deaf, if I remember correctly.

The letter with the package started out something like this:  "I appreciated getting your Thank You note a while back.  I enjoyed our visit too, very much.  I should have given you these things then, but I wanted to think about it first."

6

Inside the little box were various items from Dad's father, which his son - Kellie's husband, the other Warren "junior" - had saved.

Among the items were two photographs of a very young Warren Nathaniel in an army uniform from about 1898.  On the back, apparently in Dad's father's handwriting, his unit was identified as a Florida volunteer regiment.

Most items were related to the guy's career, including a photograph on a campaign flyer of him as candidate in 1920-something for the presidency of his "international" union.  Another was a photo of him in a hotel lobby next to a palm tree dated the same (on the back).  There was also a nice pocket watch engraved, "Warren N. Derrick, President, International Brotherhood of Bookbinders, 1919 to 1925."

Finally, there was a gold-plated cane handle, also inscribed as a gift of the union.
Mother gave me these things after Dad's death in 1980.  She indicated that Dad had not seemed very interested in this memorabilia, although she'd had the handle mounted on a plain wooden cane.

7

One other thing:  at some point (I don't remember when), Dad told me that, even before the encounter with Kellie, he had known that his half-brother Warren had been in vaudeville, with his older sister, in a song-and-dance act.  He had the impression they'd been successful enough to travel around performing for several years. 

They must have started young, because their mother had traveled with them.  Dad's father and she had divorced in the early '20s.

While in college in central Texas in 1923 or '24, Dad had somehow seen a notice of a vaudeville show scheduled for a few days in the big city of San Antonio.  Among the performers listed were "Bob and Betty Derrick."  It;s not a common name, of course, and Dad knew nothing of any relatives, so...

He took a bus to San Antonio and managed to make contact with these other Derricks.  Yes, their father was Warren Nathaniel Derrick.  Their mother, his second wife, was with them.  Dad went to their performances that afternoon and evening and spent the time in-between with them.  He had an old photograph of him, "Bob and Betty," and their mother Mary crowded around a park bench near the Alamo.

It had apparently been a pleasant interaction, but they did not communicate again.

8

My mother absolutely believed in Heaven, where loved ones are reunited for all time.  Dad understood that such a belief brought strength to many in times of trouble as well as motivating many toward good values including social and moral responsibility, self-discipline, hard work, and - above all - kindness to others.

In my mother's Heaven, Mother and Dad are together again now and forever, along with her parents "Dad" and "Muddy" (Ben and Myrtle), and Dad's mother, grandmother, and brother.

Warren Nathaniel Derrick, his father, is not with them.

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