Despite what you sometimes see in the “alternative” press, white males are not all powerful wealthy evil bastards. Having the same demographics as the corporate elite doesn’t automatically let you in said elite. You know, all bananas are fruits but not all fruits etc. A lot of us British-Isles-descended folks are just average losers who eat poorly, indulge too much or too little for our own good, drive old Mustang IIs into country ditches at midnight, cringe at our grandparents’ racist jokes, try not to flunk science classes, and basically try to figure our role in this complicated world.
One white guy who wasn’t an average loser was my friend Lilith’s great-uncle, Lemuel Lewis Bolles. One of Lilith’s prized possessions is a picture of Uncle Lem during WWI, standing proudly on the steps in front of his barracks. In a lovely frilly white cotton dress and matching wig.
He was no Cpl. Klinger type trying to get kicked out of the service, mind you. He was a career officer who was friends with Theodore Roosevelt, General Pershing, railroad tycoon Cornelius Vanderbilt, and Lady Churchill. He was an an active chief by adoption of the Blackfoot Nation. He also worked at various times as a cowboy, homesteader, farmhand, rancher, reporter, bank cashier, and lawyer.
But he also advocated the fate of the lowly foot soldier, both as a VA Board of Appeals member and as an American Legion co-founder. “All those guys who went through an actual war, they all hung together. Even though he was an officer, he said the guys who had fought the war were more qualified to make the rules about their benefits.”
And he just happened to have a taste for fine ladies’ garments, which apparently reminded him of simpler times when his mother dressed him in his sisters’ hand-me-downs on the farm. “Today,” Lilith opines, “there’s a lot of people who try to look like that but just can’t pull it off. He could. In one picture he’s holding a purse in a way that would put any woman to shame.”
According to Lilith, Uncle Lem (1885-1957) came from a long line of restless, wanderlusting types. His mom became a society woman. One of his brothers became a UW crew coach and Harvard dean of athletics. Another brother helped found the Seabees.
Born in Minnesota, Lem’s formative years were spent in a homesteader’s sod house somewhere in the Dakotas, where (according to a newspaper obit Lilith has) he decided at age 10 he had to get out and see the world. The Army was his vehicle. Apparently, his eccentricities as well as his ambitions thrived in the supposedly ordered world of the military.
As Lilith describes the image she’s gotten of him from family stories and mementos, “He was too cool. He’d like to be here today, he’d have fun. He did have to fight in Germany in World War I, but he wasn’t a fighting guy. He wrote that war is wonderful in theory, but when you see it close up it’s horrible and you never forget it. He was just somebody with the nerve, the attitude, to do what he wanted. When he drove, they tell me he never stopped at intersections. He just lay on his horn and sped on through with force of will. He never got hit; everybody stopped. He had attitude. But he could back it up.”
Somewhere along the line he studied law, at the UW and in London. He lived in a variety of places (Maryland, Virginia, New York) eventually settling in Yakima where he joined the Masons and the Rotary. He was admitted to practice before the U.S. Supreme Court, but preferred his work on behalf of vets and their families. “He was really gung ho about widows and children; he liked it when got these children a lot of money from the government.”
He re-upped for the service in WWII, eventually serving as head of public safety for Allied-occupied zones in Europe. During this second tour of duty he caught maraia, complications from which led to his retirement in 1947. But even after he stopped working, he kept on living. He traveled; he volunteered on behalf of various causes; he moved from place to place. “He probably had attention deficit disorder, a long time before they had the name for it.”
Lilith only met Uncle Lem once. “I was four or five. He was so nice; he was so real. I would have gone with him wherever he went.”
Instead, she had to resume her own often-bitter childhood in the Bitter Lake area, out by the former amusement park where the Aurora Pay Less is now. She seldom got along with her father, who “scared all the guys away from the door.” She became the teenage unwed mother of a son taken from her at birth, whom she didn’t meet til he’d grown up. She had six more kids by six fathers, only one of whom she married and that very briefly (one of her sons is a former Simpsons animator). She hid Army deserters during the Vietnam days. She spent the past couple of decades on and off assistance.
She recently left a part-time job at a vintage store, and plans to leave town this summer. She’s sold most of her belongings, except for Uncle Lem’s stuff and her collection of pre-1965 works on paper (matchbooks, road maps, pamphlets, toy boxes, postcards, signs, recipe booklets, et al.). She admires the elegance and beauty of some of these old mass-produced items, qualities she finds lacking in today’s American culture (“They worked for quality then; every bit of that old stuff was cool”).
She inherited Uncle Lem’s papers and correspondence last November. Lilith now has at least one relative she can look on with pride. “What’s great about looking back at your ancestors this way,” she says, “is you can find pieces of yourself in them without having to deal directly with their personalities. It’s not what he did that I connect with; but the way he created situations that fit him and didn’t screw anybody over.”
