LETTERS FROM NORA MESSENGER JOUGHIN

By Lula Joughin Dovi 2008

   It was a great surprise to learn recently through a cousin doing family research that the family name of Messenger was not the real name of our great grandfather. He was Ludwig Schlesinger who emigrated from Sweden to the United States around 1850 with his brother John. After arrival here Ludwig changed his name to Louis Messenger. Preserved letters that crossed the Atlantic Ocean described many difficulties that beset the men.

   Their troubles began when their father Aron[Avraham Meir ben Yehudah]  Schlesinger of Goteborgs, Sweden, allegedly a successful silk merchant, went into bankruptcy in 1831 and had to spend three years as a debtor in prison. Aron’s wife died in 1834, and the siblings had a struggle. Aron died in 1866.

   Louis married Mary Jane McCabe McCauley, a 19-year-old widow of Mt. Airy,VA, in 1853. Among the nine children they had was Nora, my grandmother. The Civil War left them homeless, and the family eventually made its way to Memphis, TN. Louis wrote a number of times to his nephew Robert who apparently had difficulty finding a career in both Sweden and this country. Letters also passed between Robert and his cousins, including Nora.

   Nora seemed to have escaped the yellow fever epidemic of 1878 probably because she left to be married in 1874 to Robert J. Joughin, a building contractor from the Isle of Man. Her father Louis wrote to the Swedish family that it was difficult to leave Memphis because of quarantines and armed guards preventing people from boarding trains. However, a married daughter, Rosa Hanbury, and her husband provided an escape to a house in Dalton, GA, where her father and some of the family remained outside the town under quarantine.

   Louis described the terror in Memphis where “people were dropping dead in the streets, the deaths [ran]...up to 120 per day out of only one quarter of the population of about 7000…”His wife succumbed in 1882 to the strain of losing her father, mother, brother and others whom she had nursed. Almost ten years later from 1887 to 1888 Tampa also suffered a yellow fever epidemic. Some families left and decamped outside the town.

   Robert Joughin’s contracting work took Nora to Terrell, TX, which is where my father, Robert T. Joughin, was born. Two other sons were born before him. In her correspondence with cousin Robert, Nora recounted many details of her life and tried to induce him to join her husband in his work.   

   By 1884 Nora and her husband, Mr. J as she called him, were in Sanford, FL, where he was building houses and acquiring a citrus grove. She described one of his projects as a house costing $900 to build with the expectation that it would be rented for $15 a month. Houses were in demand, she said. At that time part of the geographic importance of Sanford was due to the boat traffic on the St. Johns River.

   On the personal side, Nora wrote that she had been real sick and that “my Doctor was afraid I would have nervous fever—but I suppose I took it just in time. I am not feeling real well. I suffer so much with nervous headaches—and there seems no help for it. But if I can only keep up so I can attend to my home duties I will be so thankful.” She complained that weak spells once in a while made her feel very bad and discouraged at the time and that they did “ irritate Mr. J so.” She referred to her husband as “Mr. J.”

   Nora wrote again from Sanford in 1885 to describe what must have been a minor building boom. There were many Swedish people there. Evidently her husband was building one house at a time and selling it. A letter to her cousin in 1888 told of the unexpected death of her father. She also mentioned,”Yes we are in ‘the land of flowers’, it is truly a lovely Country, but as Sanford is quite a new little town, we miss a great many conveniences that we have in a larger or older city, but everyone thinks that Sanford will in a short while be a large place.” Her husband did well there for a while but later had reverses due to a freeze.

   Still in Sanford in 1890, Nora wrote a letter of condolence to her cousin Robert after hearing about the deaths of his mother and father. She said her lack of letter-writing was because her health had not been good and that “my baby and four other children make it quite busy for me.”She was only 35 by then. She also complained that the servants were not helpful. Ultimately the family included six sons and two daughters.

     Later the family moved to Tampa. Robert Jones Joughin continued to have building success in the area until his unexpected death at the age of 50. He was involved in the construction of the still-existent wooden hotel, the Belleair Hotel, near the beach in Belleair across the bay. Also he is said to have built the deep-water docks for the port of Tampa.

   Before Nora died in 1920 at the age of 65 she had seen two of her sons achieve prominence. Bert was a captain in the Spanish-American War, and his name is on a monument to that war in Plant Park at University of Tampa. He founded Joughin Plumbing Company later. My father Robert T., or Bob as most people called him, was a major on the governor’s staff in World War I and founded his own plumbing company before Bert died of appendicitis in the 1930’s.

ROBERT TEARE JOUGHIN

(March 4,1880-April 25,1961)

By Lula Joughin Dovi

My father was more like an uncle to me because I went to live with his brother Leslie’s family at the age of four. Also, he was 42 years old when I was born November 19,1922. My mother, Lula, had died three weeks after I was born at the house at 320 W. Amelia Ave. in Tampa Heights.

Before I went to live with Leslie and Lillian and their two children, Lillian and Leslie, I didn’t have many clear memories of life at my father’s house. I heard he had engaged a nurse, Mrs. Campbell, and her husband to come live in the house and care for me.

Perhaps I was two years old when Aunt Evelyn  “Pearl” Riles, her husband,  “Daddy Bob,” and their son Bob came to live with us. Any memories I have of Pearl’s tenure at our home are mostly the result of her stories of certain events. Pearl told about dressing up Bob and me and taking us for rides in my father’s Pierce Arrow. She was his younger sister.

My father, for his part, told about changing Pearl’s mealtime routine. She was going to feed the children separately and then have the adults eat. But my father said “no”__the children were to eat with him. Pearl, I learned in time, had many social aspirations. She was the next to youngest child in a family of six boys and two girls and received much special attention. She was a beautiful, dainty woman less than five feet tall and with very tiny hands and feet. Her lovely voice could be heard in solo at church.

I  can imagine how delighted Pearl was with the large retinue of black servants who labored inside and outside the house. There were Christine, her niece Florence(rather cantankerous according to us children),Florence’s daughter Lily May, plus numerous others running busily about. I remember being taken to Christine’s house less than a mile away across the Hillsborough River. While there I was allowed to play happily in the sandy yard__a glorious, sensuous feeling of sand and freedom. Pearl’s clean-up dress-up routine never allowed us to do that.

Christine had some unforgettable recipes such as oyster stew and sweet potato pie.  Mashed potatoes had a delicious dash of vinegar. The smell of Octagon soap always reminds me of that household. When laundry was done the sheets boiled in a huge kettle  over a fire in the back yard. One of the servants would use poles to stir and then remove linens and white things to dry on a clothesline.

Not a tall man, my father nevertheless had a very authoritative air about him that coincided with his square-jawed, handsome face. He enjoyed all the attention that his political and business successes brought him. Some people seemed to idolize him. He was a big spender, generous in many ways, and enjoyed wearing two huge diamond rings.

As a practical jokester my father loved to tell how he put Christine’s false teeth in the bottom of a soup bowl. When he reached the bottom he scraped up the teeth and called her from the kitchen. She was mortified to see that they were her teeth.

Some memories are very poignant as I recall, probably around the age of ten, sitting in the porch swing with my father when I went to spend the night with him sometimes. There was a deep feeling of protection and love which later would be corrupted and dissolved during my college years and afterward.

My father, in telling about his driving ambition to make money and be a success, made it clear that the wealth of my mother’s family (the John Jackson family) had served as a challenge to him. He was very proud of his accomplishments. He also made it clear that he was quite intolerant of the Catholicism of the Jacksons. He was proud of the fact that when my mother was dying he came home and “threw out the priest” that my great-aunt Kate Jackson had brought in for the last rites.

Poker and other betting games were favorites of my father. He belonged to two poker groups that included a mixture of some prominent Latin and Jewish Tampans. Wolfson, Rosenthal, Hernandez and Fernandez were some of the names. The Hernandez family owned the Columbia Restaurant. My father was said to be a big winner at times. He was very fortunate in business, especially after having survived the Great Depression with some business losses. Before the Depression he sported two impressive Lincolns, one a seven-passenger green car and the other a cream colored sedan with black trim__an eye catcher which sometimes had his former deputy Pearl McAdden at the wheel as chauffeur.

During the Depression my father closed his plumbing, heating and air-conditioning business in Tampa briefly to go to Tombstone, AZ, and buy a silver mine. The Three R’S Mining Co. included two of his friends, Robert E. Lee Davis and Robert Carter. The ore turned out to be a low grade, and, furthermore the U.S. government did not go on the silver standard as my father thought it would. He thought his inside sources in the government were giving him good advice. Over the years he cultivated friendships with several senators including former Senator Claude Pepper. Probably these connections helped him win many government contracts during World War II. He was a sub-contractor with Paul Smith Construction Co. and helped in building many air bases in the Southeast. He also had big contracts for schools and buildings. He made his fortune all over again after he was 60 years old.

ROBERTA  FOUND  AGAIN

By Lula Dovi

My half-sister Roberta Joughin, unknown to me until I was at Florida State College for Women in 1940, has unexpectedly reappeared in my life through an old newspaper article—and with an accompanying picture. What a handsome 28-year-old  anthropologist she is, doing research in the wilds of Chiapas, Mexico, according to a May 1953 interview with her by a Los Angeles Times reporter. Before embarking on that project she served in the WAVE or women’s branch of the U.S. Navy in World War II.

Last mention of Roberta, also known as Bobbie (having been named for our father Robert T. Joughin, former sheriff of Hillsborough County), placed her in Mexico in 1953 after marrying the second son of the ninth Duke of Manchester, England. She was his fifth wife. One year later, after a wedding in September 1953, the duke died at the age of 48 in Mexico. All of this information came to me a few years ago through Philip Allen, a British cousin who is a lawyer and collaborator with me on family genealogy.

My unfounded notion that she might be a society, fortune-hunting girl has had to be discarded. The reporter who tracked down Bobbie in the Chiapas jungle said her dream had been to help a famous anthropologist, Franz Blom, discover buried cities and study descendants of Mayas called the Lacandon group. She was working on a doctoral degree at University of Mexico. I think I would have liked and admired that young woman. She graduated from University of California at Los Angeles. Her mother Flora lived and worked in Los Angeles.

The newspaper photograph is the only other picture I have of Bobbie. A snapshot found in my father’s house after his death in 1961 shows a pre-teen in a riding habit on a low hill among desert mountains. An inscription on the back, written for my father, says, “Lovingly, Roberta.” I was immediately apprehensive and somewhat jealous. Until college days I thought I was my father’s only child. I did not have the interest to discover more about her. I knew she was two years younger than I was, born in 1924, and my father mentioned in his will he had “already taken care of her.” She was said to be living in Mexico.

After my shocking discovery about a half-sister I heard conflicting stories about her  Jewish mother and also about her own existence. I heard a different story from each of my three aunts. One aunt claimed my father had no other children. I heard there was a hint that Flora, who owned a business with my father in downtown Tampa, might have had an affair with him before my mother died a few weeks after my birth in 1922. Family undercurrents could have made the new marriage very difficult. My mother belonged to the prominent Jackson family, early founders of Tampa and also Sacred Heart Church. Her father and grandfather had been mayors.

In 2003 when Cousin Philip discovered Bobbie’s place on the family tree we still had no idea about her career or why she died at 40 with no children of her own. We only knew she had met the duke in Mexico. But further startling information came to light a few years ago when a friend of mine made an internet discovery. A book, Fieldwork Among the Maya:reflections on the Harvard Chiapas Project, by Evon Zartman Vogt, revealed Bobbie’s anthropological work.

Vogt related that Bobbie had been working with University of Chicago field workers in 1956. According to him she was owner of a spacious colonial house in San Cristobal and “one of the more interesting members of the expatriate Euro-American colony who had purchased houses in San Cristobal and spent part or all of each year in Chiapas.” She was described as being from a well-to-do Sephardic Jewish family in New Orleans. A close friend of Bobbie was well-known anthropologist Calixta Guiteras-Holmes who always stayed in her house when she was in town.

In 1960 Bobbie had the idea of establishing an anthropological field station at her ranch on the outskirts of San Cristobal. She had bought 40 hectares of land mostly for grazing horses and cattle. That year the University of Chicago, Stanford University and Harvard University signed a contract with her to rent the property and buildings for five years. The place became known as El Rancho Harvard or The Harvard Ranch. Until 1981 the  Harvard Chiapas Project continued renting the ranch.

 Vogt wrote that Bobbie died suddenly of a heart attack on August 31, 1962.  However, other records list 1964 as the year of her death. The heir to the property was Bobbie’s long-time friend Calixta who also had been named guardian of an Indian child, Tete, who was adopted by Bobbie shortly before her death. Calixta finally decided to sell the ranch in 1980 because Tete had grown up and, according to Vogt, become an accomplished ballerina in Havana. Calixta moved to Cuba and became an anthropological advisor to Fidel Castro.

Roberta Joughin Montagu, better known as Bobbie, left her mark in anthropology with the establishment of Harvard Ranch which housed field workers for many years. She wrote several scholarly papers which are mentioned on the internet. Her Land Rover automobile also received appreciative mention in Vogt’s book as she drove him around to become familiar with the locale.

But there still are big gaps in our knowledge of this “very personable young woman.”

TWO  GOOD  WOMEN

By Lula Dovi

2008

There are no photographs of my great-grandmother,Mary Jane McCauley Cole  Messenger. But the family narratives passed along to me portray a woman who, although living only 48 years, displayed unusual strength, devotion and literary talent. She survived many losses of family members and her home in Petersburg, VA, during the Civil War.

Mary Jane was already a widow at age 19 when she married William Louis Messenger in 1853. They had six children, among them my grandmother Leonore Messenger Joughin. During the Civil War her family lost the home at Mt. Airy, Petersburg, due to the fiery ravages of battle. After that the family moved to Memphis and later to Rome, GA. Family history says that Mary Jane and her mother, Mary Jane McCauley, began a young ladies seminary there.

Before the family left the home they were said to have been visited by enemy soldiers demanding all their food. Leonore’s grandmother said she would have a good meal prepared for them and feed the entire company. She did so, and at that time the men did not burn down the house or take their silverware. Next time the Northerners visited was the disaster. For a while the family lived in the slave quarters.

According to Leonore, there was a hazardous trip across Northern lines to deliver quinine and other medicines which could be wrapped in paper. She pretended to be ill as the wagon transported her lying on a mattress filled with the medicines. On the way, however, soldiers stopped them. They lifted her out of the wagon while men ran their bayonets through the mattress.

In an 1882 obituary published in The Sunny South by Mary Jane’s brother-in-law,Thomas E. Hanbury, a newspaper owner and editor, a clear portrait emerges of  the loss felt for her:

   [In the language of those times]…”It is not amiss here to state that although poor in this world’s goods at the time of her death, yet she had seen better, happier and brighter days. She was an offspring of a wealthy and noble Virginia family whose house was ever open and whose hospitality warmed and refreshed the guests and the stranger within their gates, until their all was swept away by war’s desolation. Many old Virginians who sojourned in Petersburg before the war will remember the famous cool…heights familiarly called ‘Mount Airy’ … In Memphis she went through three serious epidemics nursing the sick, and caring for the dead…until worn away with fatigue and after she had nursed and buried her father, mother, brother and many others…For her family she was an untiring worker and for them she labored and hoped…”

   “For many years in her younger days she followed literary pursuits, and her articles adorned the pages of the best literary papers in the country…  “

One of Mary Jane’s poems, Lines to Leonore E. J---N., Terrell, Texas, for The Sunny South, expresses her love and longing for her daughter, 1875:

   …(last stanza of three)”When Evening dons her fleecy veil

   And clasps her starry zone,

   I’ll smile on thee in moonbeams pale

  And sing in Zephyr’s tone;

  Across the waste of years my love

  Turns to thee evermore,

  As to the ark the faithful dove

  My loveliest Leonore.”

Leonore, born in 1855, had an easier life than her mother in some ways except for losing

her childhood home. Her father was a Swedish immigrant, and she, too, married an immigrant, Robert Joughin, from the Isle of Man. Her husband’s career as an engineer and builder took her to Texas, Tennessee and eventually to Florida. He had groves and a bank at Sanford, FL, until the freeze of 1898 reversed his financial fortunes. Among his building projects were the Belleair Hotel in Belleair,FL,  and the deep water docks at Tampa.

Petite and with curly hair, Leonore shows us in her photographs the happy face of a mother of six boys and two girls. Some of the boys, according to stories from my father, Robert, got so many paddlings from their father that they cut up the strap into little pieces. When my father and his brother Cleve were late teenagers they decided to run away and join the military service during the Spanish-American War. They were unable to be accepted in the Navy because of color-blindness. Their father said if they were old enough to run away they were big enough to get back home by themselves. Which they did by working for a while in a bakery.

After their father died unexpectedly at the age of 50, the sons took good care of their mother. Bert, the second oldest son, was a captain in the army during the Spanish-American War and founded a plumbing and heating business in Tampa which employed some of the younger brothers.

At the age of 65 Leonore died in 1920. I never knew her but her picture and a framed poem that she wrote hung on a wall in each of her children’s homes. It was told that     she had played well on a ladies guitar given to her by her father. The instrument was bound in ivory and decorated with mother-of-pearl grapes and leaves. She would have been proud of the successes of her children and especially of my father’s appointment by Governor Doyle Carlton as sheriff of Hillsborough County in 1929.

The love for her husband shines brightly, and sadly, in two poems Leonore wrote. In an excerpt from the first one, “Which One,” she asks:

   “One of us,dear_

   But one

   Will sit by a bed with a nameless fear

   And clasp a hand

   Growing cold as it feels for the spirit land_

   Darling,which one?”

In answer to the question, she later wrote, from the poem ,“God Thought It Best”:

   “One of us, dear, had first to go,

   Yet many happy years,

   Which it would be we did not know,

   God willed it so.

   Darling, I am the one left,

   God thought it best.”

CROSSING  CULTURES

by Lula Dovi

     “It won’t work.” “You’re making a mistake.” “He’s a Sicilian.”

     Those were some of the warnings thrown at me by family and friends before I married Stefano Dovi in 1946.He had just been discharged from the Navy as a lieutenant junior grade and was returning to Milwaukee to finish his undergraduate degree in chemistry at Marquette University. We had met the year before in San Diego where I was working as a journalist for the San Diego Tribune-Sun and later as an Associated Press editor. AP promised me another job in Milwaukee which, however, would not open up until after our June wedding.

     Coming into Milwaukee by train from Chicago gave me a first impression of a dirty, dingy, huge industrial city with blocks and blocks of side-by-side duplexes. Everything seemed gray. My only experience with city life had been in small-town Tampa from  the 1920’s to the 1940’s , when I left, and sunny San Diego with its colorful Latin-style houses, many canyons and views of the Pacific Ocean. Lake Michigan looked dark gray. I longed for the emerald waters of the Gulf of Mexico. Not even the chirping of summer robins could lift my spirits.

     Steve had warned me. His father was a janitor in a boat motor factory because he had suffered a stroke in his thirties and could no longer work for the railroad where he had had a good job. The stroke coincided with the onset of the Depression and the family had been briefly on relief. Steve had worked grueling jobs while going to Marquette. He was the oldest in the family of two sisters and a brother.

     Grandma Nina didn’t work but she reigned over the household. Steve said she was not too happy that his wife-to-be had been married before, even if she were a war widow. Each daughter and her husband Luigi turned over their paychecks to her for the miraculous effects she could wring from them. She always came up with lavish gifts seemingly from nowhere.

     When I entered the family I immediately felt the generous warmth from all of them. But there was a definite hesitancy as to how to cope with a new family member who had graduated from college, who came from a comfortable economic class and who was from the South. Within the first few days as we discussed wedding details I had some strong feelings about walking out of the whole situation.

     Grandma Nina was very insistent, talking mostly in Sicilian to the family, that we should have the Catholic priest conduct a ceremony even if we didn’t marry in the church. I said absolutely not because Steve and I had the understanding we would have a justice of the peace marry us. She immediately developed hysterics and began sobbing and screaming. The daughters begged me to relent. I replied that my religious ideas were as important to me as their mother’s beliefs were to her. They had to call in a doctor to administer a shot to calm her. The whole episode seemed foreboding.

     Over the next 27 years we were married there would be some other clashes. I was never able to communicate very well with Grandma Nina. But I learned to respect her more as the years went by. And I used many of her recipes and menus. Steve liked to cook also and duplicated some of her cooking. He was always her favorite. I was jealous in the early years that he called his mother every day. But later I changed my feelings about that and saw what an exemplary son he was.

     Our marriage was built on a profound community of interests as well as a great deal of tenacity. We did have some vociferous arguments with choice invective. But we shared the same interests and activities in politics and in our community wherever we lived. We could talk together endlessly. Before he died of cardiac complications in 1974 at the age of 52 we had reached a very tranquil and fulfilling period. He became regional manager for Crown Life Insurance Company. Both our careers were progressing, mine as a teacher and curriculum coordinator, and our three children were a great satisfaction to us. Steve’s funeral was an ultimate concession to his mother’s wishes. We arranged for a Catholic priest as well as our Unitarian minister to preside at the funeral home before a graveside Masonic service.

     When my children get together we have good and not-so-good stories to tell. It is undeniable that the Sicilian heritage has enriched their lives and mine too. One of our memorable stories is about Grandma Nina’s determination to wear black to my daughter’s wedding five months after Steve died. After a lot of threats and arguments my daughter finally persuaded her grandmother that her son Steve would greatly disapprove of the black. She showed up in a perfectly acceptable ivory-colored gown.

ASTRID’S  LEPRECHAUN

Tom, the Irish leprechaun, was sad.

The leaves were falling from the trees.

The leaves were turning many colors. They were becoming gold and brown and red. Tom  could see that summer was gone. Autumn was here. The nights were getting cooler and the breeze was chilly, too. The sun did not stay out as long and the days were getting shorter.

What was a green leprechaun going to do? He did not like the brown colors of autumn and winter. In October there might be Halloween goblins out at night.

Tom remembered that Astrid’s Grandma Lula lived in Florida where it stays green all year. Grandma Lula is partly Irish and knows about leprechauns.

So Tom called Grandma Lula on the telephone. “May I come down to Tampa for the winter, Grandma Lula? Do you think your granddaughter Astrid has a place where I can sleep a lot during this season?”

Grandma Lula said, "I’ll be glad to ask Astrid about your plan. She has a green yard with plenty of room. She has talked to you many times on the telephone. I am sure she will be happy to have you even though she can’t see you. I’ll ask her if you can stay in the little toad house in the back yard. We know you can make yourself small enough to get inside. And I’ll ask Astrid to find a little green frog to keep you company. The little frog can also tell you when spring comes back again in March.”

Astrid was happy to hear about Tom’s visit to her yard. She went out and checked the toad house. She found a little green frog for Tom. And she made a little bed of pine straws for him. Nearby there were three lizards that could eat any insects that might bother Tom during his long, long naps.

Sometimes Astrid thought she could hear Tom when the winds whispered through the pine trees in her yard. When spring arrived she heard the little green frog and knew that Tom was getting ready to leave on his trips. Before he left Tom touched the flowers in the yard. Rainbow colors were everywhere : red roses, yellow roses, yellow iris, orange nasturtiums, white and red bleeding heart, oh yes, and orange blossoms with their spring perfume.

Tom talked to Astrid on the telephone before he left on his next trip. “Thank you, Astrid, for the best winter napping  I ever had. Your toad house is very comfortable. I will talk to you again. And tell Grandma Lula hello for me.”

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