Over Here: 5 – The Downing Clan
...Grandpa Downing, a small, finely-sculpted, extraordinarily handsome man, labored all of his life at a nearby brickyard. The fourteen kids absolutely doted on their dad. To the days of their individual deaths, most of them had at one time or another mentioned the "wonderfully clean" smell of Grandpa Downing’s sweat! (I just report the facts, folks. I don't explain them)...
Ron Pataky, continuing his autobiography, tells of his family tree.
"Mom" was the former Daisy Downing, a Midwestern girl who'd met my father while waitressing at the Greer-Lincoln Hotel coffee shop in downtown Danville, Illinois, directly south of Chicago and a few short miles from the Indiana border.
Several of the Downing clan, accordingly, had years before strayed 'cross the border like ornery cattle and settled in as Hoosiers, although every one of Mom's ten brothers and three sisters were born and bred English-Irish-Cherokee-Illinois stock.
One can only imagine the shameless intra-family hostility that must have gone on the day of the Indiana-Illinois Big 10 football game! (Assuming, of course, that any of the hard-drinking male Downings were still on their feet, which come to think of it would have been an altogether improbable scenario).
Grandpa Downing, a small, finely-sculpted, extraordinarily handsome man, labored all of his life at a nearby brickyard. The fourteen kids absolutely doted on their dad. To the days of their individual deaths, most of them had at one time or another mentioned the "wonderfully clean" smell of Grandpa Downing’s sweat! (I just report the facts, folks. I don't explain them).
Grandpa Downing's only vice was chewing tobacco. He never swore, he never smoked, nor did he drink, although he did sire ten sons, most of whom were drunks throughout great portions of their hectic lives. Go figure!
Grandma Downing prayed a lot, made clothes, had her fairly extensive garden out back, cooked, baked, and canned constantly... and had babies, fourteen in all, and all of whom lived at least into late middle age. Indeed, all of the four total non-boozing sisters (Mom included) lived well into their 80s.
As I understood it, my Mom HAD partaken of a single Crème de Menthe frappe in the early 1940s. Lending credence to the story, she is rumored to have been still praying for forgiveness well into her seventies! I do know that Mom had no use whatsoever for alcohol, foul language, or what she would call folks without manners. You and I know them as jackasses, uncouth slobs, or simply as stupid S-O-B's.
Grandma's father, a Smith said to have direct lines to the inimitable Captain John Smith of Jamestowne fame, had lived his life as a dirt-poor farmer, unassuming all his life despite the generally accepted nobility of his lineage.
Grandma's mother was a full-blooded Cherokee beauty whose clear eyes shone even into very old age. Among treasured family pictures was one of my great-grandmother, standing next to a small table in a clearly hand-woven dress, holding in her wrinkled left hand the clay smoking pipe that accompanied her everywhere.
The Downing kids, all fourteen of them, were striking in appearance, the boys remarkably handsome with clean, lean features, (Alan Ladd was the movie star to whom several were compared most frequently), and the girls each quite beautiful.
Daisy, or Day, my mother, was head-turning gorgeous all of her life, as was amply and vividly demonstrated during the near-year we lived at the Wardman Park Hotel in downtown Washington, D.C. One event during that time was the celebrity-packed President's Birthday Ball, held each year for FDR at the Wardman Park, during which event my brother Gordon and I were utterly dumbfounded at the spectacle of perfect strangers shyly approaching our mother to ask if she would autograph otherwise blank pieces of paper!. The lady was, as I've said, drop-dead pintoresco; moreover with long-lasting, near-perfect accoutrement to match.
