Not a Model Man
Imperfect in a word....make no mistake
The next lines are: “….but I’ll give you everything I have. Take me as I am” - and for my subscribers, I hope you will stay with me as we evolve “Harrowings” into what it can become within the realm of both the possible - and the impossible.
I spent time today speaking with the proprietor of “Active Potential” - which I hope I can convince all of you is worth your “click” and then some. My friend who has run this company for many years literally saves people’s lives every day by her skilled services. Not only that but she has literally given so much away for free!
This substack is also freely available with a few posts for paid subscribers. The balance is likely to shift because, for the time being, this is my major source of income. I thank all of you for considering becoming paid subscribers.
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The smallest gesture can mean so much. We need each other to keep stable in a world that is always in motion. To that end, I’ve been thinking a great deal about being a silent center of my own universe - a place from which I can regard “The Passing Show” - and those of you who see much me of Facebook know that part of my personal practice - my discipline, if you will, is to “Go Live” and walk down the street recording “The Passing Show.” Admittedly, its production values leave something to be desired but it is “Raw Journalism of Who, What, When, and Where” - a little primary documentation for historians of the future. That’s where it links to the “Harold B. Gill Foundation” - as primary documents were the life’s blood of my father’s work.
Who is Harold B. Gill, Jr.?
This is a question that I have difficulty answering, even as his son and namesake. My father was born on his own father’s 26th birthday - January 16, 1933 - in a room in which he would later take his examination for his driver’s license. The DMV clerk did not believe him, but it was true. That would have been in 1949 if he got it at age 16 and he soon acquired his first car; a gray 1930 Ford Model A with yellow wheels. He taught himself how to chrome plate parts for it. He had it until graduation from William and Mary College in 1955 when my grandfather presented him with a new ‘55 Chevy and its payment book! Time to get a job.
(When I graduated from Randolph-Macon College in 1986, Dad did something similar but he had paid the late Jay Gaynor - then Curator of Mechanical Arts at the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation and later Director of Historic Trades - a thousand dollars for Jay’s deceased father’s 1976 Chevrolet Caprice Classic.)
My father had a range of jobs. He had studied Chemistry and History at William and Mary and got a job at a wood-treatment plant on one of the larger farms near his hometown of Orange, Virginia. The farmer who owned it was an older man named McDonald - so yes, Harold worked on “Old McDonald’s Farm.” Now to give you an idea of the kind of establishment we’re talking about, Old McDonald used to have friends fly in and land on his front lawn to have breakfast with him. He offered to pay for my father to have flying lessons to be his pilot, but for one reason or another, my father didn’t take him up on it. He’d been offered opportunities to go up in planes when he was younger and visiting the airstrip outside of the town but his father never would allow it. That might have been part of the reason for turning down that opportunity. Interestingly, the first time my father flew in an airplane was on a trip to Chicago where he had a fellowship at the Newberry Library to study the application of statistical analysis to historic records. This happened around 1977 or so by which time he was 44 years old and had been an employee of the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation’s Research Department for about 16 years. By this time he had authored the books mentioned in the earlier post here called “Works of Harold B. Gill, Jr.”
In those 16 years since he had moved his baby daughter and wife from Richmond, VA to Williamsburg in the winter of 1961, he’d worked hard and fathered a son, me. He told me it was the coldest, clearest night he could remember when I came into the world on February 4, 1963 at Williamsburg Community Hospital. My mother, just shy of turning 24 years old, was a stay-at-home Mom until I was 9 and my sister was 12 and Dad was able to buy a new brick ranch home in the Birchwood Gardens neighborhood. My mother bought him a jigsaw and a set of plans for a hutch that stands in the dining room of 100 Underwood Road to this day. By degrees, a woodworking shop took form in the garage of 108 Dogwood Drive where we would live until 1977 - that year in which Dad went off to Chicago. In the meantime, that house on Dogwood Drive would be furnished by products of his skilled work with power tools. As a young boy, I would spend hours out there with him. He built my sister a tool house and hand-carved dinosaurs out of blocks of pine which he had me sand. He put up a basketball hoop in the backyard and build us a tree house in one of the three silver maples that grew at the rear of our property. My sister and I had a fairly idyllic childhood growing up with numerous neighborhood children.
My father’s creative work included working on a lathe where he created not only the table that now graces my mother’s studio at Charter Senior Living, but also wooden tops. I remember him teaching Bob Gerling how to spin them at the Geddy House yard where family life in the 18th century was a major focus and where I served a few years of apprenticeship in the brass foundry.
Before we moved out of Birchwood to Kingsmill on the James in 1977, my father had developed an interest in photography and built a darkroom in the garage of 108 Dogwood Drive. He spent many hours practicing there after taking some training from Virgil Rowe, the husband of the late Linda Rowe, who was also a researcher in Colonial Williamsburg. His facility with the camera led to many photographs gracing our homes walls. Once we moved to Kingsmill, he made modifications that allowed him to convert his study over the garage into a dark room also. It was there that he taught me what he knew. This led to me being the photography editor of my high school newspaper, the Lafayette Ledger, for a time.
Dad also created pieces of folk art and painted. His output in these areas was not as prolific but it’s all part of the legacy which I plan to preserve. He also collected stamps, even running his own approval mailing company during his teen years that had allowed him to save enough money to buy that 1930 Ford Model A mentioned above. His collection is extensive and I am in the process of boxing it up to send it to Kelleher Auctions. It should be out of here early next week. Thankfully, they’ll be making a catalogue of the collection along with a bit of biographical information about him. It’ll be one more way to ensure that his time on this earth is not forgotten.
One thing about the man was his enthusiastic generosity with his knowledge and his ability to bring the people of the past back to life through his scholarly research. He once told me that he was a historian of the inarticulate - meaning those people whose traces on this earth are left in account books, ledgers, wills, and inventories. Historians are detectives and, as he was taught by his professors and colleagues, “If it is printed, it’s suspect!” - Always go back to primary documentation or as close to it as you can get and remember that no one every prints anything without an axe to grind.
Manuscripts then were an essential part of his research and he was one of the few people who could read 18th century hand-writing as easily as most of us can read this font on the screen. He even identified works by a Williamsburg apothecary by his hand-writing. He benefited greatly from his ease in creating relationships with people of all walks of life. Particularly beneficial was his rapport with the members of the Historic Trades Department. The next paid installment will expand on this aspect of the answer to the question: “Who is Harold B. Gill, Jr?”