an art store, a breveted chocolate shop, a milliner, photographers, soldiers, a historian and more… a picture story spanning two continents, six generations and almost 200 years…
Pierre Marie Germain Rachel
Auguste Sarah Frederic
Simone Fred Jr
Alain Guy Edward
Florence Penny Tom
Sophie Anna
Germain Pondarre (Pierre’s brother-in-law), Pierre Gentieu, Auguste Pondarre, Orthez, 1898
Rue de l’Horloge, Orthez, Lower Pyrenees, France, 1898. Photo by Pierre Gentieu on his only visit back to Orthez, after emigrating to America 38 years earlier. The shop on the left, with the Papiers, Peints, Peinture, Encadrements sign is an art store owned by Pierre’s sister and husband, Marie and Germaine Pondarre. Marie, with Pierre’s other sister, Rachel Gentieu-Baillan run the Gentieu-Baillan Chocolatier Brevet shop up the street, which is an old family business breveted by the Duchesse de Berri in 1828.
Map of 1828 Orthez given to me by Orthez historian Emmanuel Labat in 2019 showing La Praire, an apartment building owned by the Pondarres, and the location of the chocolate shop close to the art store. Up the street is the castle and across from that, the Gentieu family homestead, which could be the same house where Emmanuel lives. (The initials, PGB, which could stand for Pierre Gentieu-Baillan, an ancestor, and the year 1769 are carved above the doorway.)Marie, 1868Rachel, 1868chocolate shop, 1898
Sarah and Auguste Pondarre (son of Marie and Germain), c. 1905. Sarah was a milliner and had a hat shop.
Baby Simone Pondarre with the geese, 1907, La Prairie, Orthez.George Gentieu, stationed in France during the Great War, visited Orthez and the Pondarres in 1919.Major Auguste PondarreGeorge Gentieu shaking hands with his French cousin, Auguste Pondarre.George, son of Pierre, Civil War veteran: “I am in your place over here so that America returns to France your services.”Jessie Gentieu visited Simone in 1949.May 25, 1952: on the right, Alain, Guy, Edmond and Simone Mousques, Sarah (Simone’s mother), Nelly Bessouat, Berthe Dornercq, her husband Eugene Dornercq, Paul Humbert, the son-in-law of Mn ch Hlad,(?) Domercq. __ Auguste Pondarre the photographer.We visited Orthez and Simone at her fortified farmhouse in 1994. Here is Tom and Anna, sitting between Simone and Sophie at Simone’s table. 1994: Simone holding a family photo (c.1928) of George and Fannie Darrigrand Swahn, descendants of the Brooklyn Darrigrands who owned the Darrigrand French Bakery on the corner of Dean Street and Flatbush, where Pierre first lived when he came to America.Sophie and Anna18981994Anna in Orthez on rue de l’Horloge by the old art store, 1994
meanwhile, back in Brooklyn…
Darrigrand French Bakery, 452 Dean Street & Flatbush, Brooklyn, New York (1877?)
452 Dean & Flatbush mashup with envelope from Orthez dated April 1872, Darrigrand French Bakery to The Cake Ambiance, 2014The Cake Ambiance, 452 Dean Street, 2014, a recent establishment in the building on Dean Street where my great great grandfather lived when he first came to America. My great grandfather, Frederic Auguste Gentieu was born here, before the family spread out. My grandfather was born in New Jersey, and my dad was born in Michigan. I was born in Ohio, but now I live in Brooklyn, right up the street from this building.
Pierre took his camera to Orthez in 1898 and captured in photos not only a history for his family, but a future as well. He also adopted the city’s motto, Toques si Gaouses (Touch It If You Dare) as the new American Gentieu’s family motto. In 1929, his son, my great grandfather Frederic commissioned a stained glass window to be made with the motto. It’s mine now, and I display it in my 16th floor office window overlooking old Brooklyn.
“The ideas for my photographs come from things that I see, from a preconscious kind of seeing, and then I go back and try to assemble what l’ve seen. But whenever I try to come up with the image completely from inside myself, it never seems to work. It always needs to be triggered by something that I see. There is a sort of marriage between intellect and human response.” James Sandall, Interview by Lou Hillman, Agenda, October 1997
“What bothers me most about Ann Arbor – and l’ve lived here over 30 years – is that you meet people who are very intelligent; they know the names of all the artists; they know their backgrounds and they’ll get into a big discussion with you. Then you go to their house and they have pussy cats framed on the walls.” Barry Avedon, Interview by Lou Hillman, Agenda, October 1997
Imagine Brooklyn around 5,000 moons ago, when my Willett ancestors first set foot onto American soil.
It’s through my great grandmother, Maude Willett (1872-1961) who married Frederic Gentieu (1872-1951) in Camden, New Jersey in 1892, that my family tree was spiced up with early Dutch and English settlers in Brooklyn.
our earliest Brooklyn ancestors
It started with the Cools and the Stoothoffs who came from the Netherlands.
In 1639, Cornelius Cool came from Doorne, Amsterdam, Nederland to Gowanus, Kings County, Long Island, New York colony. Age 50 years old, he came with the entire family – his parents and children – and purchased property adjoining the Bennet Farm.
William Adrianse Bennet settled Gowanus for the Dutch in 1636, while Jan Lake, Nicholas Stillwell and Dutchman Fernandus Van Sicklen were part of the group that settled the English town of Gravesend along with Lady Deborah Moody, who founded it in 1643. *
Cornelius Cool’s daughter, Aeltje Cornelius Cool (aft 1615-1683), was born in Utrecht, Netherland in about 1615. She was previously married to Gerrit Wolfertsen Couwenhoven, the son of Wolphert Gerretse van Kouwenhoven, one of the founders of Nieuw Amersfoort (Flatlands) and ancestor of the Vanderbilts. After Gerrit died in 1648, Aeltje married Elbert Elbertsen Stoothoff (1620-1688). Aeltje brought her first husband’s property into the marriage.
Elbert Elbertsen Stoothoff (1620-1688) was born in Nieukerken, North Brabant, Holland. He immigrated to New Netherland in 1637, only 17 years old. In order to make the overseas trip, he agreed to be bound in service to Kilian Van Rensselaer for six years. But soon thereafter he made out pretty well when he married Aeltje.
In Flatlands, he owned, through his wife, a house looking just like the Jan Martense Schenck house that was built in Mill Basin, circa 1675-6 that is now on display on the third floor of the Brooklyn Museum.Stoothoff was the largest landowner in Nieuw Amersfoort (Flatlands), owning 600 acres at the time of his death.
[add photo]
Cool + Stoothoff + Willett + Cornell
Thomas Willett (1620-1647) came to New Amsterdam from Bristol, England in 1643. As a soldier for the Dutch West India Company, he was granted land in New Amsterdam in 1645. There, in 1643, he married Sarah Cornell (1623-1703), whose family came to Boston from Safron, Waldon, Essex, England in 1638. At the young age of 27, Thomas died, but not before he and Sarah had Thomas Willett Jr. (Colonel Thomas Willett Jr.) (1645-1723).
Map of the Original Grants of village lots from the Dutch West India Company to the inhabitants of New-Amsterdam, grants commencing 1642, Located from historical & legal records by Henry Tyler, New York, 1897. Boston Public Library.
Thomas Willett owned four parcels in lower Manhattan on what is now Stone Street to the East River, granted to him in 1645. His son, Colonel Thomas Willett Jr. later owned it, at least from 1686 to 1715. Source: The Willett Families of North America, Vol. 1, Albert James Willett, Jr., 1985.
From a 1660 map of the city of New Amsterdam called the Castello Plan. Courtesy of The New York Public Library.
In 1693, Thomas Willett’s property was the home of the first printing press in the colony of New York, which was operated by William Bradford, who was forced to move his operation from Philadelphia.
Aechtje Cornelius Cool and Elbert Elbertsen Stoothoff had HeiltieStoothoff (1646-1701.) Heiltie married Colonel Thomas Willett Jr. (1645-1723) in 1667.
Colonel Thomas Willett Jr. was the High Sheriff of Flushing in 1670, Captain of Militia on Long Island from 1671 to 1678, Sheriff of Yorkshire in 1676 (included L.I., Westchester, and Staten Island), and Judge of Queens County from 1702-1710. Colonel Thomas Willett Jr. was able to produce 1,000 men in 10 hours for the defense of NYC, on the occasion of the French alarm in 1704.
Colonel Thomas Willett Jr.’s 200-acre estate, the Spring Hill Farm in Flushing, having the Willet Family Burial Place, was sold by the heirs, Thomas Willett and John Willett (1690-1774) in 1762 to Lieutenant Governor Cadwallader Colden for 200 pounds. The property became known as the Colden Estate. Colden died in 1776. His son David was a Tory. The property was confiscated and sold in 1784 to William Cornwall. In 1893, it became the Cedar Grove Cemetery, incorporating the Jewish section in 1909 as the largest part of it, Mount Hebron Cemetery, which has over 225,000 graves. Barbra Streisand plans on ending up in this cemetery, she has a mausoleum in place already.
about the Cornell family
Sarah Cornell was Colonel Thomas Willett Jr.’s mother.
The Cornells are from an ancient English family who traced their lineage up through Barons of Burford to Richard de Cornewall, son of Richard, Earl of Cornewall, second son of King John. King John was the younger brother of Richard, and reigned from 1189 to 1199.
Sarah Cornell’s father, Thomas Cornell (1594/5-1655) in 1638 was one of the first settlers of Boston. In 1646, New Netherland authorities granted Cornell a patent on an area of about four square miles that later became part of today’s The Bronx.
Cornell’s Neck was bounded by Westchester Creek, the Bronx River, village of Westchester and the East River. The area now is known as Clason Point. Source: Cornell, John, Genealogy of the Cornell Family Being an Account of the Descendants of Thomas Cornell of Portsmouth, R. I. and Historic Pelham Blogspot.
Thomas Cornell willed Cornell’s Neck estate to Sarah Cornell. Its ownership was the subject of one of the first lawsuits (1665) of the first judicial system of the area, after the English took over from the Dutch. Cornells won the lawsuit because the English promised to respect the Dutch-era landowners.
Sarah Cornell’s mother (1623-1703), Rebecca Briggs (1600-1673) was “killed strangely” (possibly by her son). It is a murder that was the subject of a 2002 book titled Killed Strangely.
How the Willetts moved to Bucks County
Colonel Thomas Willett Jr. and Helena (Heiltie)Stoothoff had John Willett in 1690,who married Mary Rodman in Flushing, Queens in 1714. They had Jonathan Willett in 1722, born in Flushing, died 1804/5 in Bucks County. Jonathan married Deborah Lawrence about 1743 in Flushing.
Named for his maternal uncle, Jonathan Dickerson of Philadelphia. His uncle died when he was only 3, and left him chief heir of his estate to be delivered to him at age 21. Jonathan received all of his uncle’s estate in Pennsylvania, and also a dwelling house and land in Flushing brought of Dr. John Rodman, Jr. who moved to Bucks County as a young man, near the village of Langhorne and Philadelphia.
While the family was living in Flushing, three of the children died in July 1753 – there must have been an epidemic.
The Willett family went back and forth from Thicken, Bedminster, Bucks County, Pennsylvania in the early 1750’s, where Ann Willets was born on Oct. 4, 1750. John Willett was born in Bucks County in 1760. He married Sarah Walton.
Somewhere along the line, the Willetts became Quakers.
Meanwhile, back in New York… political radical Marinus Willett (1740-1830) was a leader of the New York Sons of Liberty and fought valiantly during the American Revolution. He eventually became the Mayor of New York, from 1807 to 1808.
Marinus Willett is my second cousin, seven times removed. (He’s the great grandson of Thomas Willett Jr., descended from Elbert, older brother of my 7th great grandfather, John.) His life-size full length portrait by Ralph Earl hangs in The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Ralph Earl (American, 1751–1801). Marinus Willett, ca. 1791. Oil on canvas, 91 1/4 x 56 in. (231.8 x 142.2 cm). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
In 1792 Marinus Willett was asked by George Washington to command American forces in the ongoing Northwest Indian War in Ohio. Marinus begged off, replying that pursuing peace on the Ohio frontier would be a far better solution.
Marinus Willett died just before his 90th birthday, at 58 Broome Street, where it is said that over 10,000 people came to view his remains. He was buried with military honors in the family vault in the Trinity Churchyard. His body was later moved to New York City Marble Cemetery on 2nd Street between 1st & 2nd Avenues.
Fun facts about my grandfather, Sherwood Mortley Pinkerton, Jr.
(Source: a newly discovered journal written by my mother.)
He was happily married and came home for lunch everyday, and so did the daughters from school.
He had a photographic memory and called all of his employees by their first names, 400 at one time.
He maintained a quarter-acre terraced garden with rock garden, arbor with sweet peas, and goldfish pool, formal rose garden with shaped boxwood hedges around each bed and a privet hedge around the outside of garden, with hibiscus in front of sunroom and stone bench on other side – 400 roses including rose garden and upper-terrace plantings. He crossed day-lilies and developed one that he named Helen, after my grandmother.
His grandfather, after the Civil War, had a grocery store and he got the idea of making chewing tobacco using clippings from a nearby cigar store. He began the Pinkerton Tobacco Company (and not Abner. Abner was one of the brothers involved in the grocery store, only.)
Kellogg’s “Pep” was a cereal in the 1930’s and 40’s, and Sherwood had chewing tobacco named Pep, so the Kellogg’s people wrote him and asked him to drop his Pep name from his tobacco. So he looked up the patent records and discovered that his patent preceded the Kellogg’s one, so he wrote them and told them to drop it.
Invented a humidor that could keep tobacco fresh — didn’t go.
Invented a rose food called Treet and sold it for 20 years.
His daughter Julia at age 11 wanted to do something naughty so she acquired a pack of Kool cigarettes, tried one and left the pack on windowsill between the house and the porch. When Sherwood looked out to check the thermometer on the porch, he noticed the Kools and asked, “Whose cigarettes are these?” Julia answered, “They’re mine, Daddy.” “Well don’t leave them on a windowsill where they will dry out.” She quit smoking them after this because her escapade did not make the impression she expected.
Sherwood ran the company as Vice President by himself when his Uncle Orr Bovard was President because he spent every winter in Florida.
He was always ready to help his daughters with homework, he took vitamins, he was happy and fulfilled, his employees loved him, he was an amateur weatherman and could tell you what the weather would be, he was not a materialist, and he drove a little maroon Ford for years, until Helen made him buy a new one.
My immigrant ancestor David Henry Mortley was born in Kent County, England in 1820. Not much is known about his parents – his father died when he was 7, his mother died when he was 10.
Orphaned so young, he came alone to America, at age 16, not knowing one person on the ship headed to New York City. He traveled to Coshocton County, Ohio, where he apprenticed with his brother, Ford, in the carpenter and joining trade.
He was a craftsman, a trait which perhaps contributed to his exquisite handwriting. When he was 30, he worked as a secretary on the 1950 Ohio constitutional convention, and it was with his hand that the parchment document of the new Ohio constitution was written. They paid him in today’s dollars $2,144 extra to do that. (“His chirograph being perfect, he wrote the great document on parchment.”)
In 1844 he married Eliza Jane Sherwood, daughter of William Sherwood from Malta, and had three daughters and one son.
He was the quartermaster for the 122nd Ohio Volunteer Infantry until he fell ill in December 1863.
After the Civil War, he was elected twice the Clerk of Courts in Morgan County.
In 1873, he went into the grocery business in Zanesville, Ohio with his son-in-law John W. Pinkerton, who is my great great grandfather.
In the summer of 1887 he was nominated for Senator by district convention composed of delegates from Tuscarawas, Coshocton, Guernsey, Monroe and nine townships of Noble. As the oldest man in the Senate, he presided over the 68th General Assembly.
He was a Justice of the Peace in Coshocton for many years. He died in McConnelsville and was buried in Woodlawn Cemetery, in Zanesville.
My grandfather was named after David Mortley and his wife, a Sherwood – my grandfather’s name being Sherwood Mortley Pinkerton, of Westmoreland, in Toledo, the third-generation president of the Pinkerton Tobacco Company, that emanated from the Pinkerton and Mortley grocery business in Zanesville, that was helped along in its infancy by David Henry Mortley.
Sherwood Mortley Pinkerton, with Hebe, Goddess of Youth, Westmoreland, Toledo, Ohio, 1978. The white Carrara marble family heirloom is displaced, in the process of moving on to the next generation. Photo by Penny Gentieu
It’s November, 1906, and there is a big party going on at the Buckingham house in Putnam, Ohio. 300 people reportedly attend. The large photo above is their family photo taken at the event. My grandfather, Sherwood Pinkerton, Jr. is kneeling in the right corner, next to his brother, David Wills. Behind him is his mother, Julia Buckingham standing next to her father, James Buckingham. In the center is James’ bride of 50 years, Jane Peebles Wills Buckingham in her wedding dress made of silk, lace, hoop skirt and having a “little old-fashioned waist.” Behind Jane are her two other daughters. To her left is Mary Humphries Greene, who is a recent widow and a current resident in the house. To her right is Elise Wills Darlington, mother of the four other boys in the photo, who are (counter-clockwise from the right, Henry Buckingham, John Hardenburg, Frank Graef and James Buckingham. The young woman with her arms around Frank is 16-year old Eleanor Young, daughter of the Buckinghams’ daughter, Ellen Wood Young, who died of childbirth complications. The baby, Eleanor was taken in and cared for by the Buckinghams.
The man in the back on the left is probably Frank Darlington, Elise’s husband. The Darlingtons live in Indianapolis.
The old woman in the chair, who doesn’t seem to be part of the family portrait could be Mrs. A. Spencer Nye of Chillicothe, related to the notable abolitionist of Putnam and veteran of the War of 1812, whose house was used as a stop on the Underground Railroad.
November 1906
January 1891 wedding announcement of Julia Buckingham and Sherwood Pinkerton, parents of my grandfather, Sherwood Jr.
It’s January 1891, two months after Julia’s sister, Ellen, died of childbirth. Because a large wedding wasn’t fitting, Julia Buckingham and Sherwood Pinkerton had a small wedding on a Wednesday that took place at the house in 1891. After a honeymoon in the South, they lived in the Buckingham house, because “any sort of a separation from his one remaining daughter the sorrowing father feels that he could not endure.”
Julia Buckingham Pinkerton in wedding dress in 1891, with baby Sherwood in 1893, with Sherwood and David in 1898, with Ned and James in 1916. She died in 1920.
Baby Shane collaged with an Ektachrome slide of an old castle shot by my grandfather, Sherwood Pinkerton, Jr., coming into the world with a history.
William Alexander Pinkerton, immigrant ancestor, was born around 1740 in Firth of Tay, Dundee, Scotland. In 1793 he was killed by Native Americans in Pennsylvania while he working in the fields, with his wife looking on in horror. Alexander, his son (1783–1837), was born in Allegheny County, and became a cabinet maker. After living in New Castle, Pennsylvania for a while, he took his pioneering family on a flatboat down the Ohio river and up the Muskingham, and settled in a new town called McConnelsville, Ohio. His son, David (1817–1894) became an Ohio district court judge, postmaster, and first Treasury Department comptroller in Washington DC. David died in Washington DC in 1894.
Capt. John Willson Pinkerton. Co A & B, 62nd Ohio Volunteer Infantry
David Pinkerton’s oldest son, John W. Pinkerton (1843–1922) fought in the Civil War. After the war, John W. became a wholesale grocer in Zanesville, Ohio. From there, he developed a new chewing tobacco formula, founding the Pinkerton Tobacco Company in 1887. He incorporated the company in 1901 with 945 shares of stock.
It was an interesting time in history because concurrently, the notorious monopolist, James B. Duke, of North Carolina, was aggressively buying up tobacco companies and putting everyone who was not with him, out of business. Duke and his “Tobacco Trust,” the American Tobacco Company, tried to own the entire tobacco market, unconcerned with breaking the 1890 Sherman Anti-Trust Act, an anti-monopoly law that was enacted the same year David Duke incorporated his business. Duke was big trouble for everyone in the tobacco business, – from the growers to the factories – including the Pinkerton Tobacco Company.
How the Pinkertons came to Toledo
The Pinkertons of the Pinkerton Tobacco Company — four generations: John W., Sherwood Sr., Sherwood Jr. (my grandfather), baby Elise, Toledo, 1920. John W. holding the baby.
This was never a family story, but I’ve discovered some unsavory monopolistic circumstances that led to the Pinkerton family’s move to Toledo.
It all began down in Zanesville Ohio in 1903 when the Pinkerton Tobacco Company’s treasurer, George Monypeny embezzled a sizable amount of money from the company. This loss of money and employee trust prompted John W. Pinkerton to sell his majority shares of stock to the Continental Tobacco Company in order to get George Monpeny and three other Monypeny stockholders out of his business. Unfortunately, Continental was owned by the American Tobacco Company.
All went well until January 1907, when John W. was summoned to New York to meet with the American Tobacco Company, when they told him that they were forcing control of his company. John W. was jaw-droppingly shocked.
And so, from that date on, the American Tobacco Company dictated what the Pinkerton Tobacco Company was to sell, where they could sell it, what size packages they could sell, and the price they could sell it for. It was all for the purpose of putting companies out of business or forcing them to sell their business to James B. Duke’s American Tobacco Company.
One of the casualties was the J. F. Zahm Tobacco Company in Toledo, which Duke and the Tobacco Trust forced out of the tobacco business in 1907. The president, Mr. Zahm was so troubled that one December afternoon in his office at the factory, he put a bullet through his head.
The former tobacco factory building, behind the former Swayne Field ballpark at Bancroft and Detroit Ave, is now a U-Haul storage facility.
14 months later, in 1909, at the direction of the Tobacco Trust, this same factory building became the new headquarters of the Pinkerton Tobacco Company. Those were the sad circumstances that brought the Pinkertons to Toledo. No wonder the effects of the tobacco monopoly were skipped over in our family lore.
John W.’s oldest son, Sherwood Pinkerton Sr. (1867–1939) managed the factory to start. They manufactured chewing tobacco and Sunshine cigarettes.
How terrible the casualties of the greedy monopolist. And to be forced into submitting to their whims. Yet back then, at least John W. could see the light at the end of the tunnel. The anti-trust lawsuits had been making their way through the courts, beginning with Teddy Roosevelt’s election in 1904. Finally, in 1911, by order of the Supreme Court, James B. Duke’s monopoly, the American Tobacco Company was divided into three companies, and Pinkerton Tobacco became a subsidiary of Liggett & Myers. John W. Pinkerton resumed control of his company, and the monopoly-busting of 1911 led way for the booming economy of the Roaring Twenties.
American Tobacco Company and Its Sixty-Five Subsidiaries Are Bumped By the Supreme Court, The Cincinnati Enquirer, May 30, 1911
American Tobacco Company and Its Sixty-Five Subsidiaries Are Bumped By the Supreme Court, The Cincinnati Enquirer, May 30, 1911
John W. Pinkerton’s City Point, Florida home. John W. Pinkerton was about 76 when he retired and moved to Florida. He died shortly after, in 1922 at age 79. (Sherwood Sr. also moved to City Point, Florida, after his wife died in 1920. He died there in 1939. He went into the citrus fruit mail order business.)
A family business
Sherwood’s oldest son, Sherwood Pinkerton Jr. (1893–1980) was my grandfather. He turned 16 in 1909, the year the family moved to Toledo. They lived at 2510 Parkwood. Sherwood, a 1912 graduate of Toledo Central High School, graduated from the University of Michigan in 1916 with a degree in chemical engineering.
Sherwood served in the Ordnance Department of the U.S. Army during World War I. While stationed in Washington D.C., he met Helen Moyer. (“The first time I saw her in 1918, my inner voice said, she’s the one,” my grandfather would tell us.) They got married on a Tuesday in June 1919, towards the end of the Spanish Flu pandemic. They built a house in 1927 in the new Toledo neighborhood of Westmoreland. They had four creative daughters – one who became the inspiration for my website, artistsoftoledo.com, my mother – Audrey Pinkerton Gentieu (1922–2009).
Sherwood Jr. ran the family business for many years, becoming president in 1940, and retiring in 1959. He developed new chewing tobacco flavors. He put the first woman on the board of directors and instituted an employee retirement plan. After Sherwood retired, the company moved to new facilities in Owensboro, Kentucky. John W.’s greatest legacy to his family, his chewing tobacco company, managed to sustain three generations of the Pinkertons, all because monopolies were busted in 1911.
Sherwood Jr. had a blessed life, seemingly free of the business problems his grandfather faced. Besides personally enjoying the chewing tobacco he cooked up and brought to market, Sherwood Jr. and his family embraced the finer side of life, such as photography and roses. John W. bequeathed to my mother and my grandparents a life of grace and happiness. In turn, my Pinkerton grandparents were, to me, a major source of security and affection, and somehow I inherited the photo gene.
Sherwood Pinkerton’s Peace blooms, a few of many different strains of roses that he cultivated and photographed.
John W. would say to his grandson, Sherwood Jr., that retirement isn’t good for some people, if you lack activities you will shrivel up.
Sherwood proved to be excellent at retirement, as he cultivated roses for 17 years after he retired, and for at least 31 years before. Sherwood was Toledo’s first Rosarian. He gave up his rose garden in 1976, when, in their eighties, he and Helen decided they had to downsize and move into an apartment. Their health declined after that. Helen died on November 22, 1978, and Sherwood, who could barely live without her, died on New Year’s Day, 1980.
The Pinkertons lived in an elegant Georgian Revival house at 1978 Richmond Road. They created four beautiful gardens in their artfully landscaped bi-level yard, including a formal rose garden, an informal rose garden, a shade garden, a goldfish pond, a fountain, and a greenhouse. They had a Florida Room in the house. Their house was filled with never-ending curiosities and memorabilia from their long lives, stuck in the rafters, in the attic, in every corner, nook and cranny. It was a treasure hunt for their 13 grandchildren to explore.
Sherwood and Helen Pinkerton in their greenhouse, The Blade, April 8, 1973
I made this photocomposition of Helen and Sherwood Pinkerton and their house. It was featured on the cover of Our Grandmothers, an anthology of photos and essays by photographer-granddaughters compiled by Linda Sunshine, published by Stewart, Tabori & Chang in 1997.
The Pinkertons held an estate sale in 1976 and moved out of the house.
Grandfather contemplating his mortality, with Hebe and her eternal youth displaced from her pedestal and destined elsewhere, October 1976.
In their living room was a neoclassical marble statue of Hebe, the goddess of beauty and youth, and wife of Hercules. Hebe is the one, in case you are interested, who brought the nectar (the drink of eternal youth and immortality) to the feasts.
The statue came from Italy, a family heirloom passed on to Sherwood by his Great Aunt Julia who picked out the statue with her U.S. Ambassador husband while on an overseas trip. Julia died and bequeathed it to Sherwood in 1911, the same year of the federal trust-busting that would benefit the Pinkerton family for the rest of their lives and on to the new generations. Next to the fireplace in their living room, Hebe appeared nonchalantly and purely incidentally in family photographs over the fifty years they occupied the house.
Then one day Hebe was picked up by movers and shipped to their daughter Julia, in Portland, Oregon. I captured that moment, one of my first black and white photographs, because the moment felt like a dichotomy, my grandfather letting her go.
My father flying me like an airplane, Hebe floating along side.
Howard Ruffner, photographer and student at Kent State University, was hired by Life Magazine to photograph the events of May 4, 1970. His photo is on the cover of the May 15, 1970 issue of the Life Magazine cover story about the Kent State massacre. He has published a thoughtful photographic memoir of the few days surrounding May 4, 1970 – Moments of Truth, (Kent State University Press, 2019.)
Like May 4, 2020
gas masks, no students on campus, no graduation ceremony, unpopular president, protests, overwhelming resistance. We will commemorate the 50th May 4 online.
May 4, 1970. Monday at noon.
In a monumental movement, college students across the country were standing up for what they believed in, standing up to The Power. But then The Power pulled their guns and shot them. At Kent State University, in Kent, Ohio.
The Ohio National guard’s excuse was that stones were being thrown at them, by Kent State students who were 100 feet away at the bottom of the hill. A stone’s throw is no more than 30-40 feet. Most of the students being shot at were just on their way to class.
“Guard! All right, prepare to fire!”
In thirteen seconds, the National Guard shot 64 bullets at the students, striking thirteen students; four shot dead.
Here’s what Life Magazine had for us on May 11:
“Nixon in a Crisis of Leadership.” Nixon got the headlines.
They wouldn’t dare shoot bullets into a crowd of Ivy League students, but Kent State was a small town public university in Ohio where the students were considered expendable.
Nixon withdrew troops from Vietnam in 1971.
Newsweek, April 28, 1980
It took nine excruciating years for any money to reach the victims of the Kent State Massacre in a long and painful court case, and then an appeal. No guilt admitted. For this, many students, including Howard Ruffner, the photographer, who was the lead witness with his extensive photo documentation, had to devote extensive periods of time during the 1970’s to testify in court about the Kent State massacre.
There is no justice for little people.
Moments of Truth by Howard Ruffner. A photographer’s experience of Kent State 1970. Published in 2019 in remembrance of the Kent State massacre.
A Monday just like the day I’m posting this, on Monday, May 4, 2020, during the Great Pandemic.
But still:
“Stay passionate for what you believe and stand together to make changes.” -Howard Ruffner
Of the William and Mary who came on the Mayflower. Nothing is known of his wife. William was the oldest Mayflower passenger to have participated at the First Thanksgiving, in his early fifties.
400 years ago
Before coming to America on the Mayflower in 1620, William Brewster helped form the Separatist church in England. When the group was found out by the King of England, they fled to Holland, in 1608. While in Holland, Brewster had published a number of religious pamphlets which were critical of the Church of England. One caught the attention of the King, and Brewster had to go into hiding until he sailed to America on the Mayflower.
William Brewster was the Reverend Elder of the Pilgrim’s church at Plymouth.
One in a million
I love it that I’m related to such a dynamic radical who is so personally responsible for the ultimate founding of the United States of America. As there are about 10 million Mayflower descendants in the U.S., I figure that William and Mary might have ultimately begat a million of us, including Angela Davis, the feminist civil rights activist, my new-found cousin.
Happiness is having a book published. More happiness is when Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library picks your book to be sent to 100,000 babies in the month of December for three years in a row.
Fun facts about my grandfather, Sherwood Mortley Pinkerton, Jr.
