Uncle Bruce joins us and opens up the family album, taking us down a road well-traveled by memories, laughter, and the occasional tear. Bruce's narrative doesn't skip a beat; he paints a vivid picture of our roots, the deep connections he has with his brothers, and the challenging dynamics between he and our bio dad, Kurt.
A summer gig at a tomato packing plant might seem ordinary until you hear about the unexpected camaraderie that emerged amidst racial segregation, which Bruce recounts with the kind of detail that makes you feel the humidity in the air. Our conversation then takes a turn to honor the remarkable women in our lives - from the theater-loving matriarch who faced adversity with a song in her heart, to the grandmother whose dance steps told stories of love, sacrifice, and strength. Their tales aren't just our heritage; they're an anthem for anyone who's faced the odds with grace and tenacity.
As the curtain falls on this episode, we get Bruce's perspective on being united with his daughter, Dena, who met in earlier episodes.
Our 23 and Me origin just keeps giving and giving. Be sure to listen to be a part of the saga!
LIKE, SHARE, SUBSCRIBE and watch on YouTube!
dumpsterdivejj@gmail.com
PLEASE READ CAREFULLY
These Terms and Conditions apply to your use of Dumpster Diving with Janice and Jane Podcast. Your use of the Podcast is governed by these Terms and Conditions. If you do not agree with these Terms and Conditions, please do not access the Podcast.
See FULL Terms and Conditions Here.
Uncle Bruce joins us and opens up the family album, taking us down a road well-traveled by memories, laughter, and the occasional tear. Bruce's narrative doesn't skip a beat; he paints a vivid picture of our roots, the deep connections he has with his brothers, and the challenging dynamics between he and our bio dad, Kurt.
A summer gig at a tomato packing plant might seem ordinary until you hear about the unexpected camaraderie that emerged amidst racial segregation, which Bruce recounts with the kind of detail that makes you feel the humidity in the air. Our conversation then takes a turn to honor the remarkable women in our lives - from the theater-loving matriarch who faced adversity with a song in her heart, to the grandmother whose dance steps told stories of love, sacrifice, and strength. Their tales aren't just our heritage; they're an anthem for anyone who's faced the odds with grace and tenacity.
As the curtain falls on this episode, we get Bruce's perspective on being united with his daughter, Dena, who met in earlier episodes.
Our 23 and Me origin just keeps giving and giving. Be sure to listen to be a part of the saga!
LIKE, SHARE, SUBSCRIBE and watch on YouTube!
dumpsterdivejj@gmail.com
PLEASE READ CAREFULLY
These Terms and Conditions apply to your use of Dumpster Diving with Janice and Jane Podcast. Your use of the Podcast is governed by these Terms and Conditions. If you do not agree with these Terms and Conditions, please do not access the Podcast.
See FULL Terms and Conditions Here.
All right, you are listening to Dumpster Diving with. Janice for the fourth time and Jane Okay, because we've been having a lot of fun with Dina and Dylan, and now Bruce, our uncle, our UB Uncle Bruce is on the line with us too. We're super excited. Oh my gosh, we're going to have like a little, a little pow wow of the game.
Speaker 2:We're going to have a great time and we've got one of the best people in the world. He said Springer style, jerry Springer style, just because just we can aspire. Right, we can aspire, he is. This is one of the missing pieces. One of the missing pieces is yet another doxy brother to our biological father, kurt. And so, bruce, thank you so much.
Speaker 3:It's wonderful to meet you. I get to know you. I'm so excited about what you're doing.
Speaker 2:I'm so excited about this and so I'm so excited about you.
Speaker 2:I don't know if you're watching or watching, and I think you're terrific, you're so kind. Thank you for that. Is Kim online? No, we missed him. We're not sure. We're not sure if he was. He had indicated he was going to join us, but we haven't heard from him. So, yeah, I don't and I don't have a way to like get ahold of him outside the.
Speaker 2:Yeah, he gave us Bruce when Kim was on. He gave us such a great perspective right on the Doxy family and especially, you know, the brothers and especially, of course, our father, and so we've spent lots of time with Dylan and Dina. We kind of know the intricate story that led to you know the connection with you and Dina last year, and so we have all these pieces. So really, I think today we're just really hoping that, you know, we can hear a little bit about your story, right? No, whatever it is that you want to share, whether it was growing up as a Doxy, whether it was, you know, some different points in history with the family or the brothers or what have you like, you know, we're just interested in understanding as much as possible through the stories of all the folks at the table. So Dina and Dylan are sticking with us because, of course, they are such an important part of your story. But yeah, that's kind of what we're hoping for, man.
Speaker 3:So how many people have we got in this group right now?
Speaker 2:Just five of us. So it's you, dina, dylan, myself of course, and then Jane.
Speaker 3:Okay.
Speaker 2:Yes, good.
Speaker 1:I'm here. I'm just on mute because I have a little conure that likes to scream her head off. So I'm, I'm in her bed. Uncle Bruce knows how that what that's like. He's grew up with birds too. Yeah, that's right.
Speaker 3:That's right. Good morning Papa.
Speaker 3:We always had we always had hello, how are you doing, baby, I'm good, I'm happy to see you, Happy to see you too. So I guess my, you know, when I grew up I had, finally, I had three brothers and so the four of us no sisters. And until later when, after I had long left home and Sabrina was adopted by my mom in Hawaii, and so I didn't know Sabrina until she was like 12 or something, I guess. And anyway, my brothers and I, we always seemed to be teamed up. Kim and I were like a team. We got along pretty well. I got along well with Jan. I never got along with Kurt because he was a little over assertive.
Speaker 1:He's a Leo. Leave him alone.
Speaker 3:And you're right. You're right, but but he would team up with Kurt, would team up with one of us, and that would last for a little while and then something would happen and the sides would shift. You know, but I was, I always felt like I had to protect myself from Kurt because he was offensive to me.
Speaker 3:And yeah, so so it was sort of a combative growing up and that was accentuated by dad being in the Marine Corps and moving us around constantly and and I ended up going to 13 schools before I graduated from high school. Wow, yeah, that's a lot of moving around, and some places I was there for more than a year and some places it was like I think it was when I was in the sixth grade. I went to three different schools. That's hard to adjust. Yeah, we had a lot of fun. We did a lot of pretty cool things, you know, and like living at Paris Island that's when I was in high school. We lived on the base and so I was very much connected with my friends and people outside the family unit, you know. And that was really wild down there and but we had we had boats at our disposal and we had a shrimp net that we would capture shrimp and all the waterways around there were just fascinating to me. And then the culture was so odd.
Speaker 3:The course that was hardcore slave area there in the old times, but a lot of the black people, when they were freed, migrated out into the islands and the islands down in that particular area they were islands, that low tide and swamped at high tide, you know, and. But they staked out high ground spots out there in the islands and they maintained their own dialect, which is Gullah and Gullah like G-U-L-L-A-H. Gullah. And so I couldn't speak Gullah. So when I'd go out to the islands I didn't often succeed in chatting with just anybody I came across and of course they were still intimidated around white people, so they were not assertive about creating communication. And so at one point one of my friends in high school, his father, was a plantation owner and they grew a lot of different crops and it wasn't much different from slave days, I'll tell you, the black people did all the work and the white people sat around and drank and smoked and made jokes and got at things and whatever. So where was I going?
Speaker 3:Oh, and the Gullah people were also heavily into Voodoo and they would use that against each other, against each other in settling disputes and so forth. And there was a witch doctor in Charleston whose name was Dr Buzzard, and Dr Buzzard had been around for many decades and he was a powerful force in all up and down the coast amongst the Voodoo people and the sheriff, the local sheriff I don't remember where the county lines were in a lot. But he was a formidable character and he had learned to speak Gullah and after a few years his sheriff became a witch doctor and because it was the only way he could get the people to communicate with him. And so if somebody has a dispute and they wanna settle it through witchcraft, they would take a certain kind of route and dig it up and clean it up, and then they decorate it and do incantations over it and then they would bury it on your property.
Speaker 2:Oh, wow.
Speaker 3:And then, when that happened, your kids would get sick, your animals would get sick, everything went bad and your crops would fail. And so they call on the sheriff and the sheriff would come out and bring his dogs and his people and they would do ceremony and they would dig up the. They would find the route and dig it up and then he would do I don't know whatever he did to diffuse the power of the route and then he would sling it out into the water. Wow, and it worked. It worked for them, and so it was. Anyway, point of story was, it was a very interesting place to live in.
Speaker 1:I still am right, Peace Wow.
Speaker 2:How long did you live at Parris Island, Bruce? Three years that was the longest, so was that the longest.
Speaker 3:That was as long as I lived anywhere.
Speaker 2:Wow.
Speaker 3:Wow, yeah, that's amazing. Yeah, so 1960 to 63, that's when I was there.
Speaker 2:So did you graduate high school from there or you went someplace else to finish up high school?
Speaker 3:No, I went to high school there.
Speaker 2:That's where I was at most of my high school right there yeah.
Speaker 3:And also interesting point was in South Carolina at that time. If you had a driver's license, you could apply for a school bus driver's license, which I did, and I got a job driving a school bus while I was in school.
Speaker 2:Oh my gosh.
Speaker 3:Yeah, that's amazing. It was pretty interesting. I got a lot of schedule alterations and so forth because of that.
Speaker 2:I was about a different time, that yeah.
Speaker 1:Did any of the kids challenge you, tell you to shut up because they were older than you, or no, I was a pretty tough kid back then.
Speaker 3:Sounds like it there were bigger, tougher guys, but they weren't interested in hassling me.
Speaker 2:Oh my gosh, that's too funny.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 2:So where was it?
Speaker 3:Oh good, also, I was a car guy. I'd spent my life reading about cars and car related stuff, love it, and from living in California for a few years, I had gotten immersed in the car culture. And then we went back East to Virginia and we were there for a fairly short time, but I also got some hands-on car experience there.
Speaker 1:And then when?
Speaker 3:I moved to South Carolina, there were a lot of kids who drove cars to school, and a lot of them were pretty junky cars, and so it was like the beginning of Le Mans at a closing bell of school, people migrating very quickly to parking lots, get their cars and get the hell out of there.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 3:But inevitably there would be one or two or three or four cars out there that didn't fire up, and so I would go out there and help them get going.
Speaker 2:Nice.
Speaker 3:And so I established myself as a car guru and cause I could almost always get them started, unless they had something broken that they had to go buy parts for or whatever.
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 3:And so after that went on for a while, I got acquainted with a few boys whose dads were moonshiners, and moonshiners would spend any money on their cars and cause they had to be really fast, they had to run from the cops. Of course, we were only 40 miles from the Georgia border, so if you could go 120 miles an hour for 40 miles, you could shake the cops, you know.
Speaker 2:Oh my gosh.
Speaker 3:And so they would invite me out to their places in the swamps or in the islands and they would feed me and entertain me and so forth, and I would go out there and work on their cars, modify their cars, do all these things, and so I was a minor celebrity there for quite a while.
Speaker 2:Well, how old were you? Hold on, how old were you?
Speaker 3:16 to 18.
Speaker 2:Yeah, Everybody hold on for a second. We got to acknowledge the experience here, right? So as a 16, 17-year-old, you were a bus driver, you were a school guru and you were a hired talent for the moonshining industry. So I just want to put that in perspective with our 16-year-old.
Speaker 1:Not to mention it sounds like he was accepted by the local tribal community. That's pretty much what happened, and new little secrets as well. So you know, I swear it has to be a doxy thing, because I swear like I even have weird stories about being integrated into people's like little communities and stuff. Like I think it's just in our DNA to befriend anybody and just like, let's go, let's have a good time, you know.
Speaker 2:And the thing in my head, jane, is so our youngest daughter right is a junior in high school, so she's thinking about next year and applying to colleges and all the things, and so she's lamenting right about the fact that nothing terrible has happened to her. So she doesn't have a good college essay story. I'm thinking Bruce. I write her story for her and we'll just insert her name in it and then show boom, that's it.
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah, so you know life has been really good for her she doesn't have a good story.
Speaker 2:So yeah, there you go.
Speaker 1:There was a good revenue stream for you. This could be a whole new revenue stream writing good essays for college.
Speaker 3:That's right, I wanted to tell you about the plantation. I wanted to get a summer job and I mentioned it to my friend whose dad was a plantation owner, and so he said I'll get you a job. So he went and told his dad that I needed a job and what could he do or where could he put me, and so forth, and so he sent me to work at a tomato packing plant and there were about 200 or 300 black people who would go out and pick tomatoes and bring them into the plant and package them up. And the problem with that was there was the building was open at the bottom and closed at the top, and they had air conditioning in the upper level, and so all the white people that worked there which is maybe a dozen, including me we didn't do anything.
Speaker 3:I didn't have any assigned work to do, and so I was just up there sitting in this big office space doing nothing, shooting the bowl with people. But I got real bored with that and so I started going down and talking to the black people, and nobody went down and talked to the black people unless they were giving orders or handing out pay or something like that, and so I had quite a good time with these black people, and they were astonished that a white person was coming down and chatting with them just for the hell of it, and so that also got me like a ticket to ride. I could go out in the islands and people knew who I was, and so that was kind of a fun thing. And did you ever read what the hell is his name? One of my classmates became an established author and he wrote a book called the River is Wide and it was a story about him.
Speaker 3:He went to college for a couple of years and then he wanted a teaching job and so there were no teaching jobs open, but out in this island I forget what the name of the island was there was a big community of black people out there and they had a school and so he became the school teacher and he tells a lot of great stories in this book about things he did and how he became accepted and so forth and his interaction with individual kids and so forth Wow, and disputes with a lot of the hierarchy.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:And I'm trying to say his name, I can't say it.
Speaker 2:That's all right, we can look up the book itself, but it just seems like obviously that was a really high impact time in your life and certainly being able to spend, like you said, multiple years there versus moving around I am, if you're okay with it. I would love to shift a little bit, bruce, because we've heard a lot about a lot of things and one of the people who keeps surfacing that I'm actually really interested in kind of better understanding who she was as a person is your mom. Oh yeah, some of our grandmothers, because we've, you know, I've heard the perspective of the grandchildren of your mom and I'm just super curious as a obviously as a woman myself, as a mom and a grandmother myself, and I'm just super curious about like what it was like growing up with your mom and and yeah, that's it Like kind of who she was as a person.
Speaker 3:Let me tell you a little bit about her. Her, her mother was named Catherine and the grandchildren always called her Nanu. And she, she had, I think, six children. One was stillborn or died in infancy. And but she, she was a single mother. After the children were born, her husband, appleton Lawrence, he flaked out and went and claimed he had a job offer and disappeared, kind of like Kurt, you know, yeah.
Speaker 2:But wasn't she the first woman in Washington to get divorced?
Speaker 3:I don't know about that.
Speaker 3:I haven't heard that story, okay, but anyway she was. She was a pianist, a concert pianist and very, very quality music, and so that's how she made her living, that in teaching piano, students would come to her house and she bought a little house in Arlington, virginia, and which is where I was born, and she sometimes took in a border, rented a room to someone and and you know anything, anything to make a buck to to raise her kids. And she was also quite a character. She was sort of alcoholic and and she smoked King Edward cigars and they're pretty nasty cigars. I tried one and it made me sick. Oh, the other thing was Ram said ale, and so sometimes she would get sick, which meant she was on a binge.
Speaker 3:You know she was right drinking for a few days in a run, and but as a child I would go and visit her and and she would send me up along block to a local store and they don't call them bodegas out there in Virginia, but you know, just a little small market, liquor store kind of thing and she'd give me a note and with the power of the note I could buy anything at all, you know, anything she wanted, and so that was kind of interesting. But anyway she had, she had five living kids, and every one of which is a story, let me tell you. Mom was Peggy, was the youngest and Peggy was always in theater. All of them were in theater from time to time, because my grandmother was, she'd always have them around the piano singing and so forth. It was all show business oriented.
Speaker 3:But boy, that group. I only heard them like two times when they were all present and they were all singing and God, they all remembered the different parts that they would sing and it was sensational. And there used to be a guy with a radio show named Arthur Godfrey. Every year of him.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Yeah, okay, well, they would sing on his. Not all of them, but I think two or three of them would sing on the Arthur Godfrey show, wow Radio. And the house, when she bought it, had no electricity and no plumbing. And so as the kids grew up, bill, who was the second oldest I think he was second oldest, maybe, I don't know, I can't remember exactly but Bill was a guy who developed skills like crazy. He was amazing and he became a plumber when he was 15 years old or something, and so he plumbed her house. He gave her two bathrooms and a real kitchen Wow, yeah.
Speaker 3:And then he took up being an electrician, so he wired the house for it to get light and power into all the rooms, and so he was a pretty wild character and he and his brother Larry were athletes. They would walk around on their hands and go up and downstairs walking on their hands. Wow, and so pretty impressive. And but later in life Bill bought property out in Virginia. He bought a fair amount of acreage and this was before World War II, and he was a pilot. He became a commercial pilot and in World War II he flew big planes back and forth to Europe to drop supplies.
Speaker 3:Wow, and so that was his war. I never heard his war stories actually, but that was his service. And he came back to his house and he got married and started having children and he figured that he needed a barn so he built a barn. He also built his house, which was a little wooden house, but he built this barn and he couldn't afford the lumber to build a big wooden barn so he decided to make a block wall, a block wall barn, and he made his own cinder blocks 15,000 of them to build his barn. It still stands today, you know, and they always kept a cow and so forth. But he did a lot of fantastic things and he was always building something, building a big house inside a hill. There was a stream that went a little minor river stream, something that went through his property.
Speaker 3:And so he dammed it up and made a little lake there and made a real beautiful bridge that went from one side to the other, because his access to the road was by his little house, his old house, and to drive to the new house, which he had to do to carry building materials, a lot of stone and cinder, block and so forth, and so it was turning into a really ritzy kind of property out there. Wow, and he was right, he was located right next to the Manassas Battlefield Park, oh yeah. And so he found in his little river. He found a perfectly preserved musket, or no, it was a cap and ball rifle, I guess. Whatever it was, he found it in the mud, in the bottom of the stream.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:And which led him into collecting, building, making his own guns and collecting guns. And by the time he died I don't know 95 or whatever he was. He had an amazing collection of guns and by that time he had moved up to Washington.
Speaker 2:So I am. So, first off, your depth of detail is amazing to me and I feel like Jane. Obviously there are many episodes to come in terms of the different people and the potential of the stories, bruce, that you're kind of bringing to the table with them. So I'm thinking about so, then, and we have about 20 more minutes or so in terms of like the length of this episode. So I'm wondering if we can like I love that you told us now about your grandmother, so some of our great grandmother, and then you got to your mom and her siblings, and I think we're hearing about one of her brothers right now.
Speaker 3:So can we shift to your mom? I wanted to tell you about my mom but I had to tell you about her siblings. To put a perspective.
Speaker 2:I know, I know, I know. So I think we, like I said, we probably have many times to come back to hear about all the different people.
Speaker 1:We can have the UUB, uub University, you know, so University of Uncle Bruce, and we can have a lot.
Speaker 2:I love it. But honestly, I'm going to be really selfish and I love all. On one hand, I like I don't want to sacrifice the context that you're setting for us. On the other hand, I'm you know, I'm really just like I would love to hear a little bit more about your mom and then we can come back to all the siblings, if that's okay, just because, yeah, I just yeah, I would love to hear your perspective on her.
Speaker 3:Well, she was. She was a little timid when she was a girl and but she was a pretty girl and they all lived in their, in my grandmother's house, and they went to school and so forth in a normal way, and I'm sure there's a lot of content that I never heard there. But and then Peggy, her younger sister, was the baby doll. She was really pretty and she was like privileged character for some reason, and so she grew up there and losing my voice. What was I getting to? Oh she, she was a performer because of my grandmother and she was a singer, dancer kind of girl and and when she finished school she became a professional dancer.
Speaker 3:And this is like the tail end of the, of the what do you call the age of people on in theater making short movies and performing on stage. Okay, and there's word for it, but she had a partner where she was not involved with other than being a dance partner, and and she was involved in theater in Washington DC and I think that's where she met my dad. She, I think, believe, I believe she met Bob Rollings when she was still in school.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 3:And she went to school together, right, she was very enamored of Bob and and Bob was enamored of all the pretty girls. And, it's true, and I love Bob, everybody did but he was a bit of a scoundrel and a very cool individual, always had nice clothes and looked great all the time and where was I going? So then my dad was a Marine and he was stationed at what they call the Marine Barracks in Washington DC and they were the guys who did all the ceremonial work where the Marines needed to be represented in Washington DC and Arlington Cemetery, and so he's usually wearing his dress blues and looking good, and I think my mom kind of fell for him right there Harder than just a man in uniform.
Speaker 2:Bruce, we all know that.
Speaker 3:Yeah, so he asked my mom to marry him and he was a pretty talented guy also, and but he impressed her and they got married. And my mom told me much later on that if Bob Rawlings had asked her first, she would have married him.
Speaker 2:Oh man. This is the Jerry Springer part. People, yes, right there.
Speaker 1:I was just thinking about Grandpa because I remember going to church with them when we lived in Florida. I remember going to the flea markets and Grandpa would always say, flea market, we don't need any fleas. And we'd be like Grandpa. He would always have his little jokes, but other than that I don't remember a lot about him. So we're going to have to do an episode about Grandpa Don, because I don't remember, because we spent more time with Grandma Jane when we did the little bit of time that we did at their home and, like he West and stuff like that, we spent more time doing, you know, ceramics and and painting and different things. And then Grandpa was, you know, blowing his nose upstairs, you know, and you could hear, you know. So I don't remember a lot about him. So I would love to do an episode about Grandpa and get you and Kim together and kind of talk about you know.
Speaker 3:I'm always surprised at the different things that Kim knows, that I didn't know, you know, so it would be good if we were both present, yeah.
Speaker 1:I love that idea Not to be able to tell Grandpa Jane because I want you to keep going, but I just had to insert that because it just dawned on me. We don't talk about Grandpa Don very much and I would love to. So Right, carry on, I'm going to go with Grandma Jane because she was the best.
Speaker 3:Yeah he was. He was not the kind of person who who looks for attention or publicity or anything you know right, exactly, it wasn't him so. So he's, he always gets the second billing Exactly. So, um, yeah, you probably knew some pretty interesting stories from Key West that I didn't know about because I was basically never there. I was come for stay for a week or yeah, and and that was pretty rare too- yeah. So where are we going? Are we running out of time?
Speaker 1:No, no, no, you can, you can finish talking. I'm sorry I totally derailed us, but I just, you know, I felt inclined to say that because I don't want to Of grandpa.
Speaker 2:We have, jane, probably about 10 to 12 minutes or so left and this, this conversation, bruce, but we'll, like said, this is the beginning, not an ending, right? We're excited about that, so I love the idea. Like you said, jane, I'm coming back to the grandpa, but focusing right now on your mom.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and yeah, yeah yeah, yeah, I get it. Well, it's pretty cool because this is a type of event that never existed before you know, that's right, yep, yeah, yeah. So I remember we have one picture of my mom Sitting at a table, her own table, in a little crummy house.
Speaker 1:I know exactly the picture.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and and she's, she's wearing her better dress and and her table was set with everything you can think of that goes on a table. Some of it was pretty minor league stuff but nonetheless she had all the accoutrements and she was sitting there and her hair was kind of curly styled and and I remember sitting there looking at that picture and that was that where's. Where's the Marine Corps place in North Carolina where they're advertising bad water?
Speaker 1:Oh, oh yeah, the the June.
Speaker 3:Camp. Yes, yeah, and that's where this was, this picture, and, and, and I was looking at her picture and I was thinking here's a little girl who's like maybe 20 years old maybe I don't know exactly.
Speaker 3:Wow, and scared out of her wit, she didn't know what the hell was going to be fall or next, you know. But she was. She was in love with Don and he wasn't there much, yeah, and. But he, he trained as a pilot and he trained as a paratrooper, and so that meant that he was being sent off to different places, not even not even not even the war times where he was sent off to the Pacific and stuff. But he just she's never knew what was going to come up next.
Speaker 1:Hello, oh, we're here. Yeah, we're here, we're listening, okay, Um so.
Speaker 2:It was a hard time to be married to somebody in the military right, cause there were a lot of conflicts, like you said, around the world that pulled them away. So it sounds like you know she spent more time away from him.
Speaker 3:No, just that he was. He was pulled away for these different training sessions.
Speaker 2:Oh, yeah, yeah, absolutely.
Speaker 3:And he was he was weeks or months that he's gone, you know.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:And saying messenger Sarah to your group.
Speaker 2:Oh, that's just people putting messages in the messenger. You can ignore that for now.
Speaker 3:Okay, yeah, so, um so anyway, I was just imagining her sitting there alone and possibly pregnant with Kurt.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:And um, I'm not sure about that, but but that's where he was born, I believe North Carolina, and uh, but I can't tell you that I went by that, that little house that she lived in there, and it's just a rudest little hut and it might've even been a duplex, I'm not sure, but tiny, tiny wooden place on stilts and uh, you know, very poor lighting and and uh, obviously bad water and pretty horrible situation. But there she was dressed up and set the table with candles and the whole thing.
Speaker 3:Yeah, wow you know, like that she was, you know.
Speaker 2:That proves for me like I could, we could stop right now.
Speaker 2:And here's why because that is like that captures so much of the age.
Speaker 2:Jane, I don't know about you, but the pieces that I feel like we're hearing about both your memories right, and you and Dylan have both shared memories of her from when you were younger Um and um, and some of what Kim shared with us, right, but that just captures the strength. That, I feel like, is the common thread, like nobody's perfect I'm not, I, you know, I will never have had the privilege of meeting her and I'll tell you, bruce, and I've said it on the podcast before, that, um, listening to Dylan and Jane, especially, talk about experiences as grandchildren, um, with with your mom, that's probably the only time I've become kind of wistful in these conversations in terms of somebody who I wish I'd had the chance to know. Right, my own experiences with my maternal grandmother were not pleasant and so um, so, so that, and that common thread of the strength that she brought to the, to the table, is that, like, that image you just painted for us is really beautiful and really helps kind of tie those pieces together.
Speaker 3:When she was young she was always sketching and drawing and, um, by 1949, I guess, um, she decided she was really going to be as serious about her artwork and she, um, she took lessons. We were living in Oceanside, california, north San Diego County and, uh, and the lady's name was Mrs Miller and she lived out east of Oceanside but my mom would go out to her once a week to get her, uh, her lessons for painting, I guess.
Speaker 1:And.
Speaker 2:Mrs Miller was a wonderful old person and uh, and so, the point being that, from that time onward, she, she was a real artist and she wasn't world famous and not likely to be but but she took it seriously and she worked at it for the rest of her life and she influenced generations right, Dylan and Jane both talk about those again, those experiences as grandchildren and remembering that time with her and how influenced it was by her, her art, Her art.
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah Right.
Speaker 2:Right, amazing when you visit Papa's house you'll get to see.
Speaker 3:He has several pieces of her art at his house and that was amazing opportunity for me.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I bet.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I didn't. When, when she passed away, I didn't try to collect a lot of her stuff, because my house is so full, it's just like bursting at the seams. Yeah, and so I. I bought a truck when I went down there to disperse the, the belongings and and I put a lot of her work, a lot of her furniture and so forth, I just gave away her whatever but her artwork I distributed on my way from Florida back to Nevada.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:To people that she knew, friends and whoever. Yeah, so I ended up with a very little amount, which was which?
Speaker 2:was okay. Yeah, yeah, Love that, that's well I, you know, again, I I just really value the, the insight and kind of filling out that picture a little bit more. Jane, I'm thinking this is probably a good place to wrap. I mean it's in the middle of a story, but I feel like forever it's always going to be in the middle of a story for us, right, Like there's just so much.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you know, I I have to say thank you to Bruce for for doing that and going and and distributing some of her artwork, because when I the last time I saw her, I was 18, or no, I wasn't 18. I was. It was at Devin's wedding. But the last time I went out to Florida to visit and see Kurt and everybody, I was 18. And she had given me this cool little, like three by five little canvas with a she just, you know, acrylic painted a little Canadian goose on it, and I have it in this larger frame because it's it's to me, it's larger than life, because it's her artwork. You know, it was just so fun and but when Jason passed away, you, before he passed away, you stopped and gave him the bust that she made of him, and because it, you know, it's just a bust of his head and and it's just beautiful and it's when it was about 12. And when he passed away, that was the one thing that I got. It was was yeah.
Speaker 1:So so I now have it, yeah, and I love it to death. My daughter thinks it's creepy, but whatever, it's Uncle Jason and it doesn't matter.
Speaker 2:He's always watching.
Speaker 1:He's always watching, so you know. But you know what it's funny? It's funny. I dress him up for the different holidays. I'll put Santa hats on him and stuff like that, because you know, I just adore that I have that piece of artwork. So thank you for doing that, because that's the only piece that I got, other than the little goose. You know that I got to. You know, keep from Grandma Jane, which I adore, yeah.
Speaker 3:Well, I'm glad you got it. Yeah, and that little little small painting, but that's just great.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I love it. I have it. It's it's about this big, but I have it in a frame that's like this big and it's centered and it's just you know.
Speaker 3:You have to show it to us on screen.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I actually have it in a box right now because I haven't had a good place to put it in the living room after I've arranged it, but I'm going to find a good spot for it and put it out again.
Speaker 2:We'll see it, we'll see it next time, and I'm thinking like we're going to wrap up really quick and end the episode. You guys stick around for obviously just a couple of minutes, so let us do the quick wrap up and we'll stop the recording and then we'll come back. But you know, what everybody Jane got to hear today was again another piece to the Doxy family puzzle. Right, we added our uncle, bruce, to this conversation, and Dylan and Dina. Thank you for being here. I know you're more moral support than anything else, but again, you're such an important part of the story that we'll hear more about. So I feel like I appreciate you, bruce, for being with us for the first of what I hope will be many times and for you sharing some of that picture and allowing us to be able to direct that a little bit so we could learn more about your mom, and we know there's so much more to learn about your story as well. But thanks to all of you for being a part, jane. Final word yeah.
Speaker 1:Well, you know me and bringing in the drama. So I would love to do an episode about how the 23 and me and, and finding out that Dina is your daughter and all of those things, how that, how the current Bruce, you know, handled that and it sounds like everything's going swimmingly and it's amazing. But I would love to hear a little bit about that because, just as much as Janice and I, finding out that we were sisters was a shock, I'm sure it was for Dina and Dylan to find out that they were siblings as well, so kind of how, how that all unfolded to, because you know, it's, it's real and it's now and it's it's been just as long as Janice and I have known each other.
Speaker 2:So we'll come back to that one then.
Speaker 1:I love it yeah.
Speaker 2:All right, everybody, make sure you like, share, subscribe, do all the things, and remember we are on YouTube now, so feel free to go get a look at all of our beautiful faces and the chair from earlier, but that's a whole different story. Thank you all for doing all the things and continuing to be committed to listening. As long as you're listening, we'll be here.
Speaker 3:So okay is Kim with us today. All right, no is Dylan.