Vrooooomm

I love this photo, but it's a mystery. It's from my Grandmother's box of family photos, but nothing is written on the back. I'm guessing late 1940s to 1950s; and the landscape suggests California. It's not a picture of my grandmother Dorothy, though the shape of the face is definitely Scott. Gramma Dorothy had a taste for fast cars: in the 1960s she drove across the country in her bright red Karmann Ghia. But I'm guessing this is Aunt Fran who seems to have led the relocation of the unmarried Scott sisters to California. I don't know what kind of car that is but it sure is cool. This coming from a lifelong non-driver. The rolling hills here look ripe for development; I wonder if this was indeed Marin county in a wilder time. Oh for a convertible, a dirt road, a driving scarf, and an empty, rolling landscape. Vrooom!

This photo enlarges nicely. Click on the photo to see it bigger.

My Gay Genes

More from my treasure trove of family photos. Flying up in the air here is my great aunt Fran, full name Frances Scott, one of my grandmother's younger sisters. These two photos probably date from the early 1960s, as they appear to be taken in the A-Frame house my grandmother had built in Mill Valley, California, on a chunk of land she bought from Aunt Fran. Fran had moved to the area in the late 1950s; she was a photographer by trade. She built her own house as well as the third house on this chunk of property, a modern cottage called The Kite. I met her on several occasions as a child; she was very private and didn't really join me or my parents on our visits to gramma.

I don't remember when I was "told" about Aunt Fran, but she was a lesbian, and lived for years with a female partner right there next to gramma Dorothy.



I like these photos because the people in them are having so much fun: and I presume one of the two women here is Fran's partner. The top photo is inscribed by my grandmother on the reverse "that kid sister" and the bottom one "Ann, Fran, Kenny, Eral [Eval?]." There's a couple more in this series that involve dancing and one that involves something improper with a lampshade. While my Grandmother was most definitely heterosexual, this party seems evidently something not so strictly so, and its before-Stonewall vintage speaks to me of a sort of prehistoric time.

I wish I had known Aunt Fran better; but I'm glad that one of the family legacies I shared with her were a set of gay genes.

My Great Great Grandfather

I've written elsewhere about the journey of my father's father's family from Russia to the United States. Here's a little bit about my father's mother's family. It's the most "American" branch of the family: unlike the immigrant Volga-Germans, German-Germans, Irish, and secret Jews comprising the rest of my ancestors, the Scott wing seems to have come to these shores before there was an actual United States. I was recently sent a box of old photos from my grandmother's estate--she's been gone a long time but these were floating around somewhere--and included is this amazing photo of my great great grandfather William W. Scott, of Vicksburg, Michigan. He's shown in his Union Army uniform in 1865. I don't have a lot of documentation of any of my family roots, but I know at least that William Scott was born in Indiana in 1844, and died in 1918. He was married to Maria Decker, and among his children was my grandmother Dorothy's father, Clinton R. Scott, a dentist in Marcellus, Michigan (who married Dora Kimble--sometimes spelled Kimball), born in 1868.

It's amazing to see this young man of 20 or 21, just before starting his family, perhaps on discharge from service in the cataclysm of the Civil War.

Here's another photo, undated, but apparently in some sort of parade in the 1910s. On the back is pencilled in "Dr. W. W. Scott".

The Scotts had lots of children. I'm sure my distant cousins are legion. I don't know when they settled in that part of Michigan: but my father was born there and my grandmother didn't leave there until the 1950s. My grandmother herself was one of many siblings: I met her oldest sister Ruth once, the beloved daughter of the family who died in the late 1960s or early 1970s, in a nursing home in California. The photos of the Scott children in the early 1900s show pampered middle-class children in tree-lined small town idle. My great aunt Frances Scott, gramma's sister, was a photographer--and more-or-less out lesbian--in Mill Valley, California from the 1950s through her passing in the 1980s. It makes me wonder, given this family blessing, what it would have been like to be gay in William W. Scott's generation: was it always a suppressed and hidden inner struggle, or were there blue-coated brothers in some former secret army of lovers?