| What,
A Family? Ronnie Dee (c) Copyright 2025 by Ronnie Dee 
|
 Photo by Chad Montgomery on Unsplash |
Fortunately "Momboo," our maternal grandmother, saved my sister and me from an orphanage or foster care by taking us to raise. We had lived with her all our lives except for a year or so when mother remarried and our stepfather wanted it to be just us four as a family. My stepfather's mother made some noise about bringing us up to live with her in New Jersey. NEW JERSEY! This was a woman who didn't even know our name. In all of her correspondence she addressed us as Ronald and Doris Durkin. Our name was Durbin. Momboo ignored her and she quit bothering us. She really didn't want us, thank God. I couldn't imagine leaving Kentucky to go up north, and boy, was I glad we didn't go to Japan. My stepfather, Freddie, was stationed there after the war and my mother, sister and I were going to join him, but my mother died suddenly and that never happened.
Anyway, our grandmother raised us following our mother's death, but again we were never officially adopted. That made for some difficult moments during our school years when we had to have a parent's signature on something, because we had literally been disowned by our father, Butch, so we had no respect for and an intense dislike of him. It was confusing to me and I think that was the root of some of my anger as a teenager.
We had no official income, as Mom (Momboo) was born before social security and never had a real job. The restaurant in Florida, where she worked on occasion, paid her in cash, but that had been part time. No messy tax forms or any of that nonsense. My two uncles helped as much and as often as they could, but they had their own families to take care of. My sister was forced to get a job when she was fifteen in Woolworth's Department Store where our uncle Kenny's fiance` worked. It sure beat things like selling Christmas cards, a difficult and demeaning task, and not very profitable. And me, being five years younger, just blissfully skirted along with the tide. My deadbeat father rarely came through with any child support. Our court appointed lawyer would urge Mom to get him.
"We'll take him right out of work and put him in jail today," he would plead.
"Oh no," she would say, "We wouldn't get anything from him that way."
He and his wife, Bonnie, went to great lengths to hide our existence. An old friend ran into my sister one day and told her this story; She said that they had bought a house on the same block as Butch and Bonnie, and Bonnie came running down to visit them almost immediately. They had company, but Bonnie was insistent and said that she had something very important to tell her, so she sat in their kitchen, waiting for the company to leave. When they finally left, Bonnie dashed in and begged the woman not to tell a soul about their former lives, especially concerning my sister and me. I mean, you would think they were bank robbers or something.
So it wasn't long after my grandmother died, in 1966 that I changed my surname from Durbin to Dee. I was the last one in my immediate family with that name and I wanted to get rid of it. It was an easy selection because a lot of people already called me Ronnie D or R D, anyway.
You see, very soon after our parents divorce, my father married my Uncle George's wife, or my Aunt Bonnie. Bonnie and uncle George, had two children, a boy and a girl. In other words, my father married my aunt. He adopted the children and had another child, a girl, with his new wife. Then they literally disowned my sister and me. They never disclosed any of this to their own children and the kids were too young to remember anything about it. They found all about it later in life.
Oddly enough, my uncle George had nothing more to do with his original two children, and he remarried and had two children with his second wife. Everybody then went their own way for a number of years and then it got a little complicated.
Uncle George worked on the night shift in the Courier-Journal engraving department and my father worked on the day shift in the Courier-Journal Engraving Department. Several years down the road, my uncle was appointed the manager of the entire Engraving Department and was switched to the day shift. So now my uncle was my father's boss. They hadn't spoken, that I know of since the divorces and marriages some twenty years before. Again, as far as I know there were no problems between the two of them. Then in 1956, six months after I graduated high school, I got a job at the Courier-Journal. I was the advertising department office boy on the second floor. I worked there for a year and I thought I was doing okay. All of the sales staff seemed to like me well enough, but I can't say the same for the bosses.
One small aside here: I actually had three bosses and one afternoon one of them came charging out of his office yelling, "RONNIE! RONNIE!," and looking around for me.
"I'm right here," I calmly replied.
He turned and looked at me, stunned. The whole office roared with laughter and he turned red as a beet. He was shocked that I was actually at my desk. I was known to do special errands for the sales staff and was often gone.
I was transferred to the Dispatch Department after that first year. It was still part of advertising, but on the fourth floor, adjacent to the Engraving Department. So I was now on the same floor as my father and uncle. I got along well with my uncle, so no problem there. My father and I ignored each other to the nth degree. One day I stepped into the elevator and the only other passenger was him. We rode down four floors in stone silence.
Then one day I was sitting at my desk, alone in a little two desk office and I looked up, astonished to see him standing there. I said nothing. He finally speaks, something like: "My youngest daughter," (the adopted one) is going to be working across the hall and I would appreciate it if you wouldn't mention anything about our situation to her."
I mumbled something like, "Don't worry about it," or something, and he left.
That was the only
"conversation" I ever had with him in my life. My sister
had an even more unpleasant confrontation with him. She was fifteen
or sixteen at the time and he was late again on child support
payments, so mom coerced her to remind him of his obligation.
Reluctantly she went up to the Courier-Journal to meet him after
work. When she approached him in the lobby, he recognized her and the
very first thing he said to his firstborn child after a ten year
absence was "What do you want?"
His youngest daughter started her job shortly thereafter and she was a very nice girl. Our work intersected often and everything was fine. I had no gripes with her. None of this was her fault. None of it was the kids fault. We worked like this for years and she eventually found out about me and my sister, but we never talked about it. She was just confused like the rest of us, I guess. She eventually had a long talk with my sister on the telephone and they parted amicably, but it went no further.
Then a few years later her half brother got a job as an artist in the News Department, also on the fourth floor of the C-J. This was uncle George's actual son. And he often had business with the engraving department. So, on occasion there was quite the round robin what with my uncle, my father, my cousin and my half sister; uncle George, his son, his ex brother in law and his nephew; my cousin, his father, stepfather, half sister and cousin; my father with his ex brother in law, son, stepson and daughter; and my half sister, her father, stepbrother, and half brother within twenty feet of each other acting like we are all casual acquaintances, which I guess, we really were. Geez! You talk about a screwed up family reunion.
The old man tried so hard to keep it all a secret. We never understood why. He got divorced and remarried, so what. People do that all of the time. He had a heart attack one time and my sister somehow found what church he attended. She called the minister on the phone to inquire about him and the guy was stunned when she told him who she was. It was the same way at the Courier. He tried very hard to keep it a secret, but everybody knew anyway, and nobody cared.
Five people, so closely entwined, intermingling and knowing, but never speaking to one another about what is going on is just bazaar. I used to hope against hope that someday, somehow, we five would all end up on an elevator at the same time, but alas, it never happened.