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Uncle
Kenny Ronnie Dee
(c)
Copyright 2026 by Ronnie Dee |
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If there was a male presence in my life who I admired, it was my Uncle Kenny. But make no mistake, unlike me, my Uncle Kenneth Mock was a hard working man. He was also very skilled as a mechanic, a carpenter and an architect. He was the elder son of my grandmother, with my mother being in the middle and my Uncle George the youngest.
Both boys were the right age when World War II started and Uncle George joined the Navy and became a Seabee in the South Pacific, while Uncle Kenny joined the Army Air Corp and became Chief Mechanic, working on the big B29's on a base in India.
Uncle George was wounded, having been stabbed in the arm by a Japanese soldier one night while on guard duty on some island. He was a pretty big guy and he dispatched the attacker with his bare hands. He fully recovered from his wound and the brothers came home after the end in 1945 to celebrate Christmas with the family.
It was close after WWII, and production levels were a little low, so Uncle Kenny made our Christmas gifts that year. I don't remember what I got, but he made my sister a 78 rpm cabinet record player.
Uncle George was a tall guy with dark, curly hair and the family jokingly called him "Mike" because they said that he looked like Mike, the butcher or milkman, or garbage man (I don't remember which) that did business with the family.
Kenny gained notoriety as a youth by fighting any kid in sight. He came home beat up one day and my grandfather told him if he came home beat up again, he would be beaten up worse at home. So he fought everyone in sight and gained the moniker, "Battling Mock."
As a teenager he got his picture and an article in the paper when he stood on a flagpole for hours through a raging thunderstorm despite my grandmother, who braved the weather and begged him to come down. Flagpole sitting or standing was a big thing in those days.
Both boys were successful in life. Uncle George got the whole family confusion started, when he divorced his first wife, who promptly married my father, who had recently divorced my mother. George then married his second wife, with whom he stayed for many years until her death. He took his third wife several years after that. He had a boy and girl with his first wife and they stayed with their mother. He had another boy and girl with his second wife. He kept those two. He worked at the Courier-Journal newspaper, eventually becoming the head of the Engraving Department. He was a good man. He was more conservative and practical than Kenny. I spoke previously about his Cushman Motor Scooter, and after that he bought an ancient Ford. I think it was a Model T, with a green and white striped interior. They made them until 1927 and this was about '48 or '49. We loved to chug around in that thing and it actually ran pretty good..
Uncle Kenny ended up working as a draftsman at the same place my grandfather worked as an architect. He then took the exam and started out on his own, getting an architectural license barely a year before it became a law that architects had to have a college degree. He opened his own office and after a rough start, his business picked up and he became quite successful. He built countless churches, schools and apartment complexes.
In the meantime, he personally built a new wing on his own house.
I patterned my life more so after his attitude and outlook on life rather than his work ethic. Uncle Kenny was always the guy who bought you that special Christmas and birthday gift. He once bought me a BB pistol and another time he bought me a car. A beautiful blue '59 Chevy Bel Air hardtop. He liked to joke and laugh. He wasn't a millionaire, he just lived like one.
He never worried about money, whether he had it or not. He drove Cadillacs and red convertibles. He dressed well and ate at good restaurants. He loved playing poker and going to the race track. He smoked expensive cigars. He was a Kentucky Colonel and an honorary sheriff. He knew a lot of influential people and he knew a lot of common folks. He was generous to a fault. Everybody knew that Kenny was always good for a ten for twenty if you needed it. He once took out a loan in order to lend it to a guy who wanted to borrow more money than Uncle Kenny had on hand. Of course he was also a big tipper. He loved to go out near Christmas and leave twenty dollar bills for the busboys after lunch and watch from a distance to get their reactions. Then he would buy a Mall train ride for a whole class of young kids or something like that.
He made it his mission to make all the kids laugh. We would be at the dinner table and he would tease Mom by saying, "Well, Mom, I see you made your springerles (or as we called them, springleys) for Christmas again," and he would grab one of the cookies and pretend to throw it on the floor. Then he would stomp his foot loudly and pitch the cookie high into the air and catch it, like it had bounced. We kids would howl with laughter. Her springleys would be great for a few days and then inexorably turn into virtual "brickbats." One of her few missteps in baking.
He was the only person to call me "Rink." I don't know where that came from, but it was fine with me. He would also come by at night sometimes and say, "Let's go get a snowball."
Mom would say, "Well I don't know Kenny, they're getting ready to go to bed," and he would counter, "What the Hell, it's only ten."
Mom would then give in and say, "Well, okay, I guess it's all right."
And we would hop up and march into the night with Uncle Kenny and go down to the snowball stand which stayed open late.
He was the neighborhood kids' favorite. He played basketball in his school days and he would engage the neighborhood kids in games of "Horse" for money.
He was the "Secret Santa" who went undiscovered for years, who helped a poor school by buying presents for the whole school and he would "adopt" a family and help them through the whole next year. He would also buy a piece of equipment that was needed by the school.
There were several newspaper articles written about that. All anyone knew was that he was a middle-aged, well dressed man. I would get a kick reading that in the paper because I, of course, knew who he was.
He had three children of his own, my cousins Betty, Barb and Judy, from two previous marriages. Not to be outdone by Uncle George, he was also married three times.
He would take all of us kids uptown for lunch and we always had a great time. Once he picked up my hat and plopped it on his head and paraded to the checkout counter. Everybody started laughing and we thought it was hysterical.
Mom was always cool with any of Uncle Kenny's suggestions.
When he was fourteen, my grandparents took him out of school to drive them to Columbus, Ohio and he went into a bank there where the teller leaned out of her window to look at something. He asked what she was doing and she said, "Well, you're from Kentucky. I was just checking to see if you were wearing shoes."
He stayed with his third wife, Lucille for forty years or so. They produced no children, but he had two little dogs, Cookie and Dolly and he just adored them and they he. They lived a good life and died within a couple of weeks of each other. He grieved for a long time after they passed on.
Aunt Cille was a lovely woman who was a store manager for Woolworth's Dept. Store in downtown Louisville. She gave my sister a job when she was fifteen. Sis' job was to sell women's compacts with their initials personally carved on the lid while they watched. It was the most popular item in the store. Sis did not actually hand carve the compacts, she had a machine to help. She would put the compact securely in a vise and a metal block with the impression of an Olde English letter in another vise. She would trace the letter with a metal "pen" while an attached needle would scratch the initial into the compact. The ladies were fascinated by it all.
Aunt Cille also made the best eggnog in the world. Donna and I never failed to drop by their house on Christmas Day to say Merry Christmas and slurp up volumes of egg nog.
Uncle Kenny loved to party, but he was not, nor had he ever been a big drinker. I guess he didn't need to. He just saw life as a good time. He was 85 when he died and a number of food servers, store clerks and custodial workers paid their respects along with the well-heeled. Like at thousands of funerals, they played "My Way" at the service. With most people, it's just a pipe dream, with Uncle Kenny it was quite appropriate.