Carl B. Greene

Here’s a photo of my mother, Mary Alyce Greene Anderson.  It was taken in 1941 or ’42 when she was living in Long Beach, California, where my father
was stationed during the first part of the War.  (Soon after he left for the
Pacific, she realized she was pregnant. She raised me alone until Dad came back when I was a year and a half old.)  I really like this photo, taken while they were still together
in California, because she seems so happy.
Mary Alyce (1919-1989) was the second surviving child of Carl Brown Greene
(1882-1949) and Gertrude Blanche Holdren (1885-1929).  She was, she once
told me, named for her grandmother, Mary Adkins Greene.  The notes I’m looking at
right now, made when Mother was alive, give her mother’s death date as 1929.
That would have made my mother ten years old at the time, and that jibes
with the feeling I always had from her, a sense that she lost her mother at
too young an age and that she felt the absence throughout her life.

Carl and Gertrude’s first child was a son named James, who died when less
than a year old.  Next was Phyllis (1914-1979), whose only daughter, Ann
[Keenan] (b. 1940), still lives in Vienna, WV; and then came my mother.
After Gertrude died, Carl married Stella Nuzam (born around 1934); and they
had one daughter, Patricia Ann.  Pat has lived in the Chicago area for many
years.
 
Carl died in 1949, when I was four and a half. I wish I had some real memory
of the man, but unfortunately all I’ve got is a composite made up of odds
and ends that I’ve been told about him.  He worked for the trolley line that
ran through Parkersburg; and my Mother often recounted how, when she was
still alone with me, Carl B. would come by on Saturday afternoons to take me
for a ride on the trolley.  We could go for free, and we’d stay on as it took its entire circuit through the city—him, proud to be out with his grandson, and me soon fast asleep.

 
In his latter years, Carl prided himself on his active membership in several
fraternal organizations and, I think, the Eagles.  He also liked to go out
dancing on Saturday
nights.  After Dad came back from the service, sometimes they’d all go out
together (Stella Nuzam, the step-mother, was a teetotaling Nazarene and
stayed home.)

I wish I’d been old enough to go along on those evenings out, because Carl
sounds like he was a really interesting man. He was a snazzy dresser, as you
can see from the photo.  Gertrude seems to have been the same,
based on the photo I sent of her.  Not only did she own a millinery shop,
but most of her sisters had careers outside the home, from Alice Ballentine,
who ran a bank in Marietta (because, it was said, her husband, who had
started the bank, was a little too fond of drink), to Odie, who never
married but who for many years worked at the Pentagon.

Gertrudeýs family had a farm not far from the Greene farm in Newport.
According to my notes, it was just about where the Ohio River dam is today.
In a photo that I have, the house actually looks much like the Greene house.
(My mother was able to go to California to be with my dad during the War
because she sold, for $500, the share she had inherited of the Holdren
farm.)  Apparently the Holdrens didn’t approve of Carl and Gertrude getting
married, because, according to my mother, the two of them flagged down a
riverboat on the Ohio and eloped to Pittsburgh.

That wasn’t the first time Carl had done such a thing.  When he was sixteen,
the story goes, he lied about his age, joined the Navy, fought in the
Spanish American War, and sailed around the world.  I’ve got photos of some
of the vessels he was on and a journal that he kept. Mom said that he had a
ship tattooed on his chest.   What a guy!