Uncle Fred occupied special place

Editor’s note: This column is being reprinted from July 22, 2004. Whether invention or adventure or something else, we all have a story. Jack’s great-uncle was the inventor type. Connie’s was more the adventurer.

Uncle Fred never looked better.

At least, I’ve never seen him looking better. But then, I’ve never really seen him at all.

Let me explain, or try to.

Uncle Fred isn’t really my uncle at all. He was my wife’s mother’s uncle. I guess that makes him Connie’s great-uncle, if I have the nomenclature right.

Their relationship is the equivalent of my relationship to Elwood Haynes, who was my mother’s uncle.

At any rate, Uncle Fred was no Elwood Haynes.

Though they lived in roughly the same era, the second half of the 19th century and the first few decades of the 20th century, their paths were widely different.

While Elwood was an inventor and businessman, Uncle Fred was an adventurer.

In family pictures at the old farm house in upstate New York where my mother-in-law was raised, Uncle Fred is a tall, gaunt figure, usually in some sort of strange surroundings.

Once, in search of gold, he traveled with a band of adventurers to South America, only to be turned back by revolutionary turmoil which made a trip inland impossible.

His machete from that trip is in a family collection in New York.

Later, he traveled West. There are antique photos of him standing beside a sod hut on the high prairies of Wyoming not far from the land which was brought to life in the pages of “The Virginian.”

His Colt .45 from that experience, now in a New York history museum, has three notches on the handle.

Family legend recounts that by Uncle Fred’s Colt record-keeping “Indians didn’t count.”

In recent weeks, Uncle Fred’s been back on the family radar as Connie worked with her siblings to settle her mother’s estate.

A pair of chairs which belonged to him can now be found at our house, but in some ways the sentimental prize was a pencil sketch Connie’s mother made of Uncle Fred when she was an art student in the 1930s.

The face is unclear and partially erased, but Uncle Fred sits in a rocker with a pipe in one hand and his other arm in a sling.

It had been horribly framed, but our framing friend Heather has worked wonders, setting it off like the family relic that it is.

And Uncle Fred now has a new home in Jay County.

It may not be as wild or remote as the Orinoco River or the high plains, but we think it will suit him just fine.