Throwback Thursday

Facebook loves TBT. I rarely participate, but today I couldn't resist posting a photo of the man for whom I am named.

He has been much in mind since reading a chapter in Sally Mann's Hold Still last night. Titled "The Munger System," she writes about our mutual ancestor, a great-grandfather to her and a great-step-grandfather to me, Robert Sylvester Munger. A fascinating, generous man whom my father adored, Mr. Munger cast a long shadow in Birmingham, my childhood home. He was loved for his charitable works and admired for his inventions and industry.

While I already knew much of the information in the chapter, other parts are startlingly new, especially a private letter Mr. Munger wrote to three of his four sons, one of them the man in the photograph above, my step-grandfather.

Because both Mr. Munger and his son died before I was born, I have always been curious about them and about why my father adored them so. Gentleness of spirit, I gather, and kindness. But Mr. Munger reveals something else, something far less admirable in my step-grandfather. He wrote,

We, Mama and I, feel like we can and should get away from home now . . . to regain some of the youth and vigor that we have lost in thinking and worrying over our children's affairs . . . and we are hoping and looking forward to the time soon when they will do something for us, instead of our working or worrying over them --

We can then direct our energies into channels more for the good of our Community, our Country and our Church and in fact the wide world -- Even while away down here we see opportunities and think of the great good we could do if we could just turn ourselves loose for the rest of our lives --

. . .

Now will you do it?

You can if you will. But you can only do it by one way, and that is by "Work".

All three of you are gifted with everything necessary to assure success in anything you might undertake except one thing, and that one thing you all three lack and that one thing is spelled by four little letters -- e.i. -- W-O-R-K --

Well I would enjoy a few lines from all of you --

Your Affectionate Papa

R. Munger 

Ironically, my grandmother divorced my father's biological father for what I have heard whispered amounts to the same complaint: he just couldn't get started. Oddly, my step-grandfather is chastised by his father for similar listlessness or laziness.

I am struck by the forthrightness and honesty in Mr. Munger's letter, something I doubt many fathers could write or say to their wastrel sons today.

I am also struck by the loving plea that they live up their promise.

And I am more than a bit stunned to see my own father, second from left on the first row, staring out from page 304, in a family photograph, printed in another person's book. (Mann's father is next to my father, the first boy on the left.)

For Sally Mann's research and thoughtfulness and beautiful writing, I am grateful, and to my parents I am grateful for the family name I bear, and for all that it represents, especially the love.