Second in a series
Re “Treading Heavily While Walking Down a Rugged Path with Gourley”
Taking an unplanned, open-ended walk with irascible Steve Gourley, owner of the thorniest lexicon on the School Board, can lead a companion into deep and muddy waters.
Like a man flying on a flexible trapeze, the conversation veered from the deadly serious to the disarmingly light.
Without warning or following a straight rhetorical path, Mr. Gourley wandered into the musty pages of the family scrapbook.
While searching for relief in the shadowy portion of a sidewalk, he simultaneously leaped halfway across the country to Missouri and the most peculiarly named of his three uncles, Locuotous (pronounced loh-kite-uss) Gourley. “We never found out what Locuotous meant,” Mr. Gourley said. “But all four boys had nicknames.”
Only a dead man would not have felt at least a semi-fairy tale whirling around the corner.
“Locuotous was called ‘Boss.’ The next brother was named…
“He really didn’t get a nickname. His name was Merton, but they called him Francis, Frank.”
Naturally.
My father was the youngest. He was called ‘Swede’ because the first six or seven years of his life his hair was blonde.”
Okay. Is this a propitious time to yawn?
Having overlooked the fourth brother — who may have been kidnapped or still has not been born — Mr. Gourley turned to his family’s ethnicity. Once again, windshield wipers were called for.
“The Irish claim Gourley is Scottish and the Scottish claim it’s Irish,” he said with a ringing lack of clarity.
“Most people think I am just trying to pass as a ‘Gorelick.’” As a good audience member, he promptly erupted into hearty laughter.
“I had one client who said, ‘Gorelick, Gorelick, great last name,’” and the attorney chuckled again. “Didn’t think my name was real.”
Maybe the original avuncular claim was true.
“Let’s get back to my uncle,” he said. “The second youngest son outlived all of the other brothers by many years. Now remember, we are talking about farm country in Missouri. This uncle was called ‘Shade’ because whenever there was work to be done, you could find him in the shade.”
When his companion asked Mr. Gourley to repeat how many Gourley brothers there were in the preceding generation, it quickly became an ill-considered inquiry, leading to nearly a threatened book-length yarn.
“Four,” he replied before correcting himself. “Actually there were five. My grandfather was born in 1859, and he got married in 1881. They had one child. Both wife and baby died of scarlet fever in 1882.
“He waited another 29 years to get married again. As they say in the ancestry books, he married a much younger woman.”
Given the contents of the conversation, there was a lot of breath-holding during this vigorous walk.
“His second marriage produced four sons, from 1911 to 1923, my father being the youngest.
“I never met my grandfather. He died in 1941 after falling off a horse, and I wasn’t born until 1949.”
It would be unadulterated exaggeration to report that passersby were clustering about us, drawn, ineluctably, by the high drama that rapidly was filling the air.
(To be continued)
