I had this idea yesterday afternoon, just about the time Anne and Wes would have been having their automobile accident, I guess. I do hope that Anne will be in a position to take part.
I am going to try to recount off the top of my head what I know about my paternal grandfather, also named John Merritt Burt, and ask people who knew him (or who heard stories about him as they grew up) to expand and correct my recollections. I will also later on check available records, but as i said, part of this exercise is to see what I can come up with out of my own unassisted memory.
Have you ever tired to draw a map from memory? That is the sort of experiment I am trying here.
Merritt Burt and his brother Walden Burt were born in the 1880s, named after the two Methodist bishops in their parents' diocese. As a young man, Merritt decided he didn't like having a last name for a first name, and took to calling himself John Merritt Burt.
He joined the Navy in 1906 and left in 1912 with the rank of Boatswain's Mate 3rd Class. While in the Navy he learned to tie knots very well, and in later years was known to show off by tying knots with his toes. He also learned how to whistle the national anthems of all the world's naval powers, since when his ship was in port in Hong Kong he had to stand on deck at dusk while every ship in port lowered its flag in turn, its band playing, a process which could take as long as two hours depending on how many ships were in port.
He acquired a collection of handsome old-fashioned sailor's tattoos, of which there is alas no photographic record.
He was once put on bread and water for two days as punishment for punching out his immediate superior.
In 1917, he joined the Army and went to France as an infantry Lieutenant. He came back with various souvenirs, including his issued Enfield rifle and a plundered German Mauser rifle which remained in the family until they were stolen by a burglar in the 1970s.
After the war, he became a Treasury agent, and was kept busy during Prohibition busting up stills in the legendary fashion. He took a significant amount of copper home with him, and made it into various useful household objects such as the decorative work on a set of fireplace bellows which my parents used for many years. He never did make anything of the long-nosed copper alembic which became a favorite toy of my childhood. He also acquired, possibly also confiscated from a criminal, a long blackjack which he kept aeound the house, though the only use I know he ever made of it was in using its handle to give especially severe spankings .
Other highlights of his career as a "revenoor" included standing guard over the Golden Gate Bridge just after Pearl Harbor and finding a human brain washed up on a San Francisco beach (it proved to have been carelessly discarded after the shipboard autopsy of a sailor who had died of meningitis). He might have lost his job on account of a prank he and three male friends played, driving slowly around the San Francisco Mint as though casing the joint. They circled the building three times before a police car pulled them over and they were told to knock it off.
He worked in copper and in iron, and in wood. Once, while cutting a piece of wood with a table saw, he cut off half of his index finger. The stump of that finger was a memorable feature of his appearance when I was a small child, as was his clouded eye and his emphysemic wheeze.
He smoked for many years, rolling his own cigarettes with tobacco from a small cloth bag. He suffered from emphysema for some years, but it was lung cancer, presumably also from smoking, which finally killed him.
He married relatively late in life, and often regretted not being younger and more vigorous while his children were growing up. He fathered four children, two girls and two boys, one of whom was my father, George S. Burt. He often had a bad temper with his children, and frightened them with harsh criticism and physical punishments such as making them run home within the beams of his car headlights when they stayed out after dark. His favorite pejorative for his son George was "impertinent whelp", but you knew you were really in for it if he said, "I hope you're proud of yourself". His habit of flying into a towering rage with his children was, alas, passed on to his son and to his grandson -- I had to work very hard at unlearning it.
The children had a lively family culture, which manifested itself in various ways, including the invention of an imaginary language and culture. The kids gave themselves "Grorian" names, and may have given them to their parents also, but I do not know John Burt's Grorian name, if he had one. They also at some point gave themselves (or one another) "monster" names like "Thing" and "Creature". They named their father "Fiend With a Fearsome Face", usually shortened to "Fien", and they were still calling him that well after they were grown, and even after he had died.
Towards the end of a long day, he was fond of imitating a favorite expression of a neighbor, "Ahm tarred. Ahm tarred and ahm hongrey." His son did the same, and I have been known to say it myself. I have often wondered what other figures of speech and other habits I have acquired from him without knowing it.
He worked for the Treasury Department until he had accumulated just enough seniority, between his Treasury job and his military service, to qualify for a pension, and then retired. His wife was younger than himself, but she died of cancer more than a decade before he did.
After leaving San Francisco, he moved to rural Watsonville, and that is where he lived when I knew him, on a small acreage near what was proclaimed on its side to be "the world's biggest haybarn". I don't know if the land was an actual working farm, although that is how I thought of it as a child. The only thing I know for certain that he raised was bees.
He was a frail old man with a breathless laugh that was both comical and frightening to me as a child. I associated him with Boris Karloff, I think mainly on account of his squarish face, and perhaps also an air of mingled kindliness and menace.
He died when I was nine years old, but I hadn't seen him for some time by then. He was very sick, and I think my parents didn't want to expose me to his frailty, or perhaps to strain his health with my obstreperousness.
His last words were in response to a ringing telephone: "Uh-oh, that's Waldy." he was right: it was a call to let him know his brother had died.
Okay, that is as much as I can come up with right now. I will try to write more later, and I would appreciate any additions and corrections you folks might provide.
//The Magic Eight-Ball says, "Don't delay."\\
