FAMILY PHOTO ARCHIVE
Title: Uncle Chip (Chip Vara), Dad (Renn Vara), Doc (Joseph J Vara, Greatgrandfather), and Uncle Joe (Joseph James Vara) in field.
Photographer: Pearl? Papa?
Location: Vara Ranch, Bonifay FL.
Date: July 1962
Medium: black and white print 3x4.5
There’s a small rectangular black and white photograph of you, my father, and his two older brothers on your ranch dated July 1962. The four of you stand against a field of grass, shrubs, scattered cattle, and an overcast sky. Uncle Joe and Chip smile for the camera, their arms at their sides. Eight and nine at the time. They act as bookends—you and my father sandwiched in between.
Your hands rest on a wooden walking stick, eyes on the camera, while my three-year-old father looks up from under his miniature cowboy hat and stares, with love and admiration, at the man in the center of the frame.
*
Growing up five miles north of San Francisco, my favorite stories were of my father’s childhood in Northwest Florida. “LA,” he calls it—Lower Alabama. the Panhandle. The Real South. I grew up hearing stories of my father working as a soda jerk at the local pharmacy, of Papa, my colorful grandfather (an irresponsible spoiled mama’s boy, a career military man, a polyglot, a musician, an artist, and a lover of women, alcohol, and Pall Mall Golds), and of you, a Sicilian immigrant, who plied his trade in America as a large animal veterinarian.
*
When I was little, I wanted to be a veterinarian. I wanted to be like you, Doc.
I imagine you and my father driving in your white Ford Falcon truck on vet visits around the country. Anytime one of our pets got sick when I was little, the vet bills would be enormous (we once had a cat get a root canal), and Dad would quote you, “shoot the thing.”
We never did shoot an animal.
*
You sang. Uncle Joe recently recorded himself singing all the songs he remembers you singing. My Sweetheart’s A Mule and I Want A Girl (Just Like the Girl That Married Old Dear Dad).
“All American,” I said to Uncle Chip over the phone after listening to the recordings.
“Course. Doc never showed us anything Italian. Didn’t know he was Catholic until after he died.”
*
During our last visit to Bonifay, Dad and I drove past you and Pearl’s old house on Oklahoma Street. It's been turned into a County Office since Aunt Joyce died.
Dad remembered a story. He was maybe eight years old. You two were in your backyard when you picked up a pecan from the grass and asked him, “Where do you think these come from?”
Dad hadn’t ever thought about it.
“They come straight up from the ground,” you said with a straight face.
Growing up, I thought there was a giant cork holding the water in the San Francisco Bay from rushing out into the ocean. Every time we drove by it and the tide was out, Dad would say, “They pulled the cork out again.”
I didn’t know this trait was inherited from you.
The pecan tree is still in the backyard.
*
You came to the United States from Palermo, Sicily with your mother, father, and three siblings. You were one year old. Your family was the second wave of Italians to settle in Bualo, New York, and the second family to help run a shoemaking and repair shop in the city.
Your father was a drunk and irresponsible. This is where the family folklore started—the belief that irresponsibility strikes every other generation of males in our family (there haven’t been enough girls to tell if it affects us).
With too many mouths to feed and not enough money to do it, you were given to a local vet as an office boy. You were twelve and you worked hard. You went to Cornell University’s Veterinary School where you became a track star.
After graduating you got hired by the USDA. You went to North Dakota and treated cattle on the Pine Ridge Reservation. Then you were called to Georgia because the Cattle Tick Fever was wiping out the cattle herds of the American South and Southern California.
The USDA created a National Cattle Fever Tick Eradication Program. Vets like you were hired to travel through the affected areas. If an infected cow was found, the farmers were ordered to kill the entire herd. It was an eradication technique they called “pasture vacation.”
*
In Dodge County, you killed an African American man. Depending on which uncle I ask, you were either defending your family or “being mugged.” With the dead man at your feet, Uncle Chip told me, “Doc saw an opportunity he couldn’t pass up.”
I imagine you standing over the dead man and hesitating, at least I hope you hesitated, before strapping the body to the hood of your car. You drove through Eastman. As you did, the townspeople saw and were assured that you, my great grandfather, was a “good ole boy” just like them.
Your one car parade won the attention of a well-to-do Eastman gentleman, Joe Peacock, and the hand of his daughter, my great grandmother, Pearl.
*
Driving through Eastman this summer, I wondered what side of Main Street you drove down and where great-great-grandfather Joe Peacock stood to watch.
