Posts Tagged ‘ Everett Woodman ’

Back to the correspondence between retired Madras schoolteacher Mr. P. A. Thiruvenkatachari and my dad, Everett Woodman. At one point, my parents were awaiting the birth of their fourth child. The family joke was that my dad wanted a baseball team and instead got a ballet troupe. Mr. Patch wrote, “I should be very glad to hear, by the next mail that brings me a letter, that you have a boy; not that I discriminate. As the rhyme …Read More

I’m still immersed in the letters of the Brahmin schoolteacher in Chennai with whom my dad corresponded for many years. Mr. Patch could be crusty. I guess he figured that his advanced age gave him the right to be so, and temperament played in as well. “I am in the habit of making no mental reservations of any kind,” he wrote. “I speak as it comes out of my mind.” One issue on which he was very outspoken …Read More

Hooray! A photo of Mr. P. A. Thiruvenkatachari and my dad hung on the wall of my dad’s study for three or four decades, and I thought it had disappeared when my sisters and I cleaned out my parents’ house. But today, in the Woodman papers in the Colby-Sawyer College archives, I hit pay dirt! Many thanks to college archivist Kelli Bogan for digitizing this! Here’s Mr. Patch, with my dad, in an undated photograph taken at Patch’s …Read More

You fall into the role of family archivist gradually, without quite realizing what’s happening. My relatives think I love smelly old paper that makes your fingers wrinkle, and photo albums held together by decaying rubber bands. Actually, I do love that stuff—for example, my grandparents’ account book from their first three years of marriage. How else would I know that they were Bull Moose Republicans and ate tripe? Five years after my dad’s death, I’m still going through …Read More