Naming Roscoe

My son turned one on Saturday. His full name is Roscoe Stuart Barnett. Both my wife, Melissa, and I have graced him with names from a family legacy. Roscoe was my grandfather’s first name. Stuart is my wife’s middle name, a name passed down for five generations, to both male and female descendants, in recognition of a line of Stuarts who left no male heirs.  

Roscoe Lloyd Babcock, my grandfather, was born in Thayer, Kansas, in 1897. He was my mother’s father. Roscoe dropped out of school at 14 and left home to become a cowboy. In his own way, he was a learned man, but he had an aversion to formal education, although he did take classes at the Colorado School of Mines and was later an understudy to the noted landscape painter William Galen Doss.  Roscoe was a cowboy and a chemist; a jock and, most famously, a painter of the American West. He worked for many years at the Post Office and was known as “the painting postman” by the local townsfolk. He was always eager to explore that further valley in search of the next adventure. It is a value that my family passed on to me, and something I hope to bequeath to my sons.     

Several of Roscoe Babcock’s paintings hang in our home, inherited from my parents. When we adopted our second child, it was Melissa’s idea to name him after my grandfather, inspired in part by the name on those paintings.

The crazy thing is that, in real life, I really didn’t like my grandfather that much, and I suspect that he really didn’t care that much for me, either. My grandfather could be a nasty piece of work, a man of action, a taciturn misanthrope who really didn’t care for the talkers of this world. And if there is one thing that I’ve been over my 51-years on this earth, it’s a talker.

“Can’t you get him to be quiet?” Grandpa grumbled to my grandmother during one of their child sitting sessions. I must have been about nine at the time. It was during the college football game of the year, as the #1 Nebraska Cornhuskers faced off against the #2 Oklahoma Sooners, and I had made the critical mistake of not just being too loud, but of rooting for the wrong team.

“He’s just having fun,” my grandmother said in my defense.

“That kid acts like he’s spastic. Besides, what’s he doing rooting for a bunch of Oakies?”

I could never seem to make my grandfather happy. He’d sit there, flexing those strong hands of his, and stare at me. I admit that I could be a bit tightly wound at times. But what the hell, I was just a kid.

But looking back at it, Roscoe Babcock was a fitting patriarch of our Scotch-Irish clan. We were (and are) a bunch of Oakies, despite my grandfather’s protestations that we actually hailed from southeast Kansas, and there are two things that you need to know about the Scotch-Irish descendants of greater North America if you want to understand us: 1) We’ve been here a long time; and 2) A rabid defiance lies deep in our DNA.

My grandmother could trace our family back two hundred years, but she couldn’t name anyone who actually immigrated to this country. She knew of family who fought on both sides of the Revolutionary War; who crossed the Cumberland Gap with Daniel Boone; who fought on both sides of the Civil War; who walked the Trail of Tears (like most of the state of Oklahoma at the time, my Grandma Hazel had a bit of Cherokee blood - 1/8 to be exact) and hung with Jesse James. Roscoe and Hazel crossed the Great Western Desert shortly after World War I for California, where Roscoe took a job as a chemist at the Holly Sugar refinery. He lost that job during the Depression and had to scramble. My mom would tell a story about how Grandpa traded his cow for a neighbor’s dory fishing boat, and the family’s only protein for the next 18 months, breakfast, lunch and dinner, consisted of the fish that he and Grandma caught off the Balboa Peninsula (which at the time was an uninhabited sandbar mostly submerged at high tide), and my mom grew so sick of fish that, some 20 years later, it still made her retch whenever it touched her plate. My point is that we were working class folks, yet we knew nothing of the immigrant experience. We knew nothing about whatever hardscrabble croft of Scottish dirt and stone our ancestors hailed from (although that didn’t stop Grandma from proudly wearing her Gordin tartan scarf on those rare cold California mornings). As far as I know, none of us, other than myself, ever lived in a city. In brief, my Scotch-Irish forebears are as tied to the American landscape as my great-great-great grandmother, the Cherokee whose parents walked the Trail of Tears.

We are an ornery lot. My grandfather really liked football, both as player and fan. But he liked the old school notion of the game, of bloody mouths and broken fingers, a game of collective brutality rather than speed. He seemed to think the modern version of the sport was a kind of betrayal, as cock-of-the-walk quarterbacks tossed delicate passes to lithe, gazelle-like receivers, almost entirely bypassing the slow-motion brutality that he considered the essence of the game.

Until my generation, our family history dovetailed with that of America’s wars. Stubborn redneck farmers and hillbillies have always borne the brunt of our fight, forming an outsized percentage of those who have defended our country and killed our enemies. One of these was my uncle, Lloyd Richard, in whose memory I received my middle name, who earned a distinguished service cross and seven oak leaf clusters killing Japs and Nazis while flying his P-47 during World War II. He died a few years after the war, testing jet aircraft for the military.

A final story: My grandfather had a devious side and liked quietly stirring the pot in uncomfortable ways. One day, he loaned me two Time-Life books, one on evolution and another on the origins of man. Like I’m sure he knew I would, I read these books at my neighbor’s, an evangelical Christian who took care of me and my sister until our Mom got home from work. At one point when I was being a particular brat, my neighbor grabbed one of the books, threw it against the wall, and declared, “Why don’t you just take yourself and your monkey book and get out of my kitchen.” This led to a lengthy discussion between the two of us on the validity of evolution. The next time I saw my grandfather, I gave him back his books and let him know that I didn’t believe in any of this evolution mumbo-jumbo. Grandpa just kind of smiled, asked me a couple of pointed questions, and let me go on my way. Factually, he was on the right side of this argument, of course, but he taught me a valuable lesson that day, albeit one that I didn’t realize at the moment and one that I would be wise to heed more often, even today: It is generally a waste of time to argue with someone if they want to remain trapped in their private sandcastles, and sometimes silence is the better option. This is how most of my family handles most things. We don’t like to talk about our feelings, and we really don’t care if the dolts hold the floor; being on the side of truth is its own reward.

Like my two sons, I was adopted into the Barnett/Babcock clan. Of all the gifts that my family bequeathed me: Love, an education, a sense of decency, or even the more mundane gift of a house I could sell, I regard our independent streak as perhaps the most valuable. Sure, there are a lot of things we expect from our society, from dependable roads and rails to clean food and water and a good school for our children to attend. There are a lot of countries that fail to deliver these supposedly basic services for their citizens, so I don’t take them for granted. But the essence of America is that imbued by my hillbilly ancestors, which is our compulsion to escape the security of this organized Babylon. In naming my son Roscoe, I reassert our family’s destiny.