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Ever since the 1970s’ success of Alex Haley’s Roots, it has been a part of pop culture to ask (or speculate) on one’s ancestry; hence here is my contribution to that taste of personal pop culture.

At the right are 8mm home movies shot by my father from 1956 through 1964. I can think of few things less interesting than home movies.

As for my own roots, I am always amused at the speculation, friends, and even interviewers trying to guess cultural history. Sometimes it is fun to let them believe what they want to, and just play off of that. Sometimes it is equally fun to burst their genological bubble and simply tell them that I am "a hillbilly"; though that particular line didn't go over well working for Donald Trump or other real estate moguls in New York City.

People see the name "Green" and immediately assume that it was shortened from Greenstein or Greenberg or other Jewish heritage. When I add the information that my father’s family was a long line of watchmakers and jewelers, that seems to confirm those stereotyped assumptions.

I also frequently hear from speculative observers that I must be Irish because I have blue eyes and was born with red hair (that later turned blonde and then brownish before salting itself grey).

I have also been told by other wags that they are 99% certain that I am Northern Italian for some host of supposedly deductive reasons the generally seem to be more related to profession than linage.

It seems only to disappoint these genealogy pundits when I tell them simply “I am 100% Appalachian hillbilly and nothing else.”

In their skeptical disappointment and prognosticating about the lost Tribes of Israel, they obviously never listened to me sing or play guitar on any of my albums or concerts. Otherwise there would be little doubt of that hillbilly ridge-runner heritage.

I really was raised where it was wrong to cuss, but “Damned-Yankee” was neither a curse nor two words; where one stands up to both the Star Spangled Banner AND to Dixie; and believe it or not, where some storekeepers place all their five-dollar bills face-down in the cash drawer because they don’t want the face of Abe Lincoln looking up at them.

In 1851 a watchmaker from Person County North Carolina, Willice Green, married Priscilla Bridges; then, on September 28, 1854 (100 years before my birth) they had a child who they named James Willice Green but called simply JW. Nine years later, Willice was at Gettysburg with a North Carolina Confederate infantry brigade fighting for the lost cause; after the war, he returned safely and continued watch making and farming. In charming North Carolina dialect, on JW’s death certificate, 80 years later, his mother’s name was spelled “Pricilar”; gotta love the hillbilly dialect.  When he grew up, JW married Laura Humphries and on July 7 1885, they produced Cleon Augustus “Gus” Green in Ellenboro North Carolina -my grandfather.

JW followed in Willice’s footsteps as a watchmaker as did Gus and in 1918 the father and son opened Green’s Jewelers in Roxboro North Carolina. A true family business, Gus’ cousins and nephews trained under him to become master watchmakers and jewelers…and the business still exists today in its fifth generation of Green ownership —though I have never met any of them and I doubt if they have ever heard of me.

Gus Green married Mary Collette, daughter of Callie Hudgins and her husband John Collette, a cotton mill worker from Union-occupied Civil War Militia District 792 (between Cherokee and Cumming Georgia and about 45 minutes north of Atlanta). They had three children, Festus (who was born when Mary was 22) and my father, Joseph who was born 12 years later. A third child died at birth. Mary Green died on July 3^rd 1930 before Joe was four years old. Unable to raise a three-year old boy alone, Gus soon married Virginia Biggerstaff. Rare as it was in the 1930s for a woman to be a working professional; Doctor Virginia Biggerstaff Green was a chiropractor. My mother tells a delightful story of the first time she visited my father’s house, she opened a closet door to hang up her coat and found —literally— a skeleton in the closet.

By the time Joe had turned 16, Gus was in Baltimore being treated for a massive (and unexplained) blood clot (arterial thrombosis) in his left arm. North Carolina doctors were mystified as to how a routine cut had advanced from a mild gangrene to a massive clot. In those days before penicillin, the only hope was miracle medicine being performed at Johns Hopkins in east Baltimore. Unfortunately, the prognosis was not good and on May 15 1941 sixteen-year-old Joe Green was again orphaned…left only to his stepmother.

Knowing his death was inevitable, Gus turned the family business over to the nephews and cousins that he had trained. And too young to be part of the family business, young Joe Green hit the road from rural North Carolina to join a traveling carnival.

Touring with a band of carnies he learned where to put the weighted bottles in the baseball throw; when to hit the vibrator for the ring toss; how to position the plates for the coin flip; how to switch the sharp darts for the dull ones for the balloon pop game; how to comb the hair up on the cat racks so the sucker can’t tell where to throw the ball; …and dozens of other side-show swindles…er…I mean games. He learned that if he got into trouble to yell “hey rube” and an army of carnival goons would come to the rescue. He learned that to send him mail the writer just needed to address it to his name in care of Amusement Business Magazine Nashville Tennesse and it could be forwarded to him whenever he requested it on the road. He learned all the tricks, frauds, and scams of the bearded lady; the snake girl; the gorilla man; the smallest person in the world; the largest horse in the world; and all of the midway sideshows that thrilled small town chumps and their families. He learned to watch the yokels step right up for one thin-dime, one-tenth of a dollar to see this wonder of the world.”

Truly, in my own childhood, going to state fairs or traveling carnivals was an amazing experience. My father would either explain why I should not play a certain game, or he would simply play it and win for us. While other kids were begging their dads to let them toss the baseball at the cat pins or shoot the over-inflated basket balls into the too-small hoops, my father was reaching under the counter and asking the carnie not to hit the vibrator to move the pins when I tossed the ring. And to make it all even more cool, he spoke to them in some kind of special carnie secret-code language that indicated he was a member of their special club. It was just too cool.

But most importantly in my father’s youthful “runaway and join a carnival” adventure, he had learned to deal blackjack to the locals who would flock to the “back room” at various side show tents. He learned all the gambling games and how to cheat the locals out of their money (and yell “hey rube” if he got caught). He learned to double talk, to short change, and every card mechanic’s trick available on the 1942 carnival circuit through North and South Carolina, Georgia, Tennessee, Virginia, Kentucky, West Virginia, Alabama and the other states on the circuit. At 16 he was a genuine card hustler on the payroll of a traveling carnival.

Three years later (and four months before his 19^th birthday) as part of the generation that saved the world, my father was onboard a ship slated to be the first invasion force to hit the beaches in Japan.  With high school diploma in hand as soon as he had turned 18, in December of 1944, he had attempted to enlist in the Army Air Corps. A previously undiagnosed heart murmur kept him from flying; indeed it was the same heart murmur that would lead to open heart surgery 35 years later and that I may have inherited myself.

But America was at war and on March 30, 1945 (a year after D-day, two months before VE Day, and almost six months before VJ Day) the US Army’s 165th Infantry Brigade accepted his enlistment “for the duration of the War or other emergency, plus six months, subject to the discretion of the President or otherwise according to law”. At 5-feet-and-six-inches and 160 pounds, his enlistment document showed his occupation as “Civil Occupation: Car Mechanic, Railway or Locomotive Mechanic or Signal Mechanic, Railway or Salvage Inspector (Salvage engineer).”  It also listed his educational level as “four years of high school” … which was a slight lie since North Carolina only offered 11 grades instead of 12 back then.

He had worked most recently for the Seaboard Railroad and had developed an interest in the work of an electrician.  In fact, his first choice had been the Army Corps of Engineers; but every able-bodied man had been assigned to the infantry to hit the beaches of Japan. If the invasion was successful, and if he lived through it, there was a tacit promise from the Army that he would be transferred to the engineers.

 The Japanese invasion was planned to be a Normandy-style top-secret “hit the beaches” campaign. The blood bath was expected to surpass the 5,100 allied troops that had died on D-day on the beach in peninsular France. Literally less than a week from the assault, on August 10^th 1945 the ship’s Captain announced to all hands that (as my father understood it at that the time) “some feller named Adam (atom) had made this real big bomb that was so big that when Truman dropped it Hirohito and Tojo just gave up.”

 Spared likely death during an invasion, 18 days later Joe Green became part of the first allied occupational force of Japan. And, just a few months later he was transferred to the Corps of Engineers, given the rank of Sergeant, and on the way to becoming a master electrician.

ABOVE Left: PFC Joe Green (left) of the 165th Infantry Brigade shares Japanese tea with Private First Class William Hanshew during the occupation in Takada (Honshu) northwest of Tokyo near the Mitsubishi aircraft factory. Right: Technical Sergeant Joe Green transferred and promoted during the occupation to Corps of Engineers.

 After the war, instead of returning to the road life of a carnie, Joe Green went to work in his army-trained profession as an electrician. He signed back on with the Seaboard Airline Railroad as a signal maintainer riding the rails from the station yard in Hamlet North Carolina down to Winter Haven Florida. Seaboard operated, among many other trains, the main passenger line from New York to Florida: the sleek and high speed Orange Blossom Special.

Immortalized in the great fiddle tune written by Ervin T. Rouse (and later made famous by Johnny Cash) that train was the primary transportation for Northeastern snowbirds and tourists visiting Florida.

Joe Green was in Seaboard’s Jacksonville Florida dispatcher station one night in 1949. The stationmaster had been watching the wall board that tracked train locations. Under normal conditions, as a train traveled along the rails it would trip a signal every few miles; that signal would turn on a light on a map board at the stationhouse. By measuring the time between two lights along the way, a stationmaster can not only determine the location of a train, but its speed and whether or not it is on time.

On this particular night, one of the lights came on and when the second light was schedule to come on 15 minutes later nothing happened. A half hour later, still no light.

My father was a signal maintainer; chances were that he needed to go out and see what might be wrong with the signal… but on this night the dispatcher held him back. “I don’t have a good feeling about this; there is something wrong with my Orange Blossom Special,” he told my father.

They waited for the time that two more signals should have been tripped, and still no light. As my father began to analyze the possible causes of such a malfunction (simply shorting out the signal would have made the light come on and stay on), the phone rang. An old farmer, obviously hollering into an old-style phone was so loud that Joe Green could hear him even through the phone was in the stationmaster’s hand.

“Is this the Seaboard Railroad? Mister your Orange Blossom Special is wrecked all over this swamp and there are bodies all over my orange grove,” my father heard.

As popular as the Rouse/Cash song became, I always meant to write a song about that great train wreck; no one ever has. By the time you are reading this, I might have done so.