On the occasion of my grandfather’s 150th birthday
Yes, you read that right. If he were alive today, James Watson Wheaton would be 150 years old. Needless to say, perhaps, I never met him. He died long before I was a glimmer in my parents’ eyes. Over the years, however, I have pieced together enough information to give me a fair picture of the man, which I will try to impart publicly here.
I am the product of two “generation stretchers,” my grandfather and my parents. Jim Wheaton married twice, once as a teenager and second as a middle-aged man. His second son, my father, and my mother married when they were each 38 and I was born when my mother was almost 42. As it turned out, I met none of my grandparents.
Jim Wheaton’s father, John Wheaton, was born in Atlantic County, in southern New Jersey. His family farmed there, but John headed for the big city, New York, which even then was a magnet for opportunity. By 1850 he was gainfully employed as a wholesale grocer and living in a boarding house in what is now the Tribeca section of Manhattan. The owners of the boarding house were Chauncey and Anna Watson, who were important to my grandfather’s later life.
The details are sketchy at best, but John married a young Ohio pioneer woman, Laura W. Atwood, in 1856. She was a niece of the Watsons, so it seems reasonable to assume she and John were introduced during some visit of the Atwoods to the boarding house. Either the marriage was arranged in some way, or perhaps it was love at first sight. The sole photograph we have of Laura shows her as a trim, attractive woman who easily could have caught some young man’s eye.
James Watson Wheaton was born Sept. 26, 1857, there at the boarding house. His mother, unfortunately, died soon after giving birth, a fairly common occurrence in those days, at the tender age of 24. For a time, his rearing fell to his father and to his grandaunt and granduncle. Anna probably had the greatest responsibility.
His father remarried two years later, to a Mary Blackington of Rhode Island. Again, we have no clue how the two met. What is clear, however, is that John and Mary, after they had children of their own, left young James in the care of Anna Watson. The two families lived close to one another in Brooklyn, but there is no evidence that he spent much time with his father and stepmother after the second marriage. He did, however, become close to his half-brothers and sisters, John, Charles, Annie and Laura.
Anna Watson left behind a single, very terse diary from 1865 which depicts a somewhat unhappy life. Her husband, Chauncey, was apparently afflicted either by alcoholism, a mental disability or some other illness that periodically made him difficult to deal with. Times were hard, as it was wartime and grocery prices were sky high. She mentions the draft riots in Manhattan, a symptom of the tough times. In this less than ideal situation, however, she able in her old age to raise a young boy to adulthood. No doubt she had help from John Wheaton, whose grocery business probably fared well, war or no war.
Jim Wheaton was sent to the School of the Collegiate Dutch Reformed Church in Manhattan, a fairly prestigious institution of the day. James graduated in 1874 and within short order began work as an insurance agent and married a woman close to his own age, Emma Ketchum, whose family may also have been from southern New Jersey.
A son, James Watson Wheaton Jr., was born two years later. Soon after the family moved to Montreal, Quebec, where Jim again found work in the insurance business. It seems they lived there until roughly 1900, during which time Jim perfected his artistic skills with pencils, water colors and oils. He also began a lifelong hobby of collecting and reading books on a wide variety of subjects from second-hand stores.
By 1900 Jim, Emma and James were in Chicago, where Jim now worked for the North British and Mercantile Insurance Co. Two additions to the family were a five-year-old girl, Gladys (born Florence Nichol), and a boarder, a Dr. Nichol. Gladys was apparently the daughter of Dr. Nichol, perhaps an illegitimate one or perhaps motherless, whom the Wheatons essentially adopted. Letters and other mementos show that Gladys and Jim were close as daughter and father, even as Emma and Jim grew apart.
Sometime before 1906, Jim Wheaton had an affair with a younger woman, a Swedish immigrant to Canada named Anna Bergstrom. We’re not clear how they met. My father said they met at the World’s Fair in Chicago, but Anna would not have been in the country at the time (1893). There was a World’s Fair in St. Louis (1904), but it’s not clear whether both would have been there at the time. (Anna’s family lived in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan.) We are also not sure what Anna’s job, if any, was at the time. She may have been a maid, perhaps in the Wheatons’ employ, or may have lived nearby. We don’t know.
My father told me that Jim and Emma were not getting along by this time. Having married young, the two grew apart over the years. However they met, Jim and Anna hit it off, perhaps a bit too well. Anna became pregnant and gave birth to a son, Clarence, in 1907. (Jim would have been nearly 50.) By that time, Emma and Gladys had moved to Linwood in southern New Jersey and Anna was living with relatives in Chicago and contemplating moving back to Moose Jaw.
Jim and Emma did not divorce, it seems. By mutual agreement, the participants in this love triangle decided that Jim would support Emma and Gladys (James Jr. was now working as an advertising copywriter in Omaha) in their home in Linwood, and he would live with Anna and Clarence. Jim and Anna settled in Queens, New York, where they would eventually have another son (John Atwood, my father) in 1914 and would meet my other grandparents, both Swedish immigrants like Anna.
Jim and Anna loved each other, despite the nearly 30-year gap in their ages. Since Emma and Jim never divorced, Anna and Jim could not get married officially. Instead, they had a common-law marriage, complete with wedding bands and all the trappings of suburban family living. When they bought property in rural Mineola in Nassau County, the house was in Anna’s name, so that she could keep the property after Jim died. (Probating a common-law marriage would have been a nightmare.)
Jim’s routine in his later life was to commute by train to Manhattan, where he would walk to the offices of North British and Mercantile, perhaps stopping by used-book stores along the way. He would reverse the process to get home. He retired from the company, earning the proverbial gold watch, sometime during the 1930s. Clarence died in a swimming accident in ‘32. John (nicknamed Jack and Red) graduated high school in ‘33 and set up a radio repair business three years later.
My grandfather’s legacy to me was a huge collection of books, scrapbooks and art work. While he never attended college, Jim Wheaton was amazingly well read in English and French. He was a master of landscapes in pencil, water color and oils, and a fair portrait artist. (Some sketches, I must add, were somewhat pornographic in nature.) He clipped newspaper articles, comic strips and photos of art work and pasted them into homemade scrapbooks. Jim embraced the new technology of photography with abandon, leaving behind hundreds of Kodak negatives and prints of Anna and his sons.
And he was as devoted to Gladys, his adopted daughter, as he was to his younger sons. My father never mentioned Gladys, who also died young after childbirth, so he apparently never met her. He did meet his half-brother, James Jr., once, but the connection between two families was tenuous at best. James Jr.’s trail peters out around 1930 or so, and I have no idea what became of him.
Jim Wheaton died in 1942 of a colonic obstruction, the father of four children, spouse to two women, and grandfather of at least four. He was not destined to meet me, however. His contact with me was indirect, but still influential. Happy Birthday, Grandpa!
This post was lost due to a server crash a couple of days ago. This version is from an earlier draft.
