Uncle Sam and lamenting the passing of a way of life
The family: Sam Graham (front right) with sister Betty Threet. Back row is Sola Goss, Jerry Graham, Paulette Graham Reed and Judy Graham Swallows. Older brothers Vance and Wayne are deceased.
The mountain never leaves some of us. Others never leave the mountain.
The tall, stern, gray-bearded Uncle Sam, he who exhorts “YOU” to the service of the USA and who is the graphic personification of our country, is likely still shaking his head and that larger-than-life finger over the sickening events at the Capitol on Jan. 6. That’s surely not what he has in mind when he says “I want YOU.”
He’s bound to be thinking more along the lines of my own Uncle Sam, Sam Graham, who answered that call to service in 1967 and served a combat tour in Vietnam. He was drafted and he served. He doesn’t talk much about it but he doesn’t have to. He was there.
Sam was in Vietnam at the same time, through coincidence, as a number of boys from Cumberland County, although not with the same units. Sam spent some of his off-duty time tracking down the ones that he heard where there.
One of those was another uncle, Maj. D.L. “Barney” Wright (“Snee Wee” if you knew him from Crab Orchard), my mother’s brother. Uncle Barney flew F-4s for the Air Force. His tour was 99 missions, but Air Force pilots traditionally flew one more to make it an even 100. Barney flew 100.
As a civilian, Sam didn’t have much use for Barney — those times he’d encountered Barney in Crossville he thought Barney was cocky, self-centered and full of himself. And I’m sure he was right. Barney was career Air Force and a fighter pilot, flying the F-4 Phantom, one of the hottest new jets in the inventory. Those guys generally aren’t lacking self-esteem.
In one of his letters from Vietnam to my dad, Sam says that if he ever had anything bad to say about Barney — Snee Wee — he took it all back. Sam said there was nothing like watching a formation of fighters take turns delivering munitions in combat.
“When they dive in it’s nearly straight down turning one way and then the other. When they come out of it, it’s the same way, straight up, twisting and turning, on their back, and every other way,” he wrote. “I take back all the things I ever said about him because if a man will do that for 100 missions, he’s a hell of a man in anybody’s book.”
(Sam told Barney as much when they met up again — in Crossville, of course — a couple of years after their tours in Vietnam. And Barney told Sam that he loved and admired those ground troops and that it was his honor to support what they were doing. Sam and Barney were all cool after that.)
Sam’s duty fulfilled, the call answered, he came back home, home to the mountain, passing up Dallas and a sure-fire job there, arranged by an Army buddy. “Is Dallas on the mountain?” Sam said he asked his friend, probably without a trace of irony. Like a courtroom lawyer, he already knew the answer. And his friend got the message.
Because home to Sam Graham IS the mountain. I’m not sure anyone loves what the mountain is and what the mountain represents more than Sam Graham. Maybe my dad, Wayne Graham, one of Sam’s older brothers, had a love for the Cumberland Plateau to match Sam’s. Or maybe, my dad’s love of the mountain helped feed Sam’s passion. “Wayne was always my big brother,” Sam once told me. “He was my hero.”
Sam came by the house in Homestead last fall, a few weeks before the election, to talk. He’s helped me navigate “old” Crossville and Cumberland County, finding folks who knew my dad. It’s pretty easy for Sam because he knows most if not all of the same people my dad knew.
On that day we sat in the cab of his pickup, windows open and air conditioning running as a Covid precaution, and talked. Mostly Sam talked. I listened.
He talked about a way of life on the Plateau that is largely gone, a time when “things” really were different. Sam bemoaned the loss of “old” Crossville and Cumberland County. He acknowledged that the influx of residents from elsewhere have created work for natives (try to find a tradesman or craftsman for immediate hire right now) and have kept the tax rate low.
But he also acknowledged how difficult it was to pass on that way of life, a rural lifestyle that permeated even those who lived in town. At its core, I think, was a connection to the land and nature — farming, timber and logging, extracting stone and minerals, hunting and fishing. And it meant church, school and family. Maybe not in that order but it doesn’t really matter because they were all sort of the same.
Sam told me that we could be that way up here on the mountain because everybody here shared the same values, and there’s a lot of truth to that. We all looked the same. We all basically worshipped the same — freedom of religion here essentially meant which brand of Protestantism you believed. Even if you didn’t go to church you still believed in God. We attended public schools in the same system, and, after high school consolidation in 1962, we all came together at Cumberland County High School. Our families knew one another, often for generations. It was the proverbial village. Everybody had a role.
Sam, 76, loosely observed COVID protocols and especially disliked the restrictions on gatherings. A gregarious, social man, he and a small vocal group, every Saturday for nearly 30 years, have performed and sang hymns and other inspirational music at local nursing homes. “I haven’t sung since April,” he said. There was sadness, almost resignation, in his voice.
He told me that he’d lived for seven decades and considers himself on “bonus” time now. I’m now taking that to mean he feels like he’s largely served his purpose on this earth and God is letting him just hang around, to enjoy what’s left of his time here.
We didn’t solve anything that October morning. I don’t think Sam was looking for answers anyway. He knows his generation may have been the end of an era for Cumberland County. He knows subsequent generations don’t see the mountain the way he does, and there’s almost no way for newer residents to see it through a native’s eyes. That’s not a criticism. That’s just the way it is.
Sam was recently diagnosed with cancer, on the heels of a bout with COVID. Sam’s a mountain boy, a tough, independent man who’s not given to complaining and certainly not to whining about himself. Sam is a man of faith and is surrounded by family and people who love him. I’m worried about him, but I’m also not worried. Sam will find his own path through this, and he’ll follow that path wherever it takes him.
Because in Sam’s world, all paths lead to the mountain.
rpdgraham@gmail.com