Tuesday, December 3, 2019

The Tinling Family
This account is not the usual thing for these blogs. It’s a very personal account regarding what I know about my mother’s family. It may indeed be worthy of note to others, since the Tinlings had some lively experiences and a few connections of real general interest. I had many personal interactions with the Tinlings – many more than with the Hoods of Tennessee and Kentucky.

During my lifetime the senior Tinlings resided in a very nice home at 104 Scottswood Rd., Riverside, Illinois. The street behind them had a Frank Lloyd Wright-designed house called the Coonley Estate. The entire Village of Riverside is internationally recognized as one of the first planned suburban communities in the United States and was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1970. The Burlington railway running west passed through the town just to the north. The towns to the west included the home of the famous Brookfield Zoo.

The nuclear family as I knew them were as follows:

Charles Franklin Milton Tinling - My grandfather (Big Daddy) – b. 23 Nov. 1858,   Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. d. 11 May 1943, Riverside, Illinois.

Mary (Brownie Belle) Tinling (nee Gridley), My grandmother (Big Mama) – b. 4 Dec. 1866 – Logansport, Indiana. d. 21 Mar. 1957, Riverside, Illinois.

Gladys Helen Tinling – My mother - b. 15 Aug. 1889 – Miles City, Montana. d. 21 Feb. 1964, Denver, Colorado.

Theodore (Ted) R. Tinling – My uncle - b. 10 Jan. 1899, Washburn, Wisconsin. d. 31 Jul. 1969, Denver, Colorado.

Virginia Tinling – My Aunt – b. abt. 11 Sept. 1900, d. 23 Mar. 1972, Denver, Colorado

There were four other members of the nuclear family of whom I have little knowledge – except for my grandfather’s sister, Katherine. She lived in Washington D.C., and as a child I used to get cards from her regularly. I never actually met her, but I have a photo of her someplace. I do not know if she ever married or had any children. As far as I recall she was single. Big Daddy had a brother, Frank, who worked with him for the railroad in Montana. I was told that he moved to Seattle from there, and as far as I know there was little subsequent connection with the family. A child, Jean Milton, b. 1888 in Stillwater, Minnesota, was the firstborn and died as an infant, and a son, John Creton, b. 1892 in
St. Paul, Minnesota left home as a teenager, went to New York and changed his name.

The family lived in Memphis for some years. My mother kept a diary in her teen years in which she noted her basketball activities, her piano playing, going downtown in the afternoon for a coke, and her distress at the disappearance of her younger brother, Jack. She tells a story of working in a music store in Memphis when W. C. Handy entered and asked her to play some of his music. He wanted to hear how it sounded with someone else playing it. I checked Handy’s movements on the web and found that he and his band, quite famous by that time, were indeed in Memphis in 1906. My mother would have been about 18.

For this account I should be quite clear; my direct connections with this family were limited to their residences in Riverside, Illinois and Denver, Colorado. Determining when and where the various members resided has been a problem. Obviously they lived for some time in Memphis, as that is where my mother worked in her late teens and where she and my father were married.

I have an album of photos, many of them taken in Riverside, and a lot at wherever they vacationed in the summer. They had a place across Lake Michigan in Oceana County, Michigan. That may have been the location of most of their summer holidays. They show my grandfather shooting a rifle, chopping wood and generally enjoying the great outdoors. He must have been a very vigorous and active person, and, although an executive with the railroad, clearly enjoyed the “rough” life. In that same album and having the same “age” feel are photos taken by my uncle Ted of his model airplane and one with a note in his hand, “Beachy over Midway.” The very grainy photo is clearly identifiable as a Curtiss biplane with interplane ailerons that Glen Curtiss used to avoid the Wrights’ claim of the ownership of lateral control patents using wing warping. Lincoln Beachy died in a crash in 1916 in San Francisco. One would guess the date of this picture as 1915 or slightly earlier. Ted would have been about 16 and clearly living in Riverside; Midway is the Chicago airfield near Riverside and the name of a nearby east-west boulevard.

I have a formal portrait of C. F. M. Tinling that fully justifies him being mistaken for Buffalo Bill Cody from time to time. This amused him, and he never actually set people straight on the matter. My grandmother, Big Mama, tells two interesting anecdotes from her childhood and youth. She said she once met Sitting Bull while traveling on a cruise boat on the Mississippi. He was in the company of some army soldiers. He gave her a small beaded purse – regrettably now lost. The other incident occurred later while she was aboard a lake cruise ship which became caught in a violent storm. My mother, Gladys, her only child, an infant at the time, was with her. Gladys had not been baptized, and Big Mama was in fear that they would sink followed the teaching of their Presbyterian faith. So she performed the child’s baptism herself.

I had my first contact with my mother’s family at about age 10 or 11. My parents and I made the trip then to Illinois from our home in Alamosa, Colorado for an extended visit. I do not recall the trip, but we undoubtedly traveled by train. It might have been the Burlington Zephyr from Denver. I have a vague recollection of traveling on the Zephyr, and that must have been the occasion. My sisters were not present. Dorothy was working, and Jean was graduated from high school and was probably in or about to begin her college work at the Colorado Women’s College in Denver.

The household at Riverside consisted of my grandparents; Ted, who was employed as an architect in downtown Chicago and also had an office and bedroom in Riverside; Wilma, the lifelong housekeeper and the cook for the family; and the dog. I don’t recall Virginia’s presence, but I recall that she was employed at the time at Carson Pirie Scott in Chicago. They hadn’t a bed for me, so I had a room at the neighbor’s house to the north. I have no recollection of those people – only the accommodation that they gave me. We took all our meals in the Tinling home with Big Daddy, an imposing figure, at the head of the table. We did go to the zoo at Brookfield, but the major activity that seemed to engage me
was perusing a book I found in the house on how to read tea leaves. This must have amused the adults, and I have no idea why this so intrigued me. I also have a vivid memory of uncle Ted giving me specific detailed instruction on how to mow the lawn. Apparently that was an assigned duty of mine while there.

There were two further occasions for me to visit Riverside. The next was in 1943, while I was taking primary naval electronic training at Wright Junior College nearby to the east in Chicago. I probably also visited there during my training at Navy Pier in 1944. My grandfather died in 1943 before I came to Chicago out of boot camp, so I would have had only the one visit to get to know him personally.

After Barbara and I were married and were living in Boulder, Colorado, we had an occasion to visit the Riverside home during a visit to Barbara’s parents. This was in the summer of 1949. We had our first son Jack with us. I show the picture of Big Mama, aged 83, with Jack on her lap. Virginia and her husband Clark Austin took us all out to dinner on that occasion, and Jack managed to throw up in the restaurant. Ted was present and still working in Chicago.

 

Big Mama died in 1957, and Ted decided to sell the property, retire, and move to Denver. This was not unusual since he got his civil engineering degree at the University of Colorado in 1925, the year of my birth. Anyway, the rest were in Colorado. Clark and Virginia had already gone out to Denver a few years before.

My wife Barbara thought Ted should just marry Wilma and take her with him into retirement. That didn’t happen. We had been in California for six years, and I was at the Navy Electronics Lab by that time, but we made frequent trips to Colorado and kept in close touch with all the family. Ted moved into a retirement facility in Denver, and Clark and Virginia had a nice modest home in east Denver. My parents’ home was at 819 Steele St. just a few blocks west of Colorado Boulevard.

The Ted Tinling saga was not quite over. Very late in life, he did decide to get married – to Acklyn (maiden name unknown). They moved into an apartment, and we (the rest of the family) tried to like his new spouse. It was difficult, but then Ted always was a bit eccentric, so we soldiered on.

The Tinling story was also not over. Gladys, died in 1964 at her home on Steele St. Ted died in 1969, leaving Acklyn allegedly better off than she was. But we will never know, since she disappeared – completely.

The Virginia and Clark Austin story has some quixotic twists. Virginia was a character right out of some classic piece of humor. She loved to give everyone a big hug and kiss whether they wanted it or not. She had a car that would only go forward; it had no operating reverse gear. She didn’t seem to mind. She always just looked for parking places at grocery stores and elsewhere which had plenty of room in front so she could always just drive straight out. She never saw this as a problem. When Clark became very ill with cancer, he took off one day unannounced and drove down to either Santa Fe or Albuquerque and rented a motel room in which to die. He didn’t want to be a bother or an
expense. Virginia kept his ashes on the mantle for the rest of her life, although she could have used the mausoleum east of Denver where the rest of the Hoods and some of the Tinlings were buried. Ted used to say that when the rest of Denver had turned to dust, that fabulously built mausoleum would still be standing.

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