Lewis Edward McCown with Cousins
Tragedies are different than setbacks. They are not simply the experiencing people we love, live and die of natural causes. They are those events that for some reason feel singled out because they are unexpected and notably unfair.
Sometimes tragedies in life are single events that individuals suffer for a short time then heal. Other tragedies leave scars that families struggle to heal from. Still other families seem to have unrelated tragedies that pile up on the generations.
In the last tragedy blog, I looked at Robert McCown, my great-grandfather's brother. Robert died in a prison fire in 1930 when his only son, Lewis Edward McCown, was seven years old. Lewis's mother, Mary, had been previously married to Ova Dunfee and had a son, Ray, who was seven years older than Lewis.
Lewis with his older Stepbrother, Ray
When Ova was only eleven, in 1907, he was injured when he was struck by an automobile in Huntington, WV while he was riding his bicycle. This incident wasn't a tragedy, but it was notable because of how early it was in the history of automobiles. (The first recorded pedestrian / automobile accident in the was in London in 1899.) Ova died, though, when he was only twenty-three -- leaving a widow and a three-year old boy.
Ova's widow married Robert McCown two years later. Lewis was born the next year. Sometime between 1922, when Lewis was born, and 1930 when Robert died, Mary and Robert divorced. Robert was unable or unwilling to provide financial support for his family after the divorce. Lewis, therefore, grew up in a divided, difficult, and depressed (financially) household. When he was seventeen, he was living with his grandmother, Mary Ellen McCown, and Aunt Margaret Eaton in Athalia, OH.
Judging from surviving photographs and discussions about Lewis by my grandfather, the extended family was part of Lewis' life. He posed with photos with his first cousin, Carlos Stone, Jr. and his second cousin, Robert "Bobbie" Wylie, all of whom were born within a year of one another. Carlos had lost his mother, Elizabeth McCown Stone, to illness when he was only three. He moved to Springfield, OH with his father - though he did come back to Lawrence County, OH to marry.
Like all young men across America, Bobbie and Lewis joined the military during the height of World War II. Carlos likely did, too - though I know no details. Lewis, though, saw terrible and historic things.
Lewis was a Water Tender in the engine room on a large naval vessel [a Landing Ship, Tank (LST)] that delivered tanks, trucks, and other logistical equipment onto the beaches at the littoral front of military operations. These were used repeatedly during the war. Lewis was an LST crewman at Salerno on his 21st birthday in 1943, at Anzio in January 1944, and on that fateful D-Day in Normandy a few months later in June. In total he would have witnessed the loss of six LSTs during the three operations.
Lewis' Navy Photo
Despite the danger, Lewis returned home in January of 1946 and married Edna Martin the same month. Three years later, on 30 July 1949, Lewis was killed in an automobile accident at the intersection of 8th Street and 8th Avenue in Huntington, WV. He left behind a young wife and two children under three.
Bobbie was not unaffected. He continued to live and work in Chesapeake, OH as a Chiropodist (now called a Podiatrist), but in 1968 while on a business trip to Wisconsin - he committed suicide. If reasons for his choice were revealed or known they have been lost to time. He left behind five children, three still living at home with the youngest only eight years old.
These tragedies, stretching from Robert to Lewis to Bobbie, do not form a tidy chain. They are scattered, unfair, and deeply human. Ecclesiastes reminds us that “time and chance happen to them all,” and perhaps that is the only thread that ties these events together. They were not clearly deserved, they were not predictable, and they were not connected — except in the lives of the people who had to endure them. Remembering them in its own way can help us to endure our own inconveniences and even tragedies we inevitably experience.
