Chapter 1

Samuel Edward Williams was born on a sultry day in July 1897. His conception and her confinement came as a bit of a surprise to his 45-year-old mother, but his father seemed to accept his wife's pregnancy and his second son's arrival as part of the normal state of things. In fact, he barely took note of the event.

Caroline, his hardworking mother loved her "bundle of joy" as another fascinating part of her endlessly interesting life, and the baby prospered and grew rapidly under her sometimes casual and often absent-minded care, chasing the chickens and rabbits and running around bare-tailed except in the coldest months.

Sammy had a slim brother named Robert who was nearly eleven when he was born and a plump sister, Lucinda, who was eight and very helpful around the small farm when she was not day-dreaming. He also had two half-brothers and a half-sister who were much older and no longer at home, people he usually saw only at funerals and weddings and at Christmastime. They were the children of his mother's first husband, his father's older brother.

Through all of his childhood and years of schooling the youngster tried to get his friends, his teachers and his family to call him 'Sam.' He failed. For reasons unfathomable, people evidently thought the youngster looked like someone who should be known as Sammy, and with very few and usually derogatory exceptions, that was what he was called. He did not like it, felt it was somehow demeaning, but he learned to accept the diminutive. Sammy was like that, he took things as they came and made the best of them. Just like his mother, said most of his relatives, slides right off his back. Later, when he worked for him, his brother-in-law did call him Sam.

The youngest member of the Williams family was nearly six feet tall by the time he enjoyed his sixteenth birthday in the summer of 1913, by then a rawboned young man with freckled cheeks, bony wrists and utterly untamable hair. He had graduated from the academic program of the county high school in Rockville, one of the few who did, and had been talking with his older brother about taking courses at a business school in nearby Washington, D.C.

He was not sure what he wanted as a career, but he was pretty positive that it was not farming or store keeping. In appearance he favored his mother's side of the family and was, many of the old folks said, the spit and image of her lanky father who had recovered from business failure to enjoy a productive old age.

Sammy remembered attending his grandfather's funeral at the white Presbyterian meetinghouse on the hill, but he could not recall what the man looked like except from the tinted picture hanging on the parlor's smoke-stained wall. He had held it up beside his ear and looked in the cloudy hall mirror, but he could not see the resemblance between the bland and blurred visage and his own tanned and serious face. Like his father, Sammy tended to be taciturn, but he was a good listener and, everyone agreed, a hard worker who seldom left a task unfinished.

His often-irascible father, now well into his sixties, had hoped his younger son would take over the old farm where he had grown up and develop the small dairy herd in which he had recently invested. Seth Williams had given up on his son Robert who had tried a half-dozen career paths before becoming a government clerk under the reasonably-new Civil Service rules.

Sammy did his chores every day and did them diligently, punctually and thoroughly, but he had no interest in farming, dairy or any other kind. He did not exactly hate it, but he knew he did not want to spend his life milking cows and shoveling manure. His mother cared for the chickens and guinea hens as well as her neat vegetable and herb gardens, but all the fields, fruit trees and the other animals, including the small herd of goats and the remnants his father's well intentioned but disastrous experiment with rabbits, were in the young man's reluctant purview. The family was eating up the remaining rabbits as quickly as possible in stew after stew. Those that had gotten loose were breeding, as was their kind's wont, and despite the wandering dogs, they forced Sammy to build a chicken-wire fence for his mother's kitchen garden.

"Shoot," Sammy said as he sat with part of that evening's newspaper on his lap, the page bent to the 'help wanted' ads, "maybe I can get a job down in Bethesda at one of those stores or in the city, but who's going to take care of the farm. Paw's got all his clubs and meetings and such. You know; his family research, his fulminating letters to the editor, and his visits to his pals up at the courthouse plus that Thursday poker game and Saturday checkers at the store. Besides the orchard's about the only thing he really cares for, that and the dratted cows, and his aches and pains seem worse every day to hear him talk."

"No," his brother said, leaning back and lifting his chair off its front legs, "he's quite anxious to make a go of the dairy business. He thinks that's the coming thing. How much do you reckon he's invested?"

"Maw still keeps the books, Robert, you know that. I get two dollars and fifty cents a week; that's all I know about money. Lord, if I wanted to take somebody for a picture show or over to Glen Echo to ride the merry-go-round or the roller coaster, I'd have to save up for a month of Sundays."

His brother laughed and let his chair down. Leaning forward and lowering his voice, he said, "They'll manage if you get a job or go back to school. Maw can hire a hand if she needs to. Plenty of men, black and white, are out there looking for work these days. Maybe Jenny and her husband can come live here and tend the place."

"Michael McPherson, a dairy farmer, oh I don't think so." Seth laughed without mirth. "Michael McPherson skirt chaser, pool player and luckless gambler; that's more his style. I doubt he's ever milked a cow much less a goat." Sammy smiled at the idea and folded his broadsheet newspaper to the sports page.

Robert nodded and fingered his neat mustache. "Fear you're right. All the more reason to get him out of Gaithersburg and away from that foul bunch of so-called friends."

"They're all richer than he is, wastrels each and ever one; that's what Paw calls 'em, wastrels; the younger sons' club. What's the word: ne're-do-wells? One's even got a car, not a Ford either, a Marmon I think, and Michael, well, he borrows a horse and goes out riding cross-country with them and some floozies, spending more than he has. I'm sure they're deeply in debt."