A McDonald Narrative

By Alan Yamada

This is the electronic version of the previously printed book.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Alan Yamada
• Release date: May 12, 2014

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A McDonald Narrative

Gems from the McDonald Family Newsletter

Joan McDonald

Joan Dingman

Published by Alan Yamada at Smashwords.

Text copyright © Joan McDonald, 2014 except where contributions are explicitly attributed to others. Print edition also published by Alan Yamada for limited distribution. This publication is not registered (it does not have an ISBN so it will not appear in book databases and can not be distributed through traditional online retailers).

Portions of this text first published in paperback under this title in 2012. This edition published in 2014 as ePUB–02 (June 10, 2014), an update for electronic distribution.

Many thanks to Ann Sears for her hours of assistance in editing. Her valuable input and support were integral to the completion of this project.

Introduction

One of Alan’s goals in this project was to bring an awareness to the process of family connecting in various ways. As the family grows up and moves to Canada we get a bird’s eye view of family input and correspondence to each other. In later years we see the participation of family members in the development of the Newsletter.

Ultimately Alan wanted you, the reader to have a glimpse of the process involved in seeking out further information or fun details for the book. In the last chapter there are e-mails and e-mail exchanges from various sources demonstrating the collaborative family effort in creating this book.

A perusal through the notes in the appendix will bring a further awareness to the development of points of interest that come up throughout the book.

The Newsletter told of births, graduations, marriages, travels and other goings on in our family. Periodically, amidst the family news, there was a gem of writing about Mom’s Welsh family, a little glimpse into her former years, a historical snapshot of a day gone by. I treasured those gems, but they were sprinkled throughout 10 years of newsletters and therefore lacked a thread of continuity that would provide a more complete picture of those early years.

I have always felt an enormous chasm preventing a linking of myself to Mom’s family background and history. Added to the immense curiosity about her family, is the romanticism of a famous opera-singing father, a renowned pianist sister and a brother who was a timpanist, a comedian and a radio producer. There were four children in Mom’s Welsh family. Her second oldest brother lived in South Africa from the time Mom was about seventeen. The tragic deaths of her mother, father, oldest brother, and her sister — all before Mom was eighteen — demand an understanding of the events themselves and the sequence of those events.

I felt compelled to take advantage of the writings that Mom had given to us through the family newsletter. I chose to thread the writings together, through order, connection, and interest, in the hope that as you read through this book you will have a deeper connection to Mom’s earlier years, her Welsh family and the world in which she grew up.

When Mom went blind in 2006, I asked her if she would like to record some memories and reflections to include in this project. I also invited a few people to have conversations with Mom on areas of her life in which they had an interest. I’ve included a few of those conversations with permission from both Mom and granddaughter Christina.

The scope of this project was not to write Mom’s life story, or to enlarge on the original writings. I wanted to preserve the authenticity of how Mom wrote, and how she expressed herself. Mom’s voice has its own cultural background, and its own way of expressing her thoughts.

The Newsletter is an amazing resource for family history, and I hope you will treasure them and share the stories with the next generation. My focus, with this project, was not the stories or the family history, but what Mom sometimes called Flashbacks and other personal writings that I felt contributed to knowing this wonderful person a little more.

This book will provoke all manner of questions for Mom, or perhaps there will be questions that grandchildren and even great-grandchildren will have of their Nana, or of their own parents. This is just a starting point.

—Joan Dingman, 2013

Preface

This simple project of digitally laying out various anecdotes and related media for print has been quite a process. My role — as graphic artist, typesetter, or editor — should not be felt within the pages of your narrative, but as I am both an outlaw and the first to argue that it is never really quite so simple, I admit that I’ve tweaked as much as I possibly could.

I knew this project could go on forever — and for many I’m sure it has — but it was not simply for amusement that I poked and prodded my mother-in-law, Joan Dingman, to consider needlessly complex ways of dealing with your Nana’s writings.

So, yes, this project should have been simple — print the fecking thing and be done with it — but what I would like you to consider, if not before you pick up the phone at least while it rings on my end, is just how extraordinary this project is.

This is not a slight, by the way. I admire whatever it is that encourages an immediate, impromptu interrogation of the McDonald brain trust. Dropping everything to call an aunt or far-flung cousin to find out about the family, without ever worrying about interrupting someone’s routine, is amazing.

It is also amazing that, within the melee of the typical McDonald gathering, there is always a place of relative calm where Nana sits and draws in conversation. I don’t ever know what gets said, but my wife, Christina, gleans things I would not have thought possible given the overall chaos. Nana said…is how Christina begins every news report that comes after a McDonald gathering.

The McDonald Clan is a close, outspoken bunch, and while it’s probably impossible to quantify closeness, this project made it clear that there is something about your Nana’s Newsletter that factors into that quality.

Writing is often about conveying facts and details, and that can be the extent of it. Writing can be good or bad, true or false, enjoyable or not, but what makes Nana’s Newsletter significant is that it conveys, in addition to facts and details, something of Nana herself. It also brings out that McDonald characteristic of dropping everything to pick up the phone.

This project is not extraordinary because Joan saw something of significance in your Nana’s writings — I’m sure you all did — it is extraordinary because Joan took them on even though doing anything to them risks not doing them justice. It is extraordinary because the safe, easy thing to do is to respect them by not doing anything at all.

So you have me to blame for corrupting the simplicity of your Nana’s Newsletter. I provoked my own mother-in-law to consider that it is not simply about the Newsletter. I told her it’s okay to shuffle things around, to contribute her own pieces, and to add random research stuff.

This is not how Nana would have done things; I have no doubt we got it wrong more than a few times; and if we had taken more time we would not have missed as much as we did.

As Joan says, this is just a starting point.

As much as possible, it’s just Nana’s voice that moves this book forward. Where the richness of what needs to be told makes that impractical, I’ve quietly moved details to the back so the main text would appear less cluttered. It’s a compromise that will work for some, not for others, and it’s the reason for the numbers in the margins: they direct you to pages in the back that contain relevant details.

—Alan Yamada, 2013

Family Connections

Way, Way Back

I never knew any of my grandparents, and never even heard much about them. I’ve just realized that the same things apply to my children, since the last of their Irish grandparents died when Fran was 4 years old, and their Welsh grandparents died before any of my children were born. This dissertation concerns the Welsh part of your heritage. Perhaps more about the Irish side another time.

Both my parents came from a Welsh coal-mining town called Treforis (Morriston in English). It’s close to a larger city called Swansea, on the south coast of Wales. My mother’s name was Mary Agnes Thomas. She was an only child. My father’s name was Edward Davies, the youngest of eight boys and two girls. Welsh was the predominant language in that part of Wales, and the main interests were music, and religion of the Hellfire and Brimstone variety, with ministers who excelled in the art of oratory, and congregations who sang the hymns magnificently.

My father was a very gifted operatic singer. He spent 2 years in Italy, and sang in the famous La Scala opera house in Milan with great acclaim. He then resumed his 20-year career as principle tenor with Britain’s Carl Rosa Opera Company.

Nana (front middle) With Her Family

Nana (front middle) With Her Family

Our family consisted of four children: two boys, Tom and Bert, my sister Ella — each about 18 months apart — and 12 years later I arrived: Joan Agnes Davies.

I was born in London in 1917, during the first daylight Zeppelin raid of World War I. When I was 2 years old my father retired from his travels with the Carl Rosa Opera Company and we moved to Cardiff where he taught singing and voice production to this music loving Welsh population.

My brother Tom was in the British Navy for as long as I can remember. At some point Tom did leave the Navy. He came home to visit after my father’s second marriage