Tracking T.J.

By John Sandifer

An old wood carved print in a dusty book and an inherited double-barreled shotgun sets a former investigative reporter to wondering about the story behind them. What he found was a Mississippi boy whose grandfather had fought a bear with a knife, was wiped out by a hurricane, and whose father fought in the Civil War with five of his six sons, including himself. T.J. Sandifer was the product of the migrations of southern farmers and their trials and tribulations influenced by weather, terrain, economy, issues of state's rights, slavery and war. His was an ordinary family in extraordinary times, reflective of thousands of other early Americans who contributed to the making of a nation. His name was Thomas Jefferson Sandifer, but everybody just called him Tee-Jay.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Dec 15, 2010
• ISBN: 9781456831172

John Sandifer

John Sandifer was raised in Amarillo, Texas, and Sedro Woolley, Washington. Mr. Sandifer spent 40 years as an award-winning broadcast journalist for radio and TV stations and networks After retirement, in 1994, from KING TV, the NBC affiliate in Seattle, he served for 15 years as the Executive Director for the Seattle Local of the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists. Having written thousands of news stories and dozens of documentaries, during retirement he has produced two books, both involving family members at war. “One Tough Ombre” follows a favorite uncle in Patton’s Army in Europe.

Book preview

Chapter 1

The Shotgun

It started with the shotgun.

This was one of those trips I took as a reporter for the TV station. My job was to report on the strip clubs operated in the Phoenix area, part of an expansion to the Southwest, by Frank Colacurcio, the closest Seattle could come to a mob boss. I read in the paper today (7/3/10) that he died at 93, while under a racketeering indictment again. Local authorities said he was relatively harmless, about the worst they had on him was skimming cash from the clubs and choosing not to pay the taxes, and making an occasional deal with the strip dancers for personal favors.

Anyway, Phoenix cops were on his case for diverting cash at his Arizona clubs and that was my assignment. Since I was in the area, I decided to stay with Uncle Les and Aunt Jimmie Wren, my father’s youngest sister.

Aunt Jimmie ushered me into her Tempe home, directed me to the family room and poured a Greyhound, for me. It’s the logical beverage at their house because they have two prodigious grapefruit trees in the back yard and are always looking for ways to share the fruit. If you didn’t depart with a box full of grapefruit, then it must have been off-season.

After Uncle Les had settled into his easy chair with his drink and we had caught up with all the family gossip, Aunt Jimmie said, You know, Little John, (my dad was Big John) your Uncle Les and I are not getting any younger. We thought as long as you are here, maybe you’d like to go around the house and if there’s anything you would like to have when we pass on, you could let us know. We’ll hold it for you.

I said, Fat chance, you two don’t smoke or drink or abuse your bodies. You’ll still be around when the rest of us are long-gone. I reminded Aunt Jimmie she is only about 12 years my senior.

Yes, she said, I used to baby sit you all the time. You were my little boy. You were such a sweet little thang. She talks in a deep Texas twang.

I said, And just look how I turned out. Anyway, I consented to being led around the house. At that time, probably about 1985, I had a storage facility already brimming with the couches, beds, chairs, pictures and bric-a-brac of the kind that grace their home; only mine was cheaper. Not to criticize, but there was nothing for which I had a strong interest. Except the picture.

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T.J. Sandifer Family

Who’s that? I asked, referring to an old photograph of a little white-haired man with mustache, surrounded by a passel of kids.

Well, that’s T.J. Sandifer, your great granddaddy and his family. She pointed to one of the kids. This little guy here is your Granpa, my daddy. This was taken near the turn of the century, there in Childress, Texas.

I studied the picture. T.J. stared fiercely with intense dark eyes at the camera. His pose was ram-rod straight. The hair was grey and full, the mustache a work of art. I said, "T.J., Thomas Jefferson wasn’t it?

Yes, but everybody called him Tee-Jay.

It’s amazing how little we know about our forebears. I told Jimmie and Les I have only two fleeting memories of my grandfather, T.J.’s son, James Ira. In one of my memories, he watched as I played on his living room floor in Childress, Texas, with a train he had made for me from wooden cheese boxes. In the other memory he was in a three-piece suit with a watch chain dangling from the vest pocket, as he watched Dad jig sawing a small wooden cowboy boot Dad often made in Amarillo, probably about 1942. Then Grandpa died when I was about 3. Heart attack in a barber’s chair.

Well, no, Honey, said Aunt Jimmie. Your mamma would never tell you the truth about that. Appearances and all. He had a heart attack alright, but it was in bed at his mistress’s house.

Whoa! I paused for air. "That’s fabulous. I mean, I always thought of him as a grey cloud floating around, no personality, no real history, except as a meat cutter in a market, and a bit of an alcoholic. This gives him a little personality. Are you sure about this?

Well, I had to go and identify the body. Momma was out of town, working in Amarillo at the ammunition plant.

Uncle Les changed the subject. As long as you’re interested in T.J., let me show you something. He rounded a corner into his office where an awesome display of hunting rifles and shotguns covers one wall. He brought forth this old rusty double barreled shotgun. This belonged to Thomas Jefferson. There’s something of a mystery surrounding this old gun. He struggled to break it open. It’s pretty stiff. I don’t think anyone should ever try to fire it. Probably blow up in your face.

In fact that had almost happened. According to Les, my dad had discharged the gun without realizing he had stuck the tip of the barrel into the mud. It caused a noticeable bulge toward the muzzle.

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Les and Jimmie Parrish

What’s the mystery? I asked.

Well, we came up with this gun back in about 1950, when we were visiting the old homestead in Childress with your granny, before she died. Les continued to struggle to open the gun. It was stubborn in its resistance. We were rummaging through the old cabin that James Ira, and, I think, Uncle Con had built for the old man. It had been rented out for a lot of years, so there wasn’t much inside and it was pretty much the worse for wear.

Les, frustrated with the gun, put it down and retreated to his easy chair. Then, your granma, sort out of the blue says, ‘Les, pry that board off the wall behind the stove.’ Well, I sort of looked at her and she told me to go ahead and take the board off. So I did. The shotgun was hidden in the wall behind the board. All those years. Been there for God knows how long.

How did she come to remember that?

I don’t know. Sometimes old folk’s memories just work like that. So, if you’re interested, we’ll throw it in with the picture.

The old gun had markings on it: The A.J. Aubrey, manufactured by the Meriden Firearms Co., Meridan Conn. Patent applied for. Ought to be able to dig into that.

What was it doing in the wall?

I don’t know. I guess that’s part of the mystery.

So, there it was. An old double-barreled shotgun, owned by an ancestor who had died in 1934 and about whom I knew nothing. It was enough to start a little investigation.

Chapter 2

Being Transported

The boy breaks open the shotgun and inserts two shells. His older brother moves stealthily to the left and the dog enters the underbrush on command. They work the edges of the Possum Trot Road as the Mississippi humidity rises, and duck under the rail fence at the edge of Thomas Carr’s property. The dog obviously wants to get to the bushes along Magee’s Creek and the hunters let him go.

Suddenly, a great whirr stirs the silence and four quail dart out of the brush. The 12 year old raises his gun and fires. He feels for the second trigger and fires again. The birds continue their course cutting left at about 20 yards. Two more shots ring out and two birds fall and splash into the creek. The dog jumps and swims towards them.

Dang, James Wesley! The youngster looks with admiration at his older brother. James Wesley is straight, strong and good looking. Dang, you are the best shot in Pike County!

James Wesley smiles that self-satisfied smile of his and whistles the dog to his feet. Tell you what, Tee-Jay, you better learn how to shoot better’n that before you go after enny Yankees, or you’re gonna come home wearing buckshot in your backside.

I feel like I am there, as I wander along a stretch of the Possum Trot near China Grove. The sun is settling in behind the tops of the Loblolly pines and I can see the hunters return, with their birds to the old homestead.

The scene ran through my mind as I took in the smells, the sounds of birds chirping nearby. This was what standing on the ground was all about. But it wasn’t enough. I needed facts I could chew into. The shotgun should be simple. Even though the Meridan Firearms Company went out of existence almost a century ago, there had to be information on the Internet and a dozen other sources. That was easy. What about Tee-Jay? I knew a little. Filling in the blanks 155 years later was the challenge. The shotgun meant little without knowing more about the owner. Who was Tee-Jay? What about his father and his father’s father. How did he get here? Did he know a war was coming on?

That’s where the heritage of my mom’s side of the family kicked in. Ever since our mother, Adeline White, won a writing contest, for a short story, when she was in high school in Texas, researching and writing had been firmly a part of the environment. I think Mom featured herself as a true historian and writer. God knows, she wrote a lot; boxes of material, much of it extremely mundane in her later years. I thought she could have written about more important matters, and even though she produced valuable histories of both of my grandmothers, she also avoided any skeletons in their closets and pictured the old ladies more as saints than people. It’s probably impossible to really tell the story of someone while he/she is still alive, particularly a relative. There’s potential trouble there. What do you suppose Granma Rennie would have thought if Mom reported, for instance, that Granpa Jim was involved with another woman when he had a seizure and keeled over?

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Chick Sandifer 2005

The point is the intellectual curiosity and the opportunity to transport yourself into another time and circumstance. It explains why my brother, Chick, not only picked mushrooms as a hobby, but learned the names of each plant, what trees they grew beneath, at what altitude and temperature. It’s part of his fascination with fly-fishing; the research includes deep understandings of bugs, larva stages, hatching patterns, reading water, developing a new vocabulary, actually tying replicas of these critters onto a hook and learning how to throw it into the water at the end of a certain type and weight of leader. I once accused him of being odd or obsessed. He just reminded me he enjoys research.

Research sounds like study and study sounds hard or boring. But to me it sounds like investigation. Detective work. Real reporting. You often don’t know what you will find. So this old shotgun set me off on a journey of discovery.

Chapter 3

Ask Dad

I remembered an old woodcut picture from one of my dad’s books. He had shown it to me as a kid. It had a gallant figure named Peter Sandifer fighting a bear with a knife. I knew Peter Sandifer was my earliest known ancestor and it was about all I knew about Tee Jay’s forebears.

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Peter and Bear

For a start, I went to my dad. He had suffered one stroke by the time I got around to interviewing him and two more before this project really got underway. It became increasingly difficult after Dad lost speech, even though he regained most of it through therapy. He still struggled for certain words, so talking family history with him sometimes became as much a courtesy as any real collecting of facts.

Of course, by virtue of living with him daily, Mom had a pretty good idea what he was saying and sometimes had to interpret. Now that he’s gone its easy to forget how cranky he was getting.

The strokes didn’t seem to have affected his memory at all. We had talked briefly about his having hunted with his grandfather and the shotgun he packed at the time.

Oh yeah, an old double-barrel. And he was a crack shot with it too. I went out huntin’ with him a lots. I was about 20 years old when he died. He got the gun when he was 12.

How do you know that?

How old were you when you got that .410 for Christmas?

Twelve.

Yup. And me and my cousin Perry got our first shotguns when we was 12. And my dad got his when he turned 12. It was a family tradition. Dad popped a can of beer and offered me one. We had all kinds of shotguns around. Granpa had a shotgun. My dad had a couple of them. Me and Perry both had shotguns. Ever farm kid had a shotgun. Hell, huntin’ was about all we did.

So, if Tee-Jay got his shotgun when he was twelve, what year was that?

Mom had to help with that one. She was the walking memory bank. Let’s see, I think around 1859, maybe two years before the Civil War.

Was he in the Civil War?

Dad rejoined, Oh yeah, him and all his brothers. I think the whole fam-damly was in the war.

Mom was facing the kitchen sink, fussing around with a steak and a can of mushroom soup. You know, honey, if you want to study the family in the Civil War, you should really study my side of the family. They were really somebody. They were officers. That was a typical comment from Mother.

I said, Yes, I know Mom, but my name is Sandifer, and that’s who I’m studying.

My comment didn’t stop her. My father’s father was in the Confederate Army. He was a doctor like my father and was the surgeon of his company. She was such a delightful snob. It’s why I called her The Mississippi Princes. I think a tombstone says her grand-dad, Charles White, served in the 12th Confederate Infantry, but I had trouble finding him in regimental rosters.

Anyway, I wasn’t going to let her get away with this and I said, Yes, and I know you were little miss prissy and got to serve mint juleps to the Doctor and the Senators and folks out on the veranda in West Point.

Well, I did.

Where the magnolia blossoms twine around the door.

Now, if you’re going to be smart alecky, you can just do this by yourself.

Seriously, Mom, your family would probably be an easier research, but I don’t know much about the Sandifers. I think I’ll start with them.

Fine.

Besides, we already know a lot about your side from all that research you did to get in to the D.A. R. I think we ought to find out about the horse thieves over on Dad’s side.

Well, be that as it may. You’ll probably find dirt farmers, because I think your father’s family was dirt farmer from start to finish. Turns out, she was right. But there was more to it.

Dad was finishing his beer and opening up the refrigerator to get another. We got some stuff around here somewheres from one of them reunions. They had gone to a Sandifer family re-union, held every year in Crystal Springs, Mississippi. Within a year or so, I found myself there too, meeting a bunch of Sandifers who were courteous, but not very helpful with genealogical research.

Here we go. Dad pulled two books from the shelf and blew dust off them. One was Luke Ward Conerly’s history of Pike County Mississippi, published in 1907. The other