My father was born in 1850. That made him thirteen years older than my
mother. He was born in Richmond, Virginia. He was educated
Page 125 in the private schools, as was the custom. He was
obviously a good student because I have recently given to a
great-grandson named for him, two sets of books. One given "to Master
Robert Somerville for general excellence," and one "given for excellence
in German." Then, he was a page in the Virginia Senate which voted
secession and we have the autograph book that he had made up of
autographs of all the senators. Then he went to the University of
Virginia in '67, '68 and left there with a certificate in mathematics
and something, engineering or something, and so from then he was deemed
to be, under the standards of that day a civil engineer. He worked on
the Richmond and Fredericksburg Railway helping lay out rights of way
and things that a civil engineer does. Then he went into some railroad
in North Carolina and somewhere, and you don't know as a child what to
ask and it is only when people drop a word here and there that you pick
things up, but somewhere he met a remarkable civil engineer, Major
William Starling from Kentucky, who asked him to come with him to
Mississippi where he had been employed to help work on the levee
protection system. Now, that is called flood control and so my father
came to Greenville, Mississippi in 1884 and he lived there until his
death in 1925, although actually he died in a sanitarium outside of
Nashville, Tennessee. He was a man of conservative views and not
inclined to take chances. He explained a matter very clearly, but he had
no eloquence in public speaking. He was literal minded and I have
inherited that trait, which is a handicap, because you don't know when
people mean for you to actually answer a question or whether they are
just fooling, [unknown] anyway, he was very much that way.
He would laugh at a joke, but he didn't have what is called a sense of
humor. He was greatly respected in the community. He was [unknown]
Page 126 the Sunday School, I think, for twenty-five
years. He held some state offices in the Masons, of course, they were
secret, you know, and he had a reputation for integrity and he would be
most unhappy in this day and generation. I recall one day, he was to go
and buy the tickets for us to come to Monteagle and a relative in the
room said, "Well, you are not going to buy an adult ticket for Lucy are
you? She is a little thing here and nobody would think that she was more
than ten years old." "Oh," he says, "Yes, she will be twelve the first
of July so I will buy her an adult ticket." Well, you see, I was Little
Miss Big Ears and that impressed me. Then, a part of his responsibility
was inspecting the work of the levee contractors when they built the
levees. Well, if he would agree to shave an inch off of ten miles of
levee, it would put a lot of profit in the pockets of the contributors
so, these gifts would come to the house, you know, a ham and bunch of
bananas and a barrel of molasses and this, that and the other, and they
all went back no matter what. Well, a few times he became really
indignant and that was when something came addressed to my mother and he
said, "How low can they get," to try to get tora man through his wife
and of course, that went back, too. Of course, she agreed with all of
this, but when I got to be first assistant General Counsel to this War
Claims Commission which was going to dispense a lot of money and we were
setting up regulations and establishing policies, one of the men came to
me and said, "What is going to be our rule about gifts?" "No such
thing," I said. He said, "You mean that if somebody wants to give me a
bottle of whiskey, I can't take it?" "No," I said, "You can't take
it."