One hundred and twenty years ago, in 1906, my grandfather, Thomas McCornick, left his hometown of Kirkcollen in what is now Dumfries and Galloway Council, Scotland, boarded the SS Laurentian in Glasgow and emigrated to America. There he met and married Mabel Johnston of Nova Scotia and had three sons: Thomas Jr., John (called "Stanley"), my father, and William. Each of the boys had two children, first a boy - all boys were born in the same month as their father - then a girl.
I was the first-born of the six McCornick kids; then came Brian, son of Thomas and Elizabeth (Hughes); then William, who went through life simply as "Billy." The girls, my sister, Karen, Brian's sister, Diane, and Billy's sister, Peggy, came in-between. Because of the enclosed photo, I am focusing only on the boys for now.
At one point in our lives, my mother wrote me a letter telling me "how proud she was that all the McCornick boys were serving their country." I wrote a nasty letter back, which I would withdraw from history if I could go back in time. I was fiercely opposed to the Vietnam War raging at the time and had no use for America's armed forces and told my mother if she mentioned that fact again I'd never again open a letter from her. My poor mother had many reasons to doubt my choices in life; that was one of them. Brian made a career in the Air Force and Billy was a Marine. I went to Berlin first as a Russian "linguist" - as the army calls people who have anything to do with languages - but switched to German, once they found out I was of greater use to them as a "German linguist."
As kids, we got together almost daily during the summers because we lived by a lake and the swimming was good. Billy and Brian and Diane and Peggy were more like my sibling, Karen, than cousins. We were each other's best friends and constant companions.
I went away to college; Thomas' family moved to Florida and Bill's family got into family quarrels over property in Nova Scotia, and the closeness we once had shattered. We never put ourselves back together. Of the six McCornick kids, three remain alive: Billy and my sister Karen and me.
Two nights ago, Brian's daughter phoned my sister to say that he had died in the hospital. I had intended to give him a call, but as I dithered over what to say across the sixty-year silence gap, time got out ahead of me; I never phoned and now add that to my list of old-fogey regrets.
Fortunately, I remembered that I had a photo of the three of us McCornick boys stashed away somewhere. It took hours, but I managed to locate it.
Here it is: Alan standing behind the barrow, Brian in the middle, Billy in the front.
Proof that we were indeed young once.
