I've always remembered Uncle Rowland's birthday, as it fell two days after mine. He and his twin brother Andrew would have been 100 years old on Tuesday, July 11th, 2017. Andrew died about twenty-five years ago and Rowland on Memorial Day, 2000. It was fitting that Rowland, after beating one of his friends in tennis, (he was an excellent tennis player) woke up the following morning, bathed, and as he was dressing dropped to the floor.
Rowland was one of the most complicated people I ever knew. Never married, he was conservative to the core, embraced old-school prejudices, despised liberals, drove Chevrolets (which he traded in every two years; as a salesman he didn't want to drive anything that would make it appear that he was too successful) , flew an American flag, served in the Air Force, loved tennis and young male tennis players (I never knew whether he was gay or not, but if he was, he was not only in the closet, but he locked it behind him), drank gallons of Coca-Cola in six and a half ounce glass bottles, (to which he referred to only by that name, not "Coke"), was always well-dressed, loved the symphony but never listened to music and couldn't sing, appreciated design in all things—clothes, furniture, and art, had little tolerance for stupidity or bad taste, and was generous to both people and institutions such as museums and charitable foundations.
It was his love and generosity to people that I knew best. My father died when I was six weeks old, and Rowland, a bachelor, took his place. He took me and my brother to Cincinnati's Union Terminal to watch the trains, to Coney Island, an unwilling passenger in the" Dodge-Em" electric bumper cars. He bought us Greater's ice cream cones, Frisch's Big Boys, and other treats that were conspicuously absent from our normal diet. When my mother remarried, Rowland continued with his generosity, paying for tennis lessons for me and other unremembered acts of kindness.
Rowland loved the traditional Eastern "good" colleges, and took me to visit three of them in 1962—Duke, Davidson, and UNC. A year later, when we unexpectedly moved to California, he came west and took me on my first visit to Yosemite.
Three years later I found myself back in Cincinnati for my brother's wedding. Disenchanted with my two years at Whitman College I found myself 1-A (draft bait) and because Uncle Rowland invited me to live with him, I walked down the street and enrolled at the University of Cincinnati.
Although he strongly objected to my marrying Jadyne, he, as the rest of my family did, learned to love her. He was a frequent visitor to our modest home in Oxford, and he flew to California more than once to see us in Santa Rosa.
On the night before he died, I said to Jadyne, "I have to call Rowland", and even though dinner was on the table I dialed AVon 1-0229. We hadn't talked for a couple of months, but something made me call him right then. All was as it was supposed to be. I remember much of our conversation. I was the last person to talk to him.