For several years I worked for Amtrak, the U.S. rail passenger company. Our offices were at 400 North Capitol Street in Washington DC, just a short walk from the U.S. Capitol.

One day I had a phone call. The caller was very… enthusiastic.

“Hello, Dave! This is Fred Sidecar!”

That wasn’t his name, but that won’t matter much to the story, except that “Fred Sidecar” didn’t mean anything to me.

“Your wife and my wife have worked together for years, and I’ve heard very positive things about you.”

“Nancy Sidecar” (also not her real name) rang the faintest of bells. Finally I recalled that she and my wife had taught CCD classes together at the parish we belonged to. I might have been able to recognize Nancy, but I wouldn’t have wanted to stake a lot of money on it.

That didn’t matter. Fred was off and running. He’d heard I was a successful, respected, and ambitious guy, and just knew I would want to hear about the great opportunity he wanted to tell me about.

Which to me meant only one thing: he was selling Amway products.

He didn’t exactly say that. He asked where I worked (which made me wonder how he got my number) and asked if he could stop by to see me the next day, because it just so happened he’d be in the neighborhood.

I was pretty sure I knew what the pitch would be like, but it was a slow week, so I suggested we meet for lunch at the Dubliner, an Irish pub and restaurant just a block from my office.

And so we did.

The food was good, as it usually was at the Dubliner. The pitch from Fred Sidecar was pretty much a mystery. There was a lot of swamp gas about what a talented guy I was and how he was sure I had many dreams I wanted to accomplish, and how he wanted to share with me an opportunity to help other people accomplish their dreams while I accomplished my own.

This went on in a highly motivational way for at least half an hour.

Finally I said, “Fred, I understand you see me doing all these great things and making a financial success. But it seems to me at some point some goods or services are moving in one direction” — I made a motion with my hands — “and money is moving in the other direction.”

I was pretty sure the money was coming from all these people I’d be “helping,” but I wasn’t sure what they’d be getting for that money.

Fred seemed almost miffed that I would ask, and said that it involved a catalog of “some of the finest merchandise available.” Like microwave ovens and crock pots and hair dryers.

So, it wasn’t exactly Amway, but as I suspected, I’d end up wanting (or needing) to recruit other people to help yet other people achieve their goals (meaning, to sell stuff to others), and somehow I’d get a cut of the action.

I took five minutes or so to try and convince Fred that I really was a person with very little ambition, content to let my family stay in the impoverished state I was condemning them to.

He was pretty disappointed in me.

About that time the waitress brought the check, which she set on the side of the table, close to me and far from Fred. I took out my credit card and put it on top of the check.

Fred made some gesture to pick it up, but I waved him off. It wasn’t that big a deal, and this way I knew I’d clearly be ending the meal and getting out of there.

He made one more effort to convince me to accept the opportunity, but I just kept saying, “I’m sorry, I really don’t think I’m the kind of guy you’re looking for.”

The check came back. I signed the credit card form and peeled off my copy, then started toward the exit.

I looked back to see Fred standing at the table. He’d taken the restaurant check (not the credit card slip) and was tearing off the receipt portion.

In other words, his current business opportunities were so good, he was going to save a receipt from a meal he hadn’t paid for.

That told me all I needed to know about Fred Sidecar and his wonderful opportunities. On the other hand, the lunch probably didn’t come to $20, and I’ve had fun for years telling this story.

Hughie talked a few weeks ago with a former boss from his time working at Chrysler’s Warren Stamping Plant on Mound Road in Warren, Michigan.

It reminded me…this was quite a while ago. It was on my birthday, so I decided that I wouldn’t work Saturday and Sunday, you know. One of those days was my birthday.

Saturday, they were working — we used to work seven days. “Oh, Fergie must be sick or something. He didn’t clock in. Didn’t clock in yesterday or today.” [So Al and another supervisor put in the paperwork.]
On Monday, when I came back to work, I got my pay, and here I had a full week, seven days.

So I said to Al, “God, I don’t know. I’ll have to go up and tell them that they made a mistake.”

He said, “You better not — there’ll be three of us on Mound Road.” They would have fired the three of us, thinking it was all a put-up.

When Al came in [the other week], he reminded me of that.

My cousin Frank once wrote about a report issued in Scotland that projected that in the future everyone in the world would be named Macdonald or descended from a Macdonald. “In other words,” Frank wrote, “they’re predicting the best of all possible worlds.”

That world just came much closer.

On my mother’s side of the family, the Macdonald connection is clear. And if anyone were uncertain about it, the spirit of Jack D would likely appear to set things straight.

On my father’s side of the family, though, I’d known about MacDougals and MacIsaacs and MacFarlanes. Then, just a few weeks ago, I came across a family genealogy posted by a Donald MacFarlane.

The extensive family tree he’s created shows, first of all, that he has a connection to Mrs. Mattie (born around 1890). Her parents were John MacDougall (born around 1870) and Catherine MacLennan (born around 1870).

And Catherine’s parents were Roderick MacLennan (born around 1850) and Catherine MacFarlane (born before 1847).

The significance is that Catherine MacFarlane (Hughie Ferguson’s great-grandmother), according to Donald MacFarlane’s website, is a direct descendant of Ranald MacDonald (1352 – 1389), the son of John MacDonald, Lord of the Isles. Ranald is the namesake of the MacDonalds of Clanranald.

Ranald’s father was John, Lord of the Isles; John’s father was Angus Og MacDonald; Angus Og’s father was Angus Mor MacDonald.

And Angus Mor’s father was Donald, son of Ranald, who in turn was the son of Sorley (or Somhairle, or Somerled). Even that Trump guy would have to concede that this is THE Donald of all Donalds.

That Donald (1190 – 1269) is the namesake for all of Clan Donald.

If all this research is right — and you can’t always be sure they kept meticulous records three hundred years before Columbus — then it’s 21 generations from the father of all MacDonalds to Mrs. Mattie.

Frank: Frank Macdonald, son of Freddie Macdonald and Catherine Gillies
My mother: Greet Macdonald, daughter of Jack D Macdonald and Annie Belle Rankin
Mattie: Mattie Ferguson, father of Hughie Ferguson
Mrs. Mattie: Sarah MacDougall, wife of Mattie Ferguson
John MacDougall: father of Sarah MacDougall
Catherine MacLennan: wife of John MacDougall, mother of Sarah MacDougall
Roderick MacLennan: father of Catherine MacLennan
Catherine MacFarlane: wife of Roderick MacLennan, mother of Catherine MacLennan

To visit Donald MacFarlane’s genealogy site, click here.

I moved from Detroit to Washington DC in 1977. For many years afterward my parents would visit us from time to time.

During one trip, in 1983, Dad said one day that he’d like to go into Washington with me (I was going into work part of the time while they were visiting). He said he wanted to do some sightseeing.

I thought this was a bit odd, because I never thought of him as much of a sightseer. I asked if there was anything in particular he wanted to see. He said yes: the Canadian embassy.

That wouldn’t have been my first choice, but it was fine with me. At that time, the embassy was on a part of Massachusetts Avenue that the tour guides call “Embassy Row.” I gave him some directions as well as the address and phone number of my office near Union Station. Cabs in D.C. are fairly inexpensive, so I told him that he could flag down a cab to 400 North Capitol Street any time he felt like it.

As I remember, I dropped him off at St. Matthew’s Cathedral, just off Dupont Circle and not that far from the embassy:

Here’s what I found out later about his sightseeing:

He did walk from the cathedral up to the Embassy. When he got there, he went up to the Mountie on duty. (At American embassies, security is provided by the United States Marines. At Canadian embassies, it’s the Mounted Police.) The Mountie asked if he could help him. Dad said yes, that the Mountie could tell him his regimental number.

(As I understand it, the first Mountie ever would have had a regimental number of 1.)

The man told him the number, which was somewhere around 49,000 or so, and asked why Dad wanted to know.

“Well, my regimental number is 12375.”

The Mountie was impressed — a number that low meant someone who’d been in the force well before 1939. (Dad joined in 1934.) He excused himself and made a phone call.

Within twenty minutes, the Mounties had taken Dad inside the embassy, into their own offices, where he spent the morning having tea and telling stories. In other words, he felt right at home.

They offered to arrange a tour to the FBI, and would not hear of him taking a taxi to come meet me for lunch. Instead, they drove him in an embassy car, and gave him an LP of music from the RCMP band.

I visited Mom and Dad this past July. One of the things he showed me was this notice clipped from the RCMP Quarterly magazine. The date is spring or summer of 1983.

Here’s the text in case you find the image hard to read:

Veterans’ Affairs: Among the recent visitors to the RCMP Liaison Office at the Canadian Embassy in Washington, was Reg. No. 12375, ex-Cst. Hugh J. Ferguson, who dropped in on February 28, 1938, to say hello during a visit to this area. Born on April 1, 1913, ex-Cst. Ferguson joined the Force in 1934, took his training in Regina and his discharge in 1935. Reenlisting in 1941, he served in Halifax until leaving the force in 1946. After two years as Chief of Police at Inverness, Nova Scotia, Hugh worked for Inverness Coal Mines until settling in Detroit, Michigan, in 1951. He retired from Chrysler Corporation in 1976 and resides with his wife and two of their five children in Detroit. His many travels during retirement include trips to three of his children throughout the United States.

• Mom and Dad: Greet Macdonald and Hughie Ferguson, Dave’s parents

I bought my first new car in 1974. I was torn between the VW Rabbit, a new model that year, and the Plymouth Valiant.

The Rabbit was different, but it was also a new model that year. Consumer Reports liked the car overall, but of course had no information on how well it would hold up.

I figured I wasn’t going to be able to buy another new car anytime soon, and so I didn’t like the idea of helping to try out a new model. So I went with the Valiant instead.

This wasn’t a cool choice. It seemed that most Valiant owners were little old ladies with blue hair. On the other hand, the car did have a long — a very long — history, and while it wasn’t the best car ever built, it was about the best car within my price range.

Not that that range was very crowded.

I kept the Valiant for about ten years, by which time I’d moved from Detroit to the suburbs of Washington DC. My family had gone from one child to three, and the hot summers convinced me I needed something better than the Valiant’s vinyl seats. I even went so far as to buy a car with air conditioning.

Not to say that the Valiant was low-end, but my kids noticed immediately that the new car had carpet on the floor, not some kind of thick rubber.

The Valiant was getting weary from commuting and from long car trips back to Detroit, and had had a series of increasingly expensive repairs. The tipping point was when the guy at the garage said I might need engine work, but he’d have to take a look at the cylinder heads to be sure. That was a multi-hundred-dollar operation, so I decided to simply run an ad:

For sale: 1974 Plymouth Valiant. 113,000 miles. Engine needs work.

I don’t remember if I put a price in, but I thought I’d be lucky to get $200. I certainly didn’t expect that the first phone call about the car would come in at eight in the morning the first day the ad ran. We probably had fifteen calls by the time I got home that evening — to find two men arguing about who had called first.

Neither of them living in the same county as I did. In fact, neither lived in the same state. One had driven about 30 miles from the far side of the District of Columbia, and the other hand come from a similar distance away in Maryland.

The shorter man, with a strong Indian accident, complained that he had called first, though he didn’t know the time. The taller man wasn’t impressed by this at all. The shorter man said, “I spent a lot of gas to get here!”

So the taller man took out his wallet and offered the guy $10. Which he took.

With that, the short guy left, and the tall guy offered me $200 for the car.

I hadn’t had time to get the title out of the safe-deposit box, which annoyed him greatly. I’m sure he thought I was a rank amateur in the world of car sales, which was the correct way for him to think.

Probably, considering how willingly he paid the $200 for the car, I could have gotten more, but I kept telling myself I wasn’t trying to put anything over on anyone.

With the money from selling the car, we bought a new set of pots and pans, a couple of which I still have.  So they’ve gotten good mileage.

I think it was the summer of 1966. I was sixteen, and as usual I was visiting Inverness with my family.

“With my family” isn’t exactly right. Once we grew out of toddlerhood, when we went down home my parents would farm us out to different relatives. My brother John usually stayed with Danny and Olive. My brother Art usually stayed with Billie. I spent a lot of time at Roddie and Pat’s.

I’m sure we must have seen my parents from time to time — we always managed to be in the car on the way back to Detroit — but I don’t remember much of that.

What I do remember, along with other things from this visit, was being at Billie’s house on MacIsaac Street one day. I noticed an old man at the place next door. As I remember it, he was doing something on the roof of the porch, like repairing shingles.

It wasn’t a very steep roof, but he wasn’t particularly young, either. In my mind’s eye, he looks like he’s in good shape for age 70 or so.

I said something to BillIe about the old guy up on the porch next door. She laughed and told me that was Dan Kennedy.

It seems this was the house he’d grown up in. As the Kennedy children got older, they moved away, started families of their own, and I suppose their parents stayed in the house on MacIsaac Street.

Eventually Dan’s own family grew up, and I guess his wife died. However it happened, he ended up moving back into his childhood home, the place where I saw him repairing the porch roof.

Billie told me that the same thing had happened to a couple of Dan’s brothers and sisters, and that a few of them were now in the house together, just as they had when they were children. I think she called the place “the pensionage.”

And I was right, she told me. Dan Kennedy was in good shape for his age. I was just wrong about the age.

Dan had been born in 1864. The man fixing the porch was 102 years old–or, to put it another way, he was three years older than Canada.

David is the son of Greet Macdonald and Hughie Ferguson.
Billie: Billie Macdonald, Greet’s sister
Danny and Olive: Danny Ferguson (Hughie’s brother) and his wife, Olive Duffitt
Roddie and Pat: Roddie Ferguson (Hughie’s brother) and his wife, Patricia Dunn

When Dad left [Inverness], it was February of ’52. and he stayed for our anniversary, but I don’t know when after that he left, shortly after. We had a bad winter. We were snowed in; they had to shovel us out one time.

I was there two or three months, and I used to worry about the stove, because we had a big stove in the living room. It was called a Warm Morning; that’s what it was called. And Freddie used to say, now, bank it at night so it won’t go out. And every day I used to call him. “How do I bank it?” And you would put coal in, but then you put ashes in on top of the coal, from below the stove.

I was always so worried about that. I was so afraid. I would lie in bed at night and think, if there’s going to be a fire, now I could put the kids out on the — there was a porch in front, you know, from your bedroom, I could put the kids on top of the porch. This is what I used to plan at night.

Anyway, the time came, Freddie had no housekeeper for the three kids. And I had to sell that house anyway, before I’d leave. So he talked me into selling the house and moving over there [with him]. And I did that. Sold the house for eighteen hundred dollars. That’s what we paid for it, can you believe it?

And we moved over there, stored some of my furniture at Pa’s and took a little bit with me. I suppose I took the bed, I don’t know.

But anyway, we moved in. We had six kids. I don’t think Frankie was seven yet. Three in diapers — you, and Jackie, and Art. But the kids got along great.

If you remember, Freddie’s street was the next street to the main street. This was Campbell Street. And the back yard of Freddie’s was at the back yard of this restaurant, the Greek’s restaurant. Harry the Greek’s.

And you would go down there — you were kind of a loner. You would go down there and go in. You made great friends with the truckers; they’d be in there. You must have been — I think you were two and a half, maybe, but you could talk like a lawyer.

And these truckers would give you money. And you would buy candy, and you never waited for change. You’d take the bag of candy and you’d come home and you’d treat all our little kids — you were generous, you’d treat them all with the candy. And you did that over and over and over again.

And sometimes you’d go down and there wouldn’t be truckers there, you know. But the girl in the restaurant had a glass, and she would put your change in the glass when you didn’t wait for it. So you could go in and order candy, and she’d take the money out of the glass pay for it.

And you’d bring it — oh, you did that so many times, and you’d bring it home and treat the kids.

Just wander down there by your self. But you know, at that time in Inverness, you didn’t worry. You couldn’t get lost. Everybody knew everybody’s kids.

One day you didn’t come home, and I got worried. And we started looking, and we couldn’t find you. We looked, oh god, we even looked down by the mine. Going crazy. And coming back, I walked up the side of — I don’t know if it was Harry the Greek’s place or the next building — and there you were, asleep on the grass.

You got tired and you laid down.

Dad: Hughie Ferguson, Greet’s husband
Freddie: Freddie Macdonald, Greet’s brother; a widower with three children
Pa: Jack D Macdonald, father of Greet and Freddie

Greet: When Roddie was really sick, we made a point of going. We always stopped to see them anyway as we drove down and back. But the last year we were going to stay two or three days in Antigonish.

And we were going to stay in a motel because Roddie was sick at home. But Pat wouldn’t hear tell of it. She said, “You’re going to stay here.”

So we stayed two or three days. And Pat and I would be in bed early. Hughie and Roddie would be up talking. And Roddie was — I nearly died when I saw him, he had failed so, you know.

And then when we were leaving, Roddie was kind of sad. And I said, “You know, Roddie, before we go back, Hughie’ll come back and spend another couple of days.”

Because we were going to Berwick, because I knew Cyril Sampson would take Hughie down to Antigonish.

And they were so grateful for that. The days that we were there, Pat said, he was so much better — he got up and he got dressed and he ate all his meals with us, you know, and was enjoying it.

Hughie: On that trip, when I was going out with the suitcases to the car, Roddie said to Pat, “I’ll bet you that fella will say, ‘That Roddie’ll be sleeping out soon.’”

That was the expression down home — if you were in the graveyard, you’re sleeping out.

Roddie: Hughie Ferguson’s brother
Pat: Patricia Dunn, Roddie’s wife

When my family first moved to Detroit in 1952, we lived in the lower half of a brick duplex at 13101 Cherrylawn, in northwest Detroit.

Some time around fifth grade, I was learning the “proper format” for writing letters. My teacher insisted that we include “street” or “road” or “avenue” after the street name. I remember wondering with a little annoyance how anyone knew it was Cherrylawn Street rather than Cherrylawn Road, though I didn’t argue. The street signs around us only showed the names: Cherrylawn, Northlawn, Buena Vista, Fullerton.

When the Jeffries Freeway was built, and my former street was one of the few to cross over the freeway, I learned that I had lived on Cherrylawn Avenue.

Just across the street from our house was Littlefield, a city playground that took up most of an entire block. Walking from our house, you’d first pass some tennis course, then a large expanse of concrete with a thin metal pole, and finally come to the playground itself.

My brothers John, Art, and I had it pretty good, living across the street from a playground.

The playground had lots of room. There were areas with monkey bars, with swings (for little kids and older ones), a telephone pole on its side with a steel rail (as in railroad) attached to it (for balancing), another pile of telephone poles, stacked on their side in a pyramid. Sandboxes for little kids, fields for baseball and kickball, and open areas for simply running around.

One block over was the land belonging to the public elementary school. Since the playground was named Littlefield, we always called the school lot “Bigfield.”

In the center of the Littlefield playground was a building used as an office by the city Parks and Recreation staff who ran programs. I learned to make kites there, and big masks out of papier-mâche.

The expanse of concrete I mentioned earlier, with the metal pole, was known as “the showers.” In the summer, kids would arrive in swimsuits, and at scheduled times one of the parks people would turn a hidden valve, and water would gush out from the big shower head at the top of the pole.

So, yes, it was like a giant, outdoor shower, and we’d run around on the concrete, having a great time. It didn’t strike me as strange at the time, though later I realized I’d never seen another place like it.

Years later, after I’d married and moved to Virginia, I happened to meet a woman at a party. She’d grown up two or three blocks away from my house on Cherrylawn, and remembered the showers distinctly. Because she was a few years older than I am, she even knew how there came to be showers.

According to her, there had originally been a swimming pool at Littlefield. But in the late 1940s or early 1950s, because of the fear of spreading polio, the pool was filled in. Eventually, probably after polio vaccine had been developed, the parks department decided it would be too expensive to tear up the concrete, and instead came up with the idea of the giant shower head.

Polio was no idle fear. My brother John walked with a brace on his leg because of polio he’d contracted back in Nova Scotia. And every family in St. Brigid’s parish, where we lived in Detroit, knew about Patricia O’Brien, whose family lived a block from the church. She was twelve years old when she contracted polio. It left her paralyzed from the neck down for decades.

Pat was a vivacious, dynamic person. Despite behing unable to walk or even turn the pages of a book on her own, she joined discussion groups at church, and although she needed a portable respirator and a reclining wheelchair, loved going to events with friends.

I wonder whether her particular situation had anything to do with the filled-in pool that (after an effective polio vaccine) became the playground showers?

David: Do you remember your grandparents?

Hughie: My grandfather was Hughie.

Greet: And his grandmother lived with them after the grandfather died. She couldn’t speak English.

Hughie: With the Gaelic, oh, yeah. They did a lot of talking about it.

David: What did he do?

Hughie: He was a coal miner… You’re darn right it was hard work, and the pay was poor, but I guess they were satisfied with it.

Greet: They only had two children, eh?

Hughie: Yeah, Pa and Uncle Dan.

Greet: And nobody ever saw Uncle Dan.

Hughie: No, after he left home, he never came back. He was about 20 or 21. Grandpa Ferguson told him he’d have to smarten up. “Why don’t you do like Mattie?”

Danny drank and Pa never had a drink. So Danny left.

They start hearing from his writing to Grandma once a month. And it wasn’t very much news, but Pa was very glad to have it. To say “we were over to see Sandy Ferguson” or something like that, living out in California where he was.

February 26, 2006