My Uncle Charlie (Part 4)

I hate eggs. I don’t like their taste or their smell. The closest I can get to eating them is in a quiche. I once tried eating a dinner omelet when over visiting in France. The host saw how much of a gag reflex I had trying to get it down and said (in French) “You know, you don’t have to eat it.” Merci a dieux, I didn’t.

It wasn’t always this way. When I was two or three years old, I loved eggs. I ate almost nothing but hardboiled eggs. I think my mother loved it because she wanted to ween me off of eating Gerbers and other baby foods. However, somewhere along the way, I must have OD-ed on eggs. I went from loving them to hating them almost overnight. I theorize that my subconscious brain began associating them with baby food and as I got a little bit older I rejected them.

Unfortunately, my aunt Alice didn’t get the memo. We went over to my aunt Alice and uncle Charlie’s house one day for lunch. Alice had prepared egg salad. I wouldn’t eat it (I was about three or four). My uncle Charlie did not take kindly to such insubordination. I can recall him saying something along the lines of I’ll teach him to eat “Mrs. Hunt’s salad”. Even back then, I found it odd that he referred to his wife as Mrs. Hunt. He took me by the hand and marched me into another room. I recall that in the room was an antique wooden spinning wheel.

Charlie then proceeded to beat me. It wasn’t like the spanking my father sometimes did. It wasn’t like the time my mother about yanked my arm out of the socket because I stumbled while crossing a street and she didn’t want me to get run over. No, this was smacking about the head, a true beating. I didn’t cry. I think I was too stunned to cry. After he was done, Charlie grabbed me by the hand and marched me back to the dining room (this whole thing took place out of sight of any other adults) while he said, “You will now eat Mrs. Hunt’s egg salad.” Fortunately for me, my aunt Alice must have known what was about to happen because the egg salad had disappeared from the dining room table by the time we came back.

I remember hearing that Charlie’s son Gene used to crawl out from under the sheets on his bed rather than fling them off so that he could easily tighten down the sheets and make the bed look totally undisturbed. Why would he do that? I suspect that Gene had seen Charlie’s wrath too. As an adult, I can recall driving with my uncle Charlie in Salt Lake. Gene was a retired police officer by then and Charlie was telling me that each time he and Gene were driving in a certain area, Gene always made sure to say that “This is the street that divides Taylorsville from Salt Lake”. Gene did that because I think he had to know the different jurisdictions. What surprised me though was how angry Charlie was about it. “He tells me that each time we drive across this street, EACH TIME!” I can see that as annoying, but Charlie’s clear anger over it was alarming.

I forgive him in a sense though. Normally, I don’t forgive anyone who doesn’t make an apology in some manner. However, Charlie’s father, Colonel Irwin Hunt, had supposedly been a history professor at West Point.

(Source here).

I read William Manchester’s book “American Caesar” years ago.

In it, William Manchester describes the brutal almost sadistic treatment of cadets mainly at the hands of their upper classmen. The cadets were often expected to stand still unflinchingly while being insulted and pelted if not smacked outright. It came from a military tradition where officers and sergeants had to keep soldiers in line while they were being shot at. If you imagine the Napoleonic wars where the discipline was mass volleys of troops, and how that later proved to be so disastrous in our Civil War with the improvements in firearms.

I imagine that Charlie came out of this brutal background and regarded it as normal. After all, he was raised that way.

However, that is not to say that Charlie wasn’t a kind man. He helped my parents out by “loaning” them something like $20,000 in 1972 in order to buy the house in the suburbs that I really grew up in. (My parents would never admit to white flight, but it certainly looked that way to me in hindsight). Going through his old letters, I found that he helped out a lot of other relatives with home loans too.

I was fortunate that my parents paid for my college education. However, when it came time for my going to grad school, they couldn’t afford it. So, I took out student loans. When my aunt Alice and uncle Charlie found out about that, they offered to give me a loan at a much more favorable rate. I believe it was around 40 grand that I owed them. I was working odd jobs while putting in applications for things like the Border Patrol to pay back the loan when they suddenly announced that the loan was forgiven. I was surprised, but my parents weren’t. Apparently, aunt Alice and uncle Charlie had a long track record of doing this.

Charlie had said that he regretted that his own children had not wanted to continue their studies and did encourage others to do so too. I found in his letters where he set up a scholarship fund for geologists and got a thank you letter written to him from the proud recipient over in Denver, Colorado (I suspect attending the University of Denver).

The couple wasn’t just generous with their money. After all, they did adopt two children. They had a dog named Waggy who I believe was also something of a rescue. He wrote about saving a wild coyote from a trap. In their remote travels in desert and mountains, Alice and Charlie came across it with one of its paws caught in a metal trap. When they approached, of course, it snapped at them and growled. How do you get it out without getting bit? Thinking quickly they drove their truck over the chain of the trap. With the coyote on one side of the tire and Charlie on the other, he worked hard to free the paw, which apparently took some doing. The coyote didn’t immediately run off, as if it couldn’t tell that the metal clamp was no longer pinched on its leg (I suspect the leg had become numbed by the pain). Once it realized it was free, it ran off rapidly with the paw that had been in the trap apparently not badly damaged. When it was far enough away, it stopped and looked back almost started to circle them as if to wonder “Were you my saviors or my failed executioners?”

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After writing all this up, the question arises, why did I bother? Why did I bother to write about a geologist who the internet doesn’t even recognize as one of the United States’ top 100 most influential geologists? Well, normally, I write on immigration and (frankly) matters of race. Why is it that so much of the modern world was made by whitey? The automobile, the airplane, the light bulb, modern astronomy, manned space flight, modern science in general etc… (Grok thinks so).

I can remember uncle Charlie saying that his father had taught history at West Point. He had gone to college thinking he would do the same, but found that history didn’t go back far enough for him. He then tried archeology, however, he didn’t think that went back far enough for him. (Archeology was something Alice got her degree and researched in, Archeological Survey of the La Sal Mountain Area, Utah; Archeology of Southeastern Utah (1956); Archeology of the Death Valley Salt Pan, California).

Charlie called it his quest for eternity. Each time you go back, you try to still go back further. Maybe, if he had lived long enough, he would have gotten to the Big Bang or whatever kicked his great experiment off.

In Charlie’s time, matters of race were largely irrelevant. Looking through the names of his colleagues, they were almost all white English sounding names with a few German. I had to ask, why was geology even a field to begin with, who decided to look down at the dirt at his feet and wonder how it got there in the first place? A quick internet search tells me it is James Hutton “Scottish geologist, physician, chemical manufacturer, naturalist, and experimental agriculturalist.” I’d never even heard of him. (Frankly, I thought it would be some Greek or Roman guy). In reading a bit about him, to be a geologist is to be a bit of a philosopher. They talk about things like “Deep Time”.

Why was the field so heavily white? Asians have higher IQs than whites, are they not as curious? According to Grok, white people make up approximately 13.83% of the world population with 60% living in Europe, and 36% living in the Americas (I’m guessing the remainder are primarily in New Zealand, Australia, and South Africa). In 1900, 25% of the world’s population was in Europe alone!

We are a shrinking minority. In Charlie’s era, the main dealing he had with non-whites was the war with Japan. While working in the southwest, Alice said she and Charlie saw some Mexicans walking north in the desert. The Border Patrol swooped in on them, stopped them, gave them water, then let them go continue on their way. I suspect this was in the very early days of the Border Patrol before things like Operation Wetback.

However, the infrastructure of the United States was built by white men whether in government, academia, religion, or, whatever…

Charles B. Hunt’s legacy is that he helped out a lot of people, and helped to enlighten academia about how the world, the earth beneath our feet works. Too bad there aren’t more people like him even if he did have his flaws.