Editor’s note: Born and raised in Stockbridge, Wilcox is a current resident and former Moderator of Alford. Wilcox touches on an important topic in this excerpt from a longer article.
John J. Weiss (1880-1971) was married to our Aunt Belle (Isabella Jane Bidwell) on November 27, 1934. He was a widower with one daughter. It was her first marriage. After they were married, Uncle John and Aunt Belle purchased a hillside plot of land on the south side of Main Road (Route 23) in Monterey and built a small white house above the highway.
I told [a cousin}, “I’m going to add in stories about ice cream, chickens, and the colored chemicals we used to play with.”
Before telling about Uncle John’s chickens, I will pick up on his Jewishness and his violin playing. My Wilcox/Bidwell heritage was a strange combination of extreme tolerance and inclusion combined with a sense of exclusivity. My grandmother was very vocal (to me, at least) about her support of equal treatment of African American people. Her daughter (my Aunt Jane) once told me “we were always told that we were no better than anyone else.”
I came to suspect that Aunt Belle marrying a Jew was probably pretty scandalous. By the time I came to this conclusion, most of my relatives who had been alive at the time (1934) were gone. Only one remained: our Aunt Jane (born March 10, 1923) my father’s youngest sibling.
In 2013, to honor her 90th birthday, my two brothers (and their wives) and I went to visit Aunt Jane. We had a wonderful visit (and well-timed, since she would not live to see her 91st birthday). When our conversation turned to family connections, I said to Jane, “It must have been a family scandal when Aunt Belle married a Jew.” She replied, “Oh, no — he was not Jewish, ‘Weiss’ is a German name.” I didn’t argue with her, though I was surprised that she clung to what was (to me) an obvious denial.
[After being a lawyer and a violinist, John told Belle] “I’m going to be a chicken farmer.”
It was 1941…suddenly the US Army had a need for vast quantities of food to provision the troops headed for Europe and North Africa. By supplying chickens to the Army, Uncle John’s modest business soon became a huge commercial success.
Uncle John was, at one time, the designated keeper of the Monterey silver cane, entrusted to the care of the oldest living person in Monterey. He was very proud of that. Not long after he received that honor, he had a completely disabling stroke.
