My Great-Grandfather built so many Catholic churches in the Bible belt, the KKK burned a cross in his front yard.
My Great-Grandparents' original church in Muskogee, Oklahoma, now houses a charity and has been replaced by a contemporary church.
I was not expecting this when I attended my Great-Aunt’s funeral, planning to take my daughter to the same church where Gaga got married, where I attended my Great-Grandmother’s and Great-Uncle’s funerals and my cousins' wedding.
I hardly recognized Muskogee and did not have time to sort it all out as Google maps was not much help. Fr. Marlin, the Casady chaplain who grew up in Muskogee, came to Aunt Lucy's funeral and mentioned how many old buildings had been torn down and things had changed, even street names.
The Catholic school headmistress even came, which surprised me because I remember Mom and her cousin saying how mean the nuns were.
As soon as they were old enough to be educated out of Muskogee, off my family members went to prep, boarding or military schools, some Catholic, some Episcopal. My Great-Grandparents built buildings on campuses, too, of schools they went to and schools they didn’t, including a Kappa Kappa Gamma Sorority house. Gaga said her Father built the Kappa House at Oklahoma State University, yet my cousin said he built it at University of Oklahoma so that she could get in. Gaga once remarked when the pledge class a year after mine took the first black member that the Kappas had always taken Jews. My Great-Grandfather built some of the older buildings on the old Oval at the University of Oklahoma, though I could never find the signs Gaga said were behind the doors on the walls when I was a student there.
When I was a child in Oklahoma City, there was a period when many of the buildings my Great-Grandfather built were torn down. It became weekend entertainment to go to a nearby office building and watch them go up in dynamite. The wealthiest man in town was buying up the Art Deco buildings and demolishing them.
One time I asked, “Mommy, why is he tearing them down?”
“Because they remind him of when he was poor.”
“Because they remind him of when he was poor.”
The architectural agenda in Muskogee looked as if they were trying to influence the legacy. The front pews were separated from the rest and had exactly the number of places for our cousins’ immediate family to sit.
I wanted my daughter sit with her cousins, to show her the beautiful, solemn church, the hilly, winding road canopied with trees leading to houses built for entertaining, a big park where the azalea festival takes place every year, a soda fountain named “Chet’s” (my Great Grandfather had a Dalmatian named Chet), Baker’s Catfish and a peach grove in nearby Porter where we always bought Red Albertas, and a pecan farm.
Aunt Lucy and Uncle Larry's house opened up with cabana doors to a Koi pond with stepping stones through it that led to the front door. Spanish tiles in Moorish shapes lined the floors that expanded into a row of living rooms to the right and a dining room to the left. Past the piano, long dining room table and walls covered with oil portraits of every family member was a pool. Then down to a little farm where my cousins raised chickens, eggs with room for a little forest and a horse or two.
Since that was sold, after a church-parlor reception with lemonade and cookies, they headed to the River, where my Great-Grandparents had built two summer cabins for their ever-growing family during the Great Depression to keep the construction crew employed at something they could take pride in. For the club they built a dining hall and pool with an octogon-shaped diving tank.
I didn’t hear about the cross burning until a year or so ago. I guess you wouldn't tell your children something that scary. Mom, Gaga and all of us have always been protective, cautious, private about coordinates. It took a lot for me to go on facebook and write in the social media. Gaga's safety and the safety of the chapter may have been considerations in the construction of the Kappa house. My Mother grew up under union kidnapping and death threats. The brief period when she attended public school, the Masons were actively anti-Catholic and she steered clear of them. I imagine we would be a far less educated family without the building contributions. A parish would take up a collection and my Great-Grandparents would do the rest.
Some of those churches have been rebuilt, like the one at the River. When your business is construction, you don’t get attached to old buildings, unless the preservation of them is smart in terms of real estate development. Nobody’s going to go on a scenic tour of the new church in Muskogee, light and airy as it is, with great acoustics. Sometimes, my Great-Grandfather would salvage architectural elements, like old courthouse doors on the cabin at the River, so that the crew would feel like they were building something important using the best materials. The old buildings have some history that will be worth remembering in the future.
Though Gaga and her two brothers all lived in new houses they built, they contributed to the historic preservation of important structures. Gaga served on the Board of Regents of Kenmore that saved Ferry Farm, George Washington's birthplace. She also contributed to preserve the Murrell Home, an antebellum farm on the road to the River. After both of my Great-Grandparents had died, a natatorium was built at Georgetown University, where my two Great-Uncles and Grandfather had graduated. Before it was co-ed, Gaga, Aunt Lucy and Aunt Mimi went to Georgetown Visitation, the Sister order to the Jesuits that had the missionary inroads from New Orleans to the West that the Sacred Heart nuns followed to build more schools starting up the river in Saint Louis (these orders were literally sister orders as a Jesuit Priest educated his parents' daughter in the Jesuit model, then suggested they start a sister order led by his sister. The Visitation order was shut down in France by the government at the time the Sacred Heart missions in America began.) Uncle John restored Dahlgren chapel at Georgetown University in his late wife's name even though she had gone to unrelated Catholic schools. Now it has been renovated again by our cousin Francis.
Aunt Lucy once said, "You can't save every church." While that may have been true at the time, tearing down the old doesn't make it go away. Building new influences the future, but not always in the desired way.
The Italian Futurism exhibit at the Guggenheim museum last year showed how new architecture led to fascism, the opposite of freedom. The marxists take down old icons and build new to destroy the memory cues that keep the social order in place. In the end, it doesn't work for them either.
There are better solutions for all: build new things in new places and the people who want new will go there. Some are better off to "shelter in place."
You always want your family to feel like they're coming home, that they can come home, that home is a good place that will be there to strengthen them. You want to build good memories of home and family. Inclusion is a sign of a healthy family. A church is a spiritual home.
Someday, future generations will visit Muskogee who never even knew my Great-Grandparents. They might drive by their house, meet the new owners, want to see where they went to church, visit the cemetery. That's all that may be left, and it is more than most people have. In the case of my Great-Grandparents, there was hell to pay for building those churches.
This was not the Presbyterian committee to build a new church in an established city my other Grandmother served. A huge, heavy, grey stone building you couldn't tear down if you tried. Some churches need to be fought for. Her funeral took place in a newer undercroft chapel built to say masses in Asian languages to new immigrants who were joining the parish. We would have had big music upstairs, where we had gone to church with her sometimes, but she wanted the smaller chapel. New things happen in old churches, too. Gaga chose her parish church we had never even been to. Like Aunt Lucy's, it was a little more chaotic getting settled than at Uncle John's, where everyone filed naturally into the Cathedral, where we had celebrated our cousins' weddings.
Because I grew up in an inter-faith family, some people didn't even know I was Catholic. Every once in awhile, I got an earful on their thoughts on Catholics, too. These were not the cross-burning class, but some did listen to KKK anti-black music.
Consider the sacrifices people made to build churches back then. Think about family members coming back to funerals. It isn't a time to add confusion. It is a time to reflect and pray in peace for those you love, who gave you so much.
