A piece of Galveston’s history is family’s history

For me, Galveston and family history are indivisible.

My mother was the last BOI in the family, but I grew up surrounded by BOIs, and many of the best lessons and happiest days came from a place that my father — definitely not a BOI — used to refer to as “the United States and Galveston.”

Coming south off the causeway and heading south on 61st Street to the seawall, you pass Calvary Catholic Cemetery, which is full of relatives who may have gone before but have never really left.

In a story that represents how important the dead are in my family, consider the case of my great-grandmother.

She and my great-grandfather had 10 children, of whom only five made it to their majority, which wasn’t all that unusual in the last quarter of the 19th century.

When she died — as The Daily News noted — “at the advanced age of 60,” she was buried in the family plot with her children.

After an appropriate period of mourning, my great-grandfather remarried — not unusual at the time — but had the bad grace to marry one of his daughter’s friends, who was at least 40 years his junior and had red hair. In her defense, she was Irish.

My great-grandmother’s family was so scandalized that they had her body exhumed and moved to their family plot.

Whether they had heard his comment to his 50-something son that he had married a 30-something woman because he “preferred to wake up smelling perfume than Ben Gay” has never been proved, but they no doubt took grim satisfaction when May and December gave way to June busting out all over and being exiled to the family farm in East Texas.

When great-grandfather finally shuffled off this mortal coil before the late unpleasantness with Germany and Japan, he was buried alone until his only surviving son, full of years and good whiskey, joined him a dozen years later.

Not only did his son join him, but my grandmother took advantage of the fact that her mother’s family was no longer in those precincts and so had her mother re-exhumed and moved back to her family plot. Today — 60 years on — I’m happy to report the family still is resting in peace together.

There is the question, “For if the trumpet give an uncertain sound, who shall prepare himself to the battle?”

That I don’t fear because there never was an uncertain sound but always the clarion call to the precepts of a faith that has not changed in 2,000 years.

I still hear their voices, as clearly as I heard them when I was a boy, and so long as I breathe, their words have life in me.

What prompted these reflections was an old friend and I elected to take our morning constitutional in Galveston.

Walking is no longer only a pleasure but also is a necessity to control diabetes and blood pressure.

Lately, my neighbor suggested we go to the beach, which is much less populated during the winter and a trip to Surfside where we hiked east into a 15-knot wind before being blown back to the car.

With it at our backs, it gave us an inkling why nobody but the Polar Bear Club and the Southern Society seeks these sandy stretches during the winter.

At the east end of Galveston Island, more or less at the junction of the seawall and East Beach Drive, you can park and hike though the beach front through Apffel Park and come back along Boddeker Road to the sight of old Fort San Jacinto.

The adventurous might proceed from the road’s end along the Galveston ship channel to one of the old 1920s-era gun emplacements that protected the port during World War II and haven’t been turned into a boutique.

Like the old 16-inch pillbox at the San Luis, the guns are long gone from both, but the solidity of the emplacement has weathered half a century of neglect and given current building standards, may be the only thing left for the archeologists of some future century.

After this detour — to be made only by the sound of wind and limb and with stout hiking boots — you can walk back down along Seawall Boulevard, pick up your car and retire to Miller’s Landing for a richly deserved shrimp po’boy.

I don’t care how many idiots try to ruin it, Galveston has the Gulf and it has history and it endures. Even if you don’t hear the same voices that I do, it will talk to you and is worth a listen.

William Leach lives in Houston.

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