The House That J.L. Built
A Tribute to My Uncle, J.L. Hallford
I wrote the following as a tribute ten years ago to my Uncle J.L. Hallford shortly after he passed away on January 22nd of 2015. He was my dad’s older brother by nine years, and by far one of the most influential Hallfords in my life. In a lot of ways, he was like a second father to me for reasons that will become clear.
This was originally created as a Facebook “Note” — a blogging feature that was discontinued a few years back, but thankfully I’ve been able to retrieve the text of it. I’m sharing it here and now with you because his house — and his place in my life — are closely intertwined with the next entry in my From Gamer to GameDev series.
“JUST CALL ME J.L.” - My grandparents never gave my Uncle J.L. an actual name, but simply called him by the initials J.L.. Once he enlisted to fight in World War II, the Army required that he have an actual name so he was dubbed Jessie Leroy, but after leaving the service he went back to plain ole J.L..
On this day when my family is saying goodbye to my Uncle J.L. and I'm trying to think of stories to tell about him, I realize that most of them aren't really stories about MY experiences with him, but well-traveled, dog-eared, hand-me-down tales from others. We didn't really have any wild and crazy adventures together, but he had a number with my dad -- which were far better told in my father's collection of stories. My brother Gene and cousin David Dotson were lucky enough to take several cross-country trips with J.L. back before he settled down with my Aunt Marianna. Many of my first impressions about what was "out there" in America were based on the things they talked about, and the stacks of Kodachrome slides they brought back from their explorations. I still marvel that my uncle could have chosen almost anyone to take on his expeditions of discovery, but he decided instead to take his teenaged numbskull nephews. For him, that's what family was about. (I have no doubt that this in part is what inspired my brother Gene to drag his sixteen-year-old brother along on his first intercontinental adventure to Europe, but that's an epic story better told in on its own and at another time.)
Mostly what I remember about J.L. is just being at home with him and listening and talking with him (we Hallfords do a lot of that). First, at the house he shared with my Grandmother Hallford. Later on, after my grandmother passed away, J.L. married my Aunt Marianna, and they had a house built on the other side of the sprawling metropolis of Stilwell — nearly a whole mile away.
Before seeing J.L. and Marianna's place, I don't think I'd ever even set foot in a brand-new house that belonged to someone. Everyone I knew lived in houses that were at least decades old, if not half a century or more. But J.L.'s house was like a palace. Brand new carpets, brand new furniture, brand new everything as far as my young eyes could tell. But there was one feature to this new house in particular that stuck with me, something completely unlike anything I'd ever seen, and something that left such a strong impression on me that I'm sure it helped set the course for my future.
At the back of J.L.s house, tucked behind the laundry room and opposite the guest bathroom was a single, private door that was usually closed. Normally guests didn't have any cause to go back there since we did all the visitin' in the living room, but when I was invited to go through that door for the first time — I won't lie, it was like hearing a choir of angels singing the Hallelujah chorus.
Inside was a room whose walls were completely lined from floor to ceiling with books. The shelves practically groaned with titles on every topic — religion, philosophy, history, genealogy, science, geography — it was absolutely astonishing to me. I'd spent more than my fair share of time as a child haunting public libraries, but I'd never seen a collection like this in a private home. If the books hadn't been enough to give away the real purpose of the room, then the careful, altar-like arrangement of the desk at the far window and the electric typewriter that sat humming like a waiting steed erased all doubt. This was his room for writing, his inner sanctum. To stand inside that room was to stand inside his mind, and browsing those shelves you could page through the many eclectic ideas that shaped and possessed his thoughts. Certainly, all of his learning hadn't just come from those books -- he'd traipsed the world during World War II, and then later trekked across America with my brother and cousin, but it was in here where he put everything down, where he pulled it all together. In this room. At that desk. On that typewriter. To my eyes, this was everything that I'd ever imagined that a writer's room should look like.
THE MIGHTY IBM SELECTRIC III - In 2021, years after i wrote the rest of this tribute to J.L. I bought an old IBM Selectric III typewriter. It was in part a tribute both to the typewriter in J.L.’s home office, and also to an identical model that sat in my father’s office at Charles Page High School upon which I composed several of my earliest short stories.
Of course as I read over all of this, it sounds more like an essay on his house more than about J.L. himself. I'm fretting because I don't have a story like my father's about the time J.L. had had the brilliant idea of transporting a sick calf with a school bus (not a good idea), or Gene and David having all kinds of adventures with J.L. that they probably don’t want aired in public. But when I was with him, I heard all those stories, and that's what our relationship was about. Stories about the places he'd been, his deep thoughts on life, on God, and above all his family. And all those stories seeped into the brick and mortar of that house that J.L. built, and that's why when I think of J.L. I think about that house. It reflected so much of who he was, and it was filled with the living embodiment of all those stories he told.
In so many ways I am a product of The House That J.L. Built, and I will always be thankful to have had it as my home away from home. Goodbye and thank you, Uncle J.L.. I hope the next time we meet that I'll have a few good tales to tell to you.
#Stilwell #Oklahoma #Family #Hallford #Writer #Library
What a beautiful tribute. We all have someone in our family who touched us, to me it was a combo of my mother's mother and my father and his brother too.