Twenty Thousand Roads, page 7
Heavy drinking was institutionalized in the Snively universe. Dickey Smith remembers visiting the orange-processing plant during his sojourns in Winter Haven with Gram and seeing special concentrate, made only for the Snively family’s use, that combined orange juice and alcohol—ready-made screwdrivers. “The way you could tell was the Cypress Gardens orange juice [the commercial product] had a picture of a man skiing with a lady riding on his shoulders holding a flag. Well, for the family’s OJ screwdrivers, that lady was topless. I remember them showing that to me.”
Avis had been Papa John’s favorite. His death hit her hard. She spent even more time in Winter Haven with her children, leaving Coon Dog on his own. The demise of the family patriarch stirred up the surviving Snivelys and increased the pressure on Coon Dog. Though he might have been a Snively Groves vice president, in the family view he was nothing but Big Avis’ consort.
When his wife and children were off in Florida, Coon Dog’s life had little purpose. O. J. Cowart offers a grim memory: “He spent a lot of office time making a special stock for his rifle. He had a regular piece of glass that he sharpened, and he’d shave that stock down. He spent hours on it, and most of the time he spent out at the plant he spent working on that gun stock. He had a stool he sat on and had that thing in a vise where he could shave it, and he worked on it I don’t know how many hours.”
Had Avis told Coon Dog she was going to file for divorce after Christmas, as some have claimed? Or did she love him more than ever and carry a small hand-carved coon hound wherever she went? Did her family poison her connection to her husband with its meddling and belittling; had Avis come over to their view? Was she sleeping her way through Waycross, as a chorus of anonymous sources insists, or was she a devoted and loving wife? At this distance it’s hard to say. What’s clear is that by the end of 1958, just after Gram turned twelve, Coon Dog had had enough.
THAT YEAR Coon Dog bought a special Christmas present for his son. Recognizing Gram’s love of music and music-making, Coon Dog bought him a reel-to-reel tape recorder. Given that home reel-to-reels were about as common in Waycross as remote-control TVs, it was a grand and esoteric gift.
On December 21 Coon Dog drove Avis, the kids, Johnny Barnes, and Louise Cone to the Waycross train depot. They set off for Winter Haven and Coon Dog went home. He told them he would drive down to Florida by himself on the twenty-third.
Later that day he phoned Gram’s friends Dickey Smith and Henry Clarke. “Gram was getting a reel-to-reel tape recorder,” Smith recalls. “It was going to be his big gift. Which was a big deal back then, and [Coon Dog] was getting it so Gram could make music on it. His mother, sister, and Gram went on down to Florida—his father stayed up in town to work. He called me and Henry, called us by the house to tape a message to Gram wishing him a Merry Christmas.”
Coon Dog then went to a local photographer and made arrangements for an eight-by-fourteen-inch color photograph of himself to be mailed to his mother. In the photo Coon Dog wore a suit and tie and a big, happy smile.
His mother had recently been to Waycross to see him. “He called my mother three weeks before and asked if she’d come down and visit,” his sister, Pauline Wilkes, remembers. “I was taking care of my children, so Tom [Coon Dog’s brother] drove my mother down and they stayed I guess about a week in the house. Tom said he felt Cecil seemed happier than he had in years and years and years. He just seemed perfectly happy because he told Tom, ‘Things are all working out.’ Tom didn’t know what he meant by that. Tom said he’d read later that when some people make the decision to commit suicide, they feel like they’ve solved all their problems.”
On December 22 Coon Dog went to the plant and had a long discussion with O. J. Cowart. “I’d been up to the plant in Baxley,” Cowart remembers, “and I come in and he was sitting. He was in the office by himself, leaning back in his swivel chair with his hands behind his head. I sat and talked to him for about thirty minutes. Then we both went home. He said his family was leaving, gone to Winter Haven for Christmas, and that he would drive down the next day. Then he says, ‘We have some fruit we can give out; the truck will be down tonight with a load.’ The company gave all the employees fruit for Christmas then. He says, ‘I’ll give you a list of who to give it to tomorrow.’ So the next day, twelve o’clock, and I hadn’t seen Coon Dog. But I knew who got the fruit anyway. So I told them load up the fruit, carry it on out, and give it away. So they went on and gave everybody the fruit.”
On the twenty-second Coon Dog also called Freddy Barker, an exterminator. Coon Dog’s golden retriever had brought ticks into the house and Coon Dog made arrangements for Barker to come over and fumigate the next day. Coon Dog told Barker he would be leaving for Winter Haven in the morning; the house would be empty and safe to work on. He insisted that Barker not come before five o’clock.
On the morning of December 23, Christine Dixon came to clean up. She was the last person to see Coon Dog alive. Sometime between her departure in the late morning and Freddy Barker’s arrival in the late afternoon, Cecil “Coon Dog” Connor shot himself in the head with a .38-caliber revolver. Freddy Barker found his body when he came to fumigate, as Coon Dog intended he should.
The Waycross Journal-Herald ran the story on its front page on December 24:
Coroner A. J. Willis said Connor was found lying across his bed and had been shot in the right temple. A .38 caliber pistol was found near the body. An inquest will be held at a later date on completion of an investigation, the coroner said.
Connor, vice president and manager of Snively Groves, had been active in the Boy Scout movement in the Waycross area for a number of years. He served as neighborhood commissioner of the Central District, chairman of the Central District, member of the Okefenokee Area Council and vice president of the 23-county regional council. Several years ago he organized and was scoutmaster of Troop 80, sponsored by Grace Episcopal Church. The troop was given the same number as Connor’s squadron in WWII. He was instrumental in the development of Camp Tolchee at Little Blythe Island. He was a member of the Brotherhood of the Order of the Arrow, the highest honor conferred on an adult scout leader.
The story goes on to note that funeral arrangements were “incomplete.” That’s because there were none, at least not in Waycross. The Snivelys had Coon Dog’s body whisked to Winter Haven as soon as the inquest into his death concluded. Like his son, Coon Dog is buried far from home.
ROSINA RAINERO REMEMBERS, “When Coon Dog killed himself it was so awful…. We were waiting there in the living room. We thought every car that came in the drive was him. Then her brother came in and said to Avis, ‘Are you a big girl?’ She said, ‘Sure, I’m a big girl.’ And then he proceeded to tell her what had happened.”
“A pall came over the whole estate,” Dode Whitaker says. “Everyone was in disbelief, and then came the realization that we had to face that it was true. I remember Haney’s driver, Travis, a lovely man…. I remember seeing him holding Haney and Avis and rocking them as they all cried. When they heard, they turned to Travis in a little upstairs sitting room and the three of them were sobbing.”
Louise Cone recalls, “Oh, I was hurt. ’Cause when we left to go to Winter Haven for Christmas I can remember he said to me, ‘Take care of my Avie.’ That’s what he called out: ‘Take care of my Avie, now.’ And I said, ‘Yessir, I sure will.’ And we left and the kids and I were upstairs playing whenever that call came that he had done this.”
Avis decided to withhold the news of their father’s death from Gram and Little Avis until after Christmas Day. Gram spent the holiday quietly, away from his Snively cousins. The adults and the help were either crying or subdued. Dode Whitaker remembers, “That whole Christmas was terrible. They were trying to keep things light for the children, but it was rough…. They told the kids their dad was not going to be there for Christmas. And all this time [Avis and Gram] thought he’d be driving in any time.”
Avis’ brother didn’t wait to call Coon Dog’s family with the news. “I was at home, with my husband and our two children,” Pauline Wilkes says. “John Snively Junior called and he told us there’d been an accident. That Cecil had been shot and was dead. He told us Cecil was cleaning his pistol and it went off. He asked if we would tell our mother and father. We got in the car and drove up to my mother’s and my husband said, ‘You’re in no condition to tell them. You stay in the car and let me do it. You come on in in a few minutes.’ So I sat there and he went into the house and he told Mother and Daddy and in a few minutes I came in. We all four were in shock, just sick at heart, with no way to describe the feeling.”
Gram did receive his big Christmas gift from his father, the reel-to-reel tape recorder. Family legend has it that after making a few nonsense recordings on one side of the tape, Gram turned the reel over and played the other side. His father’s voice emerged from the machine saying, “Just remember I will always love you.” Evidently Coon Dog—knowing full well what he was about to do—made the recording as his farewell to his son. In this family, the story is just Twilight Zone enough to be true.
“When they finally told them,” Dode Whitaker says, “Gram yelled out, this bloodcurdling scream. Everything in the house was hushed, and normally it was loud and everyone cheerful…so you could hear him scream. Of course their mother was lost and crushed, not knowing what or why or where she was going, how she was going to continue. I remember her saying, ‘I don’t know what I’m going to do. Where am I going to go? How am I going to go on?’”
As part of her effort to give her children a happy Christmas, Avis postponed the funeral until a few days later. “I think it was December 27 we left here,” Wilkes says. “The four of us went down on the train. We got to Winter Haven and the Snivelys met us and we stayed in a hotel that night. We didn’t want to stay at the Snively house; there was too much emotional confusion.”
Back in Waycross, the official story was that Coon Dog’s death had been accidental. “I’d been up to Baxley that day,” O. J. Cowart said. “So when my wife called me to say that Coon Dog had killed hisself, I said: ‘Don’t start nothing ’round here!’ And she said: ‘I won’t.’” Cowart knew instinctively that the Snivelys would never admit that one of their own—even kin by marriage—could commit suicide. But he adds: “I don’t know whether they were having problems or not. I did hear—and this was all hearsay, gossip—that when he was going down there at Christmas she was going to put in for a divorce. But he never said nothing to me about it.”
Marital problems seemed to many the likely explanation. “Everybody was shocked,” Ben Smith says. “I think he was unhappy in his marriage; obviously he wouldn’t have taken a gun to his head and pulled the trigger. It was quite a sensation for Waycross at the time.”
Dickey Smith remembers, “Maybe a day or two after his daddy shot himself, or accidentally shot himself, the police played the tape and they called me and Henry Clarke and they questioned us. You know, did we see anything unusual, et cetera…. I’ve thought a lot about his death and changed my mind from suicide to accident many, many times. If I had to say, I don’t see how he could accidentally shoot himself. He was a sportsman, a veteran, he was used to guns and I think something was going on between him and his wife. Even though I will sit here and say I’ve never seen a more devoted couple. But it has always been hard for me to swallow that he could have shot himself by accident.”
The Snivelys made sure they were represented when the official verdict on the death was handed down. Attorney Edmund Pedrick says, “The Snivelys called my law partner, Kontz Bennett, and asked him to attend the inquest. I don’t know what occurred there, but they quickly came away with a verdict of accidental death, which is not unusual. It’s so the insurance will be paid and so forth.” (Most life insurance policies will pay in cases of accidental death but not of suicide.) The Snivelys did not need insurance money. The inquest’s decision seems to have been more about propriety and control of history.
Baffled by the Snivelys’ insistence that Coon Dog’s death was accidental, his sister went to the funeral home and demanded to be shown her brother’s body. She stood over him in his casket, turning his head this way and that, carefully examining the hole in his skull, searching for motive, for proof.
The author Stanley Booth, a native of Waycross and a great chronicler of rock and roll, described his hometown with that excess of gothic spirit that sometimes characterizes Southern writers who have spent a lifetime worshipping whiskey and William Faulkner. “Waycross is a place with a strong vein of Manichean madness,” Booth wrote. “It is populated by people who know the flesh is evil. It’s important to know that, to understand the Deep South, and its peculiar dynamic.” And in a funeral home in central Florida, a proper, genteel, heartbroken Southern sister stood face-to-face with her dead brother, proving Stanley Booth correct about a certain Southern emphasis. Pauline Wilkes was searching for truth in the one place it could not be concealed: the flesh.
“We got in a taxi and went to the funeral home. Daddy was so distraught that he and my brother’s wife stayed at the hotel. I went over and talked to the funeral director. I told him I wanted to know exactly what happened and he said, ‘Well, he shot himself.’ ‘Why do you think that?’ I asked him. He said, ‘Definitely, because of the position of the wound. If you’ll go in there and look at his body, I’ve covered it up as best I can, but if you look you’ll see a hole.’
“It was right there above his right ear, and I wouldn’t have seen it if the funeral director didn’t tell me about it. There was a hole above his right ear that had been filled in. If you were cleaning a gun and it accidentally went off, you wouldn’t be holding it at your head. It had to be intentional.”
The Snivelys had Coon Dog’s body brought down to Winter Haven for burial. Gram and Little Avis did not attend the funeral; shielding children from the fact of death was standard procedure in that time and place. According to Snively cousin Susan Alexander, a contemporary of Little Avis, “We were sheltered kids as far as death…so we were not encouraged to go and participate in funerals. Death was never discussed with us.”
Coon Dog’s siblings and parents were at the funeral. When they came back to the Snively house afterward, they were stunned to find a cocktail party in progress. The event had already been scheduled, Avis’ sister Evalyn told Pauline Wilkes, and there seemed no point in canceling it, since “everyone was coming over anyway.”
Big Avis decided to move back to Winter Haven and her parents’ house. She postponed returning to Waycross even temporarily. “The shock was terrible,” Rosina Rainero recalls. “She stayed home [in Winter Haven at the Snively mansion] a good while before she decided she would go to Waycross and pack her things. I’d say she stayed home for about a month. When she finally figured she had to go up [to Waycross], I came to help her pack her stuff. Naturally, she would have her times of crying…. She was questioning why, why, why did this happen? But we never could come up with any answer.”
For Gram and Little Avis, the shock was even greater because Coon Dog’s death was apparently never discussed with them. They had to contend with the sudden loss of their loving father and the complete upheaval of their lives.
Avis packed up the house in Waycross and she, Gram, and Little Avis were installed in the Snively mansion. The house at 1600 Suwannee Drive was sold to the sheriff of Waycross, improbably named Robert E. Lee. Attorney Edmund Pedrick remembers, “Ware County [where Waycross is located] takes its politics seriously, and one year on election night when no one was home, somebody bombed the house and it was demolished. Blown up, blown to pieces, completely destroyed…. So that was another wiping out of the Connors’ memory in Waycross, you might say.” The house was, in fact, not completely destroyed, and was moved to another location in Waycross a few years later.
At the Snively mansion, space was tight. John Junior, his wife, their two older boys, and their two girls, Susan and Martha, had already joined the household following the death of John Senior. John Junior’s boys were off at boarding school, which made for some breathing room but not much. Little Avis shared a room with her cousin Susan. Gram and his mother shared another in a recently built addition. Even in a house that big, quarters were close; family members got a good look at one another.
Gram became increasingly withdrawn after learning of his father’s death. “It was a turning point,” says cousin Susan Snively Alexander. “They had to leave their Leave It to Beaver home. In Waycross they had a great house in a smaller town with close friends. It was ordinary, nice and warm. There was a whole other dynamic in Winter Haven. Life was never as low-key and carefree as they had known. Gram was never the happy-go-lucky boy [I knew] in Waycross.”
Martha Snively, Susan’s sister, says, “His mom lost her father, and eleven months later her husband committed suicide. The motherly attention Gram needed wasn’t there, because Avis was going through her own grief process.”
Little Avis’ response to her father’s death and a new home was to spend her time as physically close to Gram as possible, holding on to him, sitting in his lap, following him wherever he went. Gram did not shoo her away.
Susan Alexander says, “In Waycross, Gram was a typical adolescent boy, but Gram and Little Avis were still deep; they almost never spoke. It’s like they were throwbacks to another time. [Little] Avis’ spirit had a quietness about her even as a little girl. I cannot see an aspect of their life that mirrors anything in the lives of other members of their family.”
