Clifford James was my dad's cousin and he died on Thursday last week. I met him twice or three times, I think, and a few years ago he found out what my email address was and started sending me, as well as a fairly extensive list of other recipients, what he considered to be "awesome pics" of US military hardware. This was during the Iraq war, about which he was very gung-ho, so I responded by sending him and his contacts "awesome pics" of the damage done by the sort of hardware he was so enthusiastic about. It didn't take long before he stopped sending me the pictures.
It was a shame in some ways because Clifford had lived a very interesting life. He was born in pretty abject poverty, in the same house in which my father was born some 2 years earlier, in New Tredegar, South Wales. From what I can gather my grandparents took his parents in when they had nowhere to live. I recall my father telling me about Clifford's piano lessons in which the teacher would hit him with a piece of wood if he played wrong notes.
In about 1930 Clifford's parents decided to emigrate to the US in order to look for work, there being none in the Welsh valleys at the time. He was 14 and his father managed to find employment in the local steel mill. I'm not certain but I think he may have lived in Pittsburgh originally. At least two other of my great uncles also moved to the USA: Hector was killed in a mining accident but Eli survived until the 1962 and he left my father enough money for him to buy his first car. Clifford told me in one email that his piano playing came in very handy because, as a 14-year-old, he was earning more money playing in a band at night than his father earned in the steel mill during the day. "I saw a lot of things that a 14 year old really ought not see, I can tell you!"
Clifford worked in the aerospace industry, at least some of the time for McDonnell Douglas and I would imagine that he earned quite a bit: his house was one of these, in
Friday Circle, Cocoa, Florida, so he would have had a ringside view of anything taking off from Cape Canaveral. In recent years he occasionally phoned my aunt Phyllis, who is two years his junior. Occasionally the discussion would stray to politics and he was very right-wing and clearly anti-immigration, which is a bit ironic. "Although Mr. Obama is not really to our liking, we wish him well," he said, about 4 years ago.
He leaves a 94-year-old widow, Mary, to whom he was married for 71 years and who, it appeared, looked after him very well. She did tell Phyllis that it was a relief when he died. They didn't have any children.
