The Work of Car Crashes
For three generations of Bateman women, death was at the wheel
Until the latter half of the Nixon administration, Bateman women never drove cars. But cars drove them to their graves, anyway.
My grandmother Ellamae and great-grandmother Maude shared a bond that went far beyond that of mother-in-law and daughter-in-law. Both died in automobile accidents while riding as passengers. In each case, a relative operated the vehicle. In each case, that relative had been drinking.1
These deaths occurred in the coal patch towns of Western Pennsylvania, where my late father never tired of remind me that drinking remained as common as breathing. This was the sort of place where a poor, booze-addicted Whitsett, PA coal miner might name his son Edsel Henry Ford Bateman with the honest belief that Henry Ford himself would reward such brazen brand loyalty with the gift of a free automobile.
Spoiler alert: Henry Ford would not!
"Grandfadder laid that Nom De'Plume on [my uncle] thinking that he would write the great Henry Ford and he would give him a car for doing so," my father explained in one of his emails. "He did write and he did get a response. It said THANKS."
This obsession with automobiles runs through the Bateman line like a crooked road. Maude was killed when her son, the aforementioned Edsel, ran an automobile off the road and into a shed near Vanderbilt, Pennsylvania. Edsel suffered chest injuries in the crash. His father Oliver,2 my great-grandfather, broke his nose and suffered brush burns.
Great-grandmother Maude had never driven a car in her life.
Years later, Ellamae Bateman Will died from injuries sustained in another automotive disaster. Her second husband Gregory Will had been drinking. This was the way they lived in those hardscrabble towns, with alcohol functioning as both medicine and poison.3 Ellamae had never learned to drive, either.4
This cruel symmetry continued into the next generation. My Aunt Maylene — daughter of Ellamae — also met her end behind a windshield, though in a slightly different fashion. Once her high school’s homecoming queen, Maylene had suffered numerous health issues and eventually came to resemble Darlene Cates, the actress who played the housebound mother in What’s Eating Gilbert Grape? (1993). She suffered a heart attack while driving to her bingo game. She was also not supposed to be driving — she had heart problems and didn’t fit easily behind the wheel of most cars — but the son who usually drove her had skipped that night to engage in a particularly lucrative round of pool sharking. The car crash that followed the heart attack resulted in her hospitalization and eventual death a few weeks later.
My father harbored no grudges against the drivers responsible. Not against his uncle Edsel, whose drunken driving killed great-grandmother Maude. Not against his stepfather Gregory, whose intoxicated motoring led to grandmother Ellamae's death. Not even against the barfly nephew who couldn’t pass up a quick buck at the pool table. You see, my father liked to party and preferred to drive drunk himself.
"I did drive after having a sniff and a toot on many occassions to steady mine hand and open mine eyes," he wrote. "Not proud of that scholar.....Rolled a few autos and cars in my day.....so be it....."
For my father, drunk driving was not some grand moral failing but a medical condition born of the material conditions of life. "We can call it a CRIME but alcohol is first and fore most a DISEASE of the mind and brain," he explained. He added that a man sometimes needs "a nip to steadyy the hand and open the eyes and mind and minds I."
Nor is this some sort of family curse unique to the Batemanzees. Consider the curious case of Marc Bolan, the T. Rex frontman who achieved fame in part due to car-themed songs like "Jeepster," "Cadillac," and "Mustang Ford." Car-crazy though he was, Bolan — fearful of an early death — also never learned to drive. Yet on September 16, 1977, he died as a passenger when his girlfriend Gloria Jones crashed their Mini into a tree after both had allegedly been drinking. Bolan's death transformed that random tree into a shrine, a place where fans still gather to pay homage decades later.
So it goes. We build our modern world around machines we cannot control. We organize entire societies around devices that routinely kill us. In Texas, electronic highway signs proudly announce the year-to-date motor vehicle death count as if chasing Billy Mitchell’s spurious high score in Donkey Kong. The automobile stands as one of the most liberatory and deadly consumer product in history. Some of us name our children after cars5 and then die inside them.
The Bateman women — my grandmother and great-grandmother — lacked the ability to operate these machines. But they rode in them regardless, putting their fate in the hands of men who thought they could tame these mechanical beasts while dulling their senses with alcohol. My aunt — who was feeling lucky that day — took her fate in her hands because her son had decided to try his own luck at the pool table.
My father identified this contradiction. "I was blessed be cause I have a third eye and a 6TH sense," he wrote, explaining how he could "feel the road" or even fly planes6 "without ever even looking at the instruments nor the window of the cockpit."
The terse newspaper accounts of their deaths reduce complex lives to simple facts. They tell you who died and how, but not who lived or why. They do not tell you how a family's relationship with a machine spanned generations.7 They do not tell you how a father might look at the men responsible for the deaths of his grandmother, mother, and sister and see not murderers but fellow sufferers of a disease.
The cars that killed the Bateman women likely rust in junkyards somewhere. The Bateman women themselves rest in Pennsylvania soil.8 My father, meanwhile, managed to beat the odds, evens, and the imaginary numbers. Despite the family pattern, despite his own admission of driving under the influence countless times, despite a half-dozen accidents of his own in the 1960s and 1970s, he survived long enough to die peacefully at home in his bed.
Intoxicated according to my father and other relatives. The amount of intoxication is uncertain, nor would it have been something that authorities would have explored in great detail in either 1949 or 1973. In Edsel’s case, the level of intoxication was probably significant. If his older brother — my grandfather, who began heavy boozing when he left the house to work for the CCC after the 8th grade — was any indication, it is very likely that Great-Uncle Edsel was “higher than a Georgia pine.”
The original Oliver T. Bateman. My father was the third man saddled with that name.
She had obtained a divorce from the second Oliver T. Bateman a decade earlier due to “cruel and barbarous treatment.” That was a rare thing indeed in those days before the advent of no-fault divorce.
There’s the Edsel example, but also consider this Ye lyric: “Couldn't afford a car, so she named her daughter Alexus.”
Several people who flew with him have confirmed that this was indeed the case, as it was for many wrestlers who had to fly with the legendary Florida wrestling promoter Eddie Graham. Both men were heavy-duty alcoholics, to put it mildly.
My father spent decades as a car dealer and bar owner, after all.
My father bought the side-by-side plots in which his mother and sister are buried.
As usual, love the work. Interesting original topic