About fif­teen years ago, I got inter­est­ed in ances­try research. At a fam­i­ly reunion, I told every­one I intend­ed to trace our fam­i­ly tree as far back as I could go. One of my nephews gave me the hairy eye­ball. “That’s not a good idea,” he said. “You may find out things we don’t want to know.”

I thought his con­cern was ridicu­lous and ignored his warn­ing. About a month lat­er, I found records on Ancestry.com about William Odor, who turned out to be our most famous fam­i­ly mem­ber by far. Born in Illi­nois in 1844, he gained nation­al noto­ri­ety dur­ing the sum­mer of 1870. The sto­ry of his rise to coun­try-wide promi­nence begins in the spring, nor­mal­ly a sea­son of hope and optimism.

On May 12, 1870, a Mis­souri Pacif­ic Rail­road pas­sen­ger train pulled into Eure­ka, Mis­souri, before dawn. It was due to arrive in St. Louis at 6:00 a.m. A freight train left St. Louis about the same time, head­ed for Eure­ka. In those days rail­road com­pa­nies put down a sin­gle track and trains trav­eled in both direc­tions on it. When two trains were sched­uled to trav­el toward each oth­er, one of the trains was required to pull off onto side rails, which were spaced at inter­vals along the sin­gle track. Under the Mis­souri Pacif­ic rule, pas­sen­ger trains had the right of way over freight trains, and freight trains were respon­si­ble for giv­ing it to them.

The dis­patch­er in St. Louis told the freight train’s con­duc­tor, William Odor, that the freight train could pro­ceed toward Eure­ka for thir­ty min­utes, but after that, it would have to give way to the pas­sen­ger train by pulling off on a side spur.

The pas­sen­ger train’s engi­neer, J.P. Jack­son, eased his train out of the Eure­ka sta­tion a lit­tle after 5:00 a.m. About a mile and a half into the trip, the pas­sen­ger train entered a sharp turn, and Jack­son saw the puff­ing smoke­stack of a freight train bar­rel­ing around the bluff at full speed toward him. He hit the brakes and reversed engines.

The freight train’s engi­neer, Joseph Tra­cy, tried to brake his train, too, but there was no hope of stop­ping an engine of that pow­er at that speed pulling that much weight.

The engi­neers and con­duc­tors on both trains jumped free just before they col­lid­ed. The two loco­mo­tives reared up on their back wheels like wild stal­lions fight­ing one anoth­er. The impact of the crash com­pressed the pas­sen­ger train’s six cars into its loco­mo­tive like the folds of an accor­dion, shred­ding them into strips of met­al and wood. The engines then slid down an embank­ment, drag­ging the cars and pas­sen­gers with them. Corpses, body parts, and injured sur­vivors lit­tered the tracks and embank­ment. Nine­teen peo­ple were killed. Thir­ty were injured, eigh­teen of them with ampu­tat­ed limbs or col­lapsed inter­nal organs.

Jack­son and the pas­sen­ger train’s con­duc­tor did their best to help the sur­vivors. The freight train’s engi­neer and con­duc­tor, Tra­cy and Odor, ran away. As best I can tell, Tra­cy was nev­er found. Odor was tracked down the fol­low­ing day and detained.

A coroner’s inquest deter­mined that he was at fault. As the con­duc­tor of the freight train, it was his job to keep the train on sched­ule. He ignored the dispatcher’s instruc­tions that he could run no more than thir­ty min­utes before pulling over to give the right of way to the pas­sen­ger train. The freight train had been on the track 45 min­utes when it hit the pas­sen­ger train. Odor’s defense was that there must have been some­thing wrong with his watch, the pas­sen­ger train conductor’s watch, or the clock at the St. Louis sta­tion. The coroner’s jury didn’t buy it. They found him cul­pa­ble; the pros­e­cu­tor indict­ed him for mul­ti­ple counts of manslaugh­ter; and the court jailed him pend­ing trial.

News­pa­pers all across the coun­try ran sto­ries about the train wreck and its after­math for months fol­low­ing the col­li­sion. Every arti­cle in every news­pa­per high­light­ed William Odor’s wan­ton reck­less­ness as the cause of the tragedy. Punchinel­lo, a New York week­ly satir­i­cal mag­a­zine, called for the death penal­ty (prob­a­bly tongue-in-cheek), mak­ing a pun with my family’s name. “(W)e fer­vent­ly desire to have this ODOR neu­tral­ized … with strychnine.”

Sigh.

Mer­ci­ful­ly for me and William Odor’s oth­er descen­dants, the press grew weary of the train wreck by the end of the sum­mer and his ignominy fad­ed into the mist of his­to­ry. I could find no records about the rest of his life. I don’t even know what hap­pened to him in the crim­i­nal pro­ceed­ings, but giv­en the noto­ri­ety of the case and the num­ber of deaths and injuries, it’s like­ly he served a long stretch in a Mis­souri prison.

For years I searched for some coun­ter­bal­anc­ing hero­ic ances­tor in the fam­i­ly tree. One guy was a fifth cousin of Daniel Boone, but if you do much ances­try research, you’ll find that almost every­one alive today in the Unit­ed States can claim some dis­tant con­nec­tion to the famous pio­neer, the rea­son being that almost every mem­ber of the Boone fam­i­ly spawned ten to twen­ty kids.

Oth­er than that, all I could dig up was a third cousin twice removed from Pres­i­dent John Tyler’s sec­ond wife. Tyler was William Hen­ry Harrison’s Vice Pres­i­dent. When Har­ri­son died of pneu­mo­nia, Tyler became the tenth Pres­i­dent of the Unit­ed States. He was wild­ly unpop­u­lar. The first impeach­ment res­o­lu­tion ever intro­duced in Con­gress against a Pres­i­dent was aimed at him. His own par­ty, the Whigs, reject­ed him when he tried to run for reelec­tion, and most his­to­ri­ans rank him along­side James Buchanan and Mil­lard Fill­more as a bot­tom-feed­er among U.S. Presidents.

So my family’s only pathet­ic shot at genealog­i­cal redemp­tion for William Odor’s Mis­souri slaugh­ter is a ten­u­ous con­nec­tion to one of the crap­pi­est pres­i­dents who ever lived.

But that’s not the worst of it. I made the mis­take of research­ing my wife’s fam­i­ly his­to­ry, too. One of her branch­es goes back to William the Con­queror. Her ances­tor took care of William’s hors­es on the bat­tle­field. Her tree has roy­al Plan­ta­genet fam­i­ly Eng­lish lords and ladies hang­ing all over it. One of her fore­fa­thers, nine gen­er­a­tions back, was the brains behind the Vir­ginia Com­pa­ny which financed and found­ed the Jamestown Colony. Anoth­er one was an ear­ly Jamestown set­tler, a big hero who fought off scores of Powhatan war­riors dur­ing the Indi­an Mas­sacre of 1622 that wiped out more than half the colonists. There’s an island on the James Riv­er near Rich­mond named after that branch of her fam­i­ly. There’s more, but I don’t want to talk about it.

For the half-cen­tu­ry we’ve been mar­ried, most every­one who knows my wife and me has seen fit to remark soon­er or lat­er that I mar­ried up. To main­tain mar­i­tal bliss, I’ve kept my mouth shut over the many years, while secret­ly telling myself they were wrong.

Now this.

I should have lis­tened to my nephew.

Post Script: Maybe there’s still hope. I just found out there’s a Venezue­lan named Rougned Odor, who plays sec­ond base for the Texas Rangers. I can’t pro­nounce his first name and he’s only bat­ting .250, but hey, he’s in their start­ing line­up. There’s def­i­nite­ly a fam­i­ly resem­blance between us, don’t you think? The ears are a match for sure.

My dad was born 100 years ago on this day in 1918 in Appo­mat­tox, Vir­ginia, near the McLean house where Lee sur­ren­dered to Grant a half cen­tu­ry earlier.

He had a pret­ty rough child­hood. His par­ents divorced when he was a baby and he grew up bounc­ing back and forth between them.

His moth­er caught tuber­cu­lo­sis when he was in grade school. After his death, we found a tin box in his bed­room with let­ters she sent him from the hos­pi­tal, try­ing to put a bright face on her con­di­tion. She told him how much she missed him and promised they’d be togeth­er soon. She died when he was twelve.

He grad­u­at­ed from high school dur­ing the depres­sion. There were no jobs in Appo­mat­tox, and severe asth­ma dis­qual­i­fied him from mil­i­tary ser­vice. The mil­i­tary instal­la­tions in Virginia’s tide­wa­ter area were hir­ing in the run-up to World War II, so he moved to York­town and got a job in the Navy Mine Depot’s main­te­nance department.

Mom worked there, too, and Dad fell for her. She was sev­en­teen when they eloped, run­ning across the state line to North Car­oli­na, which didn’t require her par­ents’ con­sent to tie the knot.

Mom tele­phoned her father (my Papaw) in the mid­dle of the night and broke the news. At my par­ents’ six­ti­eth wed­ding anniver­sary cel­e­bra­tion, I asked my uncle, her old­est broth­er, how that call went down. He said Papaw looked like he want­ed to kill someone.

That some­one was Dad, I guess, but I nev­er saw any evi­dence of Papaw’s hard feel­ings. Dad’s tough child­hood left him inse­cure and anx­ious, but Papaw always encour­aged him. “You can do any­thing if you’ve got Willy on your side,” he used to say to Dad. “Willy” was will power.

With Willy on his side, Dad left his job at the Depot and opened his own Hud­son car deal­er­ship, where he found his first great pas­sion, sell­ing cars. He sold so many Hud­sons that the Hud­son Com­pa­ny want­ed to lever­age his tal­ent by mov­ing him to Hager­stown, Mary­land, to man­age a much big­ger dealership.

Mom agreed to the move only if Dad promised to go to church in Hager­stown. He had stead­fast­ly refused to attend Sun­day ser­vices up to that point, but he caved in to her demand and we piled every­thing we had in a mov­ing van and head­ed up there.

At first, Dad groused every step of the way to the Church of the Light­ed Win­dow, but a few months into it, he stopped com­plain­ing. A year lat­er, he became the church lay leader. Soon after­wards, he went on a week­end reli­gious retreat where he found his sec­ond great pas­sion, this one so all-con­sum­ing that it turned our lives upside down.

When Dad came home from the retreat, he dropped his suit­case on the floor, beamed at Mom, and announced, “Hon­ey, I’m going to be a preacher!”

Shocked and not so pleased, Mom said, “But all I want­ed you to do was go to church.”

The keynote speak­er at the retreat was a Methodist bish­op with Parkinson’s dis­ease, who spoke about his life of ser­vice. At the end of his talk, the bish­op raised his hand and called to the altar those who want­ed to com­mit their lives to Christ. On his death bed fifty years after the event, Dad said he could still see the bishop’s pale palsied hand flut­ter­ing in the air like the bro­ken wing of a white dove. That hand grabbed him by the heart and called him to preach the Word.

A car sales­man in his mid-thir­ties with a wife and three sons, no edu­ca­tion beyond high school, and no way to pay for col­lege and sem­i­nary, he was an improb­a­ble can­di­date for the min­istry. The only path to the pul­pit open to him was a long hard slog through a seem­ing­ly end­less swamp of cor­re­spon­dence school cours­es while he worked full-time sell­ing cars.

He spent five years study­ing course mate­ri­als he received in the mail, tak­ing tests and writ­ing essays, and send­ing them back to the course admin­is­tra­tors for eval­u­a­tion. In 1960, the Methodist Church final­ly accept­ed him pro­vi­sion­al­ly as a “sup­ply pas­tor.” That sta­tus enti­tled him to be con­sid­ered for assign­ment to a church only after all the ful­ly qual­i­fied min­is­ters had been giv­en a post.

In 1961, the Methodist hier­ar­chy gave Dad his first appoint­ment, a four-church charge known as the Albe­mar­le Cir­cuit, two church­es with 100 mem­bers and two with less than 50, and we moved to White Hall, Vir­ginia, a rur­al town at the foot of the Blue Ridge mountains. 

I thought Dad would almost cer­tain­ly fail. He had no for­mal train­ing in pub­lic speak­ing or coun­sel­ing, and the work­load was crushing. 

The first Sun­day we were there, he met with a young sin­gle moth­er who was sui­ci­dal because her hus­band had been killed in an acci­dent. Dad moved her into the par­son­age, and she lived with us for a week. She was in her six­ties the last time I saw her.

Menin­gi­tis killed the infant of a young cou­ple. He brought them through their grief, and they went on to have four more children.

A man in a posi­tion of trust molest­ed a teenage boy, plung­ing him into chron­ic depres­sion. Dad helped him heal his wounds and move on with his life.

These are the ear­ly sto­ries. Hun­dreds more followed.

After attend­ing night school at UVA and com­plet­ing anoth­er bar­rage of cor­re­spon­dence cours­es, Dad was ordained as a full-fledged min­is­ter. He served six church­es over a twen­ty-five year career. In his late six­ties, he tried to retire, but it didn’t take. He vol­un­teered to pas­tor a church that couldn’t afford a full-time min­is­ter and preached there for almost a decade. In his eight­ies, he asked for an appoint­ment clos­er to his home. They gave him a lit­tle church in its death throes, its con­gre­ga­tion down to about ten stal­warts. He revived it, build­ing it up to 50 reg­u­lar attendees.

He had a stroke when he was 86. One month lat­er, he returned to the lit­tle church’s pul­pit, this time in a wheel chair, and Chris­t­ian-sol­diered on until old age broke him down.

No longer able to preach and bed-rid­den, he told us he was ready to go to heaven.

I sat by his bed, and we talked about old times. “How did you do it?” I asked him. “How did you over­come all the obstacles?”

He paused for a long time. “Deter­mi­na­tion,” he said. Papaw’s Willy, I thought. “And my Faith.”

He slept almost all the time his last few days. The hos­pice lady said he was prepar­ing to die. Mom rolled her wheel­chair up to his bed and took his hand. “It’s okay, Tom­my. You can go on now.” I don’t know if he heard her, but he let go soon after that.

Four Methodist min­is­ters preached at his funer­al. We sang In the Gar­den, his favorite hymn. Its stan­zas are about walk­ing and talk­ing with Jesus in a rose gar­den. One of the many Methodist preach­ers Dad had shep­herd­ed into the min­istry end­ed the funer­al ser­vice by say­ing that Dad had been walk­ing and talk­ing with Jesus those last days when he was asleep. “When they’d walked a long way up the road,” he said, “Jesus told Tom­my, ‘You know, my place is clos­er than yours. Let’s just go on up there together.’”

If heav­en is a place where your dreams are ful­filled, I know what my dad’s doing right now. There’s a lit­tle coun­try church with sun­light com­ing through stained glass win­dows to paint rain­bow col­ors on the pine pews. The sanc­tu­ary is full. Mom’s play­ing a hymn on the piano. When the singing’s done, she moves from the

piano bench to the front pew and sits beside me and my broth­ers, all dressed in our Sun­day best.

Dad stands and takes his place at the pul­pit, back straight, voice strong.

Rest in Peace, Dad.

Just as I walked out of a trop­i­cal fish shop on Mel­rose Avenue in Hol­ly­wood, a van plowed head-on into the grill of a small car right in front of me. This was in the late 70’s before car seats and airbags, so I expect­ed the worst as I ran over to the crash. A young moth­er sat behind the wheel of the car, bleed­ing from a deep gash to her fore­head. A lit­tle boy lay on the floor­board in front of the pas­sen­ger seat, cry­ing. I pulled the mom out, hand­ed her off to a woman stand­ing on the side­walk, and went back for the lit­tle boy. By that time a man wear­ing a kha­ki car­go jack­et had picked him up and car­ried him to a bus stop bench. The boy seemed stunned, but unin­jured. Oth­ers tend­ed to the dri­ver of the van, an elder­ly man, clutch­ing his chest. A fire engine and an ambu­lance arrived, and the res­cue work­ers took over.

I sat down on the bench to pull myself togeth­er. The man wear­ing the car­go jack­et sat next to me. We talked about the acci­dent. About all I remem­ber about our con­ver­sa­tion was that he men­tioned he was a cam­era man for NBC. After­wards, we went our sep­a­rate ways, and I for­got about him.

A few months lat­er, I was watch­ing the night­ly news when pho­tographs of four men appeared on the tele­vi­sion screen. One of them looked famil­iar. The reporter iden­ti­fied him as Bob Brown. When she said he was an NBC cam­era man, I rec­og­nized him as the man I had met at the accident.

A hol­low place opened in the pit of my stom­ach as she report­ed that fol­low­ers of the cult leader, Jim Jones, had mur­dered the four men and that Brown had filmed his own execution.

In the fol­low­ing days, the press didn’t pro­vide much infor­ma­tion about Brown, focus­ing instead on the main char­ac­ters in the bizarre sto­ry that led to the mur­ders: Jim Jones and Con­gress­man Leo Ryan.

Jones was an ordained Dis­ci­ples of Christ pas­tor. He found­ed the People’s Tem­ple in Indi­ana and even­tu­al­ly moved it to San Fran­cis­co. He attract­ed a nation­al audi­ence and gar­nered the sup­port of influ­en­tial Bay Area politi­cians, like Willie Brown and Har­vey Milk.

In the mid-70’s, he became delu­sion­al, announc­ing that he was the incar­na­tion of Jesus, Gand­hi, Bud­dha, and Vladimir Lenin, but thou­sands of his church mem­bers remained loy­al to him. In 1977, he moved the People’s Tem­ple to Guyana, a small coun­try on Brazil’s north­ern bor­der. By 1978, 1100 church mem­bers had fol­lowed him there to live in a set­tle­ment dubbed Jonestown.

Rumors that Jones would not allow dis­senters to leave the set­tle­ment and alle­ga­tions of sex­u­al abuse and tor­ture soon reached rel­a­tives of the People’s Tem­ple con­gre­ga­tion. Frus­trat­ed that the State Depart­ment would not address these claims, a Bay Area Con­gress­man, Leo Ryan, put togeth­er a fact-find­ing team to go to Jon­estown. The group includ­ed Jack­ie Speier (then Ryan’s leg­isla­tive assis­tant, now a mem­ber of Con­gress), sev­er­al reporters, and an NBC cam­era crew led by Bob Brown.

Brown turned down the trip at first. His friends lat­er said he had a pre­mo­ni­tion that he would die there, but NBC per­suad­ed him to go.

Fore­cast­ing the great risk posed by the trip didn’t require clair­voy­ance. Jones had built Jon­estown in a remote, iso­lat­ed area. The only way in was to fly a small plane from George­town, Guyana’s cap­i­tal, to a dirt airstrip near Port Kai­tu­ma, and then trav­el by truck through the jun­gle for an hour and a half. Jones’s loy­al­ists were heav­i­ly armed. Ryan’s del­e­ga­tion con­sist­ed of eigh­teen unarmed civil­ians with no secu­ri­ty detail.

Ryan’s par­ty arrived in Guyana on Novem­ber 14, but Jones wouldn’t allow them to vis­it the set­tle­ment until the 17th. The ten­sion between Jones and Ryan’s del­e­ga­tion is pal­pa­ble in that day’s video­taped scenes recov­ered from Brown’s cam­era after his mur­der. That after­noon, some­one slipped a note to Ryan: “Please help us get out of Jon­estown.” Fif­teen peo­ple even­tu­al­ly stepped for­ward to say they want­ed to leave. Ryan nego­ti­at­ed with Jones about their depar­ture, and he gave his con­sent reluctantly.

The next day, Ryan’s team and the defec­tors returned to the airstrip to board two small planes bound for George­town. One of the defec­tors turned out to be a plant. He pulled a gun and began shoot­ing at the oth­ers. At the same time, a truck sped onto the airstrip car­ry­ing rifle­men, who opened fire on every­one in Ryan’s party.

Brown stood at the tail of one of the planes when the shoot­ing began. He imme­di­ate­ly raised his cam­era and moved toward the gun­men. Reporter Ron Javers said, “I was knocked to the ground by a slug in the left shoul­der … Bob Brown stayed on his feet and kept film­ing even as the attack­ers advanced on him… He was incred­i­bly tena­cious.” They shot Brown in the thigh, and he fell to the ground, still tap­ing, as one of the rifle­men approached him and shot him in the face at point blank range. The video­tape recov­ered from his cam­era flick­ers and goes blank, pre­sum­ably at that moment.

Four oth­ers were killed, includ­ing Ryan. Ten were wound­ed. The sur­vivors played dead or ran into the jun­gle. The pilots fled in the air­planes, and the gun­men sped back to the set­tle­ment. The wound­ed, includ­ing Jack­ie Speier, who had been shot five times, had to wait 22 hours for help to arrive.

The after­noon of the attack, 909 Tem­ple peo­ple died clus­tered around Jonestown’s main pavil­ion. The FBI recov­ered an audio­tape of Jones telling them that hos­tile forces would take revenge for the mur­ders. Men will “para­chute in here on us … shoot some of our inno­cent babies … and tor­ture our chil­dren.” He con­vinced them to com­mit “rev­o­lu­tion­ary sui­cide” by drink­ing cyanide-laced Kool-Aid. The adults gave the Kool-Aid to 304 chil­dren and then drank it them­selves. Jones’s corpse was found wedged between two bod­ies, a gun­shot wound to his tem­ple, appar­ent­ly self-inflicted.

Most of the sub­se­quent cov­er­age con­cen­trat­ed on the mass sui­cide, Jones, and Ryan. Reports about Ryan’s mur­der some­times men­tioned Brown in pass­ing, but the press pub­lished very few details about his back­ground. All I could find was that he was 36 when he was killed, he’d been a TV reporter in LA before switch­ing to pho­to­jour­nal­ism, and he was known among his col­leagues for human inter­est stories.

Eye wit­ness­es to his death are uni­form in their praise for his courage. Oth­ers ran away when the shoot­ing began, but he advanced on his mur­der­ers with­out hes­i­ta­tion, lens up. He had to know they would kill him, but he nev­er wavered. It seems clear he made a con­scious deci­sion to sac­ri­fice his life to make sure the world would know what took place on the airstrip that day.

Hon­ors were bestowed on him in the months fol­low­ing his death. NBC set up a dis­play about the mas­sacre in its New York offices that reads in part: “Show­ing extra­or­di­nary brav­ery, cam­era­man Bob Brown record­ed the attack, per­haps even the shot that killed him.” San Fran­cis­co State Uni­ver­si­ty estab­lished the Bob Brown Memo­r­i­al Schol­ar­ship for Jour­nal­ists. And Pres­i­dent Carter pre­sent­ed a posthu­mous ded­i­ca­tion to Brown and two oth­er press mem­bers at the 1979 Emmy Awards show. “It is no acci­dent,” he said, “that the root mean­ing of the word ‘mar­tyr’ is ‘to wit­ness’ … (T)hese men were our witnesses.”

Short­ly after the trib­utes, Brown’s name and sto­ry fad­ed from pub­lic aware­ness. Today, almost no one knows who he is or what he did.

I’ve tried over the years to recall more about him, but I can bare­ly remem­ber him. You expe­ri­ence brief encoun­ters with thou­sands of peo­ple over a long life. Most of them fade from mem­o­ry with­in days, if not hours. This one seemed no dif­fer­ent. I met an ordi­nary guy on Mel­rose one day, friend­ly enough, but unremarkable.

Or so I thought at the time.