Lewis, Luigi, Mom May Turco, 1936
REQUIEM FOR A NAME
Listen to Lewis Putnam Turco read his poem, "Requiem for a Name."
For as long as I have known the meaning and origin of my surname, I have known about the Putnams of Salem, Massachusetts, and their involvement in the Witch Hunt of 1692. Luigi Turco met May Laura Putnam — “Mom May” as she liked to call herself, because of the pun, I suppose — at a Methodist camp in Wakefield, Massachusetts, where she was working as a missionary among Italian immigrants. At the time she was an old maid in her thirties who had pulled herself out of rural poverty in Superior, Wisconsin, by sheer wit and strength of will. Despite the desperate penury of her second generation Danish mother, born Laura Christine Larsen; the shiftlessness of her father, William Herbert Putnam, descendant of an old New England family, and the competition of her six brothers and two sisters, Mom May had made something of herself, becoming the only one of the Putnam siblings to attend and graduate from college — Boston University’s School of Religious Education.
Believe it or believe it not,
My mother was a Putnam once.
On her ancestral tree she swears
The Lowells and the Deweys too
Hang pendulous as lovely pears.
My grampaw was a sort of dunce
Who rather let things go to pot —
Himself, his offspring, farm and wife.
My grampaw was a sort of dunce.
His homestead I remember well:
The floors were warped, the doors askew,
And now and then the rafters fell.
My mother was a Putnam once —
She led a less than social life,
So she went East from grampaw's West.
My mother was a Putnam once
Till she was married, woe O! woe.
No longer was she maiden free —
She cursed her pa from pate to toe.
My grampaw was a sort of dunce
To cheat the eaglet in its nest
By willing her a woman's form.
My grampaw was a sort of dunce,
But what a hefty name he wore!
He gave my middle name to me;
It fits me like a saddlesore.
My mother was a Putnam once,
I'd be one too, come sun or storm.
The Deweys and the Lowell hosts
Are pendant from a hollow tree.
Now with this rime let them be felled,
Let me be nothing more to me
Than windfalls blasted by the frosts.
My mother was a Putnam once;
My grampaw was a sort of dunce.
Mom May was wrong about the Lowells, but right about the Deweys.
So my parents married and I was born into their middle age. We lived a while in Buffalo near my father's sister, Vita Sardella, and her family. I was christened Lewis (my mother was having no other "Luigi" in the family) Putnam (hyphenated last names were not yet current in the U.S.) Turco, and then we moved to Meriden, where I was brought up unaware of how poor we were. Thinking back on my early life, I consider it remarkable that my parents, given their own histories, brought up their children as members of the middle class who had no doubt at all we were as privileged as anyone else. Though we had no money, the house was full of books of all sorts. My parents read to me practically from the moment I was born, and soon I was reading for myself.
The poem is from The Collected Lyrics of Lewis Turco / Wesli Court 1953-2004, Scottsdale, AZ: www.StarCloudPress.com, 2004, 460 pp., ISBN 1-932842-00-4, jacketed cloth; ISBN 1-932842-01-2, trade paperback. Also available in a Kindle edition.
And a history of the early Putnam family in America may be found here: Satan’s Scourge: A Narrative of the Age of Witchcraft in England and America 1580-1697 e-book edition, by Lewis Putnam Turco, Scottsdale, AZ: www.StarCloudPress.com, Kindle edition, 2012, 808 pp. Winner of the Wild Card category of the 2009 New England Book Festival.
