Left to right: Grandpa Wilson (Achus), Francis Wilson, Achus Wilson, Jr. and Grandma Wilson in front of the boat they owned and used for carrying wheat up and down the Erie Canal.
By Susan James
Elsie Marie Wilson was born at home on July 24, 1933. She’s not sure why her mother wasn’t taken to the hospital for the birth. All of her brothers and sisters were born in the hospital. She’s been healthy nearly every day of her 69 years so she never bothered to ask. Her unique entry into this world foreshadowed the position she would hold in her family for the rest of her life.
Elsie’s family filled her life as she grew up in Upstate New York. Living in Fulton, New York most of her life, her grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins were as much a part of her immediate family as her mom and dad, sisters and brothers. Traveling to Rome, New York every other Sunday to visit with her father’s brother was as regular as attending church.
The family was the center of their birthday parties. Today, ten children from a kindergarten class might meet in a bowling alley to celebrate a sixth birthday amongst the frenzy of unacquainted parents, pizza, and bumpers to keep the balls from rolling into the gutters. For Elsie’s sixth birthday, her family gathered in the comfort of her home; regular, familiar, loving.
This tradition faded when Elsie’s parents died, her father following her mother within only two months. Elsie was in her thirties when her parents passed away. The family drifted. There was no longer a center. Elsie remained close with each of her siblings and their families but the certainty of the backyard barbeque to blow out the latest cluster of candles and smash the pinata scattered with the division of each family’s separate interests and obligations.
The concentration on family wasn’t always part of the Wilson legacy. Elsie’s grandfather, Achus C. Wilson, made his living with a boat he used to transport wheat and coal on the Erie Canal. He and her grandmother, Mary C. Wilson, hauled that boat up and down the Canal for some thirteen years, until Mary died. Elsie’s father, Francis Wilbur Wilson, was 14 when his mother died. Achus was not able to care for Francis and his brother, Achus Jr., after his wife died and set the boys out into the world alone.
The family knows little of the time when Francis moved from relative to relative as he was growing up. Elsie is sure that the experience must have had a deep impact on her father because he never spoke of it. It made him a dedicated family man. He was always there for our family. He always participated, Elsie remembers. He saw his family as people he wanted to be with, people he was responsible for, people he loved. Feeling grounded in family must have inspired Francis to make sure that he was always surrounded by those he loved.
Elsie’s family was full of heart. There was nothing her father wouldn’t do for his family. During World War II, her father thought it time to move from Granby Center back into Fulton proper. The one-room schoolhouse life gave way to city life. He ran into denial after denial when trying to find apartment that would rent to a family with four children. Elsie remembers the Italian family with six children who rented to them. Daily life was bursting with heart and laughter and always a child to play with.
The Wilson heart is legendary. Its deadly at its worst; at its best, its one defective organ. Elsie’s grandfather, father, and one of her sisters all died from heart attacks. Her sister died when she was only 34. Of her other three siblings, two have had bypass surgery for coronary heart disease and the third had a mild heart attack before he finally succumbed to lung cancer at he age of 51. Elsie’s generation also gets the ailing heart from her mothers side. Cardiac arrest took her mother as well. And her maternal grandfather suffered a fatal heart attack while working as a freight conductor for the railroad. He was found in the morning alone on the tracks still gripping his lantern.
Elsie’s heart, however, is the most legendary of them all. No disease, no blockage, no attacks. It ticks loud and strong. It ticks, that is, if you can find it. Elsie has a rare condition known as situs inverses. Every organ in her body is backward. Shes a mirror image of the rest of us.
No one knew about her condition until she was 11 years old. During WWII, the local hospital conducted routine chest X-rays for civilians to detect tuberculosis, which was a common illness at the time. It wasn’t until that X-ray that the doctors informed Elsie and her family that her heart was on the wrong side. They were assured that there was nothing to worry about and that was the last that was mentioned of it. When she was 19, Elsie became friends with a missionary doctor. As a favor to her friend, she helped him demonstrate how his new fluoroscope worked by posing behind the screen. Elsie’s organs, all of them completely inverted, were illuminated for all to see. Elsie has always tapped out her own beat.
Of the five children, she is the only one never to marry or raise a family. I was always too busy learning things to stop and fall in love, she says. She did have one boyfriend who wanted to marry her when he came back from the Korean War.
She had just gone back to college at night and in 1952, a wife with a full-time job and going to night school did not fit his image of an ideal way to begin a family. To him, it was either marriage or school. They parted friends and twelve years later, Elsie accepted her hard-earned bachelors degree in chemistry.
Her days in a one-room schoolhouse in Granby Center gave her a thirst for knowledge that led her to a bachelors degree from Syracuse University, the first member of her family to earn a college degree. Even before she began college, she returned to night school to complete college prep courses required for college entrance.
She left a job at General Electric where she worked as an assembler for five years. She entered the professional workforce as a lab secretary at University Hospital of the Good Shepherd and was promoted to lab technician even before completing her degree. After graduation and passing her boards for the American Society of Clinical Pathologists, she became a medical technologist at Memorial Hospital (Now Crouse-Irving Memorial Hospital) where she retired 38 years later.
At 69, Elsie’s life is wanting for nothing. Known to everyone as Aunt Elsie, she makes time for her family. She helps all of them with time and money and advice and comfort.
She is now the tie that holds her family together. She makes the rounds at the holidays and sends cards for Halloween and Easter and takes a plate of supper to a niece or nephew who has a cold. The only difference from when she was a child is that there is not one central meeting place. Elsie travels to them, making sure no one is ever alone.
Susan James 2003
Susan James is a writer and editor from Liverpool, New York.
Published U.S. Legacies April 2003
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