Pilgrim Thanksgiving Documents

After arriving late the prior year, fifty percent of the Mayflower’s company had perished in the harsh Massachusetts winter. They were buried without rites for fear the Indians would take military advantage of the company’s severely diminished numbers.

However, it turned out the Pilgrims and Indians became friends and allies, signing a treaty that endured for seven decades. And Bradford’s journal tells of their celebrating and communing together, in one another’s abodes. 

The Pilgrims’ survival was nothing short of miraculous and wonderful and served to encourage them in their convictions and determination.

I remember our annual Thanksgiving meal in the El Pao club where all families were invited and many if not most came and joined in the memorable celebrations.

Historians tell us there are few original (primary) sources from that first Thanksgiving in 1621. 

We have Edward Winslow’s Journal of the Plantation at Plymouth (modern spelling):

“Our harvests being gotten in, our governor sent four men on fowling, that so we might after a special manner rejoice together, after we had gathered the fruits of our labors; they four in one day killed as much fowl, as with a little help beside, served the Company almost a week, at which time amongst other Recreations, we exercised our Arms, many of the Indians coming amongst us, and amongst the resst their greatest king, Massasoit, with some ninety men, whom for three days we entertained and feasted, and they went out and killed five Deer, which they brought to the Plantation and bestowed on our Governor, and upon the Captain and others. And although it be not always so plentiful, as it was at this time with us, yet by the goodness of God, we are so far from want, that we often wish you partakers of our plenty.”

And we have Governor William Bradford’s, Of Plymouth Plantation, 1621 (modern spelling): 

“They began now to gather in the small harvest they had, and to fit up their houses and dwellings against winter, being all well recovered in health and strength and had all things in good plenty. For as some were thus employed in affairs abroad, others were exercised in fishing, about cod and bass and other fish, of which they took good store, of which every family had their portion. All the summer there was no want; and now began to come in store of fowl, as winter approached, of which this place did abound when they came first (but afterward decreased by degrees). And besides waterfowl there was great store of wild turkeys, of which they took many, besides venison, etc. Besides, they had about a peck of meal a week to a person, or now since harvest, Indian corn to that proportion. Which made many afterwards write so largely of their plenty here to their friends in England, which were not feigned but true reports.”

Finally, we also have the letter of William Hilton, passenger on the Fortune, written in November, 1621:

“Loving Cousin: At our arrival in New Plymouth, in New England, we found all our friends and planters in good health, though they were left sick and weak, with very small means; the Indians round about us peaceable and friendly; the country very pleasant and temperate, yielding naturally, of itself, great store of fruits, as vines of divers sorts and in great abundance. There is likewise walnuts, chestnuts, small nuts and plums, with much variety of flowers, roots and herbs, no less pleasant than wholesome and profitable. No place hath more gooseberries and strawberries, nor better. Timber of all sorts you have in England doth cover the land, that affords beasts of divers sorts, and great flocks of turkey, quails, pigeons, and partridges; many great lakes abounding with fish, fowl, beavers, and otters. The sea affords us great plenty of all excellent sorts of sea-fish, as the rivers and isles doth variety of wild fowl of most useful sorts. Mines we find, to our thinking; but neither the goodness nor quality we know. Better grain cannot be than the Indian corn, if we plant it upon as good ground as a man need desire. We are all freeholders; the rent-day doth not trouble us; and all those good blessings we have, of which and waht we list in their seasons for taking. Our company are, for most part, very religious, honest people; the word of God sincerely taught us every Sabbath; so that I know not any thing a contented mind can here want. I desire your friendly care to send my wife and children to me, where I wish all the friends I have in England; and so I rest, Your loving kinsman, William Hilton”

The first formal proclamations came later; they all acknowledge the God of all comfort for His blessings and mercy.

Men of El Pao

David Quintana kindly sent me the below photographs, for which I am most grateful. (If David reads this, I hope he emails me again as I had not checked my emails for months and only saw his emails recently — months after he sent them — and am unable to contact him now although I have tried.)

The gentleman in the center of both photos is the late Herb Ashe, the father of Mike, who has written a number of posts published on this blog, beginning with Mining Camp Memories.

The gentleman on the left in the first photo, is Sam Wright (I’m borrowing from Mike’s memory here as I did not remember him off the bat). The gentleman on the right in the second photo is Mr. Elmo Belfonti. The gentleman on the right in the first photo and the left in the second photo is the late Ted Heron, whom Mike mentions in his posts and who was a close, lifelong friend of Herb Ashe, Mike’s father.

I remember these men and am a better man for having known them. 

How can that be when I certainly did not interact with them other than in social events and interactions

Well, as I put it in Part 5 of Mining Camp Memories

“I was reminded that no one comes into this world a “blank slate”; we all bring a heritage of the previous generations and much more. Sitting at the club bar as a kid in a time and place where that was not frowned upon, I heard the men there talk about mining accidents and lessons learned before coming to El Pao and how they applied such lessons to their current employment, not to mention their own parents or grandparents, and even politics and religion, at a time and place where such topics could be discussed without ending in blood and warfare.

“Many years later, I realized that, listening to those men, I was developing an inchoate understanding that no one comes into this world with nothing. We are born into homes we did not build, eat food we did not grow, learn languages we did not invent, and much, much more.

“El Pao welcomed men and women and children with manifold exciting backgrounds and experiences. Those of us whose childhood was nurtured there were very fortunate.”

Photos are circa 1960

Father and Baseball

In memory of my father, this post is an overview of him and his love of baseball.

He was not tall, maybe 5 feet 8 inches or perhaps 9. But he was naturally, effortlessly muscular and always stood straight, like an athlete in his prime. In fact, he was an athlete: first string in his high school basketball and baseball teams in Massachusetts.

He was high scorer in a championship basketball game and hit a winning home run in a championship baseball game: both events were featured in the respective next day’s newspapers – I was always astonished by newspaper clippings about my father, hidden in a dresser drawer: my mother had shown me the clippings and had, helpfully, shown me where they were hidden and given me permission to seek them out whenever I wished to.

This I did frequently. My father’s pictures in those old newspapers demonstrated that, apart from thinning hair, he still retained much of that youthful, virile look, down to his straight nose and firm chin.

He was fast in his movements when he needed to be, surprising many younger men. And he was quick to learn new sports. For instance, the camp had built a two-lane bowling alley; boys were paid to set up the pins. Despite never having played before coming to Venezuela, he bought and practically memorized Andy Varipapa’s book on bowling and quickly excelled at the game, not only in El Pao, but also in Puerto Ordaz.

But, when it came to sports, baseball was his true love. He had been recruited by the New York Yankees in their heyday and played in their farm league. However, he decided to accept the Bethlehem Steel offer and went to Venezuela. I remember, as a child, telling him, “But why didn’t you stay with the Yankees!?”

He laughed, “Well, if I had, then you’d never have been born.”

“That’s OK! You’d have played with the Yankees!”

He laughed and hugged me.

He would drive to the labor camp and join the men who’d gather every afternoon, after the 4 o’clock whistle. He immediately earned their respect and admiration by playing ball competitively and with scrappy excellence. The days came and went and within months, my father had organized those men, and others who had joined up, into teams, assigning several “naturals” to the positions most suited for them.

He was a player-manager who also pitched and the days he did not pitch, he played left field. The company purchased pin-striped uniforms for the team’s home games and gray for the road. Bold lettering in front read: Iron Mines, short for the Bethlehem Steel subsidiary, Iron Mines Company of Venezuela.

The company also graded the field and built stands and El Pao found itself with a regulation sized baseball field and stadium ready to host the arduous daily practices as well as, eventually, home games for the team.

And they indeed did begin a celebrated career, achieving Double A status and earning two national championships in the 1950s.

My father was a strict manager, which paid off richly. And he was fearless.

He laid down strict rules about drinking, smoking, carousing, and all-around honesty – somewhat like an American high school coach in that era might lay down to his charges.

In season, he worked every day, after the 4 O’clock whistle, with the team and he expected each member to give his all. And it was hard work, as several had not even seen a baseball until my father recruited them to the team. In brief, in less than 5 years, he had transformed them into a championship team.

One star pitcher became something of a prima donna. One day he arrived at the 4:15 PM practice quite drunk. It was not the first time.

My father kicked him off the team: “My team is on the field right now. And they are sober!” He told him. “Go! And bring me your uniform tomorrow without fail.”

The uniform did not appear.

After a few days, my father drove late one night from El Pao to a two-story apartment complex in the outer purlieus of San Félix on the Orinoco, knocked on the door, and, upon the fired pitcher’s opening the door and freezing upon seeing him, demanded the company’s uniform back forthwith.

He returned to El Pao with the uniform.

I heard this story from others; my father didn’t tell me.

When asked by his superiors why on earth he’d risk his life for a lousy baseball uniform, he shrugged, “I didn’t risk my life. That uniform is company property. If we allow a cry-baby to stomp off with company property with no consequences, we open the door to all sorts of malfeasance. I know the folks in San Félix and they know me, and they know the company. There was no danger.”

It was incidents like these that generated my father’s reputation for honesty, persistence, and a desire to make things right.

He was not universally liked; however, many younger men, mostly from the labor camp loved him. He taught them not only baseball, but also discipline and sportsmanship.

I remember once overhearing him tell my mother about a Pittsburg Pirates scout who had seen the team play in Ciudad Bolivar and had approached him after the game to recruit him for the Pirates. My father laughed heartily as he remembered telling his age to the scout and seeing the scout drop his jaw.

I also recall one game in El Pao when the opposing team’s power hitter had batted the ball over the left field fence. Or so it seemed. My father ran like a gazelle, hit the fence, then climbed the fence, jumped up, caught the ball, and fell to the ground, while holding the ball in his glove. I felt like the stands were going to fall, so loud were the cheers and yells and so strong the stomping and slapping. I’ve not often seen joy like that since.

In one game I did not see, as it took place before my birth, my father ran to catch a line drive but the ball was going too fast and he would have missed it if he attempted to catch it with his glove. So he launched himself horizontally and caught the ball with his bare hand.

When he left Venezuela, word spread and the old timers came from around the country and surprised him with a farewell game. He pitched three innings.

My father and the men he trained are mostly all gone now. But I am very grateful for the memories and example he left behind. He always missed the USA. But he made his years in Venezuela count to the utmost.

As a postscript, in 1978 when I visited Venezuela on what is perhaps my most memorable trip, while in Puerto Ordaz one evening, I had inadvertently taken a left turn at an intersection where such a turn was prohibited. A police car immediately pulled me over and the officer rattled off my infraction and hauled me off.

At the precinct I tried to explain that I did not see a “No Left Turn” sign but was willing to pay any fine. But they insisted on putting me in jail and see a magistrate whenever one became available.

After about an hour going back and forth, and seeing the police were not budging, in subdued exasperation I said, “I am very saddened that after leaving El Pao and returning to visit the land of my birth, my compatriots are about to jail me.”

I said this, remembering that my father often advised me that, when in trouble, to remind folks that I am “one of them”. That might move them to see me in a different light.

“You are Venezuelan?” asked my chief interrogator.

“Of course, I am! I was born about an hour from here in El Pao.”

“Barnes …. Barnes…. What was your father’s name?”

“Charles. Charles M Barnes.”

At this, the officer broke into a big, open smile and almost yelled, “When I was a little boy I used to beg my father to take me to see your father play! I saw him as often as I could! He was the best ball player I have ever seen. Is he well?”

“Yes. He is well.”

After another 15 or so minutes of reminiscences about my father, they released me with their best wishes.

Thank you, dear Dad.

Happy Father’s Day.

Iron Mines team, circa 1956. My father on front row, far left.

On an exciting trip down the Orinoco River to Puerto de Hierro, Venezuela — Circa 1963

Newspaper account of the farewell game in honor of my father — 1976. Note: he was also known as “The Cubano” because he was born in Cuba where my grandfather, Max A. Barnes stayed after the Spanish American War.

Father’s Records and John Wayne

My father sat alone on the divan in the enclosed porch area reading El Universal, a national Venezuelan newspaper, as he listened to Aaron Copeland’s Tender Land Suite playing on the record player.

My father’s record collection was not extensive, but later in life, I would evoke the sounds of Beethoven’s and Mendelssohn’s violin concertos, Dvorak’s New World Symphony, and Debussy’s hypnotically enthralling Clair de Lune. I would often recall Van Cliburn’s performing Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninoff in that record whose cover has the famous prodigy seated at the piano as if in an arch, a picture of sublime concentration. There were other records, of course, including anthologies of movie themes such as Laura and High Noon, which I would remember.

But – as my wife and children will attest — I regularly associate the intensely lyrical Tender Land Suite, especially the finale, “The Promise of Living”, with El Pao and with … John Wayne. The Copeland compositions are not directly associated with any of the American actor’s movies; however, those rugged, American-sounding bars, and chords, and melodies summoned scenes from Monument Valley, the Sierra’s, the Rockies, the Shenandoah Valley, and the vast Texas Big Bend. 

Sights I had not yet seen, except in western picture shows which, to my mind, were never as good as when John Wayne was in them. And, to me, John Wayne was America. Especially the West.

Relatively current movies were shown in El Pao twice a week: Wednesdays and Sundays. They’d be flown in from Ciudad Bolivar, formerly Angostura, on the shores of the Orinoco, by helicopter.

The helicopter would seem to hover a bit but would actually be flying in a slow oblong circle above the clearing next to the club grounds, just beyond the swimming pools. Then it would descend onto the field, creating its own whirlwind. Boys sprinted to the clearing to gawk at the descending helicopter.

That was almost more exciting than finding out what pictures would be shown that week. Almost.

Venezuelan censure laws were strict and the American camp abided by them. “A” movies were for all, including children; “B” movies were for audiences 14 years old and above; and “C” movies were for adults 18 years and older.

So, as the pilot emerged from the cockpit, the boys demanded to know the censure rating of the movies he carried. “Well, lads, both movies are ‘C’. Sorry!” Then he’d stare at their hang dog looks as they absorbed the melancholy reality of a week wherein they would not partake of Hollywood’s offerings.

“Hah! Gotcha! Ha! Ha! Ha!” he’d practically scream.

“Very funny!” They’d, relieved, laugh with him.

Then they’d inquire as to the titles.

One of the movies I most recall when hearing Copeland is The Searchers: John Ford’s, and, in the view of many, also John Wayne’s masterpiece.

Scenes from that film were stimulated to remembrance by the record my father often listened to. Memories of a big man, Ethan Edwards, remorselessly searching, for 7 years, for the Comanche Indian, “Scar”, whose reputation for murder and mayhem, terrified even his own devotees.

It was Scar who had butchered Ethan’s brother and sister-in-law and kidnapped his two nieces. Wayne’s portrayal of Ethan, a Confederate army veteran who refuses to take the Union oath because he figures “one oath is enough in the lifetime of one man,” is suffused with barely suppressed rage and focused determination to fulfill his duty to recover the eventually sole surviving niece.

“We’ll find ‘em. As sure as the world turns, we’ll find ‘em,” he mutters as he looks across the desolate, snow covered prairies, rides through majestic Monument Valley, crosses rapids and deserts, and in fury kills buffalo to reduce his quarry’s food supply.

But he also more than intimates that “…it were better for [his niece] to be dead” than to live as a crazed woman with a foot in savagery and another in no-man’s land. In such a condition, would she not pull down the civilization where he would eventually bring her? Would it be better to kill her instead of recover her?  The tension becomes almost unbearable as the movie unrelentingly proceeds, step by step, battle by battle, to its furious climactic scene, filmed in Monument Valley.

It is a movie for adults, but one that was seared in the minds and hearts of children who paid attention when they viewed it in the 1950’s.

As a young boy, my psyche subconsciously drew in the intensely nostalgically played strings and horns of the finale of Copeland’s suite, my mind thrust forward the images of Ethan Edwards persistently, sedulously striding across the wild, savage West, every once in a while coming to catch his breath at outposts of civilization, as if to tell folks, “if it weren’t for men like me, these outposts would cease to exist.”

Maybe it was projection, maybe naïveté or childishness; nevertheless, as a boy, I did respect the men in El Pao. Would there have been such a place in the middle of that jungle were it not for men like these? Would the place survive, as it is, without such men? Or without honoring their memory?

Early years 

Charles M. Barnes (right) and Mr. Trumbour, mining camp controller — circa 1945

John Wayne in The Searchers, 1956

Christmas 2023

Lillie and I married in 1984 and that year we wrote our first annual Christmas letter. Our intent was to write one annually. We did so through our 2018 letter, marking 35 Christmases touching base with our friends and loved ones.

We’d like to resume our letters, not because you badly need to hear from us; but rather because we need to communicate with you.

The “big event” this year was my mother’s passing away from this earth and into glory with her Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, Whose birth we celebrate this season. The events leading up to, and including, her death are very vivid in my mind and I suppose they will remain so for the rest of my life. We buried her in Fairburn, Georgia, next to her beloved husband, Charles, our father, who preceded her in death by 41 years. 

Life with father and mother seems like yesterday. I can still hear my father’s voice announcing his arrival from work or from a trip to the store. And I can hear my mother’s reply.

Memories can be a great joy, so long as one does not live in the past but rather uses the past as a stepping stone to advancing his calling in life. We do not worship our ancestors; rather we honor our parents and our elders — those who came before — because we know that unless we stand on their shoulders we will not do well in life. But, more critically, because God commands us to. To worship ancestors is to stagnate; to denigrate them is to destroy the future; to honor them is to progress and to help our children and grandchildren do so as well.

I am grateful for my parents and seldom do I live a day when I do not recall or act upon a gem of truth or a piece of advice given to me by them. I hope I will be half as profitable to my children and grandchildren as my father and mother were to me. I am also grateful for my birth in El Pao, Venezuela, and my childhood years there. I had good childhood friends and wonderful teachers whose wisdom persists despite the passing of the years. I am thankful for the privilege of having grown amongst Americans of different states and Latin Americans of different countries. Looking back, I can clearly see what an honor and benefit that was to me and to my own family.

Whenever I visited my father’s burial place, I would walk past Shingo’s grave. Shingo was a member or our small country church in Fairburn. The site always had flowers which I understood were placed by his sister who cared for the site for decades. In my last two or three visits to my father’s site earlier this year I noticed that Shingo’s tomb had no flowers. During my mother’s burial and for two visits afterwards, Shingo’s tomb remained bare. I can only suppose that his sister has either moved out of state or has passed away.

I know that over time, most graves will become unvisited. That thought saddens me and reminds me that most of us will not be long remembered after we leave this earth. It is good to know, however, that our Lord does remember and He will accompany us throughout our lives and as we walk through the valley of the shadow of death. And He will also raise us from our tombs on that Great Day to live eternally in a New Heaven and a New Earth.

That, too, is part of the great story of Christmas.


Two grandchildren, James and Ada, were born in March and January to Elizabeth and Tyler and to Charles and Essie, respectively. They have added to the rambunctious joys of family visits, along with their siblings and cousins, Grace, Ebenezer, Emily, and Beverly. And there are two more on the way: one to Esther and the other to Essie. 

This year marked my 70th birthday. My children gave me a great gift, the Folio Society edition of George Eliot’s great novel, Middlemarch, which I look forward to reading early next year. In closing this year’s letter, it is appropriate to quote from that work:

The growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.

Be faithful. 

Merry Christmas to you and yours, now and always. 

Taken on September 11, 2023, after my mother’s funeral. I was not feeling well and had no idea that my children had aligned behind us in birth order. Thank you, dear children. And beloved wife.

My parents’ graves in Fairburn, Georgia.