This is my great grandfather’s (Lemuel Weaver’s) pocket watch. It was a wedding gift from my great grandmother, Effie Clarissa Lee.

(The smaller of the two watches belonged to my grandmother. More on it in a later blog).

The hunter case is engraved with his initials LLW (Lemuel Weaver). My grandfather, his son, said his father had no middle name, so the second L was for balance. The chain is original as are the duel fobs.

OK, now why do I have this watch? When I was in high school, I was on the Varsity Debate Team. For our meets, I had to wear a suit and tie. My suit at that time happened to be a three piece with vest that had watch pockets. Grandpa Lee (one generation back we called our grandparents by their first names — Grandma Florence’s insistence. Two generations back they were always by last name as was the custom of my mother’s generation) had a watch that he always wore when dressed in a suit. It had been a gift from Grandma Florence and my mother had used it to teethe back in the early 1920s – her tooth marks were on the case. Well, Grandpa decided I needed a pocket watch to complete my look. He was not about to give up his watch, but he had his father’s which he offered to “loan” me with no return date. On debate days, if I ever walked into a bathroom, cigarettes were put out and flushed and then curses rose up when they figured out I was a student not a faculty member.

Now, just to clarify why Grandpa Lee and Grandma Florence were not Grandpa and Grandma Weaver. Grandpa’s mother, Effie Clarissa Lee Weaver, was my mother’s grandmother. She was always referred to as Grandma Weaver (Grandpa Weaver passed away in 1929, Grandma Weaver in 1945), as was my grandmother’s mother who was always Grandma Koontz. My older cousin was born in 1948, three months before my older brother, and Grandma Florence declared she was NOT going to be called Grandma Weaver at this point. Grandma and her mother-in-law did not get along at all. So, it was at Craig’s birth that the use of first names came into use. While for my brother and I, the custom was applied to our paternal grandparents as well, for my cousins, they still called their paternal grandparents by their last name.

#heirlooms