Arnold Zwicky's Blog

Another photo of Ann Daingerfield Zwicky (for her grand-daughter, Opal), this one taken in Lexington KY some time in the 1970s: Ann and me with Anne Brent Winn at her house on Fayette Park:

(We are all drinking bourbon. This was Kentucky.)

Now: a major name confusion. In my last Ann posting, I wrote about Ann’s aunt Ann, Ann Walcutt Winn, and her husband Jack, Judge John J. Winn. Now we have an Anne Winn, who happens to have been married to a John Winn, John Blandford Winn Jr. (To add some spice to things, when they were young, my Ann’s father, Keene, was a beau of Anne Mason Brent’s — as Anne Brent Winn was then.)

Anne Mason Brent (1908-2001) was the first of the three children, all daughters, of  Charles Scott Brent II (1881-1936) and Anne Penn Chew Mason (1879-1960); the names are important, as we’ll see. (To start with, Anne got her first name and her middle name from her mother. Using mother’s family name as a child’s middle name is a common pattern in American naming, at least in certain regions and social classes. Note that my daughter’s middle name is Daingerfield, her mother’s family name, and that her mother’s middle name, before she married me, was Walcutt, her mother’s family name: Ann Walcutt Daingerfield, then Elizabeth Daingerfield Zwicky — but Elizabeth kept her name when she married, while Ann took mine.)

In turn, Anne Brent Winn and John B. Winn (Jr.) (ca. 1907 – 1981), who married in 1930, had three children, twins born in 1932 — John Blanton Winn III, known as Jock, and Charles Scott Brent Winn (Charles Scott from his grandfather, plus his mother’s family name, Brent), known as Brent — and Anne Mason Winn (Anne Mason from her mother, which means that her name incorporates her grandmother‘s family name, Mason), known as Masey, who is now Anne Winn Benjamin. Masey , who’s about my age, and her husband run a stud farm in New Zealand; the horse connection runs throughout this family, as it does the Daingerfields. (Back on the name front, they named one of their children Anne Mason Benjamin. Even I, who have known the family for decades, have trouble keeping a grip on the names.)

To get back to Anne Winn, she was a stylish, socially prominent, charming but with a sharp edge, and a horsewoman all her life; she was still riding to the hounds when she was in her 70s.

From a recent flower blog posting on all-white gardens:

Even Anne Winn, a grande dame of Lexington, Kentucky, society, was mildly apologetic for her all-white garden. She told me she’d designed and planted it to prepare for her daughter’s wedding [that would be Masey’s wedding] and/but liked it so much she kept it after the rice was thrown.

Anne once told me that she was walking on the street in Lexington, came to Christ Church Cathedral (Episcopal), realized there was a funeral going on, and went in, on the assumption that the deceased would be an acquaintance of hers. She was right.

As for the sharp edge: Anne disliked Keene’s second wife, Velma (yes, I have a stepmother-in-law), for a variety of reasons, mostly having to do with her judgment that Velma was unsuitable for him (tacky, racist, and not very smart). One manifestation of Anne’s antipathy to Velma was that she almost never called her by her right name: Zelda, Zelma, Wilma, Vilda, whatever. (Just like Endora in the tv show Bewitched, who almost never got her son-in-law Darrin’s name right: Durwood, Darwin, Dum-Dum, etc.)

Anne and Ann Walcutt Winn traveled in many of the same social circles, so there was plenty of room for confusion. Then came the day when Ann Walcutt Winn went to a women’s lunch, stood up to fetch her coat, had a massive heart attack, and died on the spot. Before the day was out, people were calling the Winn house in Lexington (rather than the Winn house in Mount Sterling or the Miller house in Lexington) to offer condolences to John B. Winn (rather than to Jack Winn or to Ann Walcutt Winn’s son Harry B. Miller Jr.). At first, Anne answered the phone, which led to shock on the part of the callers, but then she passed this duty on to other members of the household. Later came the condolence letters to the family; Anne saved one that spoke glowingly of her and promised to pray for her beautiful soul.

When my Ann died, in January 1985, we had a memorial service for her at St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church, by the OSU campus in Columbus, and then a gathering, a kind of wake, at my house. Keene was too devastated by her death to face up to the trip to Columbus, especially on a bitter-cold day, and cope with these events, but Anne Winn volunteered to represent Lexington family and friends on this sad occasion, and drove up to grieve with us. It was a great gift.

This entry was posted on January 2, 2012 at 9:50 am and is filed under My life, Names. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.