I was talking to Mario Samorano, the lead sales associate at the Magnolia Post Office, one day recently when he made a suggestion. "We've got a client," Samorano said, "who tells me he was actually born in a post office. Why don't you talk to him?"
That led me to the door of Belmont Forsythe's condominium and the start of a fascinating story.
As I entered the condo, the first thing I noticed were the many military medals framed and hanging on the wall, along with copies of pictures and articles detailing Forsythe's career. Moving farther into his living quarters, I saw that the walls were actually decorated with quilts, over which hung framed pictures that I first mistook for painted artwork or perhaps some type of print. Closer examination revealed that they were needlepoint.
Forsythe is now 85 years old, tall and thin with a full, gray beard. He walks with the aid of a cane, but his resolve is strong.
"How did you end up being born in the post office?" I asked.
"My mother was the postmaster and she waited too long, so she had me in the back of the post office," Forsythe told me. "I was born in the little town of Belton, Ky., in Muhlenberg County." I recognized the county name from a John Prine song; it's located in the southeastern part of the state where they mine coal.
Then he quizzed, "Have you ever heard of Tennessee Ernie Ford and his song '16 Tons'?"
I had; it told the story of hard work in the coal mines and the almost indentured slavery the miners worked under because "they owed their soul to the company store."
"Belton was that kind of town," Forsythe explained.
Fortunately, his father wasn't one of those who had to go down into the mine. P.A. Forsythe, was the first postmaster of Belmont by proclamation "signed and authorized by Woodrow Wilson." When I asked what the P.A. stood for, Forsythe told me "Pearl Aloysius - the only time he ever hit me, was when I called him Aloysius once."
Belmont's mother, Ethyl Mallory Forsythe, took over the postmaster job from her husband. As a little boy, Belmont was put to work in the post office where he'd been born. When he was just 5 or 6, his job was emptying mail bags for a penny apiece. By the time he'd gathered enough empty sacks to return in a bundle, he'd made 20 cents.
He remembers, "back in 1925 or 1927," going by his grandmother's frame house in Kentucky with its porch and swing. "Us kids used to beg my grandmother to tell stories about Lincoln, or watching Civil War battles, which she'd witnessed firsthand. She was passing on an oral history."
Another thing Forsythe remembered was that, although his family weren't musicians, they enjoyed listening to old phonograph recordings of classical music and many famous operas.
Forsythe attended Western Kentucky State Teachers College, which he graduated from in 1940. After graduating, Forsythe taught math and band. (He'd been involved in both his high-school band and the band at Western Kentucky College.) However, when Pearl Harbor was attacked, he enlisted in the U.S. Marine Corps and started his professional military career as a buck private. As his career advanced, he found himself first as a drill instructor and then sent to Washington, D.C., as a mathematics instructor. (Somewhere in there he married and began building a family that now includes four children, seven grandchildren and three great-grandchildren.)
After 25 years in the service, Forsythe retired as a lieutenant colonel, having transferred from the Marine Corps to the U.S. Army. He then took a position as a Junior ROTC commander at the Punahou School in Honolulu. Eventually he left that in 1972 and moved to Seattle.
He also began documenting his life through tape recordings and writings, preserving memories that spanned visits to 103 countries, service in World War II and Korea and visits with many well-known people, including John Phillip Sousa, Frank Sinatra and Ed McMahon.
"Before I quit and die," Forsythe told me, "I wanted to leave, for my grandchildren and great-grandchildren, the stories of my life, much like the stories I used to hear from my grandmother."
The recordings and writings have taken Forsythe three or four years to complete, and each set is contained on five-and-a-half hours of tape. Copies have gone to each of his children and the library at the Western Kentucky State Teachers College, where they can be found listed as "The Frosythe Saga of Civilian and Military Life."
Forsythe told me that he once had an impressive collection of classical music tapes, but unfortunately they were all destroyed in a fire while he was stationed in Japan. He decided that he could never replace that collection (besides, he'd already collected it once), so he'd collect something different. He began to collect jazz and has amassed a collection of recordings and books, many of them foreign, on the scholarly origins of jazz.
He now considers himself "a professional semi-authority." Using his skills as a teacher, he lectured at many high schools about the development of this uniquely American music. "Music is all that saves me now," he said.
As we talked, it became apparent that Forsythe is very intelligent and has multiple stories about many subjects. When I asked about the quilts and needlepoint hanging on the walls, he told me how he had originally helped his mother make quilts back in Kentucky. While none of the quilts on the walls are those he made, the needlepoint was all done by him.
"I broke my neck in 1973 from a fall in the house. I had to sit motionless in a brace for hours every day, so as therapy I started needlepoint. My first piece was that rose by the door."
Forsythe has traveled far and seen many things from that start in the back of a post office in the little coal town in Kentucky so long ago.
You never know what stories you'll run across if you just take the time to listen.
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