Serendipity

Both my parents are from Savannah and so was John Sengstacke, the owner ofThe Chicago Daily Defender when my father was the editor in the 1950s. Last week, we held a family reunion in the city, which was well attended. The Ralph Mark Gilbert Civll Rights Museum there is housed in the old Guaranty Life Insurance Building which my grandfather Scott built in 1914. He worked there until the week he died in 1961.

After the reunion, my husband and I spent a few days on St Simons Island, one of the Georgia Sea Islands. We had hoped to see some vestige of the Geechee-Gullah culture but there’s not much left. One day we took a bike ride out to Fort Fredrica, where the English, led by Oglethorpe, stopped the northern march of the Spanish in 1742. The fort is now a national monument on lovely grounds by the river. Wandering among the moss-covered oaks, we saw a stone obelisk labeled “Abbott” , and in the visitor’s center, we found a book in the” Images of America” series written by Myiti Sengstacke Rice, about The Defender. It turns out that Robert Abbott, the founder of The Defender, was born on the island and erected this monument to his parents in 1929, well before the government owned the property. In the book is one of the youngest pictures that I have ever seen of my father. Hardly what I expected to find in the visitor’s center for an 18th century English fort. See below.