It would be a shame if the only thing my Uncle Wint was remembered for was shooting Mama Maude, because he was much more than just a man who shot his mother.
Wint was a tall, skinny farm boy who had used his fists a lot growing up, mainly because his younger brother, my dad, often started fights by mouthing off to far tougher guys at Springway or in the Gainesville Mill Village that Wint (two years older) had to step in and finish. Wint, who always won, decided that he would become a prize fighter so he worked hard chopping wood, running, doing pushups and eating mainly lettuce, which he mistakenly thought was full of vitamins and nutrients. When he was twenty and had the physique of a beanpole, a boxing promoter, for reasons known only to God, signed him up for a fight. He was well on his way to getting killed in the first round when my dad threw in the towel for him.In 1954, when I was five years old and Wint was in his twenties, my Papa Bonnell took me on the bus from Gainesville, Georgia, to Miami where Wint was working for a newspaper and attending college. I remember only two things about that trip: Papa taught me how to pee in a commode in the bus station without making a splash; and Aunt Evelyn said that Wint was the neatest spaghetti-eater she had ever seen. I felt proud for Wint that a woman could love him so much that she would say a great thing like that about him. Papa and I watched him twist spaghetti onto his fork and it was amazing. I had never seen anything so neat. I figured a man who had such manners could probably also pee without making a splash, just like me and Papa.
Wint made his living as a layout man for newspapers, using scissors and glue to arrange items on the pages before they were sent to the printing press. He earned high wages as a strikebreaker at newspapers in the Midwest, but his heart was in Georgia, so he came back home to Gainesville and lived in a three-room shanty behind Papa Bonnell's house on Hancock Avenue for many years while commuting to his job at the Atlanta Constitution and attending Marshall Law School. He eventually graduated from Marshall, but failed the bar exam. Being a Reynolds, he decided to teach those people a lesson by never taking their blasted test again! So he never became a lawyer.
When Wint was in his 30's and I was 12, we convinced ourselves that the shiny specks in the granite in his backyard in Atlanta were gold. At either his suggestion or mine--I forget which--we got some hammers, busted up the boulders and put the chips on the stove in frying pans to melt the gold out of the granite. But the only thing that melted was Aunt Evelyn who came in from her job at Rich's department store to find rocks sizzling on her stove. She promptly threw us, our rocks and the frying pans out of the house.
As a young teen, I responded to an ad in Grit by a "real Nashville songwriter" who promised to put music to any poem for twenty-five dollars. I sent him the money and a poem I had written about a girl breaking my heart. Sure enough, in a few weeks, I received a 45 rpm record in the mail--my words, set to music; and there was my name in big letters on the label. Uncle Wint was so excited about my accomplishment that he wrote some songs, too, and sent them to the same company. (At fifteen, I was already working in radio and played "Song For A Rainy Day" by Randy Reynolds on my show one Sunday morning. It being a pathetically bad song, my boss Mr. Rick had a conniption and I never made that mistake again.)
Eventually, Wint moved to Alaska without his wife and four children and became a baker. His love affair with Alaska was off and on for the rest of his life--he'd periodically spend a few years there, then a few years back in Atlanta. Baking became one of his two great passions, along with coaching Little League baseball.
His love affairs with his wives were off and on, too. Both divorced him, or he them (I wasn't in the loop) but from time to time he moved back in with one ex-wife or the other.
When Wint was in his 40's he bought, on the spur of the moment, two huge motorcyles--one for his teenaged son Danny and one for himself. He had no experience with motorcycles but it fit the image of what he wanted to be at the time.
When he got a dog, it was a ferocious German Shepard named Jim. After Jim's demise he got two St. Bernards even though he was an apartment dweller at the time.
When he got upset with how things were going in this country, he decided that only one man had the solution: Dirty Harry. So he bought a .44 magnum revolver just like Dirty Harry's and made it clear that he would use it to enforce the peace if he ever got the chance.
His chance came soon enough.
In 1985, after Papa Bonnell's Alzheimer's got so bad that he had to be sent to the nursing home, Mama Maude and my Aunt Katrina (who was widowed by then) lived together at 99 Hancock Avenue in Gainesville. Mama Maude took a taxi to the nursing home to sit with Papa all day every day while Katrina was at work. Night after night, the ladies came home exhausted, went straight to bed and lay there waiting for sleep and worrying about various things they heard in the dark. They convinced themselves they were hearing someone trying to break into the house. It never occurred to them that if someone was really trying to break in, he must have been the most incompetent burglar of all time because he tried every night and never actually got in. They felt they needed protection. So they called Dirty Harry.It was late evening and Mama Maude had been at the nursing home all day. Katrina was out with friends. Wint had been summoned to bring his .44 and the plan was for him to sit up all night and wait for the break-in and then catch or shoot the intruder.
He was careful with the loaded gun, placing it atop the pile of clothes he was lugging in from the car. When Mama Maude opened the screen door for him the gun fell off the basket of clothes, hit the porch and fired. Cement and bullet fragments tore up Mama Maude's leg.
By the time the emergency room doctors had patched her up and assigned her to a wheelchair another trauma unit was reviving Wint who had worked himself into a state worse than his mama's and fainted. (Out of courtesy, or a lack of rules, no one had called the police to report the gunshot wound, so there were no legal repercussions.)
Mama Maude, who lived another five years, has descendants scattered all across the globe now, a majority of them too young to remember her.
Even fewer remember Uncle Wint who lived another 17 years, only to be robbed by a real intruder--Alzheimer's. Some, not all, of his great-grandneices and -nephews may have heard his name in connection with the story of the night he accidentally shot Mama Maude. But there is so much more to his story than that!
My Uncle Wint was a man who followed his dreams, and didn't stay down when they didn't work out. He was a man who got a law degree; tried boxing, politics, song-writing and searching for gold in his backyard. He coached Little League. He ran a bakery. He was Dirty Harry and Easy Rider and Andy of Mayberry all rolled into one. He treated his nephew like a son. And he ate spaghetti neater than anyone.
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Brooke Abercrombie- Batt Thanks for sharing! I enjoyed reading this!
Diana
Taylor That was lovely. I loved that man! He could always make me
smile.
Kimberly
Ann Quinn and I was there the evening he shot Mama Maude.. funny or
not so funny story.. when I heard the shot, Little Eddie told me that Mama
Maude had been shot so of course I got on the phone to call the police because
I thought there was a crazy man outside shooting. Wint walked in the door and
saw me and asked me who I was calling I said the police and he replied, put the
damn phone down I shot her. I put the phone down and thought ohhhhhhhh my God,
my life is turning into a Sally Raphael show... lol
Bonnell Winfred Reynolds, 1929-2006
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