Fred Cassidy

[Wilson Gray]

Thank you for your reply, Joan. I should have made clear that I have
seen pictures of Professor Cassidy and my impression has always been
that he was a white man. But, of course, looks mean nothing, once a
person is born with a sufficiecy of European features. Otherwise, I
wouldn't have been motivated to question M. If he'd been a black man
of such stature, I would have expected to see him featured in an
article in _Ebony_, as Johnny Otis, Jennifer Beals, Mariah Carey,
Tiger Woods, Paula Abdul, Johnny Mathis, etc. have been.

That's an interesting question, Larry. The answer turned out to be
[+Jewish], in the case of that guy, Allen, whose father used to coach
the L.A. Rams, you may recall.

-Wilson

On 11/2/06, Joan H. Hall <jdhall at wisc.edu> wrote:
> ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       "Joan H. Hall" <jdhall at WISC.EDU>
> Subject:      Fred Cassidy
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> If you'd like to see a photo of Fred Cassidy, go to the DARE web page
> (http://polyglot.lss.wisc.edu/dare/dare.html) and click on "Tribute to
> FGC" on the left.
> The following is from my obituary for Fred in the 2001 volume of
> /Dictionaries/:
>
> "On his mother's side, Fred descended from the Gomes-Casseres family in
> Kingston, a branch of the Portuguese Gomes family that had taken refuge
> from the Inquisition by dispersing to France, Holland, and, in the 17th
> century, to the New World. The marriage of Manuel Gomes and Isabel de
> Caceres yielded nine children, one of whom settled in Curacao. He in
> turn had ten sons who became widely known as 'the ten Gomes Casseres
> brothers,' whose business enterprises spread throughout the West Indies.
> One of those brothers, Fred's grandfather, settled in Jamaica."
>
> Fred moved from Jamaica to Akron, Ohio, when he was eleven, but he spent
> many months in Jamaica later when he was working on the /Jamaica Talk/
> (1961) and the /Dictionary of Jamaican English/ (1967, with Robert
> LePage). When he was in his eighties he took his son and family to
> Jamaica for a visit; while looking around in a fairly deserted cemetery,
> he was accosted by a young Black man who tried to rob him. Fred's
> facility with the Creole had never left him, and he chewed the fellow
> out, saying his mother would be ashamed of him. The man fled.
>
> Joan Hall
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>


--
Everybody says, "How hard it is that we have to die"---a strange
complaint to come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
-----
Whoever has lived long enough to find out what life is knows how deep
a debt of gratitude we owe to Adam, the first great benefactor of our
race. He brought death into the world.

--Sam Clemens

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