I received over 30 emails last night asking about the backstory of my song Mr. Tweedy. The story is an achingly sad one and was told to me by my father days before he died on Christmas Eve 2004. He was haunted by it for decades and needed to get it off his chest I think. Ralph Douglas Tweedy was a quiet, gentle Englishman who came from a family populated by either artists or military men. Neither vocation agreed with him so in the 1920s he immigrated to the U.S. and settled near Sacramento. My grandfather had recently immigrated to the same area where he began to experiment with growing vegetables in steam heated greenhouses. Mr. Tweedy had a deep love for the soil and was employed by my grandfather as his assistant. The two developed a life long friendship that lasted until their deaths. In 1923 the growing operation was moved to Ocean St. in Santa Cruz near where Holy Cross cemetery is now. The farm thrived for many years and made grandpa a wealthy man. Unfortunately, his passion for women and high living eventually exhausted his fortunes and, in the late 1940s, both he and Mr. Tweedy moved in with my parents on La Madrona Drive. There was a small, two room apartment in the attic of the old house where Tweedy lived happily and became part of the family. He and Grandpa tended to the property when my father was relocated to be a flight trainer in Louisiana during the Korean War. When my parents returned, Lavish gardens of flowers and green houses had been built by the two ageing Englishmen, including an entire hillside of irises, Tweedys favorite flower. Mr. Tweedy eventually started acting not quite right and began wandering around the neighborhood at all hours of the night and finally injured his leg quite badly on a neighbors barbed wire fence. My grandpa decided it would be best if he were locked inside the attic apartment at night to keep him from wandering. What everyone assumed was a gradual psychosis was probably the onset of severe alzheimers.Tweedy would sit near the window all night gazing out at his fields of irises and cry into the darkness. One night in the early sixties, he managed to pry the attic window open and fell onto the driveway to his death. My father found the body when he arose for work in the morning. My family never got over it. Grandpa fell quickly into depression and died two months later. My mother was sedated for over a year. I was a tiny child and was told that Tweedy had to be put in a home. The last time I visited Santa Cruz, I found his tiny grave tucked into a corner of Holy Cross Cemetery under a willow tree, close to the river and a few hundred yards from where grandpas farm had been. I have many of his sister Evelyns water colors in my home today. This has been a long tale and I hope I havent bored everyone to death. It needed to be told though. I was a sobbing wreck writing the song and I hope it will stand as a tribute to a wonderful, forgotten gardener by whom I have always been haunted.
Posted on: Sat, 09 Aug 2014 17:12:30 +0000
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