A woman of great wit and a sharp mind, Tip trained as a biochemist at nearby Whittier College, a prestigious liberal arts school of Quaker origins — though my family was totally secular. She dated fellow student Richard Nixon a few times before she began dating one of her professors, Albert Upton, the dean of the English department and a professor of Russian literature and drama.

Albert, of course, was my grandfather. (He taught Nixon and directed the future president in an undergraduate drama production.) When Albert and Tip married, the family continued as casual friends with the Nixon and Spiro Agnew families. (Later in my story I’ll share my experience with Watergate and with Nixon’s resignation.)

Albert Upton was a standout even among several larger-than-life relatives who took places of honor in my family tree. Although a professor at a school with religious roots, he was an atheist. Fluent in Russian, he was also highly respected in the field of semantics. In 1941 he authored Design for Thinking, a classic textbook for teachers. In 1960, the year I was born, the New York Times reported that the Upton Method raised the intelligence of more than two hundred students by ten points in a test group. Educators still borrow from his ideas in their quest to teach their students how to think.

Multi-talented Grandfather Albert Upton was also a dedicated outdoorsman and rancher, skilled in the art of horsewhipping to punish Jim’s and Tom’s misbehavior. My father carried on his tradition by using new versions of whipping on my brothers and me. Not that Grandpa Albert and my father were unusually cruel — whipping was common among ranching families as a form of punishment in those days.

My grandmother Tip’s father, Muzzie, was also known to crack that piece of leather from time to time. Muzzie was a character, no doubt about it. I never knew him, but I sure wish I could have. Whenever my great-grandmother held a large dinner party at the ranch house, he would take the time beforehand to hide a large pitcher of water in a bathroom that adjoined the main dining hall. Just prior to carving the main course, he would excuse himself to go to the restroom. He would shut the door and pour out into the toilet the large pitcher of water he had hidden, raising it to a height calculated to cause a loud, slow, embarrassing stream that all the guests could hear. He’d save a few drops at the end to make a realistic “dup, dup,” flush the toilet, and return to the dining hall.

By this time, the guests had run out of things to talk about and were awaiting the host’s return so they could eat. He’d take his place and begin to carve the meat. Meanwhile, the guests would be sure that he hadn’t washed his hands because they hadn’t heard a faucet running. I don’t know if they lost their appetites for the meal as a result, but as a child I thought this stunt was hysterical.

My extended family on my dad’s side was prosperous but not aristocratic, though they did live comfortably with a sense of unspoken entitlement to the simple, outdoorsy goodness of life in California. Not so my mother’s family. Her childhood was poor and life was pretty harsh. My mother’s name was Eva Jean Ingersol, though “Ingersol” was only one of several last names she went by in whatever school she was attending at the time.

Jean’s mother, Lois, was half Cherokee and had grown up on an Oklahoma reservation. Her mother was Eva Storm, a full-blooded Cherokee. My mother has told me stories of Grandma Lois, describing a small but tough woman with a keen eye for inventing, and what an invention she came up with. She raised hens and rigged up a nifty device made from two boards for quickly yanking the head off a chicken. She went through seven husbands. Each time she couldn’t maintain her marriage or was hard up for money, she would put my mother and her brother, Jim, into foster homes. When her luck would change for the better, she’d come back for them.

Lois did not spare her two children from beatings. Mom says that she and Jim would climb into the tops of trees to escape her wrath, but Lois would casually take a comfortable sitting position beneath the tree, calmly smoking a pipe. She’d remind them that eventually they would have to come down, and she’d be waiting.

As she grew older, my grandmother never did mellow. I remember her only as spiteful to my mother, but her last husband, Ernest Palmero, was kind to me. They were avid square dancers, and I remember the two of them dressed for a night of allemande lefts — she in her many layers of colorful petticoats, he in his cowboy shirt and hat. I think he also had some Native American blood, and he was a World War II hero who had been decorated enough times to fill a box of medals.

My Grandma Lois died of leukemia in 1970. That is all I know of my mother’s background except for one detail that I discovered when I was nine years old. Before she met and married my father, my mother had been married to a man who was extremely abusive to her and their two sons. Prior to this news, my sister Kim and I had no idea that our brothers, Jimmy (ten years older than I) and Ronnie (eight years older), were our half-brothers.

After my mother married my father, my brothers were adopted and given the names James Tweedy Upton (after my father) and Ronald Walker (another family name) Upton. As an adult I can see that these names were gifts to them. Names have always held great importance in my family, hence the recurrence of the same ones throughout the generations. I never considered Jim and Ron as any less than full-blood brothers and still don’t. They simply are my brothers.

My Upton-Tweedy relatives were crass, witty, jovial, sarcastic, and intelligent. I loved every minute I was with them. I wanted to stack up favorably to them and still do. And that desire, along with the desire to know that I mattered to someone, is a big part of my story.

Excerpted from "Grace Is Enough" by Willie Aames and Maylo McCaslin-Aames. Copyright 2008 Willie Aames and Maylo McCaslin-Aames. Reprinted with permission of B&H Publishing Group, Inc.

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