He was a newspaper publisher, a state senator and a son of a bitch.

He was also my grandfather.

A relatively short man— 5ʹ6ʺ if memory serves— with a shock of gorgeous white hair and translucent blue eyes, J. O. was an attractive person, bright, intensely intellectual and interested in everything around him, gregarious, with the kind of charm needed by both politicians and newspapermen interested in ferreting out the story. Much of my knowledge of my grandfather comes from my mother who was not, I believe it is safe to say, her father-in-law's greatest fan. Mother's stories often carried a whiff of the Apocrypha but in this case, at least, her version of her father-in-law's life captures enough of what I personally knew to be true of my grandfather that I tend to believe it.

Whatever the case, it is verified fact that the Monroes came from southern Illinois, somewhere around Mount Vernon, Illinois, where they were what could only be termed poor dirt farmers. The original family came to what were then the American colonies around 1720, if family lore is correct. Somewhere in the DNA is a Spaniard, for when my uncle Karl developed a rare blood disease we were told it was odd to find it in him, given his background, since the disease usually affected Basques. We figured this possible link came from a Valentine Sevier, known as the Huguenot, who left southern France—somewhere near Navarre—in the late seventeenth century and fled to England, fearing religious persecution. This Valentine begat another Valentine, who apparently came to the new world and the Sevier family moved from its initial landing somewhere in Virginia. Eventually the Seviers came to rest in Tennessee, where a John Sevier became the first governor and supposedly fought a duel with Andrew Jackson. (One family tale has Sevier and Jackson both giving away the same land parcels to their followers; another version holds that Sevier insulted Jackson's wife. Both accounts end with the two good Tennessee gentlemen deciding to go have a few drinks before the duel and the whiskey doing in each of them.