Feb 15, 2016

A little bit of background in character sketches can go a long way; but, a family portrait can shape a novel. - Gary H. Johnson, Jr.

Professor Elvis Hatcher McClanahan 

Born 1974 in Memphis to Lynn Eugenia McClanahan (27 years old). 

Father, Army Chief Warrant Officer (W-4) Trace Hatcher killed on June 9, 1973, piloting a UH-1 Iroquois Med-Evac chopper in an aircraft convoy. Two of the six evac helicopters were hit by incoming rocket fire – one held John Paul Vann, director of the U.S. Second Regional Assistance Group. All three A-1 Skyraider attack choppers escorting the convoy were downed just south of Kon Tum. 

Called Hatch by his associates, Elvis McClanahan earned his PH.D. in Oriental Studies from Oxford University in 1998 after his groundbreaking efforts at the University of Arkansas. After high school, Hatch enrolled in the University of Tennessee in 1991 to study history. Following his mother’s death in a hospital shooting where she served as a lifelong attending, Hatch moved toward religious studies and applied for a scholarship to the burgeoning Arabic Studies program at University of Arkansas and was accepted in 1992. After a knee injury ended his soccer career in 1993, Hatch moved towards a degree focus in Middle Eastern Studies after being offered a full scholarship to the newly established King Fahd Center Fulbright Program in 1994. Hatch graduated in May of 1996, Summa Cum Laude – ranked 27th in a class of just under 6,000. He was awarded a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford to continue his Oriental Studies and from July of 1996 through April of 1998 he worked with a focus on linguistics, medieval literature, Islamic Studies. Following graduation, Hatch accepted a grant from the University of Arkansas, known as the Clinton-Fahd award to conduct research in North Africa. By the year 2000, Hatch released his first research in a book released by Simon & Schuster called Barbar: The Confederacy that Rocked Islam to critical acclaim. In early 2001, following a round of press junkets in America and England, Hatch received a fellowship to the American University of Beirut, where he would teach and work as a photo journalist for five years. In 2003, he met Elena Chehab, a Maronite Christian from Tripoli, Lebanon. In late July of 2006, Elena was killed in Tyre by incoming Israeli fire while working with Hatch to document the 33-day war. Following the funeral, Hatch traveled to Constantinople and then back to Arkansas. After a meeting with Professor Cohen Kaspit, his mentor, he contracted with the University of Arkansas to work in North Africa to uncover the economic history of slavery in the Umayyad period. Flush with a book deal, Hatch purchased a mountain retreat in Chefchaouen, Morocco. 

Before leaving, Professor Silver introduced himself and provided Hatch with a mission to attain Arabic manuscripts being sold on the black market to be cataloged by the University of Arkansas, Oxford & Cambridge in an attempt to acquire more information on the lost scholarship of numerous historiographers of Islamic Literature. The mission was sanctioned by the U.S. State Department in a program started by an executive order of Bill Clinton. He was provided with a full access pass to the libraries and shrines from Morocco to the Sinai along with a grant purse of $100,000 in $100 bills for black market purchases.

Hatch always wore a necklace, inherited from his mother – the one thing he treasured. The two ruby teeth were set with simple iron rings about their center and linked to a silver chain. A McClanahan family heirloom passed down after the Civil War saw his ancestor’s Hoe press serve the Memphis Appeal before coming to a rest in Macon, Georgia Telegraph’s print warehouse in 1865.

http://www.nytimes.com/1865/07/10/news/death-of-col-john-r-mcclanahan.html

The McClanahan family Saga...

In 1849, after the Mexican American war, Col. John Reid McClanahan fell in love with Rebecca Taylor, the sister of James R. Taylor, who had married John’s sister Sarah in 1846. They married in secret in 1856 and had a son, named Robert Reid McClanahan in 1858.  In 1862, John sent Rebecca and his four-year-old son Robert to a ranch he owned in Austin, Texas to wait out the war.

In March 1864, John Reid McClanahan recruited his younger brother, John Robert McClanahan, to provide correspondence from the ongoing naval battle against the Union blockade. Slipping the blockade, John Robert traveled to Funchal, Madeira, where he took a post in October aboard the newly commissioned CSS Shenandoah. Reporting on the Shenandoah’s exploits for the Memphis Appeal, his letters relating the exploits of the raider and its six engagements with union vessels were sent from the Cape of Good Hope in January 1865. The letters reached John on June 25, 1865, housed in a red case, engraved with Arabic script purchased by John Robert. On June 27, 1865, John Reid sent word to his love Rebecca Taylor and his son Robert that he would soon sell the Memphis Appeal and travel to Texas to retire. Cash, a pocket watch, and a diary would be sent by post within the same red case he received his brothers letters from the Shenandoah. On June 28, John Reid sent correspondences addressed to John Robert McClanahan to (Shadow) Henry Watterson with instructions to contact his brother on the CSS Shenandoah, when it ports in San Francisco to surrender...and to provide him with directions to his Austin, Texas ranch that he might meet his wife Rebecca and the son he named for him. That day, John Reid would meet Benjamin Dill to discuss buyout options for The Appeal. The following day, he was found beaten to death in an alley, both legs and arms broken, jaw crushed. The papers claimed he had fallen from his window.

Upon John Robert McClanahan’s return to Memphis in February 1870, he set out to meet Henry Watterson in Louisville, Kentucky, where he agreed to send stories to the Louisville Courier Journal from Austin, Texas. In October 1871, Robert McClanahan, bearing news of the death of John Reid, met with Rebecca McClanahan. The two married on New Year’s Day 1872. Robert Reid McClanahan was sixteen-years-old and upon the death of his mother and step-father in 1891 to yellow fever, inherited the ranch, married Elynn Forster McGill and fathered three daughters and one son. He named his son for his father, John Reid McClanahan. In late 1897, At 41 years of age, Robert Reid McClanahan accepted a post for the Louisville Courier Journal out of Kentucky as photographer and journalist for an expedition to Cuba to document the exploits of Theodore Roosevelt’s Rough Riders. His son John Reid McClanahan was 2 years old when his father was killed on San Juan Hill, covering the mismatch. His remains, along with a red case he used to keep family photos, pencils and charcoal, were returned to Elynn Forster McClanahan in January of 1899.

A strong businesswoman, Elynn Forster McClanahan sold the ranch and started a textile business in Memphis, Tennessee, which eventually gained a government contract to provide rucksacks and uniforms for military personnel in 1915.

In 1922, John Reid McClanahan joined the U.S. Navy as an interpreter at the age of 25, following his Oriental Studies in Arabic and Hebrew at Harvard University. He never saw combat in the military, but rose to the rank of Lieutenant Commander before retiring in 1930 to pursue a medical degree.

Elynn Forster McClanahan died in 1935, leaving the entirety of her estate to her son John Reid McClanahan.

The following year, in 1936, Dr. John Reid McClanahan established a family practice in Memphis and would hire the woman he would soon marry. In 1937, at the age of 41, Dr. John Reid McClanahan married the 21 year old beauty, Tara Eugenia MacDuffie of North Carolina he had hired the previous year and retired to travel the world. Nine years later after touring the ports South America, Australia, the Orient and, with the end of World War II, the Mediterranean, a 50 year old Dr. McClanahan and his 30 year old wife confirmed they had conceived a child and returned from the Island of Majorca off the Spanish Coast to Memphis. On the morning of July 4, 1947, Lynn Eugenia McClanahan was born. On her 11th birthday, her father, John Reid McClanahan gifted her with the red case. The following morning, Tara found her husband slumped at his writing desk and he was buried on July 7, 1958.

The McClanahan mansion in Memphis caught fire on April 12, 1969. Tara Eugenia McClanahan died of smoke inhalation, leaving the land and businesses of the McClanahan Estate to her sole heir Lynn McClanahan. Returning from Presbyterian College in South Carolina to the burned out mansion, Lynn searched for the red case her father had given her 10 years earlier. The false floor bottom where she had kept the treasure chest was gone, only the base of the case remained. Picking up the blackened red base of the case, she heard a rattling within what she thought was a solid piece, snapping the wood revealed a hollow center and within she spied two ruby teeth, two iron rings joined by a one inch metal chain. In 1970, she had a jeweler mount the conjoined iron rings to a thick cord of a silver chain in Macon, Georgia as she continued her medical studies at Mercer University.

She learned that her mother had sold the family businesses long before the fire to maintain the mansion and send her to school. With just shy of $500,000 in her account after selling the land where the mansion once stood to a family friend named Jim Taylor, Lynn Eugenia McClanahan would leave America for service to her country as a nurse in a place called Vietnam in 1972. Within months, she fell for a helicopter medivac pilot named Trace Hatcher. They planned to marry when they hit stateside. In August 1973, three months pregnant, Lynn returned to Memphis, Tennessee, bought a home and gave birth to Elvis Hatcher McClanahan on January 19, 1974.