Editor’s note: This column first appeared May 4, 2019.
Roots are good. Roots are important. And sometimes, it’s important to remember our family roots and reflect in wonder upon the far-reaching connections we have with other people — or, even the world.
(Warning: This may qualify as a weird sort of celebrity-encounter column, but hang with it. There’s a lot of cool history here.)
I was the fifth generation to live on our family ranch at Flournoy, located about 14 miles west of Corning. My great-grandfather, Jesse Wolcott, purchased several surrounding homesteads somewhere around the turn of the 20th century, resulting in a 960-acre ranch that I’ll always think of as home.
In those days, the fields had names — usually the name of the family that had homesteaded the parcel in the first place. On our ranch, we had the Loutz field, the Hamilton 80 and, perhaps most special of all, the Hanks Place.
The Hanks Place was homesteaded by a man named, believe it or not, Daniel Boone Hanks. A little research shows he came here from Booneville, Kentucky, in the late 19th century and was named after the famous frontiersman many of us remember from grade school.
The Hanks Place consisted of a small two-bedroom home surrounded by oak trees just beyond a bluff overlooking a small creek and a beautiful valley. Table Mountain has nothing on this site in terms of wildflowers; I’m lucky enough to visit this place from time to time, and I must admit, Daniel Boone Hanks had a tremendous eye for beauty.
(By the way, with a name that great, merely calling him “Hanks” would never do; he must be referenced as “Daniel Boone Hanks” at every opportunity.)
In April 1920, after Daniel Boone Hanks and his wife, Mary, had raised 11 children in that house, he passed away. His house — atop sled-runners — was pulled by a tractor and moved about a mile to the front part of the ranch. It still stands about a half-mile west of the Flournoy School, and it was my first home.
Flash ahead to the mid-1980s. My parents, Elwyn and Darlene Wolcott, were home on the ranch one day when a visitor showed up. He introduced himself as Amos Hanks and said he was trying to find his childhood home; he thought it was close by, but wasn’t sure exactly where, and was hoping my parents might recognize his last name and offer some advice.
My dad, of course, knew just the place Amos Hanks was talking about. He drove him through the hills to that well-hidden corner of the ranch — passing his towed-away childhood home on the way — and regaled Amos with stories of his grandfather, Daniel Boone Hanks.
Amos Hanks was visibly moved by all of this. He found a few mementos from the family homestead — an old hinge where a gate once hung, and a couple odds and ends — and thanked my dad for the visit to the Hanks Place.
He returned every year for a spell. Finally, around 1991, he told my father this would probably be his final trip, as he’d been quite ill for a while and probably wouldn’t make it back another year. He mentioned he was writing a book and was going to mention my dad in it.
Then, practically as an aside, he said, “I wouldn’t have lived this long if my son wasn’t an actor.”
Curious, my dad asked who his son was.
Amos Hanks seemed startled by the question, as if shocked he’d never mentioned this fact to my dad in the past.
“Oh. Tom Hanks,” Amos Hanks said. “Tom Hanks is my son.”
Amos Mefford Hanks — grandson of Daniel Boone Hanks, son of Ernest and Gladys Hanks and father of Thomas Jeffrey Hanks, the Academy Award-winning actor — died in 1992 and is buried in the Paskenta Cemetery about 18 miles west of Corning, just a few tombstones down from his grandfather, Daniel Boone Hanks, and surrounded by numerous members of the Hanks family.
Roots, and connections, are truly amazing, and capable of surprising us when we least expect. And if Tom Hanks happens to see this and wants to visit his great-grandfather’s homestead someday, I’m guessing we could probably make that happen.
Daniel Boone Hanks would have wanted it that way.
Mike Wolcott is editor of the Enterprise-Record. He can be reached at mwolcott@chicoer.com. He’ll be back with a new column next week.
