Granddad Green showed me this coat of arms as a child, claiming that it was the one we had before we came to America from England, prior to the American Revolution. He painted it himself in watercolor in his workshop, where he also enjoyed woodworking, producing a fancy chair every few months. At first I thought he must have been kidding, because of the obvious reference to the 3 stags Jim Sr., Jim Jr., and Jim III, a trinity you might compare to the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. We were a family who liked to read a lot, hence the red lace surrounding the head of the stag-topped medieval warrior in Profile. Dad was a geologist, a modern history buff, and early on an Eagle Scout through a troop which met at the First Presbyterian Church. He identified our family to me as "White Anglo-Saxon Protestants", "Americans", and "Christians". A search through a Family-Coat-of-Arms outfit on the web showed that Granddad's coat of arms was the correct coat of arms for Green in England, a family which was native to Kent, perhaps near Greenwich in London at 0 degrees longitude, from which all time is referred for navigational purposes. (Click here for tourist attractions in Kent, Map of Kent, another Map of Kent.) Perhaps the first Green in America was John Greene, who settled in Boston in 1625. More research is in order, but I am inclined to suspect our original American family tree hero was actually Aderton Greene who came to Virginia in 1623, since my middle name is "Anton". It seems Aderton intended to pose as the original tallyho snake in the American Garden of Eden. For Christ's snake! (Join, or die.) This reminds me of Lorne Greene in Bonanza!, who also appeared in Battlestar Galactica, and of the star Kentaurus in the constellation Centaurus, which appears to throw up its arms with joy in the form of a bow, standing on the stars "Agena" and "Rigel Kentaurus". "The ramping Centaur: far forth his bow is bent into the blue of Heaven..." (From Star Names by Richard Hinkley Allan, Dover). Perhaps the coat of arms means to suggest a red-headed league of men with red wigs which made them dear to each other. (Attractions in Kent.) Recently, I have begun to wonder if my father's side of the family was actually descended from the taller Norman French who came to the south of England in 1066, because his people were about 5' 9.5" tall instead of 5'7", which I suspect is more typical for the actual Anglo-Saxons as I have seen them in documentary videos and elsewhere.
Another coat of arms for the Green clan features 3 thorns piercing a heart flanked by 2 boys with big red wigs, indicating that the Greens for Christ's snake may have been unpopular in England. The 2nd Norman king William II was shot through the head with an arrow in a hunting accident, somewhat as shown to the left. Note that the feathered shaft seems to enter the head from above, as if the arrow were sent to "get him down" and reduce his height. However, the name "Green" is said by the heraldry people to be of Anglo-Saxon origin. I suspect that we were "green" after "plants" that put down roots, hence "the Plantagenets". I suppose we were French-speaking for a couple of centuries, and about as popular in England for some time as James Arness in The Thing. In today's world, however, we are more like Gulliver in Gulliver's Travels, a huge man among the Lilliputians and a small one in Brobdinnag. I note that the Anglo Saxons were associated with the legend of Beowulf, the title of which reminds me of my own legend of BeoWUF. "There laid they down their darling lord on the breast of the boat, the breaker-of-rings, by the mast the mighty one." I suspect the Anglo-Saxons were historically typically a little shorter than the Scots, who were perhaps 5' 8" on the average. Thus my hypothetical Anglo-Normans, actually Plantagenets, came to America from Kent in the South of England, partly Sir Lancelot stuff looking for a new world to conquer, then finally married in to Mom's Mayfield side of the family, which were Hessian mercenaries from Germany that fought eventually with George Washington, so that I am 5' 10.5" tall, or six feet in cowboy boots. The Hessians wore "conehead" helmets in the first phases of the revolutionary war until they joined George Washington after he defeated them in battle. Humerously, I seem to appear in S. Monocerotis above the Cone Nebula in NGC 2264, above my first wife Susan and our first child well down on the slope of the Cone to the viewer's left, as can be seen in Time-Life's book Between the Stars. It shows me as a kind of Conehead wafted above all by his WUF-ballon resume and many books. The coat of arms associated with the Hessians featured a lion striped in red and white over a blue background. The actual history and origin of the relative physical stature of European types is still somewhat unclear to me, though it seems to offer tantalizing genealogical clues. Grandma Green's "Gesundheit!" calls were probably to clue me in that the family was part German, like Benjamin Franklin's Pennsylvania Dutch. At any rate, Dad was a typical World War II American Lieutenant in Eisenhower's army, with parents who were proud of his descent from heroes of the American Revolution, namely James Green, born 1755 to 1760 who died in 1821, a Revolutionary war soldier in Captain Robert Porter's Company from Tryon County, North Carolina buried in Bond County, Illinois, in the Old Green Graveyard, nine miles southwest of Greenville, Illinois. We American young ones, however, were raised in Kansas by our schoolmasters as the children of the New World of Lincoln's Army of the Republic and sons of Eisenhower's army, ever for civil rights and racial equality, encouraged to work for the general happiness of all. Church, however, unlike school, remained as a comparatively nationalist institution for European types, nominally the note-writing, tie-wearing and revolutionary Presbyterian Scots, while school and the universities emphasized the English language, American history, and scientific knowledge with business and technical skills as the bases for internal cooperation in our society at large. As a people disinclined to submit to English rule for centuries, the Scots must have been one of the focal rallying points for the original American revolutionaries and their resistance to British rule. I have put the Zeke Clam Sex in Space stag show behind the coat-of-arms as a marvel for the contemplation of posterity.
Scholarship was important to us, and sex was not to be indecently emphasized. I remember how my 7-year old brother David claimed at the table one day that he had learned a new swear word, beginning with "V". Dad looked at Mom, and Mom looked at Dad, and we all thought as hard we could, and we could think of no such swear word. So Dad says: "Well, David, there is no swear word beginning with a V. What was it, anyway?" Then David says "Vuck!" It really upset Dad, who did not like barnyard swear words applied to the glorious passions of the Lord and his angels. It was not until 1991 or so that I discovered the Sex in Space show material in astrophotography. It turns out that the constellation drama on the celestial sphere is sub-illustrated by imaging nebulae and imaging galaxies, and that in some sectors we find the passions of the Lord and his angels as the dominant theme, hence Sex in Space, Ape-to-Angel drama, Pursuit of the Angels by the Glorious Knight of the Stars, complete with illustrated worlds like John Carter on Mars, described as the planet "Barsoom" by Edgar Rice Burroughs. Incidentally, I recently visited my old high school and junior high, John Marshall. The sensitive art on the front of the building lept into view, and the sign in front of the building seemed to say: MARSHALL.

Grandad Green was an artist who kept books on how to paint at home, including books on perspective and drawing with the pencil for pre-watercolor studies. I remember learning to draw houses from it.

Walking through the old Green-Mayfield neighborhood today, in late March of 2003, Swing Low, Sweet Chariot came to mind as I walked through the blossoms of the Ides of March and the old family homes. In Photo Gallery you can see it...a band of angels coming after me, coming for to carry me home....
Back to the Future!