Gordon Corbet Powell was my Uncle Bunny. He passed away this week, bringing back a flood of great memories of my childhood and young adulthood.
He was ‘Bunny’ because he was born on Easter Sunday and the nurse gave him to my grandmother saying ‘here is your little Easter bunny’ and the name stuck.
When I was older he asked me and the family if maybe we could call him UB instead of Uncle Bunny, which we did sometimes.
He was a funny and eccentric character, a woodworker and engineer. Could fix and build most anything. One of my best memories as a kid was the boat/fort he built in his back yard (right around the corner from our house) for my cousin Jim, who is just a year younger than I am. This was a real solidly built building type fort in the shape of a boat, with a deck and bunks and a bridge to stand on top of and pretend to drive the boat.
They moved up to Mill Valley in Marin County, California in the 60’s and it was great fun to visit them there. Hiking up Mt. Tamapais and seeing ‘black bread’ in a little alpine restaurant on the way for the first time.
He founded the Marin Zeppelin Society, which was only open to people who had survived lighter than air disasters. Of course, since all who were alive had survived everything, anyone could join. It was a joke lost on some people.
My father, who was in aviation his whole life, actually got the MZS group a ride on the Goodyear blimp and they got a certificate and everything. The group really was just an excuse to get together with a bunch of guys and shoot the breeze at a local diner.
He did fanagle Mill Valley into putting an MZS plaque on the entry marker to the town alongside the Rotary and Lions club plaques. That always cracked me up to go into town and see that.
He built a home in Mill Valley and around that time read about the ‘Aubrey holes’ surrounding stonehenge in the UK. They are holes filled with chalk in a perfect circle some distance from Stonehenge. They were discovered I think when a certain Mr. Aubrey was walking his dog and stuck his umbrella or cane into the dirt and it had chalk on the end of it. My uncle built an aubrey hole at his new house so he would have the only aubrey hole in the colonies. THAT was his sense of humor.
The photos above were taken in Estes Park, Colorado where he spent his summers with the rest of my mother’s side of the family. He later harness raced at the Del Mar racetrack in California.
He was a great uncle. I have wonderful memories of him.