"Nana Lit the Beacons": Childhood
There was some confusion in later years about the year of Bunche’s birth. After 1940 it was given as 1904, although school and UCLA records show it as 1903. He asked his aunt Ethel for his birth certificate in the early 1940s; when she could not find it, she took the family bible, in which the birthdates of both Bunche children were entered incorrectly, to a notary to get a substitute. In a subsequent letter he asked, "And how old am I? Until you folks sent that affidavit when I got my first passport I thought I was born in 1903, but you stated it from the family bible as 1904. What is the correct date? Am I 36 or 37, and why?" Bunche appears to have accepted 1904 as his birth year, and that is what appeared on the program at his funeral, but the correct year is 1903.
the Old Mill Stream," 1910
Music was a steady diet in our household and I loved it. I recall with great vividness the rehearsals, with the whole family grouped around the old upright piano. I joined in too, though neither as child nor adult was I ever musical and had no little difficulty in carrying a tune.
Around 1907 Fred Bunch moved his young family away from Detroit, trying to make a living on his own. They settled first in Cleveland, moved to Knoxville, then to Toledo, where Bunche’s younger sister, Grace, was born, before returning to Detroit.
Less than six months after his father left, Bunche’s mother died of tuberculosis, in February 1917. She was only thirty-five years old, he was thirteen, and Grace was eight. In "The Best Advice I Ever Had," published in Reader's Digest in March 1955, Bunche recounted some of his treasured memories of his mother, including a lasting lesson she taught him a year before her death:
She had been doing a lot of thinking lately, she said, and there was something that she particularly wanted to impress upon me, because I had begun to show signs of temper and over-sensitiveness, and seemed to get discouraged too easily. She took my hand in hers and speaking to me more solemnly than anyone ever had, told me: "God surely wants us to be optimistic through thick and thin. Look on the bright side of things always. Don’t ever let anything get you down, Ralph, or make you lose hope and your dreams."
I shall never forget that moment or those words. I have had reason to recall them on many occasions since and they have served me well. . . .
I am convinced that nothing is ever finally lost until faith and hope and dreams are abandoned, and then everything is lost. This, I feel, is what my mother meant.
Three months later another tragedy struck the family when his uncle Charlie, depressed about his own health, committed suicide. Overwhelmed by grief and with no reason to remain in Albuquerque, Bunche’s grandmother, whom everyone called "Nana," moved her diminished family to Los Angeles in 1917. To signal the start of a new life for Ralph and Grace, she added an "e" to their last name, which from then on was spelled "Bunche."
