Reception
How old was Wood at his father's death?
American Gothic
How the Killing of the Old Men Was Stopped Sam Wood William Mulock Wayland Wood Notes of a Native Son
How_the_Killing_of_the_Old_Men_Was_Stopped-Synopsis Sam_Wood-Personal_life William_Mulock-Early_life Wayland_Wood-Babes_in_the_Wood Notes_of_a_Native_Son-"Notes_of_a_Native_Son"
A man hid his father in a land where everyone was supposed to be put to death at fifty. He won a bet about first seeing the sunrise by following his father's advice and looking west, so he saw it on a mountaintop. People concluded that the old should no longer be put to death. 
Wood was married to Clara L. Roush from 1908 to his death in 1949. One of Wood's daughters was film and television actress K.T. Stevens who started her career in one of her father's films, "Peck's Bad Boy" (1921), credited as 'Baby Gloria Wood'. His oldest daughter was also an actress, Jeane Wood. 
Mulock was born in Bond Head, Canada West, the son of Irish immigrant Thomas Homan Mulock and Mary, the daughter of John Cawthra. His father, a physician educated in Dublin at the Royal College of Surgeons and the Medical School of Trinity College, died when Mulock was 4 years old. His mother then moved the family to Newmarket, Ontario, where he was educated at the Newmarket Grammar School. Mulock's older brother, John, died in 1852; he had two sisters Marian and Rosamund (later married to George W. Monk). The family endured genteel poverty after the father's death, so Mulock spent much time chopping wood, milking the family cow, growing vegetables in the family garden, and on outside work such as repairing the local corduroy roads. 
Wayland Wood is also the setting of the centuries-old tale of Babes in the Wood, a brother and sister who were abandoned to die in the woodland. The legend tells that these two children were left in the care of their uncle at Griston Hall on the edge of the woods, following the death of their parents. On reaching maturity they were to inherit their father's fortune, but should they pass before this time the wealth would go directly to the uncle. The uncle abandons the two children to stake his claim to the wealth. In 1879, the tree that the babes had reputedly been left under was struck by lightning. The strength of the legend had grown to such an extent that people visited the area for souvenirs. 
Baldwin explains how his paranoid and angered father died of tuberculosis when he himself was 19 years old. Prior to that Baldwin had been taken to the theatre by a white teacher of his, and his parents had let him go because she was a teacher. Later he worked in New Jersey and was often turned down in segregated places - once he hurled a pitcher of water at a waitress in a diner. He goes on to say that blacks doing the military service in the South often got abused. Finally, he recounts his father's death which occurred just before his mother gave birth to one of his sisters; his father's funeral was on his 19th birthday and the Harlem Riot of 1943. This essay is an attempt to do away with the hatred and despair he feels towards his father. 