Chapter 1
Long Lost Hopwood
It was one of those nights when you hope your biggest responsibility will be uncorking a bottle of wine. Little did I know that an internet search was about to change my life, upending my entire understanding of my purpose on this planet, my place in the bigger continuum of history, and what a home improvement project can really mean.
It was spring 2013, and I was at home in Los Angeles in the Hollywood Hills. There was only one helicopter circling overhead, so it was quieter than usual. Outside the window, daylight was fading into dusk, and the desk lamp glowed amber next to me as I sat down at my laptop.
That evening, as had become my new secret wine-time relaxation habit, I started clicking around on ancestry sites: WikiTree.com, Ancestry.com, Myheritage.com. I was familiar with all of them. Whenever I had a half hour or so to spare, Iâd dig a bit further along the twists and turns of my ancestral tree. If youâve never been on one of these sites, let me warn you: They are seriously addicting. A half hour can easily turn into a few hours or all night, so I often had to limit myself. Find a copy of some yellowed document youâve never seen before and then youâre clicking on another link, which takes you to proof of an unknown second cousin four times removed, and before you know it youâve found an old black-and-white photograph of some long-deceased great-aunt. It can be dizzying. Spend enough time on these sites, and youâll start to feel like a detective on the trail, following breadcrumbs of evidence, except in this mystery most of the people in the story are already dead and have been for decades.
Until recently, it was true that Iâd always been the kind of person who focused on the future; I didnât spend much time looking behind me. But lately, that had changed. I was becoming more and more curious about the past. How had I gotten sucked into genealogy searches? I know it wasnât thanks to the shows on TV featuring celebrities tracing their family history, because I didnât watch those. And it wasnât that I hoped to find some lost relative or uncover a family secret. If I had to say exactly why I was willing to spend hours of my life learning about people I didnât know and was never going to meet, I would say a lot of it had to do with loss. Loss, and probably some regret too.
Until recently, my grandfather on my motherâs side had been our family genealogist. His name was Herbert Hopwood Black, but I called him Pap. He had an infectious grin and was over six feet tall, so when I was a little kid, he always looked like a smiling giant. As I was growing up, Pap used to love to tell me stories about our Hopwood ancestors and how they had founded the small town of Hopwood, Pennsylvania, in 1791. Pap should know. He had been born and bred in Hopwood. The only reason he left his beloved hometown in the 1920s was because he was offered an opportunity in Michigan to get involved with a rapidly growing company called General Motors. To the end of his days, he couldnât have been prouder of our connection to Hopwood and that we could trace our family tree there back eight generations. Or was it seven?
The problem was, as a kid, Iâd never really listened.
From my perspective, anything to do with Hopwood was problematic. Yes, my name is Hopwood, just like my grandpa, but from a very early age, I hated my name. Calling me Hopwood had been my momâs ideaâshe chose it as a tribute to her father and his side of the family. When I was a baby and toddler, it was fine: Hopwood got shortened to âHoppyâ or âWoody,â which in preschool was considered pretty cute. It was only when I got to kindergarten that the teasing began. The other kids thought âHopwoodâ was hilarious. They said I should have been called John. Or Steve. Things got so bad that I came home from school one day and told my parents Iâd had enough.
âI donât want to be Hopwood anymore!â I declared as I pushed over a wooden plant stand, hearing it crack as it hit the ground. I felt bad looking at the damage Iâd caused, the fern tipped over with dirt spilling out of its side.
My dad, always a loving pragmatist, had seen this outburst coming. When I was born, he insisted at the last minute that my mom also give me the name Tod as a backup to Hopwood in case I didnât like it. (My dadâs initials were T.O.D.)
Being Tod was a major relief. The kids stopped teasing me. I got on with life. But this didnât stop my grandfather from drilling me about the Hopwoods of generations long ago. He loved anything to do with family history.
My mom was cut from the same cloth. When I was six years old, she dragged me and my two sisters to Hopwood, Pennsylvania, to visit the town of our ancestors. She was serious about giving us an education in the past. I remember on that trip she marched us around graveyards, where we were forced to do creepy gravestone rubbings alongside thorns, poison ivy, and dried bird poop. To this day, I can picture my mom wearing her signature stylish pantsuit, with stacked black hair, lipstick, and cat-eye sunglasses, as we tackled an array of educational adventures. At one point, Mom made us pose in front of the town sign: HOPWOOD. I refused to smile.
After lunch, in front of one of our ancestorsâ nineteenth-century houses, she was able to coax a momentary grin out of me by promising me a new Batman costume.
Hopwood and sisters visiting Hopwood, Pennsylvania, 1976
Photo by Deanna DePree
âSomeday, youâll be glad you took this photo,â she added.
Still scarred from my kindergarten experience, I remember being terrified that someone from my class was going to drive by and see me. (This was unlikely, as our hometown of Holland, Michigan, was about five hundred miles away, but even so.)
In high school, I continued to go by Tod. My high school yearbook lists me as Tod H. DePree, which was horrifying to me at the time because it meant everyone asked what the H stood for. I refused to tell them. Not even my closest friends knew I was Hopwood. Apparently, at graduation I was called out onstage as âTod Hopwood DePree,â giving the game away, but I think I must have blocked out the memory because I donât remember it. Even the sound of the word Hopwood was enough to make me wince. And so, when my grandfather gave me his history lessons, Iâd pretty much tune them out.
All these years later, sitting at my laptop, I knew bits and pieces of our family chronology, although there were some big holes in my understanding. I knew that my Hopwood ancestors came to these shores from England sometime in the 1700s, founding the town of Hopwood soon after. Then, at a certain point in the 1800s, the American side of the Hopwood line came close to dying out when my grandfatherâs grandmotherâAlcinda Hopwoodâgot married. Alcinda was the last to carry the Hopwood name since, once married, she would take her husbandâs last name, and the Hopwood line would be over. This bothered her for much of her life, and so when her grandsonâmy grandfatherâwas born, she demanded his parents give him Hopwood as a middle name. Which is how the name was passed down to me.
But there was one more piece of information my grandfather told me that had lodged in my childish brain.
When Pap sat me on his knee and told me stories about my Hopwood ancestors, heâd always talked about how there was also a vast area of land called Hopwood in England where our ancestors had built a magnificent castle.
âWhen your Hopwood ancestors came to America, they left behind the grandest castle youâve ever seen,â heâd say lowering his voice. âHopwood Castle.â
Despite my embarrassment about my name, I secretly loved the idea that somewhere across the ocean, there was a fairy-tale castle with the same name as me. In my mind, it looked like a cross between the one at Disneyland and my favorite childhood toy, the Fisher-Price Play Family Castle.
Where was this castle? Did it even exist? I wasnât sure. Maybe Pap had made the whole thing up, creating an exciting story in the hope that his stubborn grandson would finally fall in love with his Hopwood name.
As much as I hoped it was real, looking around at the 1970s brightly colored orange and green kitchen in our suburban Michigan home that was barely thirty years old, I couldnât help but think, No way is that true.
As it happened, after high school and college, I slowly learned to acceptâand even appreciateâthe name that had once caused me so much embarrassment and pain. I started working as an actor and comedian. I found success as a writer and producer in TV and film, founding my own production company. I realized that in Hollywood, being Hopwood might have a serious advantage over being Tod: It could help me stand out in a crowd. That Tod guy is forgettable. But Hopwood? Heâs someone who gets a second meeting! When I was about twenty-five, I switched my name back to Hopwood. My mom and grandfather were thrilled.
I spent the rest of my twenties and thirties getting roles and projects, enjoying my success and the special attention. I received more invitations to parties, and it even seemed as if people began to find me more intriguing. I shouldâve skipped the gym and gone with the weird name years ago, I thought. Despite my newfound appreciation for my name, however, I didnât spend a lot of time thinking about my familyâs history. I was too busy getting on with my life to look behind me.
Then around the time I turned forty, two events happened that changed my perspective completely.
The first was that my grandfather passed away.
Pap had been the foundation of our family. Even though he was in his nineties when he died and had lived a good long life, his loss felt like the shifting of the tectonic plates. He had been the keeper of our history, the one who knew all the stories. After his death, I truly regretted not spending more time with him talking about where the Hopwoods came from and what it all meant.
About two years later came the second event: My dad died suddenly of a massive heart attack. He was seventy-five and had only recently been given a clean bill of health by his doctor. No one saw it coming. If my grandfather was the ground beneath our feet, then my dad was a pillar holding us all up. I remember leaving the hospital after his death, and Mom turning to me and saying, âItâs just too soon.â She had lost her husband and her father within a period that felt like the blink of an eye. I could only imagine how hard it must be for herâI knew it was hard enough for me.
The back-to-back deaths of the two most important men in my life left me reeling. Not only that, now I needed to come to terms with the fact that I was the next generation on the chopping block. Where did everyone go, and how did we get here so quickly?
Outside my office window at my home in Los Angeles, I had a Spanish courtyard. A spiral staircase went up to an old weathered wooden door. Bright fuchsia bougainvillea and ivy covered the stucco walls and cacti were in pots dotted around. To one side of the courtyard was a big outdoor terracotta chiminea where I would light fires whenever I had parties at my house, usually after an event, a premiere, or night out at the clubs in Hollywood. That night at my laptop, I remember looking out and seeing a crack in the chiminea that ran up the side that I hadnât noticed before. It was how I felt about every aspect of my life: Nothing looked the way it used to anymore.
Until that point, I had never asked questions about who I was or what my purpose in life might be. I was the son of Thomas O. DePree and grandson of Herbert Hopwood Black. I was a filmmaker and an actor. I was Hopwood, and I was okay (well, most of the time). None of those old assumptions seemed true anymore. Without my dad and my grandpa, who was I? It was as if the seawall standing between me and my mortality had collapsed.
As I entered my forties, many of my friends were already married, having kids, settling down. Meanwhile, I was childless, in on-again-off-again relationshipsâmost recently off again, with a model who, in a heated argument, would not hold back from pointing out the fact that Iâd gained a bit of weight. It was all causing me to drink too much, which indeed made me gain weight, which in Hollywood is akin to a criminal act. Not only that, but I was struggling in my work. Iâd always ...
