Thomas Carlisle Montgomery was born in Marion, SC in 1889. His parents were a lawyer-banker-businessman and the privately educated daughter of a Confederate colonel. His life began in a household with three sisters and the fading memory of his two year old brother who died four months before. His father chose the name Carlisle, apparently in deference to a revered and influential professor James Henry Carlisle from his own undergraduate days at Wofford College. His son Carl, as they would call him, graduated from Wofford 34 years after his father in 1909, surviving classes taught by the same J.H. Carlisle. Except to his immediate family, Carl in his adult life would be known as “Monty.” Even the nieces and nephews knew him as “Uncle Monty,” and that moniker never applied to another Montgomery family member. A Hallmark card with no date (but clearly from a later time of life) begins with Hallmark’s choice of greeting—“Happy Anniversary to the Girl I married…” and concludes several pages later with his only effort at personalization–a five-letter addition: “Monty.”