A Charmed Life

Mom in her Kiltie Drum Corps uniform, 1948-1949.

In January 1942, when Mom was ten years old, she started a five-year diary.  Its opening entry reads: “It snowed all day.  The wind blew hard.  The temperature was 12 above.”  Over the next few weeks, Mom made more observations about the wintery weather, but also included tantalizing glimpses into her everyday life as a little girl growing up during World War II:  playing in the snow with her next-door neighbors Rosalyn and Johnny  (“We really had fun”); supper with Grandpa, who owned an old-fashioned general store (“After supper I helped mix sausage. Boy was it fun!”); her geography and history homework ( it was “very hard”); and the movies she saw, including Babes on Broadway with Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney.  But by February 6, Mom abandoned her diary. 

She made a fresh start in January 1942, but again, as February rolled around, Mom lost interest in her diary.  Then in January 1943, as a twelve-year-old, Mom again picked up her diary, and over the next three years, wrote in it every day. Sometimes the entries are short:  “Got my hair washed.”  Occasionally, she wrote about family trips to faraway places.  On a road trip to Dyersburg, Tennessee, in 1943, she wrote, “We crossed the Miss. On the ferry at 3 in the morning.”  What an adventure that must have been! 

Enduring Friendships

My sister and I found Mom’s diary in the spring of 2021, as we cleaned out our family home and prepared to move our parents into an assisted living apartment.  The diary is four inches wide by five-and-a-half inches tall, a faded green hardcover with faded gold lettering which reads, “Five Year Diary.”  On the inside cover, Mom had written her name and address, 1611 N.D. Glenstone Ct.  By the time I lived in that same neighborhood a little over a decade later, the street had changed its name to East Monroe. 

Perhaps because my earliest childhood memories took shape in Mom’s old neighborhood, the entries in her diary seem especially vivid and real to me.  People I knew throughout my childhood and beyond make repeated appearances in the diary:  my grandparents and great-grandparents; my Aunt Mary, Aunt Bob and Uncle Otis; Mom’s cousins, Gail and Diana.     My grandparents’ friends and neighbors, an older generation who helped shape my childhood, also appear regularly in Mom’s diary:   Alma and John; the minister, Brother Sanderson and his wife; the Davises, Sullivans, and Griots. 

Then there are Mom’s childhood friends, friends who endured throughout her lifetime and mine:  Rosalyn and her little brother Johnny, Lloydene and her brother Leon, Delores (who eventually introduced my parents to each other on a blind date), and Carolyn June, Mom’s closest friend.  They were like sisters.   They’re all gone now, but growing up, I knew them well.   Still, seeing them in the pages of Mom’s diary as children and teenagers has given me an entirely different perspective on their lives, a sense of the fragility of time and life, of the rare gift that enduring friendships give to those who are willing to nurture them.  

Unforgettable Pictures

Although each entry in Mom’s diary is short—just four lines for each date—I came away with unforgettable pictures of everyday life as Mom experienced it in the 1940s.  Despite her longstanding friendships, she and her cousin Diana, for example, apparently didn’t always see eye-to- eye.  On January 18, 1942, Mom wrote that “Today Diana came home with us.  We didn’t fuss very much.”   By the time Mom was twelve, boys had entered the picture and provided a new set of complications.  “Delores got mad at me today,” Mom recorded on January 10, 1944, “because I told Ruth she played post-office at Wallace’s party.” 

During that winter, Mom herself was courted by two boys—Wallace, who had hosted the infamous party where his guests had played post office, and Ivan, another boy Mom knew from school.  Just two days after Wallace’s party, Ivan asked Mom to “go to the show” on Saturday.  Mom turned him down, and went to the show with Rosalyn instead.  They bumped into both Ivan and Wallace.  Ivan was persistent, and asked Mom out again.  And again.  By the end of the month, both he and Wallace had asked Mom “to go to the show” several times.  She absolutely refused.

Then just as suddenly as Wallace and Ivan appear in Mom’s diary, they disappear.   They were simply part of the ebb and flow of junior high life, important at one moment, forgotten the next.  In some ways, life is timeless.

Memory After Memory

Last month, shortly before Christmas, Mom fell and broke her hip.   The surgery was a success, but her ninety-one-year-old body struggled to recover.   I flew back to our hometown in Missouri, and took Mom’s diary with me.  When she was released from the hospital, I sat with her in the nursing home, rereading passages from the diary and asking her questions about it.  The diary unleashed memory after memory, and she began to fill in some of the intriguing details that were missing from its pages.

In 1943, Mom had written that she and my grandfather had played table tennis one night.  “Where did you and Papa play ping pong?” I asked.  A slow smile spread over Mom’s face.  “On the dining room table at home,” she said.  She remembered Ivan and Wallace vividly, including the neighborhoods where they had lived back in 1944.   But she couldn’t recall exactly why she hadn’t gone out with either boy—except that maybe she hadn’t been ready for romance just yet.   

This conversation led to another memory, one she hadn’t recorded in her diary.   She remembered the day when she, Rosalyn, and Johnny had attempted to baptize Tar, a cocker spaniel, in the bathtub.  As devout Church of Christ children, they believed full body immersion was essential for salvation, even for cocker spaniels.  But, alas, Tar wasn’t a willing convert.  No matter how hard they tried, the three of them couldn’t get Tar’s body completely submerged.  His tail just wouldn’t cooperate.  “Then one of us said—I don’t remember who,” Mom recalled, “‘all right then.  He’ll just have to go to hell.’”

Mom told me that her favorite actress during those years had been Greer Garson.  In fact, according to her diary, she saw Greer Garson twice in Madam Curie in 1944.  “She was really good,” Mom observed.   The next year, Mom saw another Greer Garson film-- Valley of Decision– twice within the same week.   In 1946, Mom praised Miss Garson’s performance in the film, adding that “she was [named] best actress by Photoplay [magazine].”  Mom even hung a “big picture” of Greer Garson in her bedroom.   

The diary mentions movie after movie, movie star after movie star:  Judy Garland, Micky Rooney, Walter Pidgeon (whom Mom especially admired as Greer Garson’s love interest in film after film), Betty Grable, Ginger Rogers, Bing Crosby (another one of Mom’s favorites), Frank Sinatra, Rita Hayworth, Fred Astaire, Bob Hope, Dorothy Lamour—and a host of other classic film stars.   In fact, the diary reveals that Mom went to the movies one hundred and fifty-eight times between 1942 and 1946.  But she certainly went to the movies even more often than that during this period.  After all, her diary is blank for most of 1942 and 1943.   

Mom told me that she and her friends—Carolyn June, Rosalyn, and Delores—liked to go downtown well before a  movie started.    They’d stop at the soda fountain at Newberry’s or Woolworth’s on the square for a ham salad sandwich and a Cherry coke.  Then they’d buy their tickets, stock up on candy, and find their seats in the movie theater.    It was easy for me to visualize this memory because when Mom, my sister, and I went downtown two decades later, we often ate at the Woolworth’s, Newberry’s, or Kresge’s soda fountains ourselves.  I usually ordered a hamburger (I never did acquire Mom’s taste for ham salad sandwiches), but Cherry cokes were always a special treat, even in the 1960s.

A Charmed Childhood

            Mom’s diary details a charmed existence, despite its setting during World War II.   It records music lessons, “wienie roasts,” Fourth of July picnics, and birthday parties.  On her fourteenth birthday in 1945, she had a “hamburger fry” for about thirty-five guests. 

My grandparents had been founding members of the South National Church of Christ in 1929, and Mom’s life revolved around church activities.  Sunday services, prayer meetings, gospel meetings, and singings—her diary is filled with references to the church, its members, and a host of ministers.  My grandfather had a beautiful tenor voice, was the congregation’s song leader, and part of a gospel quartet.  He sometimes traveled with Church of Christ evangelists to lead the singing at gospel meetings for congregations throughout the Ozarks, in Tennessee, Oklahoma, and Alabama.  Sometimes Mom and my grandmother went along, as they did on that trip to Dyersburg in 1943.    Not many children or teenagers during this period enjoyed the luxury of travel, of seeing new places and meeting new people.

Not that my grandparents were wealthy.  They weren’t.  When Mom was growing up, my grandfather was a supervisor at Elkins-Swyers Printing Company.  To supplement the family’s income, he ran a free-lance landscaping business.   My grandmother raised chickens.  My grandparents owned their own house, a handsome two-bedroom brick bungalow.   But even as a little girl, I knew their house was tiny.  And I’ve never figured out how Nana cooked her big Sunday dinners in their compact, little kitchen.  It was so small, the kitchen table folded out from the wall.   But I’ve come to realize that Mom, as an only child, enjoyed everything my grandparents could possibly provide for her, even during the lean years of World War II.  “Daddy worked late,” is one of her diary’s most common observations. 

We Heard Some Programs

            Like many American families during the 1940s, Mom and my grandparents gathered around the radio almost nightly for news and entertainment. “Tonight we heard some programs,” Mom wrote in 1942.  “In Battle of the Sexes women won 117 to 80.”  And during Ivan’s thwarted courtship in February 1944, Mom grumbled, “Ivan called up tonight and caused me to miss Terry and the Pirates.” 

  Judging from her diary, one of their favorite programs was the Lux Radio Theatre, sponsored by Unilever and named for its Lux soap.  By the 1940s, the program featured hour-long movie adaptations, usually with the film’s original stars.  Mom’s diary features entry after entry like this one from February 4, 1946:  “Rita Hayworth was on Lux tonight.  It was very good.”   Mom seemed to enjoy Lux radio adaptations as much as the original films themselves.  She saw Loretta Young and Alan Ladd in And Now Tomorrow at the theater in January 1945, but also enjoyed its adaptation on Lux five months later. 

Mom and my grandparents occasionally attended live, locally produced radio programs, including KWTO’s hillbilly variety show, Korns-a-Krackin.   The program was performed before a live audience and began airing in 1941.   Mom was in the audience for the show’s post- Fourth of July broadcasts in 1944 and 1945, and then again in October 1946.   

Other than references to the many war movies released during World War II, Mom’s diary is essentially silent about the war effort and its influence on her everyday life.  But on April 12, 1945, she wrote just one sentence in her diary:  “President Roosevelt died today.”  Two days later, she and a friend attended a memorial for the president, and on April 15, she wrote another one-sentence entry:  “President Roosevelt was buried today.”  On April 17, Mom and my grandparents turned on their radio to listen to a message from their new president, Harry Truman. 

Mom’s diary noted two other historic moments in 1945:  On May 8, she wrote, “Today was V.E.  Day.  War over in Europe”; and on September 2, she noted simply that “Today is V.J.  Day.”  But her life continued much as it always had with new adventures at school, another round of music lessons, more movies on Saturday afternoons, and more episodes of the Lux Radio Theatre.  Her final entry in the diary from New Year’s Eve 1946 reads, “Ate with Jack and Lucille.  Went to a party at Beverly Persells.  Had  Fun.”

I Can’t Believe I’m This Old

            Mom continued to keep diaries and logs throughout her life.  When we went on family vacations in the 1960s and early 1970s, she tracked our mileage, expenses, and sightseeing stops in a series of stenographer’s notebooks.  On her sixty-second birthday, a friend gave Mom a journal and over the next three years, she wrote in it often.  By then, Mom was a grandmother and had been a preacher’s wife for decades.  On her birthday a year later, Mom wrote, “It’s 6:30 p.m. on my 63rd birthday.  I really can’t believe I’m this old.”

This journal from the 1990s focuses on family news, church activities, holidays, birthdays, and vacations.  There are references to new friends, especially a group of church ladies who befriended Mom shortly after Dad began preaching at their church:  Freda, Yvonne, Donetta, and Louise.  They went out to lunch once a month and flea-marketed together year after year. 

But this diary also includes references to Mom’s oldest friends Delores, Rosalyn, and Carolyn June’s extended family.   She had died suddenly in 1988, and Mom became a mother and grandmother to Carolyn’s daughters and grandchildren.  One of the last entries in this diary details a birthday party for Andrew, Carolyn June’s little grandson. 

One Last Journal

On my second day at the nursing home with Mom last month, she asked me to find her current journal.  It too had been a birthday present, this time from a new friend who had been bringing Mom and Dad home-cooked meals since they moved into the nursing home last summer.  In the back of this new journal, Mom kept a log of the cities where her cell phone’s scam calls supposedly originated.  Mom rarely answered her cell phone; she found its operation confusing.  But the idea that random, robotic calls came to her phone from faraway places intrigued her.

The journal’s opening pages, however, were devoted to a daily log—a list of visitors, phone calls, and cards or letters from friends and family.  From her bed in the nursing home, Mom asked me to resume where she had left off in December.  We pieced together all the phone calls, visitors, and cards she’d received since returning from the hospital, and over the next ten days, I continued to write in Mom’s journal.  So did my sister.  It was important to Mom to keep this new journal current.

During one of those periods when Mom had drifted off to sleep, I found the last entry she herself had written—December 22, 2022:

“Covid Test Angela Called twice Pam Called I fell— My leg gave way and I landed on my left hip. I also have a bump on my Head where I hit the wall. It’s 4 below Z at 6:30.”

            Mom didn’t recover from that fall.    She held on to celebrate her seventieth wedding anniversary with Dad on January 17.  Family and friends joined her at her bedside in the nursing home to celebrate their anniversary again on the following weekend.  Mom told my sister she was “happy.”  She drifted into a coma a few days later and didn’t wake up.  Mom died on January 28.

            But her life, her vitality, and her voice live on.  She remains that ten-year-old girl who in 1942 wrote, “To day I went to the show with Carolyn June.  We saw Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland in Babes on Broadway.”