Okay, maybe it is still too soon for this, but I have been dreaming it for a long time. So here goes…
There really are PROGRESSIVES living in Alabama. Trust me on this. But what happened to change progressives into conservatives? Pursuit of wealth? Or just holding on to what you already have.
(This was inspired in part by the Noam Chomsky post re: Eisenhower, which I had linked to at one point and now can’t seem to find the link)
Just hang on.
I used to live here, long ago. Actually, I didn’t live HERE, as in Mobile, but I did live on the Eastern Shore in a town called Fairhope, where I spent the most wonderful twelve years of my 66 thus far, if you consider life years in a chunk of time. From age 6 to 18. And then when I was 48 I returned. I’ve lived in Mobile now since 2000.
A painting from 1999 before I moved over the bay to Mobile.
It was the best of times, back in the 50’s. Or so we all think now. I’m not so sure, but nevertheless…
My father had persuaded his bride to move to his beloved childhood home, by the bay, to recapture that idyllic past he remembered. But that was his dream, and not really even my mother’s dream. Just his. To be well respected and a member of society, a happy society living in the 50’s in a little town known for quirky artists and hardy individualists and summer residents of Mobile, who passed through on their way to their summer homes spending money along the way.
Fairhope, Alabama in the late 40’s.
My mother may have resisted being so far away from her beloved Opelika, but she never said so. Her home town of Opelika had by then already become one of haves and have nots, after all. It was the way the world was headed. Her world, made up of a shoe repairman son of a farmer and a daughter of a postman and a younger sister, went from farm poor to very well to do in the span of her life time so that her high school years were spent in a subdivision that was near some of the wealthy inhabitants who no doubt developed the land that her parents had built. I surmise this because one of her best friends was Tay Sanford, brother of Yetta, grandson of Alabama governor Sanford, for whom Sanford Hall was named.
And mother and daddy met at Toomer’s Drug Store. In Auburn, over an ice cream cone she and her friends were eating, she fell in love with a man who looked so much like Frank Sinatra that it was scary. And they may have had a great time together, until I came along. But then there were mouths to feed, and like so many who had come back from the war and struggled to attain this newly found dream of “success” for which they were conscripted into war in the first place, he had to take a second look at the world he found himself in and figure out how to make this cottage and picket fence dream a reality.
He did, finally, get the dream home (which was after all part of that promise) built for $16,000 in the first new subdivision in our little town. I have no idea who lives there now, as it has been nearly 50 years since I left there for the last time to go off to college and marry the man I met at Auburn during my very brief whirlwind tour in 1969. We were married for twelve years and have two sons. They just wish I’d forget it and move on. So do I, but now that they are having children of their own, I feel this need to wrap up the story so they can do their thing.
And both my father and mother are long since dead and buried.
But this diary isn’t about what happened to me. My focus is on what happened to him. My father and those like him who were attempting to live out the script that was supposed to be their due. That American dream thingy...
That dream of working hard and being rewarded for it with success. Would have been possible, perhaps, if not for a few things that shut it down. Stopped it cold, actually, although it’s only through my writing in response to today’s insanity that any of it starts to make sense.
And my father’s story is not the story of everyone in his generation, or even of everyone in mine. But there is something here that warrants further investigation. Because my mother died at age 39, and my father at age 67, and his father died when he was 15.
Healthcare, Education costs, Big banks -
First, his wife died of cancer after 19 years of marriage leaving him with hospital bills, a precocious 18 year old daughter who was already reaching for the dreams and promises fed me by TV and magazines, a new wife and two more daughters and my sister at home.
By then the budding real estate business that he’d been urged to get in because he was such a natural born salesman was withering up because of the closure of Brookley Field, and the attempt to build houses in Destin had been yanked out from under him by the mysterious disappearance of someone he’d been in partnership with, and his daughter had been less well behaved off on her own at Auburn than he’d hoped, and his mother was estranged from him and living on the west coast with his sister. And he bailed out of the marriage after 7 years and filed bankruptcy for an unheard of $280,000 in the 1974 timeframe when I was a new mother and married to someone from north Alabama.
And in my writing I’ve often talked about pieces of this story. I learned another piece today when I called my former step-mother to get a phone number from her, and in the conversation she told me about a phone call my father had received while they were still married. The call was from his mother, who had recently broken her hip while in Hawaii visiting her brother, Albert, whom she had not seen in decades.
In that phone call my grandmother told my father she loved him. My step-mother said that my father’s face completely changed in this moment and when he hung up he related the story of her hip, her conversation, and her sudden need to share with him the love that she’d found so difficult to show. Her brush with death or her visit to her oldest living brother might have been the inspiration, but I know that she never really shared her approval of my father from the time my mother died till that moment, and I’m really not sure what his response was to her.
What, I have often asked myself, made my grandmother so dismissive of my father, and why did she not know how to show him she was proud of him? Well, if you know the history of Mobile you may know that this city made it’s fortune in the mid 1800’s as a cotton conduit and those who were lucky enough to hold onto money probably still have it buried somewhere, or in land deeds.
Here’s where she went to school: Barton Academy. The building itself is impressive, and she was proud of having graduated at age 16. Mobile is almost a sister city of St.Louis, in many ways. And the disparity between the haves and the have-nots is just as acute, if not as obvious to those who don’t live here.
Barton Academy
But my father’s father was a cabbage farmer and somewhere along the way he lost the farm, in the 1930’s, and what was a promising life early on became something entirely different once they moved from Mobile to Mississippi. And as you can see, he didn’t even live to see us enter WWII.
My grandmother rolled up her sleeves and went to work. Her son enlisted as soon as he was eligible.
Pride — false pride versus pride in one’s own family
Mobile’s Magnolia Cemetary where my grandparents are buried in the Douglass plot instead of the Warley plot a few hundred feet away.
By then her disdain had already affected him. His drinking to quiet the “ne’er-do’well” self-image had made its impression on him. His failure to provide for my mother during her illness might have been a factor in how my grandmother treated my father, or it might have been her own issues that were coming to the surface — she was the wife after all of a sometime farmer, widowed when my father was 15 and forced to live out her adult life in a small Mississippi town where she worked as a Red Cross Volunteer, ran the youth recreation center and eventually lived on social security until she herself became unable to live on her own and had to move to live with her daughter in California. This was around 1976 or so I believe, and because I was an airline stewardess, I didn’t know much about my grandmother’s reasons for moving because I was busy becoming a mother myself. I did discover that she lived solely on social security and was shocked by that. (Now that’s what I’ve been living on for the past four years. I think sometimes I’m reliving their lives in order to understand them.)
My grandmother was the second oldest daughter of a well-to-do Mobile man who had married a cousin, much younger than himself, and from the accounts I have and what I have pieced together his children were part of his treasure that he paraded into Christ Church (now Cathedral) every Sunday where he paid pew rent till his death.
My very spoiled grandmother.
What happened after that is all about war and remembrance, but my grandmother never lost her sense of place because she, like me, left her home never to return after the circumstances of her life removed her from the ability to be who she saw herself as in her young woman’s minds eye.
We all do this in some way. Developmental psychologists can precisely predict how you react to certain events depending on what developmental age you were when something happened to you.
For me, it was my mother’s death during my 18th year of life. For my father, it had to have been his father’s death when he was 15. But by all accounts, my father was really close to his mother, protective of her even, until the time when he was not able to take care of her any more. And that would have been in the mid 60’s when things turned sour after the announcement of the closing of Brookley Field. Before that he was one of the most respected men in Fairhope, Alabama, and it was unthinkable that he would be anything other than the happy, friendly, civic minded man who raised my sister and myself and escorted his beautiful wife to balls and Auburn Football games and dreamed big dreams for his two daughters. Maybe they tried for a son, like he’d always wanted. But if that was true, I didn’t know about it.
My father did get to know his grandsons and granddaughters before he left Alabama, and he did get to raise two more daughters for a time, and then two sons in Costa Rica when he married his third wife in the 80’s. By the time he died in 1991, he’d been with Cynthia for over a decade, so it’s possible that they are his sons. I never even thought to ask. He didn’t even tell us about them for years. He didn’t come home for years, because he too was dying, slowly, and there was no insurance for him either. Having no health insurance also meant not being employable, and that is a crime all by itself.
The reason this still burns my hide is that he was dying from the exposure to one of the Tumbler-Snapper above ground nuclear tests that eventually killed him, and most likely killed my mother as well. After his death, and thanks to the internet and to the Clinton presidency, I was able to contest his VA denial and won the service connected benefits fo my stepmother and her s
Remember those days as the time before all this change took place. When TV was just for entertainment and magazines were the real selling tools, showing you how much you needed that full 12 place-settings of Sterling Silver, the bridal entourage and the photographs of all the wedding party, the happily ever after part included in the price? When my mother and dad married in 1948 we were lucky to own a car that would get us back and forth from Fairhope to Opelika to visit “momma&em” more often than once a year. By the time she died less than 20 years later we had owned one car that was almost new. What no one realized, including me, was that my father had never made much money, and that his bartering and friendship with others accounted for most of the way we lived, which my friends later described to me as seeming to be rich.
Edwin Warley III
What daddy couldn’t barter, mother made. How much must it have hurt her to hear me dismiss the hand-me-down clothes from other families, to have me beg incessantly for store-bought clothes and shoes. Once in order to impress a boyfriend, I bought us his-and-hers matching shirts for a Sadie Hawkins dance, and didn’t even tell momma. She let me have it when the store bill came in, and I didn’t have any idea what the problem was. I was, after all, the daughter of that well-to-do man about town that had bartered his name for almost everything he had. Paying for it was becoming increasingly harder just at the time when his daughters were growing into women of their own.
And then there was the political event that I will never forget. “Come downtown, sister, I want you to do something for me.” might have been his words. I remember the skirt with white fringe on the bottom, the white boots and cowboy hat and the fun of dressing up as one of Goldwater’s Girls for the local parade and rally. And being the daughter of a prominent citizens was always the best part about it for me.
I seriously never even thought about whether I was a D or an R, much less a liberal or a conservative, until I glued myself to the television during the run-up to the Clinton Election, when I literally watched both conventions from gavel to gavel, and by the time I got through watching all that I knew which one group belonged in.Had I still been the wife of a successful man, maybe I’d never have identified with the Dems in the first place. There was no doubt I was a Democrat after that. I didn’t really vote for them, because I hadn’t gotten quite that far along in my political awareness. I was just trying to figure out what label I needed to use in case anyone thought to ask me for my thoughts.
By then I was living in Georgia, had been married and divorced, and had not given much thought to politics after Nixon, but here in living color was one party, mostly men, talking about wealth and another party talking about opportunity, about lifetime learning, about health care, and being the same age as Hillary meant something to me then. I have supported them over the years. I am not about to engage in the discussion about whose side I’m on. I’m just so glad that we can discuss it now. It’s been about that long since politics was anything but a polarizing subject.
When my parents had issues with the local politicians they talked about it. In coffee shops, at the post office, when people gathered in community events they discussed these things and agreed to disagree. And then they couldn’t anymore.
I blame the GI bill. I blame the concept that people could come back from a war and with hard work become college graduates, which somehow meant that there would also be jobs for all those GI’s to fill. There weren’t, of course. And where exactly were all these sons of the deep south supposed to go to find work?
Because as fast as they could put a stake in the ground and claim something as theirs, the ground would shift and change and that thing wasn’t there any more. What career, what job, could a graduate of a land grant institution called API in 1948 be assured of keeping through the changes that were sure to come in Alabama? Momma had sense enough to give up her Interior Design degree for a spot in the Fairhope dream that my father had, but I found myself today wondering how he talked her into it. What promises did he make back in 1947 when he proposed to my mother were no doubt never fulfilled. I don’t ever remember her raising her voice, but to say she wasn’t exasperated at the situation we lived in would be lying.
So we, my sister and I, grew up to the sound of slammed cabinet doors or bedroom doors behind which you knew my mother was weeping, but you’d never ask because she loved him and us too much to burden us with her unhappiness. And sometimes my grandfather would surprise us with a financial boost, because he had quite by accident become a wealthy man. Investing in Ampex stock was probably not a sure bet when he did so, but he was quite well off when he died.
His wife drained every penny with her own care after that, however. My father was penniless when he died, and to my knowledge the only thing I’m ever going to inherit is the plot of land next to my mother, since my father is buried in Tampa near where his third wife lives.
That and the letters. I have every letter my mother wrote to my father, every letter he wrote to her or his mother, every letter I ever wrote to my grandmother and every poem and letter my father ever wrote. That’s treasure enough.
And my belief that had he not joined the Navy at age 17, had he not shoehorned himself into the world that society convinced him was the best option, he’d have been a writer. He WAS a writer, and had belonged to the journalism club in high school. I used to think he had hidden his writing gift but now I realize that he used it in every real estate ad he wrote, and I recall them as quite entertaining. But writing as a career — well his mother would not have seen that as a worthwhile profession, so he dared not speak that dream until in 1976 at the very worst financial point in his life, when he showed me his poems he’d written.
By the time my grandson gets to be age 17, I hope I’ve found a way to put this puzzle of a legacy to rest. And I also hope that there’s some reward for creativity, for writers, for artists. That there’s
He’s due to arrive in early June. And whatever he becomes I hope the world will be a different place by then.
