My mother, like her four older sisters in Tennessee (one of whom, the 2nd grade teacher in Carthage, claimed as one of her most well-known students former vice-president Al Gore, Jr.), was, in the words of my brother, a “pack-rat.” By popular definition, that meant that she was not only heavily invested in locating interesting local artifacts, but also in “hoarding” them. This was evidenced by one of her favorite art activities with her students throughout her 25 years of teaching, which she lovingly referred to as “art with found objects.” This basically involved either physically leading her students on a tour of the area surrounding the school for items they could use to complete the project, or re-questing that they locate similar items from their own home environments.
Her own fascination with local “found objects” during the three years we lived in Boonville was evidenced by her massive accumulation of pieces of driftwood, shells, and rocks from every trip we took to nearby beaches. This continued for many years after we left the area; I suppose the obsession that both of my parents held for the ocean was due in large part to having grown up in landlocked states. The realization of this provided me with a deep understanding of how much those of us who were raised in CA take coastal access for granted—I cannot even begin to conceive of living in any geographical area where access to the ocean is more than a two-hour drive away.
So, to do justice to her supervision of the project with her students, my mother, assisted by my brother and me, engaged in her own personal excavation of the grounds surrounding the parsonage, culminating with some rather surprising and illuminating results. What we discovered, in the process of our own mini-archaeological “dig,” was a number of Native American beads and arrowheads, evidence of the earlier non-white habitation of the area that we now called “home.” It wasn’t until years, even decades, later that I began to appreciate the magnitude of this discovery, in terms of race relations, a topic to which Helen Doss frequently refers in her book The Family Nobody Wanted (1954, New York: Scholastic Book Services).
During those early years of my father’s ministry, the parsonages in which we lived were, for the most part, furnished, which greatly facilitated our frequent moves from one location to another, during my brother’s and my years of formal public school education. The only things that we transferred with us were kitchen supplies and utensils, linens and towels, clothes and other personal items, books, toys, games, and hobbies that my brother and I had accumulated, and my mother’s prized collection of handmade quilts that had been lovingly stitched, including their names, with a variety of colored threads, by the women of earlier congregations that my father had served.
That being the case, one of the few items that we absolutely needed to acquire upon arrival in Boonville was phone service. In those days, Pacific Bell was the only phone company (the basis for Lily Tomlin’s later hilarious comedy routines as Ernestine, the telephone operator), and all of the phones were rotary dial. I still chuckle every time I recall the scene from the 1997 film In and Out, in which Oscar winner Cameron Drake travels to his hometown of Greenleaf, Indiana to clean up the mess he caused by “outing” his high school English teacher, Howard Brackett, during his acceptance speech. Leaving his girlfriend, supermodel Sonya, at the motel where they are staying, to go in search of his former teacher, he admonishes her to “get something to eat—you look like a swizzle-stick.” Dutifully lifting the receiver on the rotary dial phone to order room service, she continues, unsuccessfully, to press the open spaces over the numbers with her manicured index finger, at the same time crying out in frustration, “Cam…!”
What I found especially interesting and somewhat perplexing was the fact that black phones were standard at that time, with no additional charges being incurred beyond the regular monthly service bill. Additional “colors” were available (including white), but if you selected one of these as an option, it was an additional $10 charge per phone. Again, it wasn’t until several decades later that I recognized the inherent not-so-subtle racism imbedded in this policy—one of many on a national scale, as it turned out. Of course, “party lines” were also standard, where each customer shared phone service with several other customers on a rotating basis, which constituted the central plotline for the 1959 film Pillow Talk, with Rock Hudson and Doris Day. Customers could obtain a private line, but that, too, like “colors,” involved extra charges.
Throughout the remainder of my 3rd grade year, I continued to make academic, social, and artistic progress, which was a considerable relief for my parents, whose attention had been diverted from my immediate needs to those of my brother, during the period of time that his health and welfare had been seriously compromised by his contraction of infectious mononucleosis. As much as they attempted to keep up the appearance of status quo for my benefit, I could sense how worried they were, so, with Miss Wright’s assistance, I was able to develop the ability to fend for myself while they focused their attention on his recovery. Holding down a full-time job while raising child-ren is difficult enough when they’re healthy; serious illnesses place additional burdens on parents’ time and energies. Although I didn’t show it at the time, I was as grateful for his recovery as my parents were; ties among siblings often run far deeper than we admit.
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