(Some) Things My Mother Told Me

           Like many children, I loved to hear my mother talk about the time when she was young. To my ears, she grew into adulthood in a wonderful era. And, to a certain extent, that is true. And that is what I will try to share with you.
Mother graduated Maryville College’s High School program, Maryville, Tennessee, in the 1920’s. She then took a job up in the mountains, teaching school. I never found out just where that was (Take a lesson from this: Ask! Ask while you can!) She took the train, I assume from Maryville, up to a stop not too far from the school. When she stepped off the train, there was always a school board member there to meet her. The community that had hired her would not allow her to walk the mile or two to and from the train because they felt she would not be safe from some of the older boys thereabouts. She roomed with the families of the students, rotating from family to family. She said they were always so kind to her.
        Mother was called the Little Teacher, not because of her size, but because she taught the little children. The school had two rooms, one for the little children and one for the older students. The other teacher was called the Big Teacher.
        Mother fainted a lot that year apparently due to hormone imbalances…or ? …. She also went home each weekend.
          And at the end of the year she went home to Maryville and from there on to St. Petersburg to join Grandpa and Uncle Conrad who had gone there to find work. Grandpa had always earned his living building houses, often building one, moving the family into it, and then selling the one they had just vacated… or something like that! He was a very capable builder and an honest one. He was so scrupulous that his family had a hard time making ends meet. And then, in the mid-twenties or so, when work slowed in East Tennessee, they heard that building was booming in Florida. So they went to join the famous Building Boom. And to hear her tell it, it must have been a truly exciting time for an 18 year old to be there.
       Grandpa hung a sheet across the corner of the room where he and Uncle “Connie” lived, and Mother went off to find work. She couldn’t have landed a better job: with the local newspaper.
       There was activity everywhere, and she and the friends she made at the paper, along with her sister Mary and brother John who had joined the family, made the most of it. She told of a group of them going out along the coast for dinner….a dinner which began with raw oysters….which she had never seen before. Gulping those things down whole, she quickly ate or drank something to hold them down, for she admitted to me she was NOT going to let her friends know she could barely stand them!
By that time Grandpa had managed to find a house to rent and brought Mama (our grandmother) and Uncle John then in junior high school and the youngest, Charlotte, to join the rest of the family. It seems that off and on during this time various friends from East Tennessee also came to find work and either lived with them or hung out at their house. Mother said often Grandpa would stop on his way home from work and bring a whole huge bunch of bananas slung over his shoulder. And Mama would make whole dishpans full of lemonade.
      My Uncle John was the fourth of the siblings and in junior high school. He didn’t like school. This surely must have been accentuated with his older sisters and brother out and about earning money. However, each day Mother would drop him off in front of the school. He would dutifully go in the front door and down the hall. And out the back door. He had found a job in a tobacco shop within a block of the school. At the end of the day, he reversed the process, going in the back door, down the hall, and out the front door to be picked up by his sister Alix. I don’t know how long this went on before the family caught on.
       One of the things Mother did while there was to go barnstorming. Pilots would tour the country, stopping in towns large and small to give folks a ride in this new creation….the airplane. So, of course, how could she miss this? Often, the air show and rides took place on someone’s farm. Taking a ride in a plane was one thing, but the term barnstorming came about because a stunt these pilots often performed was to take the passenger up in the air and fly around a bit and then swoop down through the open door of a barn and out the other side.
      How could I picture this mother of mine some twenty or so years later to be such a dare-devil?
      I was reminded of this tale years later when our daughter, Alix,jr. (named for her grandmother) on her first job at a newspaper in Evanston, IN, talked her editor into letting her take a ride on a hot air balloon and report on it. She has a picture of her way high in the air in the balloon.
      Aunt Mary and Mother from time to time wanted to go somewhere which required a car, something neither of them had. So one day Aunt Mary said, “No problem. We’ll just rent one.” So they did, although neither one of them could drive. They had, however, observed Grandpa and Uncle Conrad driving, so what more could they need? Aunt Mary got behind the wheel and away they went. I never heard where they were headed nor how far they got, but…I do know that when they needed to stop…well, Aunt Mary had not mastered the art of stopping. So, she just drove the car into a tree. No more of the story was related. Repercussions with the car rental? Uncle Conrad’s reaction when he had to rescue them??
        During these months with lots of young people coming and going through their house, one young man became a fixture: Lyle Beman. He came to like the family (or was it just one member of the family?) so much that after a time he and Aunt Mary slipped off and got married. This was followed in due time by the birth of their daughter, Lillian, and the world has never been the same. Lillian was unique from the beginning and eighty-one years later still is (and proud of it). Well, consider that she was born into a household of busy, active aunts and uncles, mother and father, and grandparents, plus various young friends from back home. Maybe sort of like being in a beehive?
         They say all good things must come to an end. I don’t know if that is really true, but this era in the lives of the Wohlwends certainly did when the Crash followed the Boom, and the family moved to Boston, having heard there was work there.