Betty

Columbus, Ohio

Appalachian Sprung . . .

By Betty Garrett Deeds Former Citizen-Journal Feature Writer

(From the Janury '04 issue)
Dr. Atkins' W-h-a-t?? Just pass the vittles, please!
Beat us. We had always thought we were poor, but didn't take it personally since nearly everyone around us was poor too.

There may very well be people in Appalachia today who are following the famous Dr. Atkins diet - indulging in the expensive high-protein plan comprised of all the meats you can eat, cheeses, even butter and fats, virtually anything except carbohydrates and sugars - but those folks need enough money to live high off the hawg (even the cow) to follow it.

The traditional Down Home diet of greens, beans (pinto and navy) and 'taters augmented with plenty of starchy side dishes (say, homemade egg noodles), biscuits, cornbread, yeast bread, gravies and countless varieties of pies and cakes (that we were lucky to afford but could clog the cardiac arteries of a bear) are not included in the Atkins plan.

Born in 1936 during the Depression, I was well acquainted with the Down Home diet while living in southern Ohio (New Boston) with my maternal grandparents, Frank and Lula White. They owned their own house in that little steel mill town, but no land beyond our small yard, where Mamaw worked miracles with tomatoes and lettuce and yards of climbing roses.

Dr. Atkins would have had a heart attack (but died falling down the steps instead) at the thought of the small amount of meat we consumed in comparison to all the economical and filling carbohydrates and sugars. What he could not have known is just how delicious those meals were and still are. Further, while I was growing up,

I saw almost no one who was morbidly obese, as is common here in Columbus, Atkins' hometown, the Fast Food center of America.

We did have meats, but they were primarily pork products, since the homely "hawg" could provide ham (a rare luxury), pork chops, bacon and side pork, hocks for seasoning, and lard, which was used for everything from frying chicken to blending flour into pie crusts. The feet were pickled, and some of the innards were consumed in disguised forms. Fried or stewed chickens were usually a once-a-week treat unless you had a farm and could raise your own. Men hunted game, squirrels, rabbits, and sometimes deer to augment the meats on the table.

While New Boston was a steel mill town, and nearby Portsmouth was larger as well as industrialized, we were surrounded by farms between the foothills and the Ohio River. Butter, milk and buttermilk were often brought to small towns from nearby farms, as well as large amounts of eggs, fruit (other than those gathered from apple trees in backyards and berries which could be garnered from the countryside).

Citrus fruits were rare. At my New Boston Baptist Church, we lined up to receive a Christmas treat of one orange apiece.

Origins of the dishes we ate began in the late 1700s after the Revolutionary War. People in the Eastern states crossed the Alleghenies, and their counterparts in the South headed up through the Cumberland Gap into the wilderness. Colonial Armies were often afforded land grants giving them title to large amounts of acreage in Kentucky, Ohio, and what is now West Virginia, among others. And some people came intent on physically staking claim to uncleared land.

Traveling in wagons, they could bring along only a few items from their original homes, largely building tools and cast iron skillets and cooking pots. But in some ways, most priceless among the things that were necessary for survival in their new surroundings were seeds - seeds to grow their own food.

Settling in mountainous areas and foothills meant "bottomland" between them was extremely valuable. There they could grow vegetables such as potatoes, corn, and the heartiest of apple trees. Sometimes a few areas at the tops of or on the sides of hills could be cleared, but it was rough going. It was a hard existence, but these were folks who valued independence enough to live without the amenities of "civilization."

Large families were prevalent, and they depended on labor from everyone who was physically able. If they lived near a settlement, there was usually a dry goods store where they could barter their products and precious coins with merchants and other settlers for different products.

When they sat down to eat at those early plank table, these victuals (from the Latin victua for food and victuala for provision) were translated into "Pass the vittles" immediately after grace. Most

of those people, especially from New England, were quite religious, and extremely independent. But a tradition which started immediately was hospitality. No matter how meager or abundant the food on the table, it was shared with far-flung neighbors and traveling strangers who might stop by.

The core diet of "greens, beans and 'taters" I mentioned earlier prevailed during the time of those early settlers as it did during my childhood. Later, there was a larger variety of store-bought foods, of course, but economically the region was and still is what the federal government people, i.e., Appalachian Regional Com-mission, began to refer to as "distressed" and "economically disadvantaged."

Beat us. We had always thought we were poor, but didn't take it personally since nearly everyone around us was poor too.

Here's a sample of what a week's diet in Mamaw and Papaw's house resembled. Things were pretty much the same in the few hundred other homes in New Boston.

On weekdays, breakfast every morning was bacon, eggs, leftover cornbread or biscuits from the night before, or toasted, buttered slices of Mamaw's yeast bread. There might be homemade jelly, jams or

preserves or Mamaw's favorite apple butter. We had milk, and sometimes buttermilk. A farmer from the country delivered the dairy products and abundant eggs to our house.

Mamaw was employed pretty steadily year round hanging wallpaper in houses. Before I started school, she took me with her and carried along something for our lunch, but I don't have vivid memories of it. I think she made sandwiches of lunch-meat from John Sanford's store or took along some leftovers to snack on. Unless Papaw was away on one of his occasional jobs delivering coal for his friend Marvel Sloane, he probably had the same at home.

Weeknight dinners were simple but abundant. Sometimes we had pork chops, or more bacon, but the staples were fried potatoes, pinto or navy beans and greens. In warm weather, Mamaw would take me out into the fields near the mill to help her pick dandelions and other greens I didn't recognize. She bought kale at the store. We always had some kind of freshly baked "quick" bread - biscuits or cornbread - which we buttered and topped with preserves or honey for dessert.

Sundays were another matter. That was Katey bar the door to no one. Mamaw got up by at least 5 am to bake her apple pies (lard was always the shortening for the flakiest crusts I've ever eaten, and the apples were dried slices cooked into a thick sauce flavored with sugar, nutmeg and cinnamon). She purchased flour in very large cloth bags, and it was placed in a bin in the left side of her kitchen cupboard, one of the most efficient work centers ever devised.

There was a metal container for the flour with a funnel and a handle to sift it through a screen. Shelves overhead held the sugar canister and baking supplies such as baking powder, baking soda and vanilla, and other food flavorings. In the middle there was an enamel shelf which slid out of the back to an enlarged size to roll out pie crusts, knead yeast breads and biscuits. A large space beneath it on the left held pans; drawers on the right contained things such as the rolling pin and apple corer.

While the pies were baking, Mamaw kneaded the batter for at least three loaves of yeast bread to rise. And while that was occurring, she made homemade egg noodles. This required clearing the kitchen table, lining it with pages of The Portsmouth Times and dusting flour over the entire surface.

I do not know the exact recipe for this, but I think I can come close. (I made them myself while my four kids were growing up.) She skipped a bowl and placed at least three or four cups of flour in a mound at the center of the table. Making a slight dent in the center, she dropped in three eggs, a couple of tablespoons of milk and some baking powder.

These ingredients were mixed together with her hands, and if the consistency didn't seem right, she would add more flour until it met her standards. Then she dusted her rolling pin with flour and spread that mass out into a thin sheet that covered at least half the table.

Giving them a surface sprinkling of flour, she took the pies out of the oven and, if the bread batter had risen enough, baked those. Then she used a metal egg noodle cutter - it had a wooden handle and metal discs to cut the dough - so that the dough looked like noodles. They were left to dry until after church, when she cooked them in a big kettle of water in which she placed a small precious piece of stewing beef to make broth.

Oh, I almost forgot! She took the live chickens she bought on Friday or Saturday and had tethered to the back porch and chased them around the yard until she caught them and took a hatchet to their necks, which she wrung for good measure. Then all the feathers had to be removed and the birds were singed over a stove fire before washing.

All this occurred before we went to church. Depending on how long Rev. Crane made us sing hymns until someone would confess to being a miserable sinner and "get saved," it was a bit after noon before we returned home.

How anyone can eat Colonel Sanders greasy chicken with the secret seasonings is beyond me. Here is the way really great fried chicken is prepared in any decent Appalachian or southern home:

Mamaw took one or two big cast iron skillets and melted lard before putting in the chicken which was dipped in (please pay attention) flour with a little bit of salt and pepper in it. (I used to put the flour in a paper bag and shake the pieces in that a few times.) Fry the chicken for about a half hour, turning frequently. If you like it very crisp, skip the last step of putting a lid over the chicken for a couple or three minutes to tenderize it.

When it was removed, some of the fat and little chicken pieces were saved to make gravy: just put in flour and turn it until it's browned a bit, then put in some water and milk and stir that until it's your kind of gravy.

While the chicken was frying, the egg noodles, which had dried a bit, were dropped carefully into the beef broth and cooked until tender. A dollop of butter was added. A lot of peeled potatoes went into a big kettle and were cooked until tender, then pounded with a masher while adding plenty of butter, salt, pepper and milk. The vegetable was usually green beans (fresh or preserved, depending on the season) and sometimes corn was mixed with that. On some occasions, there were also candied sweet potatoes.

All three leaves were placed in Mamaw's dining room table while this was going on, and the family - me, sometimes Mom, Uncle Bud and Aunt Renie, Aunt Alice and her seven kids - and some of Papaw's friends from A.A. who may have joined us, were stretching it to its full length and placing plates and flatware around the table.

By the time all these things were put in the "middle" of the table, there was barely room for them, as the meat platter and all those serving dishes were put out, along with relishes, sometimes a cucumber salad (slices in a sugar and vinegar solution), and of course the butter, salt and pepper and other condiments.

I never hear that Hemingway title, "A Moveable Feast," without thinking of those spreads. Actually, the feast stayed still; the diners rotated around the table and some sat, while others sought out the living room sofa or migrated to the kitchen table.

I ate at other Down Home places over the years, and asked relatives from Kentucky and West Virginia to compare that spread to what they ate, and they were, and often still are, the same.

Just writing this has made me feel like falling over, which is what most people did after dinner, except for those taking their turns at washing dishes. The Short North Gazette has a limited number of pages, so I'll pass along some of the recipes - especially those for desserts (oh, the desserts! The chocolate cakes, the home-made strawberry shortcakes, the custard and rhubarb and lemon meringue pies) - later, if anyone is interested.

Blame it all on the countless people on Dr. Atkins' diet who keep telling me about how much weight they've lost and how easy it is. I'm very glad it works for them, and I wish I could afford to try it out. The popularity of that diet has sent the price of meats, especially beef, soaring. When I go through the supermarket now, I look at the steaks and prime rib roasts - and then the price tags and wave goodbye to them. Even chicken has gotten rather costly. Need we speak of seafood?

Well, I eat meat sparingly anyway, and have tossed salad at least twice a day. (Try Gordon's Food Center, Cleveland Avenue off 161, and another on Hilliard-Rome Road - restaurant supply places where individuals can buy products in bulk, in this case, 3lb. bags of salad mix for $2.99.)

That's my good deed for the day - no, the month.

I often think of a sign that used to be painted on a huge boulder on one of the hills lining Route 23 as Portsmouth and New Boston grew near: PREPARE TO MEET THY MAKER. I'm working on it, folks� I'm trying.

Until then�pass the vittles, please.

obetsydeeds@aol.com

(From the December '03 issue)
Jesse Stuart: A Ploughman and a Poet
The greatest thing in my life," he began, sounding like the first paragraph of David Copperfield, "is that I was born. That was August 8, 1906."

Hold on to April; never let her pass! / Another year before she comes again / To bring us wind as clean as polished glass / And apple blossoms in soft, silver rain. / Hold April when there's music in the air, / When life is resurrected like a dream, � "Hold April," by Jesse Stuart

It was a dreary mid-March afternoon in 1970, and clouds were scudding across a gray sky as I sat in the rare silence of the Columbus Citizen-Journal newsroom on one of those infrequent, but sometimes welcome, days when nothing seems to be happening. The teletypes were tapping out the national headlines, and interns were checking out their assigned hospitals and writing post-dated obituaries.

At such times, particularly once March arrives, I find myself feeling restless, weary of winter, and longing for the day when April comes and when the hills back home in southern Ohio will be lined with the blossoming redbud, crabapple and dogwood trees. Then I can finally get on Route 23 and rush back to the beauty that breaks the boundaries of winter and industrialization. Monet painted nothing more beautiful than this impressionistic foam of pastels and new-leaf greens in his gardens at Giverny.

Well, the sound of the phone ringing finally broke the silence on that gray March day, and my dreams of Down Home receded as I reached for the receiver. The call was from Jeanne Thomson, publicist for Lazarus Department Store, when it was a bustling castle for consumers looking for practically anything and everything. And nowhere was it more busy, or more alluring to me, than in its bookstore. It seems a poet named Jesse Stuart had come to town from Kentucky with a new book, and Jeanne wondered if I would like to interview him.

Would I like to interview Jesse Stuart? The only writer, to my knowledge, who had ever written about the hill country in both prose and, especially, poetry. I had not known of his work when I lived in New Boston visiting my relatives in Ashland and Greenup, Kentucky, but I was introduced to his work in my literature class here at Capital University, to my great joy. Jesse Stuart is the only writer I have ever read who captured the beauty of the Appalachian land marked with its steel mills and coal mining, although Harry Caudill has chronicled its history in Night Comes to the Cumberlands.

Jeanne told me he was staying at the Neil House, and asked if I would like to meet them there before he headed out to the bookstore at Lazarus. Well, I grabbed my notepad and practically ran to that hotel, where I was greeted at the door by his wife, Naomi Deane Stuart. Stuart himself rose from his chair, and it was like watching an oak tree at its full height reach out a branch to encompass my hand.

"Well, young lady, I'm mighty glad to meet you," he said. "I hear you come from the hills yourself, and I think I may know some of your people. My home is in Greenup County, on land where my mother and father used to live in a small cabin with several acres. I've added to that until I own 1,000 acres now, and my wife Naomi Deane and I call it 'W' Hollow."

I told him that, indeed, my father and his relatives were born in Greenup County. My father had died during the 1937 flood, but I had several aunts and cousins who still lived there. My Aunt Mayme continued to teach in Greenup County even though she was nearing 80 at the time.

Stuart broke into a hearty laugh, and his wife joined in. "You mean Mayme Ramey - used to be Mayme Alexander?" I confirmed that. "Why, Mrs. Garrett, your aunt lives just across the way from us, and she has taught school with my three sisters for many years. And your father was Charles Alexander? Your cousin Charles, named for him, is superintendent of the Wurtland County Schools, as I used to be. And one of Naomi Deane's sisters married your Uncle Floyd."

He motioned for me to sit down in what was suddenly a circle of relatives and family history which had never been made known to me before. This was due to my father's death during my infancy.

"Your people, the Warnocks and Alexanders, came through the Cumberland Gap in the late 1700s, even before my clan, the Stuarts, came through in the early 1800s. There is still a Warnock settlement down by Tygart Creek. My people settled right here in Greenup County later."

I was so excited that I had to remind myself that I was there to interview Jesse Stuart, not vice versa, although thankfully, this turned out to be the first of several meetings and letters which helped me learn more about my family and our mutual territory in Kentucky. He spoke as freely and profusely as the natural well he boasted about on his property at W-Hollow: "Tap into it anywhere, and you get a spate."

"The greatest thing in my life," he began, sounding like the first paragraph of David Copperfield, "is that I was born. That was August 8, 1906." He drew on a large cigar as he continued

"My mother was Martha Hylton of English descent, a Democrat and a Baptist. My father was Mitchell Stuart, a Republican and a Methodist. Never did get together on the politics, but they weren't too strong on religion anyway� When they settled here, they had seven children, five of whom lived. Between us, my three sisters and I have taught school 120 years. But I've been the only writer in the family."

Stuart's father, like many mountain men, could neither read nor write, but took his sons with him into stores to sign checks "for the best bulls and the best grasses, even Korean clover." His mother had gone to second grade. "Both turning out all the pennies they had for our education," he continued. His mother "hung our A's up on the wall, and said, 'I want people to see you on the streets of Greenup and say, There's Martha Hylton's son! How could you fail a woman like that?"

The man who became a teacher at the age of 17 in a one-room schoolhouse believed in the value of competition. "Trying to eliminate grades and competition is just plain crazy. There were 15 chairs in those one-room schoolhouses and the students always competed for that No. 1 chair with grades. They will always find a way to compete, and should.

"I've had about 10,000 students over the years, and every one of them was my child. Now some Americans have got the silly idea that money can do everything, but it can't buy ambition and incentive to learn," even with scholarships and subsidies. "Motivation's the word they're using now, isn't it? In my day, it was just called inspiration.

"When I was head of McKell School in South Shore, Kentucky, in the '30s, folks got awful mad when I fought for just payment of teachers. They figured they shouldn't pay as much for a first grade teacher as an eighth grade teacher ... and they wouldn't hire married women, but I insisted." That got him blackjacked on the head at the time. "Kentucky folks are good hard workers," he said matter-of-factly, "but you don't fool with them when they get mad."

He beamed and concluded that "a lot of those kids went on to college, and not one of them ever failed."

He also helped his father on the farm, and wrote many of the 703 sonnets which were later published as Man With a Bull Tongue Plow in a total of 11 months. "When I was plowing, I'd lean on the plow. That team would sure thank me now for the rest, if they was alive. One time

I wrote 42 in a day. I'd just write anytime I could."

In that first book, he immortalized his parents as well as the land he was helping them farm. He wrote this of his father:

All this hill man knows is work and work. / The color of the sun is in his face, / The pick and axe have calloused his bare hands, / The weight of loads he lifts have curved his back. / But by hardship he understands / This is a place to live and a place to die. / Depository for him at the end. / The earth at last becomes his bosom friend, / He's of the dirt and he'll go back to dirt.

For his mother, he vowed:

I shall not speak soft words for her &endash; my mother. / I shall not praise her to the lofty skies, / But I shall leave her on the earth &endash; my mother / Would choose the earth in preference to the skies. / I say the strength of oak is in my mother / And in her is the courage of the wind. / And in her is the rain's cool sympathy.

Both are now buried in Greenup Cemetery.

The 62-year-old author customarily carried a tablet to the breakfast table, according to his wife, "the writing never stops." She also confided to me that he had suffered a heart attack the previous year, and although he followed his doctor's orders to take a cruise and rest, while they were at sea, he confiscated every piece of paper on board and had written several hundred pages before they returned.

As we prepared to leave for Lazarus, Stuart commented that he was looking forward to meeting new people and putting his book to market in "the concrete flatlands of Columbus."

Nearly two years later, after an exchange of several letters and many kind gifts of Jesse's signed books, I got onto Route 23 and headed down to visit my Aunt Mayme Ramey and to stop by for an interview with Jesse and Naomi Deane. Both the farms lined the same road leaving the city of Greenup, where the Courthouse and a drugstore that sold Jesse Stuart's books stood in the town square.

An unpaved road led to their home, a place Stuart described in quatrains as "My Summer Valley," where "grasshoppers sing on green cornstalks � [while] White mists rise up to meet blue skies." There were no chemicals in the farmland to choke the sweet fragrance of honeysuckles twining on the crossed log fences which surrounded his vast acreage, and a gate was open to let us into the driveway up to the porch where they waited.

The shingled cottage that had expanded into many rooms surrounding what was once his parents' cottage was filled with plump armchairs and sofas, mementos of the many countries they had visited, Victorian furniture, campaign chests from the East and primitive paintings.

At one point, Stuart said, he gave a speech in Athens, Greece, and remarked that his parents, like most Kentucky hill folks, made sure "we were raised like Spartans. Do you know, a lot of those Athenians walked out?" He laughed heartily. "Held a grudge for 2,000 years!"

He explained that it was necessary to have that kind of discipline and rigor to survive his journeys once he finished high school, working in street carnivals and the steel mills of Fort Knox while saving money for college. He stopped at two colleges that cost too much; a third, Lincoln Memorial University in Harrogate, Tennessee, accepted him for the $29.30 he possessed. He also washed pots and pans for money and became editor of the college paper, publishing his own poems. He graduated in three years, but felt no desire to migrate north.

Stuart went on to Vanderbilt University "for further study where they had a bunch of writers there called the Agrarian Movement. They wanted to combine farming and writing, and that suited me fine, except it turned out they were gentlemen farmers with three tomatoes in the backyard. Also, they wouldn't let me into a writer's club.

In one class, he was told to write an 18-page autobiography in 11 days. "Well, I turned in 322 pages, margin to margin. The teacher said, 'There you go, Stuart &endash; it's the greatest paper I have ever read in my life. You are some kind of genius, and if you were my son, I don't know what I'd do with you.' But he failed me, that's what he did. I hadn't done the job the way he said. I learned right then, writing sure is a funny game."

Six years later, in 1934, that "assignment" was published as a book, Beyond Dark Hills. Only 2500 copies were published, and it was reissued in 1972 to rhapsodic reviews. Stuart shook his head. "Now they are saying it's a great book, and will last a few years."

At the time his teacher rejected it, though he decided to leave Vanderbilt. He took the advice of another teacher, Donald Davidson, who read some poems he had written about the hills and his people. "He said, 'Go back to your country and write about your people as the Irish write of the Irish and the Scots write about Scotland." That was a good piece of advice." He borrowed two dollars, hitchhiked back to Greenup and returned to his father's bull-tongue plow.

I remarked to him that when I was living in New Boston and traveling to South Shore and Ashland, Kentucky, I had no idea I lived in "Appalachia" until Lyndon Johnson used the word in the '60s. Stuart smiled at the irony too. "That's a poetic name, isn't it? � But it's ironic that the rest of this country thought it could impose its standards of culture, in the name of help to what they're calling Appalachia � when Appalachia is sitting here with the only real true culture left in this country.

"You read the obituaries any day and you can see what's happening to Kentucky: folks dying off, their kids are spread up here and everywhere. But all the same, I believe now there remains in the people an originality and a culture that just cannot be erased."

He foresaw the tenacity of that way of life even when it had to be abandoned physically in his poem "Deserted Coal-Mine Camp":

Where have they gone to leave their dead behind / In unmarked graves upon this lonely slope? / What way of life have these men gone to find / To earn them bread and give their loved ones hope? / In years to come their mother mountain earth / Will hide scars where these veins of coal ran thin; / Bracken and fern will lay a pretty wreath / To hide the sunken spots where mines caved in. / Rich dust from these decaying shacks will grow / Tall briars whereon birds will alight to sing, / And soft white petals from their stems will blow / Down leafy corridors of April spring.

He was right. The migrants moved to cities and found new jobs, but they brought with them the customs that came to be called Appalachian: the cadences of their speech and music; the foods that sustained both body and soul; the bonds of kinship, both blood and friends. And a longing to head back to the hills as often as possible to see the bracken and the fern, the dogwoods and redbuds in their season, and the people who stayed, who cling to that land still as honeysuckle twines along the wood fences up and down unpaved roads.

When Jesse Stuart died in 1984 at the age of 77, his body had endured a long series of heart attacks and strokes. But the raging energy and work that sustained him through that time produced more than 50 volumes of novels and short stories - the most memorable being The Thread That Runs So True and Taps for Private Tussie, and literally thousands of poems. They, too, are collected in many volumes under many titles, but you cannot pick a finer place to start than he did, as a Man With a Bull-Tongue Plow.

email Obetsydeeds@aol.com

(From the November '03 issue)
My Cousin Bess: Ashland, Kentucky's "Scarlett"

"Scarlett O'Hara was not beautiful, but men seldom realized it when caught by her charm . . " - Gone with the Wind, 1936, Margaret Mitchell

My Cousin Bess Dowdy, who lived in Ashland, Kentucky - about 25 miles from New Boston once you crossed the Ohio River by ferryboat or bridge at Portsmouth - lived in another world, or so it seemed. Kentucky, set farther back into the hills on the other side of the river, was amazingly different from where I lived, in everything from accents to mores - both amply evidenced by my cousin.

Bess always said "you-all" for the plural of you, and there was a decided upswing in most of her vowels as well as her eyebrows, which had an arch as distinct as Ava Gardner's. She also had a cleft chin which resembled the great screen beauty's, although she was not conventionally pretty. Bess reached her full height at about 5 ft. 2 inches, but she was not tiny elsewhere - a fact that males overlooked when distracted by her Size C 1950's bras (rigidly pointing forward like tank turrets) and by the way she batted her eyelashes at them like Civil War fans.

We had been close friends during all the years I lived with Mamaw and Papaw in New Boston, so when Mom hauled me up here to Columbus in the eleventh grade, we continued our friendship by spending a few weeks together each summer. I was 15 in the summer of 1952 and graduated from high school the following year. Bess was ahead of me by a year chronologically, but light years away in terms of her outgoing personality and ability to attract and secure boyfriends.

Aside from holding up a Bible on Sundays in the Southern Baptist Church in Ashland (where the hymns had the wonderful gospel seasoning of black music), I think Gone with the Wind may have been the only book she ever read voluntarily and repeatedly. Bess could recite long strategic passages of it by heart, and as most of y'all know, that is one long book! She considered me withdrawn and pessimistic, and whenever I expressed doubts about anything, she would smile brightly and quote Scarlett's famous last words, "After all, tomorrow is another day!"

I, on the other hand, lived with my nose in a book, as Bess pointed out to me repeatedly over the years, and particularly during the memorable last two summers of our youth. Yes, I had read Gone with the Wind, and enjoyed it, although I never understood how Scarlett could make men fall at her feet when the things she said to them were so incredibly stupid. At that time, I didn't think Scarlett was too bright but later understood her strategy of survival, which Bess demonstrated to me by living example.

I wass busy reading period English novels, swept away by the Bronte Sisters, Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, Tennyson's poetry and Greek myths.

"Betty," Bess would say ruefully, as she primped herself for what was often the first of three dates on any given evening, "how am I ever going to find a boyfriend for you if you don't get your nose out of a book long enough for anyone to see what you look like?" She would toss aside whatever I was reading, get out her makeup and try to brush my eyebrows into something resembling an arch, shaping my lips with the most flattering lipstick she could find.

"You ah lucky to have those hazel eyes," she would remark clinically, "because you can wear any color you want and reflect it." Before I could say thank you, she was looking at my unboned brassieres and sighing, "You have got to get some up-to-date bras instead of those saggy ole thangs that let you just hang there." (I did not sag at 15, but didn't argue the point or lack of it.) Then she would put one of her own skintight sweaters over me, push and pull at the rest of my garments until she figured she had done the best she could by her task, and then take me by the hand to the front porch swing.

It was never long before the first feckless male of the evening would stop to pass the time with Bess, who would push me to the side while she sat strategically in the middle. The conversations went something like this:

"Gosh, Bess, you sure look pretty and cool sitting out here."

"Why, Ronny Ray, you are just the nicest boy to say such nice things when I know you are so much smarter than I am. Your grade cards always make me feel like a dummy. I'm flattered that you even stop to spend your time talking to me when I'm just so dumb I don't even know how to draw triangles in geometry."

Before two seconds passed, she would put her hand on mine and say, "By the way, this is my cousin, Betty Lou Alexander. She came all the way down here from Columbus, Ohio, to spend time with me. Why, she is such a scholar, she always has her nose in a book, just like you must do."

Ronny Ray or Dwight David or whomever the passerby might be would inevitably assure her that she wasn't the least bit stupid, and after dutifully greeting me, would assure her, "I don't spend all my time with my nose in books. See? I brought you one of my Momma's roses. It's not as pretty as you are, but I thought you might like the way it smells."

Oh, me. Round One.

The second part of the evening was usually a planned event. For instance, she might have told one of her boyfriends that she would go with him to see a Sandra Dee movie - if he didn't mind Cousin Betty coming along. After two or three days of that, the word was out to arrange blind dates for me. Of course, I felt mortified.

The grand finale of the evening would be a ritual right out of the movie American Graffiti, a latent classic set in the early '60s: cruising the drive-in restaurants in American jalopies that resembled the joke about how many clowns could fit into a Volkswagen. Windows down, radios blasting, male and female heads and hands sometimes leaning out as far as their waists, while they hooted at each other: "Hey, Wanda" � "How y'all, Bobby? Whatcha doin' tonight?" � "Watch out for that car hop, Johnny, or you ah gonna kill her and wreck your Daddy's car and then he will kill you!"

And the perilous weaving of the diner carhops (sometimes on roller skates, sometimes not) between the headlights of the cars and the bright-colored lights illuminating the drive-in signs advertising burgers and root beer. Holding trays up in the air and balancing them while staying on their feet unscathed was an athletic American art form. Particularly dangerous considering the way the kids sometimes jumped out of the doors of one car to jump inside another, but oh Lord, yes, it was exciting.

Rock 'n roll was in its infancy, and the first example I remember hearing was on a car radio with Bess's friends: Bill Haley's "Splish Splash I Was Sittin' in a Tub."

Bess and her favorite boyfriend Dwight David Cotton thought it was the "most." I wasn't saying much because I was with a blind date who turned out to be a nice boy despite his nickname. As humorist Dave Barry often says, I swear I am not making this up. His name - well, his nickname, the only name I ever heard &endash; was Horny. I had absolutely no idea what that meant at 15. I've wondered since if Horny did.

He was certainly chivalrous in his treatment of me. I'm afraid I was not only shy, but a snob as well at that point. I had seen Mario Lanza in The Great Caruso and became enamored of opera and, by extension, classical music, so when Bess or Dwight David said that Bill Haley's song was the "most" and asked me what I thought, I snapped nervously but brusquely that it was "sheer, unmitigated trash."

Bess's date looked at her, shook his head, and said, "Bess, your cousin shore does talk funny." Horny immediately defended my honor by replying, "Dwight, you ass, that's ed-ucation."

Well, Horny was my steady date for the remainder of that three-week stay in 1952.

The next year, immediately after graduating from Central High, I made plans to go to Capital University here in Columbus, while Bess and a number of her friends decided they would remain in Kentucky and attend Ashland Junior College, so it would be our last summer of real togetherness. I still think of Mario Lanza singing "Golden Days" from The Student Prince when I recall it.

Mom let me splurge on a real train trip to visit Bess in Ashland, instead of riding on a Greyhound Bus - cigar smoke and claustrophobia always made me vomit. I remember pulling into the depot where Bess and Dwight David were waiting for me, waving before I could even step off the train. After embracing, I told Bess swiftly that I needed to go to the bathroom - I had been afraid to enter the one on the train.

They led me to the side of the station, and suddenly I noticed something I had never seen in New Boston, Portsmouth, Columbus or any other place I had been in Ohio. There were two doors: one for Whites Only and another one for Coloreds. The water faucets outside were labeled the same way. I had been reading about civil rights, which never came up in Rev. Crane's Baptist sermons, but actually seeing those signs made me know that it was wrong. I refused to use the toilet.

I discovered something else momentous that summer of 1953: my first true love. And it wasn't even a blind date arranged by Bess. Horny had moved to Ironton, so I just went solo with Bess and her date to a party at someone else's house.

I was sitting on a sofa, observing people and listening to their chatter, when I realized a guy was staring at me intently. He got up, came over to me and said, in a truly "educated" manner, "Hello, my name is Bill Campbell. I've heard that you're Bess's cousin Betty, and people here think you're a bookworm." He smiled, and even though James Dean's face had not been seen on a movie screen yet, I was looking at a good facsimile of it. I'm glad I don't know what mine looked like then, but it had to have been moonstruck-smitten.

I scooted over to make room for him after he asked to sit down, and he continued, "I know, because people say the same thing about me. I just finished Catcher In the Rye and thought it was great. Have you read it yet?"

I had and was delighted when he told me he "identified" with Holden Caulfield, the now classic portrait of a teenage "outsider." Bill was a disc jockey for WCKY Radio in Ashland, and the courtship that consumed the rest of my stay was continued by correspondence and phone after we both started college that fall. The magic that bound us that summer can't be described and I won't even try.

All through my freshman year, I received long letters from him that came in rolls off the teletype machine at WCKY's studio &endash; different (as he was) and special. Our courtship continued the next summer when my visit to Ashland was alternated with a visit from Bill who drove up to Columbus, bringing Bess and her on-again steady, Dwight David.

Mom and my stepfather divorced after I started college. I think they both sensed that they no longer had any great reason to argue, but who knows? I do know Mom allowed my friends to visit our new apartment at King and Neil Avenues. Porches with columns surrounded several floors of quarters with large old rooms, and Mom divided them so that the boys slept in one room, Bess and I in another, while she chaperoned from midpoint.

On our last night together, after going to a drive-in movie to see The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial, Bill and I stood out on the balcony and experienced what would turn out to be our farewell scene. We didn't know it, but that bittersweet time was the end of our romance, something I had only found in literature before, and after, really. Surely everyone remembers that special sweetness occurring once in a lifetime? I don't know what happened to Bess and Dwight David after that except that they drifted apart. Bill's teletype letters grew less and less frequent and eventually stopped. So did my hand-scribbled notes composed between classes and work.

Well, one door closes and another one opens. Before too long, I was dating a fellow student at Capital University, the son of my literature professor. He studied music there and would play Chopin (my favorite composer) on the piano in the living room of the boarding house where I roomed. We married in the autumn of 1955. Bess married a tall, quiet policeman in Ashland before the end of that decade.

My cousin and I didn't see each other again until we each had our first child, both daughters. Bess had a nice home which she made sure to keep tidier than her mother had kept their home, which she

wouldn't let her friends enter. And while I was writing for the college literary magazine, Bess had taken up a hobby, graphoanalysis (handwriting analysis), which actually gained her a column in the Ashland, Kentucky, newspaper.

Her demeanor was more subdued on the surface than it had been in high school, but her enthusiasm hadn't really diminished at all. After comparing notes on family ties and the "old days," she asked me if she could have a sample of my handwriting. I scribbled a couple of paragraphs of nonsense on her steno pad.

She scanned it carefully, and I couldn't quite read the look of amazement on her face until she said, "Oh, Betty, give me permission to use this in my column, please! I may never see another one of these again!" My handwriting had never been what you'd call Spencerian, but I was certainly unaware until she examined the downward loops on all my F's and capital letters that they were those of a "classic psychopath."

"Lord have mercy, Betty, I wouldn't ever want you to get mad at me. There is terrible violence suppressed in this writing! Please do let me analyze this in my column." I suppose I should have been insulted. I only remember thinking, "Bess is loony as ever" and told her to go right ahead and use my dangerous aberration if it would help her career.

Neither Bess nor I could have guessed at the time that we would never see one another again. I had two more children in the years between then and 1962, and Bess had another, so letter-writing and visits got lost in the shuffled schedules of raising children.

I can't tell you what a shock it was when Mom called me one day in 1963, I think, to tell me that Bess was dead. Aunt Ruth had tried to reach me but couldn't locate my telephone number, and Mom had moved several times by then, so it was too late for either of us to go to the funeral when we finally heard the news.

Barely into her 30's, the cousin who embodied not only Scarlett O'Hara, but the ebullience of youth, died of some form of heart disease. I think it may have been congestive heart failure. Aunt Ruth regretted, as we did, that we hadn't been able to get to her funeral, but she was outraged that it had been a closed-casket ceremony - something virtually unknown in her family or hill country mores.

The medication Bess had taken, or something endemic to the condition, had caused her to become terribly overweight in the months before she died, and her husband, taciturn but firm, insisted that "Bess would not have wanted people to see her that way." Despite all the protests hurled his way, he honored her memory when he allowed her that last vanity.

Scarlett O'Hara would have understood that, and so did I. And I was grateful that out of all those dozens of boyfriends who came and went, Bess had taken a husband who didn't bow to Appalachian convention which prohibited such a thing. He staunchly loved her and chose to protect the memory of her Scarlett-like charm. Never more so than when there wasn't another tomorrow for Bess.

e-mail Obetsydeed@aol.com

Bud and Renie: Marriage on a Dare

(From the October '03 issue)
She had varicose veins, which she attributed to several years as a practical nurse, that wandered all the way up her long legs. Sometimes she covered them with pieces of Ace bandages, other times with long opaque stockings.

When I was five years old, I knew that I wanted to marry Leslie Edward White, my Uncle Bud, when I grew up. At the time, I didn't realize that such a union would be incestuous, because even Rev. Crane didn't mention that word when he told about all the things that would condemn us to Hell. I just knew I had a lot of competition. Tall, fair, and good-ooking, Uncle Bud was surrounded by all the girls attending Glenwood High School just before World War II.

My hopes were finally shattered when he married one of them before joining the Marines. Her name was Joanne. She was pretty, laughed a lot and cracked gum when she talked, and wore a big furry coat that looked like a bear and matched the color of her curly hair. She cried with the rest of the family when he left for Parris Island, S.C. I figured that was where he would be fighting the war, and in many ways it was.

Mamaw decorated the living room with blue satin pillows that had a Marine Corps crest and gold fringe around the edges. She also put a little flag with a star on it in the window so people would know she had a son in the war.

Before Uncle Bud "shipped out" for overseas, though, Mamaw received a telegram. "O Lord!" was all she said when she opened it, read it quickly and turned the color of flour. Had the Nazis or Japs already killed him? Mom snatched the message from her and read it to Papaw and me.

Uncle Bud was in the Parris Island hospital with something called spinal meningitis and was in "critical condition." Mamaw and Mom packed quickly, and Papaw drove them to the Railroad Depot in Portsmouth. Papaw held one of my hands tightly while we waved with the others.

"Uncle Bud will be all right, Betty Lou. Mom and Bessie will take care of him, and we'll all be together soon, just like before."

Papaw was trembling, but he was right, although it was a pretty close call. After a week or so, Mamaw and Mom returned to say he would have to stay in the hospital for a while, but he'd get well.

After that, he became a driver for one of the officers there until the war ended. When he finally returned and stepped off the train, he looked more like a movie star to me than before in that blue uniform with gold trim and billed hat, grinning from ear to ear.

We took him home, and after more hugging, kissing and rejoicing, he looked around kind of bewildered and asked where Joanne was. Things grew very quiet. Mamaw answered that Joanne was planning to meet us there for the home-coming dinner and should be along soon.

Impatient to see her, Uncle Bud left and went over to her apartment, but when he returned, he looked sick again, although he assured us that he was really looking forward to tasting Mamaw's fried chicken again and that we should go ahead and have dinner.

I sneaked around to hear the things whispered among the grown-ups, my favorite hobby. All I heard was that someone else was living in Joanne's apartment with her. Before long, Uncle Bud got a d-i-v-o-r-c-e.

He went back to work at the garage where he had worked on Saturdays while he was in high school, and before you could say single, lots of girls were calling and hanging around the house again. Nobody ever mentioned Joanne. Things seemed pretty much the way they had been before he left.

That was until one night that changed the course of all our lives for years to come.

Uncle Bud got all dressed up in his "civvies" one evening and drove his Chevy to Ashland, Kentucky, to visit a couple of our married relatives. All I heard was that he was going on a blind date.

I wondered if he was going to be with a blind lady, but didn't ask.

Unfortunately, it was Uncle Bud (usually a teetotaler, unlike Papaw) who became blind that night &endash; blind drunk.

So did Frank and Ruth Dowdy who had arranged the date. I didn't find out the additional details for quite a while. What I remember vividly is a lot of knocking on our door that night. Loud knocking, and people laughing outside.

When Mamaw got up and opened the door, clutching her chenille robe, Uncle

Bud staggered in, holding up a big woman - as tall as he was, but bigger. They were laughing, trying to talk at the same time but not making any sense. Then the woman grabbed Mamaw, hugged her and cried out, "Mom!" Uncle Bud swayed as he introduced her, "Mom, Dad - hey, Betty, what are you doing up? - this is Varina, but call her Renie. We just got married!"

Lord have mercy. Married? They'd never even met before that night.

Mamaw was absolutely flabbergasted, and she couldn't seem to find words as her face registered shock and total confusion. Papaw, who'd put on some pants with his undershirt, never talked a lot (Uncle Bud was like him in that respect), but I'd never seen him speechless before. Finally Mamaw said to me, "Betty, honey, it's real late." She then retreated into the kitchen, mumbling, "Lord have mercy."

Uncle Bud and Renie ended up sleeping in a back bedroom Mamaw saved for "good."

Come the dawn, it must have looked grim for Uncle Bud. Seems the foursome shared numerous drinks that night and got loaded out of their skulls, enough for Frank and Ruth to come up with an idea for a great joke. They dared Uncle Bud and Varina (named for Varina Davis, wife of the Confederate president) to get married! Well, Uncle Bud and Renie took the dare. As the saying goes, it must have seemed like a good idea at the time.

Later, I often wondered if Renie had really been drunk that night. She always had her wits about her when she wanted something and a way of getting it.

For the next 25 or 30 years, Uncle Bud stood by his word and his wife. His word was good, but she was another matter. Six feet tall, Renie was not what you'd call "comely." Her face was OK, sort of, but her overall bone structure was that of a Viking. She had varicose veins, which she attributed to several years as a practical nurse, that wandered all the way up her long legs. Sometimes she covered them with pieces of Ace bandages, other times with long opaque stockings.

Renie could not help what she looked like, of course. It was her behavior in the long run that truly earned the word ugly.

The newlyweds rented a small brick row house (common in steel mill towns) a few blocks from Mamaw and Papaw's cottage. Renie convinced Uncle Bud to furnish it with brand new blonde wood and shiny chrome furniture in post-War Nouveau style, putting the first of many dents in his earnings and savings.

When Renie wanted something, she usually got it. Like Papaw, Uncle Bud was laconic and didn't verbalize his feelings. Mamaw had raised him and Mom in the Baptist church before she got to me, and my instinct now is that he felt he had no right to deny his bride anything. After all, he had given his word in marriage, sworn it on a Bible - till death would them part. I'll never know for sure, but I think he felt an exaggerated sense of responsibility for her rooted in his act of weakness that night. He felt he had to make it right.

From time to time, she went back to "work" by offering to "take care of" anyone who was sick in the family or the neighborhood or all of New Boston. She bought some restaurant surplus uniforms and moved in on the helpless. People down home didn't pay relatives and neighbors for help during problems, and Renie didn't "charge," but she had a sly way of admiring doilies and bric-a-brac in their homes so that they felt they should offer them to her.

Five minutes after television sets appeared on the market, Renie "just had to have one." Neighbors, and some-times even Mamaw, Papaw and I convened there to watch this miraculous thing with pictures that moved and talked just like the movies, except they were a lot smaller.

That's where Renie saw "The People's Choice," with Jackie Cooper playing a small-town mayor who received advice from his talking hound dog, Cleo. Aunt Renie didn't think she could live without a talking hound dog, so Uncle Bud ordered one for her from Sears-Roebuck. I've told that story here previously.

Aunt Renie had just about exhausted conspicuous consumption in New Boston, that was a true fact. Then, sometime in the early '50s, southern Ohio sprouted a lot of signs advertising lots in Florida for sale (sight unseen) for only $10 down and $10 a month &endash; or whatever would have been a great bargain at that time. Naturally Renie wanted to have her own piece of Florida swampland, and for once Uncle Bud went along with the idea with enthusiasm, not just defeat. Florida sounded wonderful. Sunshine. Sand. Water. He loved to fish.

I don't believe they ever went to see their land before they finished paying for it, but Uncle Bud did plan ahead on one thing. Since he would be fishing a lot, he would need a boat of his own. He was a car mechanic, so why couldn't he build a boat? He bought blueprints for a suitable craft, and (after much persuasion) Papaw agreed to let his son use his own bedroom, the largest room in our house, to build it.

I suspect he thought that anything that would take Renie out of state and far away was worth the sacrifice. Papaw never said so, but it was obvious he didn't like her. Mamaw was better at putting a Christian manner on her feelings.

The boat-building took some time, although Uncle Bud had plenty of help. Lots of relatives, friends and assorted curious neighbors took to dropping in when he worked on it. Many a heated discussion was carried out while people took hammers and saws in hand and helped out. After some time, the boat was completed, and my, it looked yar. (New Boston definition: it looked as if it wouldn't sink.)

Unfortunately, there was one big problem - the boat filled Papaw's room from stem to stern. No matter how Uncle Bud and his biggest crew calculated tilting and turning it - horizontally, vertically or diagonally - there was no way it could be carried out the bedroom door!

Papaw had tried to warn Uncle Bud that this might happen, but of course, Papaw wasn't a mechanic or a boat builder. So he just closed his eyes, exhaled his famous snort that conveyed scorn, and walked away. By this time, I think, Papaw was a member of A.A. and it was a good thing.

It became obvious that the only way to carry out the finished fishing craft was to remove the east side of the house long enough to remove it. The Laurel & Hardy crew finally did just that, and managed to put the boat on top of Uncle Bud's Chevy

and tie it there safely. I'm not sure where he stored it, but when he returned to attach the wall back on the house, Papaw was still hunting. It was the longest time he ever stayed away in the hills.

When Uncle Bud and Renie finally headed down to Florida with the boat on top of their Chevy and some of their belongings in a U-haul truck on back, Mamaw cried, of course. Her "baby" was really leaving home after all those years. As for Papaw, he was wearing the biggest smile I ever remember seeing on his face.

It wasn't until about 1966 before I went along on one of Mom's frequent jaunts to Florida and visited their Shangri-La. Turned out their blind buy (appropriate considering their marriage started with a blind date) was located around Orlando on a sandy lot. They purchased a trailer with two bedrooms - one too many considering that everyone they knew wanted to visit them once they made Florida home.

This time, Mom took along Artie, an old friend of hers and Uncle Bud's from high school days. Artie was a Good Time Gal if there ever was one. She was petite but lively, with a laugh that sounded a lot like Tallulah Bankhead's after several post-performance drinks. Artie liked whiskey pretty well herself.

She and Uncle Bud hugged with friendly affection while Renie looked on like a tropical storm, particularly when he asked us to go for a boat ride while Renie went to the store to prepare for dinner.

It was a long drive to the little lake where Uncle Bud kept his homemade boat docked. He revved up the big motor he'd installed, and we went for quite a ride. Artie drank a cooler full of beer while Uncle Bud showed his expertise at fishing. He caught three or four pale catfish, but not enough for the dinner Renie tried to put together later while she stomped around the trailer.

When Mom pulled out after a Long Goodbye, I could sense overtones of something she and Artie didn't want to discuss in my presence.

Would you believe that after 25 or 30 years of being a devoted husband, Uncle Bud finally divorced Aunt Renie? The negotiations took a long time, and he would sit and listen repeatedly to a record by Engelbert Humperdinck called, "Please Release Me (Let Me Go)," but eventually Renie did, in return for the trailer, everything in it and alimony that would keep him in near-poverty through Social Security and into eternity. He did get to keep the boat. Then he married that sweetheart of a gal pal, Artie, and they had a helluva good time for a few years.

But something strange must have happened to Uncle Bud once he dumped Aunt Renie. He wasn't the same stoic, passive "stand by your word" guy he'd been all the years before. Artie's beer swilling, cigarette-smoking and vulgar jokes began to seem bigger than their trailer could hold. Within five years at most, he up and left Artie too!

Who knows what Mamaw and Papaw (now dead) would have thought if they had been around to find that Uncle Bud turned into a serial monogamist?

Yep, he did it again! He secured a divorce from Artie.

Uncle Bud is now married to some lady named Kate. I have never met her, but according to reports passed

along to my kid brother Jim, she was a prosperous widow with a home in Tampa and a trailer of her own. (Good thing.) The information line indicates that she is a nice woman. They sold both their trailers and moved to her lovely home on the Good Side of Florida.

I haven't seen Uncle Bud in years, not since Mom died in 1982. He won't leave Florida because he shivers anywhere else. The twain may not meet again, as he is in his mid-80's now, and I'm content to be close to my grandchildren and don't often travel farther than Down Home, preferably in the Autumn. But I truly hope he is not only alive but also resting in peace, at last.

What ever happened to Aunt Renie? Hey, I have no idea. My brother isn't sure either, although he thinks she's still alive, and I would bet living in that trailer or somewhere around Orlando. I do wonder sometimes who would "take care" of her now that she's in what would amount to her twilight years.

Gentle Readers, let's face it. I don't know. I was never even sure where Cleo the Talking Hound dog ended up either, but I hope she was as well-kept as Uncle Bud's ex-wives are.

I just don't put much stock in romance anymore, except the classic ones I read about when I was growing up. Heathcliff - I know we'll get together someday.

(From the September '03 issue)
Hoo-Hahs in the Hills

... A person's death was to be grieved, of course, copiously, sometimes uncontrollably, but a funeral was also expected to be an unfettered "Last Hoo-Hah!" a Hill term equivalent to Hurrah!

I haven't been to a really good funeral since I left The Hills.

Even though many Columbus residents came here from Appalachia in the 1940s, carrying Scotch-Irish heritages with them, most of Columbus' population originally came from England and Germany, bringing along a desire for religious freedom, hard-working stability and conservative lifestyles. The funerals I've attended here have usually reflected those traditions.

Only recently have I noticed a trend toward "Celebrations of Life" in which families and friends stress the positive, joyous aspects of the deceased's life, sometimes in ways as individual as their personalities. A few weeks ago, there was a story in The Columbus Dispatch about a devoted football fan (Cleveland Browns, I think) whose natural environment was re-created in the funeral home. His recliner, giant-screen TV, football pennants and the décor with which he surrounded himself in life went to the funeral home along with his coffin. Way to go!

In Appalachia, most people - steel workers, coal miners, hardscrabble farmers and a few fortunate owners of good bottom land between the mountains - considered life something to survive, not celebrate. That doesn't mean they lacked emotional sustenance. Family ties and friendships were intensely cherished, even clannish, but threats to their physical and economic stability always loomed over them.

Newborn children were greatly loved and welcomed, but with a realization that they too would face a lifetime of hardships. Our churches, from Southern Baptists, Nazarenes, Methodists and (in Portsmouth) Catholics, reassured us in various manners that after we died there would be a better life. We would go to live where Jesus lived, in Heaven, and finally feel peace.

Small wonder that these people with meager incomes almost all maintained a life insurance policy. Rain or shine, work or unemployment, coins and, later, bills were stashed away in a container, untouched, to pay the insurance man. Life was endurance tempered by love and faith, but Death was considered the most important event in most people's lives. Accordingly, one expected funerals to be as lavish and indulgent as the insurance policy allowed.

I first saw the word 'funeral' on the back of a paper fan in our church, furnished courtesy of (printed like a book name) Soward's Funeral Home. Mr. Soward, an unseen presence, advertised in New Boston's other churches as well, even though he had no local competition. Nor did we take our loved ones to funeral homes outside of New Boston, in Portsmouth or Wheelersburg, although we took their bodies there later, as they had the only cemeteries.

Some people maintained the ancient Mountain custom of having the deceased's coffin placed in their living room until the burial. This led to a bizarre situation around 1950 when my Cousin Harold died unexpectedly of diabetes at the age of 20. Aunt Alice put his coffin in her small living room; and as it happened, his funeral coincided with the weekend when Cousin Ruth was chosen Homecoming Queen at Glenwood High School. Wearing a card-board crown covered with sequins and a red velvet dress, she was there to receive flowers along with Cousin Harold. Aunt Alice was torn between crying with grief over her sweet son and pride in Ruth's moment of glory.

Increasingly, though, the departed were nearly all taken over to Soward's where family and friends could assess the beauty and expense of the satin-lined coffins and marvel at the number of floral tributes. Most of the arrangements involved at least some gladiolas, and I still recall an over-whelming, somewhat nauseatingly sweet aroma emanating from those flowers - unlike the ones in our backyard.

Over time, certain customs evolved into a form of ritual folk art. A person's death was to be grieved, of course, copiously, sometimes uncontrollably, but a funeral was also expected to be an unfettered "Last Hoo-Hah!" a Hill term equivalent to Hurrah!

Hoo-Hahs have since come into use in many other ways in other parts of the population, but nobody said it like folks in southern Ohio, Kentucky, and West Virginia. There weren't many reasons to say Hoo-Hah! in life, but at funerals they were heartfelt, often whooped like Indian cries of victory as well as goodbyes.

For starters, there was an ongoing feast of food served to mourners for at least two or three days prior to Going to the Grave. As people rotated around the banquet, they took turns eating and drinking and telling stories about the dead person, who was finally receiving all the tributes and praise they rarely heard in life.

My sister-in-law Cheryl recalled that in backwoods areas such as Paintsville, Kentucky, people often took off their shoes while they ate and reminisced, and sometimes passed around spirits. She has fond memories of her Uncle "Sit 'n Drink Jack," so-named because he habitually drank Jack Daniels. Many people from more isolated hill towns, who hadn't seen New Boston relatives for 10 or 15 years because of some fight, inevitably showed up for their funerals as if nothing had ever happened. No ill was spoken of the dead.

"Yessir, he was a good'un, Uncle Hy was. Seems like he was just here yesterday."

"Well, he was, Ernie. Too bad you didn't see him sooner, but he's sure be glad you're here today."

And so it went until it was time to bury the person who could finally say Hoo-Hah! in Heaven. The coffin would be carried by Soward's from the church to the cemetery. When we reached Portsmouth or Wheelersburg, or in some cases, small family cemeteries across the Ohio River in Kentucky atop steep hills, pall-bearers struggled to carry the coffin up to the waiting graves relatives had dug. A minister then came along to say last prayers for the bereaved.

Pallbearers usually carried the coffins on ropes without pulleys or mechanisms that would have made the ultimate descent smooth. Instead, the ropes were simply removed and the coffin dropped to the bottom of the hole where it rocked back and forth a bit and settled with a resounding thud.

At that point, people not only sobbed and moaned but sometimes screamed. This was the point when everyone waited to see if someone, almost always a woman, would leap into the grave to remain with her departed father or husband, hanging onto the coffin, proclaiming she couldn't go on without him. I think it was not an accident that I never saw a man leap into a woman's grave.

After much cajoling from folks above, she would finally allow herself to be pulled up, but it wasn't easy. Sometimes several people leaned over the grave as far as possible to try to pull her out; other times, it was necessary to lower a piece of the grave rope for her to grab onto to ease her back up into the world.

"Hoo-Hah! That was one awful jump," someone might say. "Thought she'd never come out of there." It was a ritual, certainly, but one which had roots in reality. Life for women became much more difficult after a husband's death, although her grown children would naturally take her into their homes alternately for the rest of her life.

In the meantime, the life insurance which provided this display of departing grandeur was always considered a good investment.

When my Mamaw died in 1957, she was 66 and her heart literally gave out. I went to the funeral home for viewing hours, thinking I wouldn't be able to bear it. Instead, I felt a strange but wonderful relief when I looked at her unnaturally painted body. It was my first certainty that the woman who was the core of love and security in my life was not in that casket. I knew her spirit had left her body and was finally, truly at peace.

When I returned home, Papaw was lying on his bed, sobbing, as he had been since the moment she died. I had just arrived from Columbus, but couldn't stop him from crying, "Mom, Mom�." (He only called her Lula during formal moments in their lives together.) I tried to comfort him while my mother and Uncle Bud were off visiting the Immanuel Baptist Church making funeral arrangements with Rev. Crane, who had made my life a living Hell for so many years.

I didn't learn until they returned that the Reverend didn't want to bury her from his church because, he said, she "wasn't a member." For at least two decades, she had put her hard-earned money into that collection plate, but he said she wasn't a member! Apparently she neglected to perform some formality that constituted his version of membership. I still feel rage at the memory of that.

They finally convinced the Reverend to be merciful and conduct her burial service, but I didn't attend the funeral. I told them I would never step foot into that church again. As a matter of fact, it was many years before I entered any church again. I had a lot of maturing to do before I stopped blaming God for Rev. Crane.

As it happened, Papaw simply couldn't be moved from the bed. Mom finally said, "What are we going to do? Someone has to stay here with Dad." I was the obvious choice and volunteered quickly.

While everyone else was gone, the house was quiet and peaceful, as it always had been. I hugged Papaw and felt certain that Mamaw's spirit was there with us as always. Just the three of us. Amazing Grace - singing hymns was the only thing I ever truly loved about those services, and the words of that profoundly moving masterpiece returned to me all day.

My last experience with a Down Home funeral was when Papaw died about four years later, in 1961. He sold the house Mamaw was so proud of owning two months after her death because he couldn't bear to stay there without her. He moved into a little cottage in Wheelersburg, not far from the cemetery where a double stone marked two lots, one waiting for him to join her.

Mom brought him to Columbus during the last months of his life as he wasted away to a child's size from esophageal cancer. I took my baby daughter Kirsten with me and visited Mom as often as I could to help out. He was taken to a hospital one last time, and surprised me by ordering me to look up the name of a Studebaker dealer in the phonebook. He wanted to fix his car and drive back home!

After his death, Mom had a breakdown from the stress of his care and asked me to handle the funeral arrangements. Of course, Papaw had life insurance, and Mom instructed me to spend every penny of it so that he would have the very best. And I did. She had already ordered an obscenely expensive metal vault, but I looked at the coffins and decided on a simple pine one that looked almost handmade.

Then the funeral home salesman opened a display rack of suits that only had front portions (what else would be seen?). I assured him that I wouldn't be needing one. Papaw had a perfectly good brown tweed suit from Sears-Roebuck (the only formal attire he wore in all the years I knew him). I told them I would return with the suit and expected him to be wearing it when his body arrived in Wheelersburg.

It was a beautiful autumn day, the kind Papaw loved for roaming the woods with Queenie or one of his other hounds, just sitting and enjoying the hills even more than hunting game. I had asked the minister to please keep the service short and simple, advising him that Papaw was not a churchgoer but a man who found Heaven in nature. Much to my surprise, after the minister recited the 23rd Psalm, he took out a book and began reading William Cullen Bryants' early 19th Century poem Thanatopsis:

"To him who in the love of Nature holds �"

Perfect. Heaven-sent.

Papaw's funeral ended there. I held onto Mom as she wept weakly while his coffin was lowered into his place next to Mamaw. The few other relatives who were left in New Boston and his closest friend, Marvel Sloane, gathered around. The atmosphere was serene. Then just as I started to lead Mom back to the car, there was some flurry of noise, of strange activity that caused us to turn around.

A woman had been standing on the side of the grave, someone we hadn't noticed during the rites, and leapt into Papaw's grave. She was crying on his coffin. I think the minister and somebody else not in our family leaned down to help her out as

we looked on in complete amazement. A slight, middle-aged woman, a total stranger. Mom and I looked at each other simultaneously and asked, "Who was that?" "I don't know, Mom. Never saw

her before in my life." "Neither have I," she said, shaking her head. None of

the remaining mourners acknowledged knowing her either.

Mom was so relieved to have the funeral over, she just collapsed into the car and we left. I think she had taken some medication to get through the funeral and may not have recalled much of anything about it because she never mentioned the incident again.

It was a few years before the strange and treacherous thought crept through my mind. Papaw had lived alone nearly four years. He had always been a lean man with an ineffable attractiveness; high cheek-bones testified to stories of his mother's Cherokee blood, and his thick auburn hair was barely marked by gray even in his 70's. Why, maybe, I thought ... maybe �

Why, Papa � you ole hound dawg!

email Obetsydeeds@aol.com

(From the August '03 issue)
Fundamental(ist) Sex Education 101

In the 1940s, though, I was somewhere between eating the green apples out back and having no idea how or why babies appeared. That changed somewhat when my Cousin Ruth suggested we "play doctor."

Sex Education wasn't taught in New Boston schools when I was a girl, nor in most of Appalachia; it was inherited. According to our Southern Baptist Church, and most other Protestant fundamentalists, it all began with Original Sin in the Garden of Eden with Adam and Eve - correction, make that Eve.

It was all Eve's fault that she and Adam were evicted from the Garden of Eden, because a snake tempted her to pick and taste an apple which God had forbidden to them. Then she convinced - okay, forced - Adam to take a bite of the apple too. It was a Delicious apple. God got so mad about it that he made them leave the Garden and go out into the Land of Nod, which was considered a bad neighborhood. While there, they magically had two sons named Cain and Abel. Wait a minute - let me clarify this again. Eve had two sons.

Because she picked the Forbidden Fruit and convinced Adam to have some too, and because she gave birth to two sons and eventually other children who had still more children, Eve was guilty of Original Sin. Somehow, this meant that all of us who were born after them, forever after, were conceived in Sin.

Furthermore, we remain sinners unless we Get Saved.

Anyway, at about 7 or 8 years of age, it was all still pretty murky. I wasn't sure whether this actually meant we shouldn't eat any apples without God's permission. But there was an apple tree in Mamaw and Papaw's backyard, and I loved to climb up in its branches and eat them, even when they were still green. I often had belly-aches afterward, but I didn't give birth to any children.

This was before the '60s, readers, or whenever Americans got around to teaching sex education in schools, and parents told children more explicit information than how their mothers had swallowed a watermelon which would become a brother or sister.

By the '50s, though, I had decided that Eve got a bum rap in that story. Personally, I think Adam had a hunch what was really going on all along after Eve talked to the snake, and even cooperated with her transgressions. Then he just claimed that since she had gotten him in trouble with The Boss, they might as well eat some more of that apple. And before he could have a cigarette, he probably suggested she might as well make an apple pie while she was up.

In the 1940s, though, I was somewhere between eating the green apples out back and having no idea how or why babies appeared. That changed somewhat when my Cousin Ruth suggested we "play doctor."

Ruth was one of Aunt Alice's seven children, and one of my best friends. Aunt Alice's husband, George, left her after she committed so many original sins. She had to raise the family by herself, which she did remarkably well - with one exception. I'll discuss that later.

There was a barn in the big back quadrant of our yard, and I loved to go inside its musty shade on hot summer days. Most of the time, I read books there, or just daydreamed. But one fateful day, Cousin Ruth came over and suggested that we "play doctor." I asked her how we did that, and she said it was like going to the doctor (rare in New Boston) and that we take off our clothes and look at our bodies. And thus it came to pass that I Showed Her Mine and She Showed Me Hers.

They were the same things. What could we do except look at each other? But we felt suitably satisfied that we had sinned until a large shadowy figure appeared at the barn door. It was my Cousin Tony, the exception to Aunt Alice's success at raising nice kids. Tony was about 15 years old at that time, tall and husky, and a star football player on Glenwood High School's football team. He was a snob who thought he was hot stuff because all the teenage girls hung around him.

He never said nice things to us younger kids. I didn't like Tony at all.

He immediately deduced what we were doing and said we were not doing it right. In a rare act of benevolence, he offered to help by playing doctor with us. Gee, that was nice of Tony, but what were we supposed to do now?

Immediately he looked at Ours with a smirk on his face, and then proudly announced that he was going to show us His. And he did. What a shock!

Ruth and I both gasped and stared at it while he smiled and preened himself and did some things (alone) with that peculiar thing that hung between his legs. I wondered how he could walk, least of all play football, with His Thing. It looked pretty awkward. I also thought it was ugly.

Before our sex education continued, however, the barn door opened and there stood Aunt Alice and my Mom who, along with my stepfather, had been visiting me at Mamaw and Papaw's house.

I lived with my grandparents because my stepfather didn't like my living in his house because I wasn't "his." He and Mom had two sons, and when I did stay at their house, I enjoyed being with my kid brother, Jim, but I never got along too well with my other brother, Doug.

All told, though, I definitely preferred the arrangement of living with Mamaw and Papaw, Mom's parents. Their house, my home most of the time, was quiet and peaceful; nobody shouted or argued, and I was loved.

I can't do justice to the terrible scene that ensued once we were caught, or all the things Mom and Aunt Alice and my stepfather shouted at us, since they were all shouting at once. They made Ruth and me put on our clothes, then grabbed us by the collars and dragged us to the front porch. Mamaw came out to see what all the fuss was about. She cried, but didn't yell at us. The others had a great time restaging The Inquisition.

As previously noted, Baptists are big on guilt and confessing. Ruth confessed her guilt right away, but had trouble beating me to the punch, because I tried to confess first.

However, Cousin Tony, whom Aunt Alice took with all her family to the Nazarene church, even stricter than the Baptists, didn't confess to being a sinner. Instead, he dropped to his knees on the porch, lifted up his hands to the sky and shouted, "Oh, God, if I am guilty of these sins, please strike me dead right here and now!"

Oh, boy! I can't remember the exact words that raced through my mind, but I can re-create their essence: "OK God, you heard him. He was guilty of sinning too, so kill him right now!" I expected he would fall over immediately, but I didn't have time to imagine what fun it would be to go to his funeral.

That's because Aunt Alice embraced him, sobbing and crying, "Hallelujah! I knew he didn't sin. Tony has The Calling! He's going to be a preacher!" Even my Mom bought the story, apparently; at least she didn't say he should be punished too. Mamaw turned away and walked back into the house without saying a word.

That left the two confessed sinners, Cousins Ruth and Betty, to accept their fate. Aunt Alice duly gave Ruth a hearty spanking, while my stepfather voluntarily took on the responsibility of beating the living daylights out of me.

Ruth was hauled back to Aunt Alice's house, while Cousin Tony continued to look heavenward and chant, "Hallelujah, Glory be to God for this victory!" He even managed to walk with a strut despite that thing hanging between his legs.

By the way, Cousin Tony did become a minister when he grew up, although according to family rumors, he was discharged from two of his ministries for impregnating two teenagers (one per church). He is still alive, though, and as far as I know, still preaching.

In retrospect, I realize that that Apocalyptic incident was almost a zero in sex education, but it was the beginning of my understanding of how Eve must have felt when she had to leave the Garden of Eden and Adam didn't even have to have babies for eating the same apple she did.

For the time being, though, I just cried on my bed, and Mamaw rubbed my back to comfort me, saying only, "Hush now. You'll feel better soon." But her mouth was set in a very grim line.

I suspect she had received the same lesson in sex education long before I did.

email Obetsydeeds@aol.com

(From the July '03 issue)
A Sobering Experience: Papaw, Mamaw and I Join A.A.

While the other females and kids kept their proper place in the kitchen, I sneaked around corners and eavesdropped on proceedings in the living room.

In June's "Appalachian Sprung," I wrote about my adventures and misadventures as a grade school companion to my grandfather when he took me to the best of New Boston's bars, the Mill Lake Inn. Other kids came into the bar occasionally, but only to try to get their fathers to return home or to make sure milk was picked up on the way back.

Unlike the other children, I remained at the bar with Papaw while he drank, reading comic books and throwing peanuts at the big Grizzly bear staked outside, until we wound our way home, sometimes in unsteady fashion.

The drinking was not discussed at home, at least not by Papaw. A proud, unbending man, he never conceded that his drinking habits were out of control. About 1950, though, he was informed by Dr. Bloom, New Boston's only doctor, that he would die soon if he did not stop drinking. Mamaw told me this one day just before a big black ambulance stopped outside our home to take him away. She said he had to go to a hospital far away, "Up North." I thought she meant Columbus, which was the northern limit of my childhood travels.

I realize now that it is possible, perhaps probable, that Papaw was taken to St. Thomas Hospital in Akron. It was then the only hospital in the country giving rehabilitative care ("drying out") to people with drinking problems. Dr. Robert Smith, a surgeon who was co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous along with a stockbroker named William G. Wilson in 1935, was on staff there.

They were the first to recognize alcoholism as a physical disease as well as a mental and emotional problem. After receiving medical care, recovering alcoholics who left St. Thomas often joined A.A. in their own hometowns, which Dr. Bob and Bill W. - as they would become known to the world - had developed into a national program.

In Papaw's case, meetings were held in Portsmouth, just west of us. Papaw "officially" joined A.A. by admitting - as the first step of their 12 step program - that he was "powerless over alcohol" and it had made his life unmanageable. I didn't hear him say those words the first time. Considering his stiff-necked pride, I can only imagine how difficult it must have been for him to stand in front of the others and say: "My name is Frank W., and I am an alcoholic."

Mamaw and I eventually joined him at the Saturday night meetings in a large empty house. What had once been a huge living room was now filled with folding metal chairs. Papaw and his fellows members (no women were present at that time) sat in there by themselves. Although A.A. does hold open meetings which allow families or anyone else interested in solving a drinking problem to attend while members have discussions about past experiences as alcoholics and the difficulties of staying sober, there are also closed meetings limited solely to members.

Mamaw and the other wives and (rarely) their children all gathered together in a kitchen at the back of the house. They brought along homemade cakes and pies and brewed fresh coffee for refreshments later. The women never sat in on the meetings themselves. I suspect that the Appalachian culture in which families did nearly everything together accounted for our actually being there.

Papaw had always refused to go to church with Mamaw and me on Sundays, a habit which did not change after joining A.A., although he regularly practiced the Twelve Steps and recited The Serenity Prayer: "God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; courage to change the things I can; and wisdom to know the difference."

Apparently Mamaw had the wisdom to know the difference between Papaw's embracing sobriety thru the partially faith-based program of A.A. and finally getting him to join the Baptist Church, because I don't recall her pestering him about it. Churchgoing involved sitting through long sermons about what to do or not do (primarily anything which hinted of pleasure) in order to avoid being condemned to Hell. Papaw voluntarily acknowledged his drinking problem and a need to change it, but he was not about to have someone order him how to behave.

Aside from missing the Glenwood High School basketball games on Saturday nights, I welcomed the time spent at the A.A. meetings and found a new interest in these occasions: listening to the men tell stories about their struggles with alcohol. While the other females and kids kept their proper place in the kitchen, I sneaked around corners and eavesdropped on proceedings in the living room.

Oh, the terrible things they had done while drunk! The misdeeds, the hangovers (physical and mental) and, worst, the pain they caused to the people they loved - sometimes losing them- were recounted in excruciating detail. Yet, expurgating these experiences allowed them to realize that they were no worse and no better than other recovering alcoholics. At the time of their downfall, they felt they were all alone in their pain and that no one else had ever scraped the bottom of the barrel of humanity as low or as hard as they did.

Papaw did not speak often, but he was a man of few words anyway. However, I do recall his confessing some of the things I already knew firsthand - such as the night he swerved off Rhodes Avenue into the field facing the steel mill, plowing the '36 Pontiac into a power pole. ("Betty Lou, I think we'll walk home tonight.") I never heard him mention the empty pint bottles of that era's equivalent of Thunderbird wine in the quilts on his bed, nor how I put them back in place when he asked me to "make" his bed. (I thought I was preserving his collection.)

He did bring up one story I had long forgotten. I must have been very young when he took me to a carnival in Portsmouth - after having a few drinks. I never got to ride the Merry-go-Round because Papaw stopped to play something called a shell game. I watched him take change from his pockets and place it on a stand as he tried to guess which shell was hiding a pea the huckster manipulated. Papaw kept guessing wrong, but placed new bets until all the money was gone.

As we walked back through the sawdust, he held my hand and said, crestfallen and ashamed as I had never seen him: "Betty Lou, I've made a fool of myself and I've wasted all your Mama's money." Yes, it came back to me with fresh pain when he told his fellow members.

One incident I never knew about until he told it there (a marathon confession of not "how great I was" but "how hard and low I fell") was his stealing Mamaw's iron. Her precious, always-needed iron, which she applied to every item of clean laundry, was sold to obtain a little money for drinking. Shameful and terrible indeed.

Listening intently, though, I also detected in these alcoholic accounts a certain sense of competition: "You think that was bad? Wait until I tell you about the time..." Or even a fugitive sense of nostalgia. After all, when they committed those drunken acts, sometimes they probably enjoyed it, or, as the cliché goes, "It seemed like a good idea at the time."

There was one man whose name escapes me, but his story never has. He couldn't recall how it all began aside from getting drunk, but when he woke up one day, he found himself on a coal barge on the Ohio River, floating along with all the other flotsam and jetsam on that polluted water. He wound up somewhere in Kentucky. "That was some trip," he sighed, before laughing, "I just wish I could remember it."

There was one unqualified tragedy in the A.A. programs, though. It occurred on meeting nights when one of the "regulars" didn't show up. It meant he had probably fallen off the wagon. A pall of dread and anxiety would fall over the room. Would he make it back, or was he lost? Of course, it was a reminder of how precarious their own hold on sobriety was and always would be. That is why alcoholics always speak of themselves as "recovering," not "recovered."

The fellowship which began for those men and their families at the meetings often extended to personal friendships which were taken home, at least that was our own experience. Eventually, Mamaw's wonderful Sunday dinners began to include at least three additional people from the A.A. "family."

One was Rev. Frank Fox, accompa-nied by wife Gretchen, who used his full name freely in our home. He always said grace before Mamaw's fried chicken was touched. Another was a World War II veteran, Warren K. who had lost both his legs and was confined to a wheelchair. We developed a special closeness, and he would make sure to put a drumstick, my favorite, on my plate. He also listened to my stories about school, although he never spoke about the war or having a family besides us. Mamaw told me privately never to ask him questions about that.

Occasionally Warren would go to the Veterans Administration Hospital in Chillicothe for care and would send me postcards making silly jokes he knew I'd enjoy. During one extended stretch, the postcards stopped coming. Mamaw drew me aside, hugged me and told me that Warren was dead. He had tried to throw himself out a bathroom window, but he couldn't scale the wall, and attendants pulled him down, foiling his suicide attempt. However, he caught pneumonia and died.

Over the coming years, Papaw and Mamaw introduced newer A.A. members into our home and extended family. Papaw never once "relapsed." He remained sober until the end of his life at the age of 73. He never gave up smoking, though. He did stop hand-rolling that Bugler Tobacco and switched to Camels.

Gratefully, he and Mamaw enjoyed a kind of companionship I'd never seen before, despite the obvious bond they had always had, even during his years of drinking. It might not have involved going to church, mind you, but there were family outings, including drive-in movies!

Mamaw was thrilled to see the Cecil B. DeMille spectacle, Samson and Delilah. So was I, although I wondered why Victor Mature was dumb enough to let Hedy Lamarr cut his hair, and worse, pull down those pillars and crush himself and everyone else in the Coliseum.

Once we traveled all the way to Indianapolis with Uncle Bud and Aunt Renie to "see" the Memorial Day 500 mile race. We parked in a dusty field, never even near, least of all inside, the big fence which enclosed the race. Nonetheless, we were there, and heard the deafening noise of the circling wheels and became covered with clouds of dust that settled over all the baskets of picnic food Mamaw had spread on several tablecloths. We swallowed the dust along with the food.

Most often, we drove to Ashland, Kentucky to visit relatives, a 25-mile excursion which took at least two or three hours at Papaw's accustomed driving speed, which sometimes only went as high as the distance. At times other cars pulled around us and people yelled things we couldn't hear. They might as well have been saying the Serenity Prayer. Unperturbed, Papaw continued at his stately pace.

What it amounted to, in a wonderful collective way, was a life that fulfilled the lesser known part of that prayer: "Living one day at a time; Enjoying one moment at a time; Accepting hardships as the path-way to peace; � Trusting that (we) may be reasonably happy in this life and supremely happy � Forever in the next."

I don't know about the "next world," but after Papaw joined A.A., things were truly happier and more peaceful for us in this one.

(From the June '03 issue)
Grade School By Day ... Barfly By Night

At least two or three nights a week, he would say, "Betty Lou, how would you like to go with me to the Mill Lake Inn?" He knew I would be overjoyed, and off we went.

When I was a child living with my grandparents in New Boston, I didn't realize that my grandfather was an alcoholic. I'm not sure he did either. This was strange, considering we both went to the same bar, The Mill Lake Inn, several evenings a week.

It was so-named because the Inn sat on the edge of a lake placed there by the steel mill. The rest of the mill's view consisted of blast furnaces and smokestacks spewing their marks against the hellish red sky. No one looked too long in that direction, though. The intent was for patrons to get blasted themselves.

In retrospect, I'm sure Papaw knew he was drinking enough to make my Mamaw unhappy, but I never heard her complain. After all, my grandmother was a busy woman. During the weekdays, she took me with her to work nearly every morning at 6 am when I wasn't in school or on vacation. Mamaw hung wallpaper steadily in houses in New Boston and Portsmouth, the large town just west of us. A realtor who handled most of the property there kept her busy.

Every morning, I awoke to conflicting aromas: coffee brewing, bacon frying, and a large steel kettle of blue Argo starch being brewed with water into an enormous batch of wallpaper paste. It had a strange sweet fragrance that I associated with both her dexterous brushing of it on the wallpaper and with the picture of the man on the Argo box-cover dressed in long robes with the long white beard. I figured he must be God.

While she brushed her waist-length hair, braiding and folding it into a crown around her head, the radio would be tuned to the "Cadle's Tabernacle." Someone always sang, Ere You Left Your Room This Morning, Did You Think To Pray?

I didn't, but I knew it was time to have my bacon and eggs (no coffee) and get Mamaw's brightly patterned homemade starched aprons from the bureau to take to work. Later, she placed a cotton belt of sorts with pockets to hold her brushes and tools.

Papaw lifted up the long folding boards which she would set up once we reached her work site to hold long stretches of wallpaper, along with the ladders she climbed to reach the ceilings of the empty rooms she transformed into paper gardens.

He would place the boards and ladders on top of our '36 Pontiac and tie them with ropes and drive us to our destination. When the weather was cold, we took along a portable metal kerosene heater which she moved from room to room to keep us comfortable and to aid the drying of her symmetrical strips.

Somehow, she always managed to find books (a rare commodity in New Boston) for me to read while I sat in the corner and waited. After her parents died, she had been forced to leave school in the second grade, and her older brother "sold her into bondage" to work in other people's homes for her keep. She wanted me to read so that I would never have to do the same. She loved to listen. Reading and freedom were tied in her mind as necessary, and she made sure I realized that.

Papaw would pick us up in the afternoon. Once home, Mamaw would prepare tasty meals with staples of hill country diets - beans, greens, potatoes and flaky biscuits - but she also fixed dishes she must have learned when she cooked for a hotel as a young woman: pork chops with potato slices and sauerkraut baked under a rich cream stands out in my memory. The origin of many of her standards seemed Pennsylvania Dutch.

Afterwards, we sat on the porch, and, when I had been "double promoted" in the second grade because of my reading skills, she had me read The Portsmouth Times to her. After I covered the news of car wrecks and domestic violence, she always asked me to read the scriptures to her. Some of the words were difficult, but there was a musical rhythm involved in separating the syllables that I still appreciate.

Then she would go into the kitchen to clean the dishes and take her bath, and Papaw and I would sit on the porch alone for a while. He was always polite to other adults, calling them ma'am or sir. He was a proud man. Courteous but somewhat laconic otherwise. Only with me, as I remember, did he let down his guard. I would climb onto his lap, put my face into those wrinkles of his, and kiss the tobacco smell that clung to his skin.

"How much do you love me?" he would ask. Mamaw asked the same question, and my answer was the same to both of them. "I love you all the bushels and all the pecks in heaven." I knew what bushels were because of the baskets I'd seen, but I had no idea how to measure a peck except that it must be enormous, for I loved them beyond measure, really.

When I climbed down, Papaw would reach into his shirt pocket and produce a package of Bugler's Tobacco. There was a picture of a WWI soldier on the front playing a bugle. A little metal device with a rubber conveyer belt, required to put the shreds of tobacco into papers, was on the porch table. I begged Papaw to allow me to roll his cigarettes, and he would let me do that, with more patience than I could have realized. When the cylinders had been formed, I took my tongue and generously moistened the edges of the paper, which were thin and sagged a lot.

After that, at least two or three nights a week, he would say, "Betty Lou, how would you like to go with me to the Mill Lake Inn?" He knew I would be overjoyed, and off we went.

The Mill Lake Inn was a long one-story building with an equally long linoleum-covered counter and high stools where the men sat while they drank their choice of the many rows of bottles lined up in front of the mirror.

There were metal advertising signs on the wall, and most of the men drank beer whose names were there. Papaw imbibed something dark in a small glass. The other men usually conversed with one another, but Papaw didn't say much to anyone except me. I would sit on the floor under the metal racks that held potato chips and peanuts and comic books.

After we had been there long enough, I would tug on the cuffs of his trousers and ask if I could buy some peanuts to feed the bear. A bear? Honest and true - a big wooly bear was in the yard outside the bar, chained to a stake in the ground.

Don't ask me why there was a bear outside the Mill Lake Inn. I had no idea, but I liked to go outside at least once during the evening and, standing back at a safe distance, throw peanuts at him. He scarfed them down and made loud noises, but I don't think he was dangerous. By the time I finished, Papaw was usually ready to make his way home. (The mill had the bear as a strange attraction or mascot, and Papaw had me as his companion/mascot.)

And so we would head home in the '36 Pontiac with the chrome Indian head on the hood. Its profile reminded me of Papaw. Grandma White, his mother, was part-Cherokee Indian, I'd been told, and his bone structure mirrored her high cheekbones and nose as surely as Chief Pontiac's.

I did not learn until I was an adult, and both Papaw and Mamaw had been dead several years, that Papaw was a direct descendant of one Peregrine White, a baby born to Sarah and Edward White aboard the Mayflower on its voyage to Plymouth, Massachusetts. Papaw never mentioned it, and may not have known. He had an aristocratic bearing and manner, and he didn't work much, although I'm not sure that was because of his background.

I had seen a picture of him when he was a handsome young man, sitting astride a motorcycle, serving as Police Chief of New Boston, Ohio. From time to time, he would drive trucks long distance and be gone several days. And he also groomed and trained horses occasionally.

Most of the time, though, Papaw was unemployed.

When we returned home, he would usually say that he was hungry and ask me, "Would you go inside and make me a fried egg sandwich, Betty Lou?" And I did. (Mamaw was in her bed asleep by then.) But when I carried the plate with his sandwich back to the car, he was almost always sound asleep. And that's where he would stay on those nights, in the car, sitting straight upright. His spine was perfectly aligned with the back of the seat.

On other occasions, he went into his bedroom. From time to time, he would ask me if I would mind making up the bed, and I was glad to do it. We did not have central heating yet, so Mamaw made plenty of quilts for us. There were at least four on Papaw's bed. I peeled back the layers one by one, removing small bottles scattered over each blanket, smoothed out the wrinkles, and neatly replaced the bottles. He hadn't asked me to remove them or throw them away. I thought he must be saving them.

The only disruptive thing I remember about our trips to the Mill Lake Inn was one night when we were riding home and I noticed that the car seemed to curve back and forth on the street. Papaw turned it to the left, and suddenly we were riding across the field in front of the steel mill.

By that time, I was yelling and crying, "Papaw, we're not in the street anymore � Papaw, we're in the mill field." The car rocked back and forth in the hard chunks of mud before it collided headfirst into a power pole. I was all shaking and scared.

"You hit the pole, Papaw. We're going to die!"

He didn't say anything for a while, just sat there, staring at the pole. His only response to me was, "Ain't that bear by the lake a smart thing? It's a good thing you give him peanuts." Then he opened his door, which took awhile, and walked around to my side, opened it carefully, and lifted me out.

"Betty Lou," he said calmly, "I think we'll walk home tonight."

And so the years passed with no declaration that Papaw had a drinking problem, until 1950 when I was in the ninth grade. Mamaw took me onto her lap and explained that Dr. Bloom told her that Papaw was very sick and needed to get help or he would die.

He was going away to a hospital in Columbus awhile, she explained, as a big black ambulance pulled up. They carried a stretcher into the house, and by the time they carried Papaw out, pale and wan, tears were streaming down all our faces - even his.

It was two weeks before he returned home and walked in the front door again.

e-mail Obetsydeeds@aol.com

Coming Next Month:

Papaw, Mamaw and I join Alcoholics Anonymous

(From the May '03 issue)
Patty Scarpelli's Star Turn

Girls wore skirts with crinolines, some adorned with poodles,
or straight skirts with a slight slit from mid-calf to the knees �

There is a time between spring and summer that always signals another year's crop of high school graduates. They blossom suddenly in Columbus' finest restaurants, the 18-year-olds in their tuxes or dance dresses, having dinner before The Prom. It is a sight that makes most of us smile to ourselves, and not without poignancy.

We remember our own proms and graduations, if not the words of "commencement" wisdom we barely heard, least of all remember. It stirs instead a montage of memories of what we have experienced in the years since we left high school ourselves: college, perhaps; dreams and ambitions lost or fulfilled; the marriages and children and the few friends we still cling to while others have vanished into the past.

There is only one thing for sure that lies ahead of all these hopeful young men and women, whether they choose to attend them or not: decades of reunions with their classmates. Class reunions are an annual American rite - a time when one debates whether or not to Go Back: to compare waists and hairlines and whatever fate has wrought while exchanging stories about the past.

As a graduate of Columbus Central High School's Class of 1953 (I was only 16, so I can't be that old), I'm contemplating the prospect of what this landmark 50th year reunion might reveal. Fifty years? Impossible! I may forget where I put my glasses and car keys, but how could I have misplaced a half century?

More easily than I could ever have imagined. There are a few choice years that you endure all your life, those that were an eternity in themselves, but most slip by as quietly as moments or months, the math uncounted.

Ours was a large class, well over 200 people. Central High School, now the classical façade on the east side of COSI over-looking the Scioto River, was a magnet school. In 1953, that meant students from all parts of the city could attend rather than those in their designated neighborhoods. Vocational education and other specialties drew many students. Long before legal segregation, we were a mixture of all races. One commonality: none of us was wealthy.

It was the early '50s. A time when only two or three students had cars. Only boys wore jeans. Girls wore skirts with crinolines, some adorned with poodles, or straight skirts with a slight slit from mid-calf to the knees. The daring ones of both genders often sported ducktail haircuts. The stratification included cheerleaders, football players and others who were "in" by clothes and invisible criteria; the academic set that made the honor rolls, put out the school papers and yearbooks, and were involved in music and drama; and a pre-James Dean set of guys who wore cigarette packs in the sleeves of their T-shirts, usually followed by "their" girls, some "loose." And then there were the loners who didn't belong, period.

Patty Scarpelli was definitely a loner. Barely five feet tall, she had enormous breasts which seemed to endanger her balance, and she clutched her books against her chest defensively. Her clothes were few and unstylish, but her short, shaggy brown hair framed a sweet smile in a sweet face. When she passed others in the halls, she always smiled, whispered "Hi," and passed on without pausing. Rarely did anyone try to stop her or engage in conversation.

Joyce Jones Buck, our Class Secretary and compulsive organizer, once got four or five of her friends to save their lunch money for a week (no small sacrifice) to purchase some clothes for Patty and give her a home permanent. Patty was reluctant to accept the gesture at first, but finally agreed and thanked them. Afterwards, she went her solitary way, just as before.

It was ten years before we had our first class reunion, and perhaps 15 years before any alumni heard or saw anything of Patty Scarpelli. Joyce Buck, involved in the planning and hard work of a half century of these events, thinks it was that late -or a bit later - before she connected with Patty. After checking all the Scarpellis in the phone book, she reached a woman who told her simply, in Italian-marked English, "Patty, she in Chicag-ee." She gave Joyce her phone number there, and thus did it come to pass that Patty made reservations for herself and several companions to fly back to Columbus for a class reunion.

The motel ballroom was crowded with well over 100 of us that evening, moving from table to table during cocktail hour to exchange stories of how we were faring. I don't remem-ber a spotlight being turned on, but there might as well have been when Patty Scarpelli came into the room suddenly, making a dazzling entrance in a clinging white dress that Marilyn Monroe might have worn, her now shapely figure disciplined by fine lingerie, and her height balanced by high heels and beautifully teased hair.

She was also wearing what I remember as a white fur stole, which revealed a huge white orchid corsage when she removed it and finally draped it on the chair where she was escorted by at least three or four guys wearing black suits. They didn't carry violin cases, but there was something about their appearance that made you feel they might. They were definitely protective in the way they surrounded Patty, who introduced one as her secretary and another as her driver to the people who rushed to form a crowd at her table. That process continued all night, but I must confess, I was enjoying the spectacle so much that I didn't go to the table. I have no idea what was said. I preferred to imagine it.

After dinner, when the dancing started, Patty found herself facing a long, long line of anxious guys waiting to ask her for a dance. She didn't sit out one number the entire evening. She knew all the new dances and demonstrated the moves for her partners and what can only properly be called her audience.

There is a phrase in show business called a "star turn." It occurs on a stage or on film when all eyes are focused on only one person. That night, it was indisputably Patty's Star Turn, and it was absolutely wonderful. It didn't take much imagination to realize that she must have dreamed of that scene without ho