The Life & Times of a Boomer Baby
By
L. K. Campbell
Smashwords Edition Copyright 2009 by Lucinda K. Campbell
All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced in any fashion without the express, written consent of the copyright holder.
The views expressed in this work are those of the author alone. All of the stories contained in this book are based on the author own recollections.
Preface
I grew up on a family farm in the smallest county in the state of North Carolina in the region called the Sandhills. For 110 years on that piece of land, four generations of my family lived, worked and died.
It was situated about halfway between the small villages of Laurel Hill and Wagram. I claim Laurel Hill as my hometown, because that’s where we went to school and received our mail.
My childhood spanned the turbulent decade of the 1960s—a time of great transition (the advent of the “new south”) and turmoil. While the rest of the country was agonizing over race riots, political unrest and the killing of thousands of young Americans in Vietnam, we were enjoying the best of times for our family.
We weren’t isolated from what was going on in the rest of the world. Every night after supper, we all sat down and watched the evening news. But at the time, we hadn’t been touched by personal tragedy. We were unaware of the brain tumor that was slowly growing within my mother and would take her life in 1975. There in our little haven, we couldn’t have imagined the hard, economic times that would cause my siblings and me to lose the family farm following our grandmother’s death.
Daddy used to say that our family was cursed. During some of the lowest points in my life, I almost believed it. As I’ve grown and moved on with my life, I’ve come to realize how truly blessed we were. I’ve found much of my strength and resiliency in the memories that were made on that small farm in the Sandhills.
In The Beginning…
…There Was Mama
While I played under Mama’s ironing board, I learned all about deceit, adultery and manipulation.
I discovered these plot devices from the daily lineup of soap operas that started around noon and lasted until my brother and sister came home from school. At the tender age of four, I knew what made scheming Lisa’s world turn and who murdered whom on Edge of Night.
Only rare occasions kept Mama and Grandma from watching “their stories”. Whatever they had to do outside of the home was done early in the morning, so that they could be back in time to find out what tragedy poor Jo was going to have to face on Search for Tomorrow. When Jo would pray for God to guide her through her latest crisis, I’d catch a glimpse of Mama wiping a tear from the corner of her eye.
I tell you no lie. I can remember Fourth of July celebrations at the Hughes household on As the World Turns as well as I can remember my own family gatherings. When Grandpa Hughes would deliver his annual apple pie and motherhood speech, Mama put down the iron, and Grandma stopped her knitting. The two of them hung on every word Grandpa Hughes uttered as if he were a prophet sent from the Almighty.
At the supper table, their conversation always drifted to what had happened, or what they thought was going to happen, on one of their shows. Daddy tried to follow their dialogue, thinking that they were discussing real life people.
“Now who is this you’re talking about?” Daddy asked.
“Bert Bauer,” Mama said.
“I don’t know Bert Bauer.”
“Oh, you’ve heard me talk about Bert from Guiding Light.”
He’d leave the table muttering under his breath, “Those goofy shows are going to send Mama and Martha to the loony bin.”
Their soaps were black and white way back then when the good characters never did anything bad, the bad characters never did anything good and always received their just desserts.
Sex on the soap operas of 1962 amounted to a demure kiss next to the bedroom door while the picture faded to black. I wonder what Grandma would think if she could see actresses strip down to the skimpiest of underclothes before falling into the bed, onto the floor or into the hay with their leading men. I know Mama would say, “That’s so trashy,” and then watch every minute of it.
I’m not sure what effect all of that soap opera watching had on me during my formative years. The commercials probably did the most damage. After growing up with the idea that a scuffmark on the linoleum would be my biggest tragedy, the real world can be a rude awakening.
As I write this, I think about the fact that I’m now the age Mama was when she died. Sometimes I look at myself, with the zigzag path that my life has taken, and feel that I haven’t accomplished much. I wonder what Mama might’ve done differently if she’d known that she would only live to be 48-years-old.
I grew up during a time when the economy and popular thought didn’t dictate that women had to (or should) work outside of the home. The women that I knew were content with that arrangement—or at least, they presented that impression.
Had she not married, I’m sure that Mama would’ve excelled in anything she’d chosen to do with her life.
She met Daddy—literally—by accident. Mama was a 19-year-old cadet in the Army Nurses Corps. when Daddy came along in November of 1945.
After being discharged from the Army that summer, Daddy went home to Chicago and took a job with Midland Construction Company. Midland needed someone to go to South Carolina to work on a building project. Daddy had been at Fort Jackson (just outside of Columbia) for two years before the war, so he knew the area well and was eager to go back.
As fate would have it, a car accident landed him in the hospital where Mama was working in the Emergency Room. He always said that he fell in love with her at first sight and after being admitted, he asked if someone would send the redheaded nurse from the E.R. to his room.
Two weeks later, they were married. Mama was afraid to tell Grandma and so she sent her best friend back home to North Carolina to deliver the news. Grandma had always hoped that Mama would marry one of the Gibson boys from Laurel Hill. According to Mama’s friend, her first response to the news was, “What kind of a name is Kosak?”
For a woman, marriage and the Army didn’t mix in those days, so Mama gave up her military career. It must’ve been a huge heartache for her, because she loved the Army. Her best friend went on to serve in Korea and Vietnam; then retire a General. Although Mama was proud and happy for her, I always sensed an undercurrent of regret for what might have been.
She held on to her nursing career until after my brother was born four years later. Then she turned all of her talents toward becoming the perfect housewife and mother.
I remember that our house always looked ready to be photographed for Better Homes & Gardens, a magazine she subscribed to along with McCall’s and Ladies’ Home Journal. I look at our old home movies (now transferred to VHS tape), and I see nothing but perfection. Everything was always in its place—even the flowerbed was weeded.
If she walked into my house today, she’d probably be shocked to see the clothes thrown over the back of a chair, shoes in the middle of the floor and yesterday’s newspaper scattered about the room.
When I reached a certain age, I was expected to keep my room clean and do it without any kind of compensation. I’ll never forget when I learned about allowance from a classmate at school. Allowance wasn’t distributed in our household. As Mama so aptly put it, “We supply you with everything you need. If you had money of your own, you’d just use it to get into trouble.”
One day, I explained to Mama that my best friend’s mother paid her a quarter to wash the dishes.
“Why should I pay you to do your household duty?”
At times, I look in the mirror and see Mama’s face. I don’t look exactly like her. In fact, I think she was much prettier than I am. She had deep, rich, auburn hair and dark brown eyes. Her lips were red and full. Mine are thin and pale.
She didn’t think that she was at all pretty. I have very few pictures of Mama, because she wouldn’t allow her picture to be taken if she could help it. A few years before she died, the state of North Carolina started putting pictures on drivers’ licenses. She hated it. She hid that thing away in her purse and refused to show it to anyone.
It’s hard to believe that I’ve lived almost twice as long without her as I lived with her. When a person has been gone thirty or more years, the memories of them become selective and fewer. We tend to throw out what seems trivial and petty in order to retain the big picture.
When I want to remember Mama, I can look no further than her 1966 edition of the Better Homes & Gardens Cookbook. In addition to the published recipes, it’s filled to overflowing with her personal collection clipped from newspapers and taken from the labels of canned food. There are recipes written on index cards in Mama’s neat penmanship.
Seeing her handwriting again reminds me of how simple everything seemed when I was a little girl. I especially remember the days I spent with Mama’s cookbook concocting mess. I can’t say that the word cooking applies to what I did back then, but Mama and Daddy were always kind enough to swallow hard, smile and say, “That’s real nice, sweetheart.”
That is until one particular day.
I had picked out a recipe called “Spanish Eggs”. Mama didn’t have all of the ingredients I needed, so I very cleverly substituted items.
The recipe seemed simple enough. First, I substituted ketchup for a chopped pimento. To tell the truth, I didn’t know what a pimento was. It was red in the picture, and I figured it was a chopped up tomato. I did know that ketchup was made from tomatoes, so I figured it would work.
It was a minor mistake compared to the second one. I had no idea that “six hard-cooked eggs” meant six hard-boiled eggs. I scrambled six eggs along with onions, ketchup, flour, paprika, chili powder and a crumbled up bay leaf.
I was so proud when I set the plate on the table in front of Daddy.
He took one look at it and said, “Darling, this doesn’t even look edible.”
After I looked up the word “edible” in the dictionary, my feelings were very hurt. To add insult to injury, the dog wouldn’t eat it, either.
Mama wanted—and tried—to teach me to cook, but I was no longer interested. Even then, I couldn’t take criticism very well. It’s more likely that I couldn’t take rejection from my beloved father—or the dog.
Recently, I went over to my sister’s house to use her sewing machine. When I sat down at Mama’s old sewing machine cabinet, the first thing that caught my eye was the stain in the shape of a ring left by the countless cups of coffee Mama drank. When I put my own cup of coffee on that spot, a memory came back to me.
I took a sewing class during my junior year in high school and had to make a dress for my final exam. Mama kept hovering around my back trying to give me advice and correct what I was doing wrong. All the while, Grandma stood off to the side saying, “Now, Martha. She has to do it by herself. This is her final exam.”
I didn’t know at the time that in less than six months, Mama would be gone. What I wouldn’t give now to have her hovering over my shoulder, telling me what to do.
My mother’s death took us by surprise. She’d suffered from seizures for about three years and had every test and procedure possible to diagnose her condition. (In the early 1970s, CAT scans and MRIs didn't exist.) Thirty days before she died, she went into a coma. It was then that brain surgery revealed the cancer. The type of tumor she had, astrocytoma, starts deep inside the brain and as it grows, it wraps around the brain tissue like tentacles. The doctor estimated that it had been growing for at least twelve years.
I was seventeen, and it was the fall of my senior year in high school when she passed away. I withdrew into myself and blocked many of my memories from those last weeks and months of Mama’s life. It took me years to be able to react to her death on an emotional level.
Mama was overly protective of me almost to extent of being compulsive about it. I never learned to ride a bicycle, because she was afraid I’d get hurt. My brother and sister swear up and down that they learned to swim when Mama threw them off the pier at Camp Monroe and yelled, “Sink or swim!” I’m not sure I believe that story, but at any rate, they learned to swim at a much younger age than I did.
I had to take swimming lessons when I was around five-years-old. Before that, I was only allowed to float in a rubber tube that Mama had tied to a rope and secured to the pier. How embarrassing! The other children my age were dog paddling around me, and I was moored to the pier like an infant.
For a long time, even after she died, I resented Mama for being so cautious with me. Instead of protecting me, she raised me to be afraid of everything. In a lot of ways, it held me back and kept me from doing things that I think would’ve made me a better, stronger person.
Now that I’m older and wiser, I understand Mama a lot better than I did when I was younger. She was overprotective, because she almost lost me when I was two-years-old. One night I was suddenly stricken with a very high fever and convulsions. Upon arriving at the emergency room, Mama learned that there were two other children brought in with the same symptoms as mine. It was odd, because they were from different parts of the county and had no contact with my family.
The illness was ruled a virus. By 1960 medical standards, the doctors couldn’t pin it down to any known virus and didn’t know how to treat it. Then the unthinkable happened. One of the other children died. A few hours later the second child also passed away. Dr. Womble, our family physician, wouldn’t give up on me. He called a close friend of his, Dr. McMillan, who was the head of pediatric medicine at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill.
Dr. McMillan initially thought that it was spinal meningitis, but a spinal tap ruled that out. He asked my parents for permission to administer a new drug that was still in the experimental stage and had never been tested on children. They agreed. Sometime during the night, my fever broke. The virus was never diagnosed and to this day, I don’t know what it was.
I can’t imagine the agony that Mama must’ve gone through during the long hours of that night when she feared that her baby was going to die. Knowing Mama, she put on that brave face that Army nurses are taught, gritted her teeth and soldiered on. But I think she must’ve made a promise to herself that night that she’d never let anything bad happen to me.
Of the few spankings I received as a child, two of them resulted from misbehavior in church. Even now, I feel that Mama treated me unfairly, but the one thing we didn’t dare to do was to embarrass Mama in church. The first time it happened was at Easter. I was attired in the customary finery, complete with hat, gloves and crinoline petticoat under a light blue taffeta dress.
The outfit was very cute with the exception of my hat. I’ve always had thin, baby fine hair that wouldn’t hold a hatpin, and the darn thing kept falling off of my head. During the preacher’s sermon, while she was wrangling with my hat, Mama accidentally stuck me with the pin.
“Owwwww,” I yelled out into the silence of the sanctuary. “You stuck me in the head!”
Sitting on the pew next to us was Grandma’s cousin and one of the pillars of our church and community, Mr. Edwin Gibson. He covered his face with his bulletin, but I could tell he was laughing. The preacher only looked up for a moment, smiled and went back to preaching his sermon. No harm done, right?
My other church spanking occurred during the Christmas season when I was a member of the children’s choir. I committed another dreadful breach of etiquette that Mama couldn’t tolerate. Just before we went out into the fellowship hall to sing, I needed a drink of water. I pushed the button on the fountain a little too hard and water sprayed all over my face.
I walked out in front of the whole congregation, wiping my face with my hands. Mama made slashing motions across her neck letting me know to stop it at once. I looked back at her and said in an audible whisper, “But I’ve got water up my nose.”
All of the other parents chuckled and made comments along the lines of “Isn’t that cute?” Mama hung her head in shame.
No incident was as embarrassing or did more to gray Mama’s hair as the Women’s Society of Christian Service meeting that went awry.
The WSCS had a habit of conducting their meetings in the members’ homes. On this particular occasion, it was Mama’s turn to be hostess. The women were discussing a scandalous issue that was being debated in the statehouse—the possibility of sex education being taught in the public schools.
Mama called me in from the other room to make an example of me and said, “I really don’t think that children Cindy’s age (eleven, as I recall) would want to learn about sex. They don’t want to think of their parents in that way.” Then she turned, looked me in the eye and asked the fateful question, “Do you?”
An eternal moment passed while she looked at me in anticipation of my answer.
I said, “Well…I…uhm…I guess you had to do it at least three times.”
Eyes popped opened, jaws dropped, and Mama’s face turned beet red. A couple of women covered their mouths, stifling the giggles.
“Thank you,” Mama said through clinched teeth. “You can go to your room now.”
I never lived down that episode.
Regarding sex education…when I was a little girl, Grandma told me that the pregnant woman I’d seen swallowed a watermelon seed. For years, I was petrified every time I accidentally swallowed one. Who would want to carry a watermelon—must less deliver it?
Considering that she’d spent a few years working as an obstetrics nurse, Mama was surprisingly indifferent when it came time to teach me about sex. In fact, she tried to pass the job off to my sister. I remember her telling Emily that she should talk to me, because “that’s a big sister’s job”.
My sister replied, “No. That’s a Mama’s job. I’m not talking to her about that!”
Mama took me behind closed doors and explained S-E-X in very clinical terms. Afterward, she gave me one of her obstetrics textbooks to read. I was twelve at the time. After looking at that book, complete with illustrations of pregnancy and childbirth, I made up my mind that I was never going to have children.
It must have been a case of poetic justice when the next year, Mama was hired as an interim schoolteacher. She taught eighth graders sex education.
When one of my high school friends told me about being grounded for making a bad grade, I had no idea what she was talking about. I thought that being grounded meant that a pilot’s license to fly was revoked.
“What do you mean when you say that you’re grounded?” I asked.
“You’re kidding, right?”
“No,” I said. “I really don’t know what it means.”
After shaking her head incredulously, she went on to tell me about all of her privileges that had been suspended.
“Oh, no wonder I didn’t know what it meant. I can’t do any of those things to begin with.”
My upbringing was much stricter than most of the kids I knew when I was growing up. Mama was the disciplinarian, while Daddy was the lenient one. Mama used to say that Daddy would let us dance naked on the roof if we were left alone with him.
I always felt that my brother was allowed to get away with more while Mama kept a very tight rein on Emily and me. Mama chose our clothes and our friends. Even the music we listened to had to have parental approval, or out it went.
When we were growing up and wanted to do some of the things that the other kids were doing, the inevitable response was that age-old reply that I believe is handed out on pamphlets in the maternity ward. “And if the other kids were jumping off of buildings, would you want to do that, too?”
Somewhere I saw a poster that read, “Don’t give your children rules. Give them choices.” I could hear my mother’s voice saying, “Okay, you can choose to come home on time, or you can choose to sleep in the car.” That actually happened to my brother. We weren’t given house keys any more than we were given allowance. “Come home on time, and you don’t need keys to the house,” was Mama’s answer.
We rebelled on occasion and every now and then we threw a little tantrum, stomped our feet and told our parents that we hated them. But today, I can say that I’m glad they raised me the way they did. They always backed up their discipline by setting a good example for us, and they never said “no” without giving us a valid reason and helping us to understand why they made certain choices for us.
Walter Cronkite once said that the decade of the 1960s was the most difficult time in the twentieth century to be a parent. Mama, I may have complained quite a bit at the time, but you did a pretty good job.
My Heart Belongs To Daddy
I’m the product of a mixed marriage.
My father was a Yankee from Chicago. Because of it, I was always a little different from the other kids in school. My classmates had a cute little rhyme that they made up using my last name. “Kosak, Sosak looks like a toe sack.”
I didn’t fare too well with one of my teachers because of Daddy. I read a story aloud for him, and he corrected my southern pronunciations. I was a little girl and didn’t know any better, so I told the teacher that my Daddy said she was pronouncing those words wrong.
For the rest of third grade, I never made another “A” in any subject.
After he came home from the war, Daddy went to work as an electrician. He never retired from that profession. He renewed his last electrical license one month before he passed away at age 84. He didn’t look his age, and I suspected that many of his clients had no idea how old he was.
When he and Mama were newlyweds, they traveled around the southeast, going wherever the construction company Daddy worked for sent him. In the late 1950s, my grandfather became seriously ill, and Mama went back home to help Grandma care for him. A short time after Granddaddy died, Grandma suffered a heart attack, so Mama was stuck at home. Daddy opened an electrical business in a nearby town, and the two of them settled down on the farm.
Frank Kosak never had a hard time adjusting to southern life. His charm and engaging personality made it easy for him to get along well with all kinds of people. As my brother said in Daddy’s eulogy, he was just as comfortable talking with the janitor as he was with the CEO of a company.
Once or twice he did have some problems of a linguistic nature. While coaching American Legion baseball in the 1960s, he had to secure birth certificates on all of the boys to make sure that they met the age requirement. He was having trouble tracking down one boy’s birth certificate, but Daddy was determined that this young man was going to play baseball.
I tagged along when he went to the boy’s home. The young man’s grandmother said to Daddy, “Mr. Kosak, he ain’t got no birth certificate. He’s an outside child.”
Daddy said, “It doesn’t matter where he was born. He still has to have a birth certificate.”
The woman shot Daddy the oddest look, and said, “I don’t know about that.”
When Daddy related the story to Mama and Grandma, they burst into laughter.
“Frank,” Mama said. “She wasn’t talking about where he was born. She was telling you that he’s illegitimate. He was born outside of marriage.”
Daddy threw up his hands. “Well, he still has to have a birth certificate. What’s the matter with you people?”
For someone who came from another part of the country, he knew how to get around our area better than a lot of people who were born and raised here. We weren’t always appreciative of Daddy’s shortcuts.
“If Frank can find a dirt path through the woods that will get us there quicker, he’ll take it,” Mama used to say.
Mama preferred to stay on the main roads. She never liked shortcuts—in life or in traveling.
One of their famous arguments centered on what was the quickest route home from church. Should they turn right onto Camp Monroe Road, then left onto our road, or keep straight on Sneads Grove Road then turn right onto our road?
One Sunday, they decided to settle the debate by taking separate cars to church and see who would get there first. They pulled into the parking lot bumper to bumper. It was a good thing, too, because the one who didn’t make it there first would surely have accused the other of speeding.
Just as Grandma had her little proverbs, so did Daddy. Whereas, Grandma’s came from a uniquely southern point of view, I suppose Daddy’s came from his Chicago/Midwestern upbringing.
It wasn’t always easy to decipher the meaning in Daddy’s adages. For years, I thought that somewhere in the United States there was a school called “Hard Knocks,” because that’s where Daddy said that he graduated.
There are little bits of wisdom that only a father can pass along. When I was a young teenager, I remember being so tickled because an older boy had told me that I looked mature for my age.
Daddy took me aside and said, “There are three times when you should never trust a man. First, when he tells you that you’re mature for your age. Second, when he says that he has some artwork at his place that he wants you to see and third, when he says, ‘Trust me’.”
I didn’t know it then, but now I can attest that he was right on all counts.
He always had a strange sense of humor—deadpanned and sarcastic. At times it was hard to tell if he was joking, because he joked about everything. Nothing was sacred.
Once, his humor was lost on the young girl whose car ended up stuck in the ditch near our house. She was frantic when she came to the door and insisted that Daddy not call her parents. Feeling sorry for her, he promised to do his best to get her car out of the ditch. He tried everything he knew, but the wheels wouldn’t budge, so he went to our nearest neighbor and borrowed their tractor.
When the car pulled free, the girl threw her hands in the air and shouted, “Thank you, Jesus!”
Without missing a beat, Daddy said, “You’re welcome.”
Having my father participate in my wedding day was one of the great joys of my life, and I think that Daddy was more nervous than anyone else.
We were lined up at the back of the church, ready to march in, and he said, “Okay, so we walk in and then hang a left at the aisle.”
“No, Daddy,” I said. “We walk over there and sit down at the back of church.”
I’ll never forget the look he gave me.
“You don’t have to get sarcastic with me,” he said. “I don’t know where you learned to be that way.”
For my eighth birthday, he took me to a Flintstones movie.
A lady standing in line with us said, “What a sweet little granddaughter you have.”
“This isn’t my granddaughter. This is my daughter. Do you think I look old enough to have a nine-year-old grand-daughter?”
The lady’s cheeks blushed, and she turned her back to us.
Something similar happened many years later when Daddy accompanied me on a car-buying trip. The salesman approached him and asked what he could do for us.
“My daughter’s looking for a car.”
The salesman looked past me to an older woman standing behind us.
“Is that your daughter?” the salesman asked.
“That old lady! You think that old lady is my daughter!”
I don’t know who was more embarrassed—the salesman, me or the woman with the mistaken identity.
Every now and then, people in my neck of the woods still talk about the Great Ice Storm of ‘69. Little wonder, because a large portion of the county was without electricity or phone service for more than a week. It always tends to stick in the mind when we have a winter storm of great proportions. It’s a rare event in this part of the state. Some years, we don’t even get one lousy snowflake.
At our house during that February of 1969, our family piled into the playroom. It was originally a two-car garage that Daddy converted into an extra room. It could be closed off from the remainder of the house and was equipped with a freestanding gas heater. We took out the camping equipment—lanterns, camp stove and such—hoping to see how tough we were when forced to rough it together as a family.
Two days later, Daddy drove to Fort Bragg in the sleet and snow to buy a generator at the Army Surplus store. When he cranked up the vintage, Korean War model, and the lights once again illuminated the house, we all sang The Hallelujah Chorus. So much for the pioneer spirit and family togetherness.
Unity of purpose was never one of our family’s strengths. Nothing could prove that point more than a family game of Scrabble. From the day Mama brought that game into the house, it was almost as if a curse had descended.
Daddy cheated at every opportunity.
One evening, I came downstairs and found Mama, Daddy and my siblings huddled around the coffee table, playing Scrabble. I noticed a word I didn’t recognize.
“Who put ‘ugler’ on the board? There’s no such word as ‘ugler’,” I said.
“Frank, take that word off the board,” Mama said.
“But Mama, if he takes ‘ugler’ off, then we have to take half the tiles we’ve already played off,” my sister said.
Soon, the four players were engaged in a heated discussion.
Grandma, who’d been observing the game from the sofa, stood up and said, “Well, thank goodness there’s no one else around to see my family carryin’ on like a bunch of riff-raff over a board game.”
Scrabble was always a hotbed of controversy. Being a true child of the television generation, I put the word “phaser” on the board.
“What in the world is that?” Daddy asked. “That’s not a word.”
Daddy never watched or approved of Star Trek, but that’s another story.
“Oh, yes it is,” I said. “It’s what they call their weapons on Star Trek.”
“That’s right,” my sister said. “So, it is a word.”
“It’s a made up word,” Daddy said. “If we go by what those idiots on television say, we’ll all be as loony as they are.”
“Oh, let her have the score, Frank,” Mama said. “It isn’t as if you don’t cheat often enough.”
Any kind of game that we played as a family always produced the same results. The five of us couldn’t even play putt-putt golf without getting into some kind of argument.
“You cheated!”
“No, I didn’t!”
Yet, my parents were flabbergasted when my first grade teacher wrote, “Doesn’t play well with others” on my report card.
Mama and Daddy were both avid sports fans and usually, to the dismay of the rest of us, rooted for different teams. They yelled, jumped up and down, stomped their feet and coached the television set until they drove everyone else from the room. Unfortunately, this aspect of their personalities carried over into other areas of their lives.
One Election Day, my sister and I were standing in line together at the polling place. We saw a man and woman go into the voting booth together.
“Couldn’t you just see Mama and Daddy going into the voting booth together?” I asked.
“Are you kidding? They’d have to call the police to break up the fight,” she said.
One of the biggest political arguments that I remember between Mama and Daddy happened during the 1972 presidential campaign. Daddy never voted for a Republican. If our German shepherd dog ran against the Republican incumbent, Lady would’ve gotten Daddy’s vote.
When he announced his intention to vote for George McGovern, Mama couldn’t believe it. Even though she was a registered Democrat, she was far too conservative to vote for McGovern.
“You mean to tell me that you’re going to vote for that hippie-loving radical?” she asked.
“I sure am,” Daddy said. “I wouldn’t vote for that shifty-eyed crook that you’re voting for if you paid me.”
While growing up in the Kosak household, I learned the importance of the political system early in life. Up until I was about seven-years-old, everyone who lived in our area voted at an old cotton gin. The first time I went with my parents to vote, I was about four-years-old, and I was very upset to find out that I couldn’t vote, too.
Bob Ed, one of our neighbors, was tending the polls that day and came up with a solution to my predicament. He found a shoebox, cut a hole in the top of it and gave me a little piece of paper. He told me my vote was so important that it had to have a special box.
After voting, Mama and Daddy stopped by George Norfleet’s store. Daddy told George about my first voting experience.
“Who did you vote for?” he asked.
“I voted for you, George.”
“Well, then you deserve a free drink.”
He took a bottle of Coke from the drink box and handed it over.
Before I learned to read or write, I’d already learned the secret to politics—you do something for me, and I’ll do something for you.
As far back as I can remember I was always interested in whatever Daddy was doing—sometimes to the point of being a nuisance.
When I was very young, Mama wouldn’t let him take me fishing on the pier at the beach. I was kind of hyper, and I guess she was afraid that I’d get on people’s nerves or worse yet, fall through a gap in the railing.
Finally, when I was around nine, Daddy bought a child-sized fishing pole and took me with him. He taught me the right way to cast my line—flinging it out in a sideways or underhanded motion so as not to risk hooking someone who might be walking behind me on the pier. He taught me how to tie the weight on my line and how to bait my hook with the fresh shrimp we bought in the bait shop. Oh, what a waste of shrimp that was.
I was so proud the day that I took my place beside Daddy on the pier. Before casting my line, I glanced around the pier to see if anyone was watching. I didn’t want to embarrass myself if my first attempt was a bust. No one seemed to be paying any attention so with the utmost confidence; I tossed my line out across the incoming waves.
While we watched my weight go sailing out across the water, Daddy beamed with pride, and I jumped up and down squealing with delight.
“That’s a good one, baby,” he said.
Then we looked down. My line was hanging alongside the pier. I hadn’t secured my weight tightly enough and had flung it right off my line.
In all my visits to the fishing pier with Daddy, I don’t remember catching anything, but I treasure those times that we spent together.
Maybe I never said it often enough, but my life wouldn’t have been the same without Daddy. At age four, I clung to him in fear on the Ferris wheel at the State Fair. That was the day we both discovered my dreadful fear of heights. A few years later, he bought a bowling ball and golf clubs for me, so that I could share his love for the two sports.
I’ll never forget the day I told him that I was engaged to be married.
“Does he play golf?” Daddy asked.
“No, Daddy, he doesn’t,” I answered.
“Well...I reckon he’ll be all right, anyway,” he said.
He taught me how to sing all of his favorite World War II songs like Chattanooga Choo Choo and I Got a Gal in Kalamazoo. He had a beautiful singing voice.
Daddy was always there when I needed something fixed or to hold my hand when I was sick. One time I ended up in the Emergency Room and from the cubicle I was in, I could hear him arguing with the nurse.
“You can’t go back there,” she said.
“The hell I can’t. That’s my baby back there.”
If I remember correctly, I was thirty-one but I was still his baby.
Daddy had a lot to put up with from two daughters who inherited their grandfather’s yen for practical joking.
One Father’s Day, he found a neatly wrapped jewelry box on his dresser. The card on the outside read, “The best things come in small packages.” Inside the box on another card was written, “But not always!” Underneath the card was a rusty nail. He was very proud of it and showed it off to people.
Where Daddy was concerned, the generation gap never failed to rear its ugly head. It didn’t help that he was thirty-seven when I was born which was considered middle-aged back in the late 1950s and early 60s.
Daddy wasn’t impressed when my sister made up my face to look like one the beautiful, exotic aliens from Star Trek. I was wearing about five different shades of eye shadow.
“You wash her face off right now! Your little sister isn’t going to run around painted up like a hooker.”
“What’s a hooker?” I asked.
“Never mind! Wash your face!”
His reaction to that incident was tame compared to what happened when I learned to dance by imitating the moves done by dancers on Soul Train.
One Saturday, I imitated the line dancers while they performed to a sexy song by Barry White. I had my hands pressed together above my head and slowly rotated my body up and down.
“What’s that dance called,” Daddy asked as he took a sip of coffee.
“The screw.”
Coffee went everywhere, and the cup shattered on the floor.
Our family church was only a few miles from our farm. My great-grandparents had pro-vided one the founding families of the church and through subsequent gene-rations, the faith remained central to all of our lives.
Nowhere was that more evident to me than in the lives of my parents. To say that they were at church every time the doors opened would be an understatement. To this day, I can walk into the sanctuary and feel their presence on the pew where we sat every Sunday. I can sit in the choir loft and look at the beautiful molding on the oak paneled rails and think of Daddy. He put in many hours of hard work as chairman of the trustees’ committee when our new sanctuary was built.
He’d been raised as a Catholic and graduated from St. Michael’s Parochial School in Chicago. Mama didn’t want to convert to Catholicism. It wasn’t that she had any prejudice toward people of the Catholic faith. She just couldn’t understand a lot of the mysticism surrounding it. It was fine with Daddy, because he’d never been a faithful member of his church.
In 1952, on the day that my sister was christened, he took his vows of membership with Snead’s Grove church. He became a Sunday school teacher, an active member of the administrative board and a Lay Speaker in the Methodist church.
Daddy often told the story of one of his most embarrassing moments as a Lay Speaker. He’d been asked to preach at Cordova Methodist Church near Rockingham. He’d never been to Cordova but was confident with the directions he’d been given. He arrived at the church a few moments before the service was to begin and introduced himself to a man who seemed to be in charge.
The man acted confused when Daddy told him that he was their guest speaker. However, he was more than willing to let Daddy preach his sermon.
After the service, the man who, as it turned out, was the pastor of the church, complemented Daddy on his sermon.
“But,” he said. “To my knowledge, we weren’t expecting a guest speaker this morning.”
It took only a few moments for both of them to realize that Daddy had gone to the wrong church. He was at Cordova Baptist Church, a few blocks away from where he was supposed to be.
When Mama died, Daddy stopped going to church—not because he’d lost his faith in God. He’d lost his faith in the church. During those very difficult years when Mama was sick, and his business was failing, Daddy felt as if the church had abandoned them. Very few of their good church friends came to visit. Only the preachers came occasionally, along with relatives who would’ve been there anyway. It was a deep wound that never healed.
Later in his life, he returned to his roots and rejoined the Catholic Church. I never knew this. I didn’t find out until he was on his deathbed and asked for his last rites. My sister said that he didn’t want me to know about it. At the time I was serving as a lay pastor to a small church, and he didn’t know how I’d feel about it.
Daddy wasn’t perfect, but who is? And why remember a person’s faults when none of it matters in the long run? We both turned out just fine.
One thing I always admired about Daddy was the way he could bounce back from adversity. From the very beginning of his life, he’d had more than his share of broken dreams and disappointments. His mother died when he was two-years-old. His father, who’d been crippled in an accident couldn’t raise him alone, so he was passed around among his aunts. He lived through the Depression, a war, a failed business and the deaths of two wives, but he always found a way to pick up the pieces and go on.
When I’ve hit low points in my own life, I could hear his voice in the back of head saying, “Baby, you’ve got to roll with the punches.”
At his funeral one of his golf buddies said to me, “Your Daddy could’ve been a rich man if he’d charged people what he was worth. But he used to say that he wouldn’t charge people more than he’d be willing to pay himself.”
I looked around the crowded funeral home at the people who came from all walks of life and realized that his buddy was wrong. Daddy was a rich man.
Very few days go by that I don’t think of him, and I still can’t believe that he’s gone. When he died, I said to my husband, “I feel as if a part of my soul is missing.”
Today, as I sit and write this, I know how blessed I was to grow up when I did and to have a man like Daddy as my father. For as long as I live, I’ll carry with me his love, his humor and the lessons that he taught me.
A Woman Ahead Of Her Time
My sweet, gray-haired grandmother was a fearless snake killer. Nothing could make her eyes dance with excitement as much as when someone hollered, “Snake!”
She’d grab the hoe and dash out after her prey like a big-game hunter on safari. Why her preferred weapon was the hoe, I can’t say. She also a pretty fair shot with a pistol. She used to say, “Papa taught all his girls to shoot.”
It always seemed to me that by shooting it, she wouldn’t have to get so close to the horrid creature. Knowing Grandma, she probably found it more of a thrill to ferret out the reptile and come face to face with it.
I witnessed the close encounter of the worst kind between Daddy, Grandma and a copperhead, a deadly poisonous cousin of the rattlesnake.
Now that he’s passed away, I can tell you that Daddy had a fear of snakes. He hated them, and he didn’t care if they were the non-poisonous, beneficial variety. He had no use for them. This particular day, he was digging sweet potatoes in the garden with Grandma. He reached into the hole he’d dug under one plant and put his hand around what he thought was an enormous sweet potato.
“Hey, Mama,” he said. “We’ve really got some good-sized sweet potatoes this year.”
What he yanked from the hole wasn’t a sweet potato. It was a fat copperhead. Accompanied by one loud, terrified shriek, he flung the snake into the air.
It landed about two feet from Grandma who, with finely honed snake killing instincts, chopped its head off with the hoe. She didn’t even flinch, and the poor snake was probably so confused that it never even knew what hit him.
While Daddy clutched his chest and turned various shades of the color spectrum, Grandma issued a warning.
“Now be careful over there. It probably has a mate that will come looking for it.”
She carried on with her digging as if nothing had happened. Grandma knew that such was life in the rural south.
Grandma
was, for all intents and purposes, my other
Mama. I’m told that when I was very small, I referred to her that
way.
She was a woman ahead of her time, who was raised in a family
of ten children. The majority of them graduated from college during a
time when that wasn’t so prevalent in our neck of the woods.
Grandma graduated from Carolina College for Women in 1917 with a
degree in business. She had a good head for the subject. She managed
the upkeep of her farm and kept the books for my father’s
electrical business until a severe heart attack she suffered at age
sixty-five forced her to retire. I use the word retire
lightly.
Not long ago, my cousin gave me a letter that Mama had written to her shortly after Grandma’s heart attack.
Mama refuses to slow down. She still gets up at the crack of dawn and works in that garden for two or three hours a day. I’m afraid that I’ll go out there one morning and find her dead body amongst the tomato plants.
As it turned out, Grandma lived five years longer than Mama did.
We lived with Grandma until Mama and Daddy built a home across the road in 1964. When we moved into the new house, I was upset about leaving Grandma. I used to get up early in the morning, walk across the road and have breakfast with her. I can still remember her open-faced grilled cheese sandwiches, because she’d always put a pinch of sugar on the cheese.
Grandma was my first teacher. When my brother and sister went off to school every day, I’d take my little chalkboard to Grandma and say, “Teach me.” I learned how to read and write before I set foot in public school.
She also taught me about our Scottish heritage, of which she was very proud. Grandma could trace her ancestors all the way back to the first ones who left Scotland following the defeat of the Highland clans at Culloden in 1746.
When I was a child, it didn’t mean so much, but as I got older I was dismayed to realize that the Livingstons and the Gibsons were like the Wilkes and Hamilton families in Gone with the Wind. They only married their cousins. My great grandparents were first cousins. Our family was so intermixed that it was impossible to go anywhere in Scotland County without running into kinfolk. Thank goodness, Grandma and Mama married outside of the family, or I could very well be mentally unbalanced.
Grandma was one of those people who had an old saying to fit every occasion. To her, there was no problem that couldn’t be solved by imparting some proverb that had been handed down through several generations of Livingstons.
I used to hear those quaint expressions like “Don’t wash your dirty laundry in public”, or “It doesn’t cost a penny to be clean or decent.” And of course, there was the one she used to explain why she’d married a man who was twenty-four years her senior. “It’s better to be an old man’s darlin’ than a young man’s slave.”
Then, there was the little jewel about the bell cow.
When I was in the fifth grade, our class competed on Field Day for the President’s Physical Fitness badges. My event was the running broad jump. I practiced it diligently until I was able to jump over four feet. Unfortunately, I was competing against a girl who was half a foot taller than I and had legs the length of beanpoles. Needless to say, I didn’t win. I came in second place and didn’t take my loss very well.
Grandma said, “If you can’t be the bell cow, be the one next to her.”
I felt badly enough without being compared to a cow, but with Grandma everything related to livestock and farming. I’ve since come to realize the lesson she was trying to teach me about not always having to be on top of the heap.
Grandma’s old sayings have provided us with many laughs over the years. “Anyone who comes to your house after ten p.m. is up to no good.” I seem to recall that Grandma made that one up after she moved into the new house with us. Her room was on the bottom floor of our tri-level house, and she must have felt vulnerable being down there by herself. She kept a thirty-two-caliber Smith & Wesson pistol in the top drawer of her nightstand.
I can’t say for sure whether or not she got a kick out of scaring people with it, but there was one story she told repeatedly and always with a laugh tagged on to the end of it.
It had to do with the oldest daughter in a family that lived about two miles north of us. I won’t say what kind of work she did, but she had to commute back and forth to Fayetteville every Friday and Saturday evening. For the sake of the story, I’ll call her Daisy.
Daisy’s car ran off the road into the ditch near our house about two a.m. one Saturday morning. We lived on a dirt road with deep ditches and steep embankments. It could be treacherous driving at night—especially in inclement weather. When Daisy’s knock sounded at the front door, Grandma got up to answer it while packing her pistol by her side.
The shiny, black revolver was the first thing Daisy laid eyes on, and she began to plead for her life.
“Oh, Miss Emily, don’t shoot. It’s Daisy from up the road.”
By this time, Daddy had made his way downstairs to reassure Daisy about her safety and told her that he would get her car out of the ditch.
Grandma’s hard and fast rule about nighttime visitors evidently didn’t apply to relatives. She had one set of cousins who were likely to show up at our house at any hour of the evening and stay until only the Lord knew when they would leave. One night, they came to visit after we’d all gone upstairs to bed. We had to put our clothes back on and pretend we were still up. Many times, we wished that Grandma would run them off with her pistol.
In my childhood and teenage years there were many times when I turned a deaf ear to Grandma’s advice. Now that I’m grown and middle-aged, I see the common sense behind some of her pearls of wisdom, even if some of them did seem a little off-the-wall. Every now and then, though, I still laugh at some of Grandma’s tenets for life.
Every time I put my pantyhose away for the summer, I hear Grandma saying, “No proper young lady goes out without wearing her hose.” I’m afraid I never could adhere to that old fashioned rule. I hate to have those things crawling up my legs all day when it’s hot out.
Not long before Grandma died, she and I had a little argument on the subject. About halfway through one sweltering day, I had taken off my hose and put them in my purse. Grandma found them and had a few choice words for me.
“What if you’d been killed in a car accident, and while they were looking for identification, they found your dirty hose in your pocketbook?”
“I doubt that I would care what anyone found in my purse after I died,” I said. “Are people going to stand around the funeral home asking each other, ‘Do you know what they found in her purse?’”
Am I kidding? Of course, they will. This is the south.
I guess Grandma’s sage advice about pantyhose went along with what she used to tell me about not washing my dirty laundry in public.
At the back of Grandma’s house there was a walk-in closet that could’ve been called Pack Rat Heaven. As a little girl, making a discovery in that room gave me a feeling known only to people like Francisco Pizarro when he came upon the Inca in the jungles of Peru.
The room always had a distinct, musty smell of something old. The sunlight passing through windowpanes yellowed with years of age gave the room a mysterious quality that excited a child’s imagination.
My main interest in Grandma’s closet was the endless supply of costuming I found for my dress up play. She’d kept clothes, hats and shoes that dated back to the 1920s, and I loved every minute that I spent smelling moth balls and prancing around in the delicate, pre-polyester-era clothing.
One of my favorite things to plunder in was her button box. Hundreds of buttons filled the tin container that once held cookies. Some of them were plain but others were quite fancy and adorned with rhinestones. I’d string the buttons into bracelets and necklaces to accessorize the dress-up play fashions I created.
As much as my brother, sister and I plundered and pillaged that room as children, we knew that we could only go so far. It wasn’t until after Grandma died in 1980 that all of the contents of the closet were uncovered. We found photograph albums from her college days. We laughed at how Grandma tried to hide her face in the pictures. Like Mama, she hated to have her picture taken. One set of photographs showed Grandma as the school May Queen. She stood in the center next to the May Pole while the other girls danced in a circle, wrapping her with ribbons that were attached to the top of the pole.
To our surprise, we learned that she’d had a boyfriend during her college years. She’d never talked about having any boyfriends during that time. He was a dashing young man in World War I army attire, but no name was written on the back of the photograph. We’ll never know who he was.
We came across two items from her childhood that told us things we’d never known about her. One of them was the diary she’d kept as a child. On the day in 1903 when her father brought home the first family car, she wrote, “Papa bought a brand new automobile. We don’t have to ride in the wagon to school no more.”
Then later that same year, their first telephone was installed. “Now we have a telephone just like Uncle Hugh,” she wrote. “Mary [her cousin] and I stayed home from school and talked on it all day long.”
That entry came as no great surprise. Eighty years later, Grandma and Mary could still talk on the phone for hours at a time. My sister used to tease them about gossiping.
“We’re not gossiping,” Grandma said. “We care about those people, and we’re trying to think of ways to help them solve their problems.”
The other item we found, tucked away in an old box of books, was an elementary school spelling primer in which Grandma had drawn a picture of her teacher as an old witch with long, stringy hair and a big wart on the end of her nose. The picture was accompanied by some unflattering remarks about the teacher’s character. What a gem to find. My ladylike grandmother, the font of wisdom and paragon of virtue had once been a typical, rambunctious child.
I never had the whole family farm experience. I came along after Grandma retired from farming and began renting out her land. In that regard, I envy my brother and sister who can tell stories about riding the tractor, killing chickens and taking crops to market.
My knowledge of the land is limited to watching Grandma and Mama plant and tend their annual one-whole-acre vegetable garden—not to mention their flowerbeds. They had nearly every variety of plant that could be grown in our climate. They even had some plants that weren’t indigenous to our area, but with Grandma’s green thumb, they grew and thrived.
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