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Monday, December 24, 2007
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An Old Person's Ramble Down Memory's Lane
by June B. Rice
Source: PHSAA.com
Last week my long ago library assistant, Pam Wall Shingler, who is now one of the movers and shakers at WMMT, the radio arm of Appalshop, which is located in Whitesburg, KY, called and asked if I would be on her radio program, Appalachian Life, which airs on Tuesday evenings from 4:30 to 6:00.
I had heard former colleague, Clyde Pack, reading from his writings on her program when I was out in the car a week or so ago, and was flattered that she wanted me on her program. I was happy to agree.
I called her one afternoon and we chatted on the telephone. I read several selections from various books of collected columns, from my cookbook, and the short story, "Mother's Inasmuch Christmas." We chatted and she recorded the interview to be played on Christmas Eve.
Pam and I go back a long way. I don't know if she wants me to rat on her, but in 1959 (Can it be almost a half century ago?) she was President of the Eastern Kentucky Student Librarian's Association, which was an arm of the Eastern Kentucky Librarian's Association, an arm of the KLA and the EKEA. a part of the Kentucky Education Association. The organization Pam was president of only lasted a few years, but when she was chief executive, the Paintsville High School Student Librarians hosted a meeting of EKSLA on a fall Saturday with library assistants from all over Eastern Kentucky as our guests.
We put on a remarkable program, as I recall it, featuring Roger Burton , who has become a local media personality, singing a parody of a Gilbert and Sullivan song, "I Am the Very Model of a Modern Major General." He sang in his best pompous form," I Am the Very Model of an Up-to-date Librarian!"
This, of course, before any of us had ever heard of a computer. Another memorable song was a duet with Sharon Patrick (now a medical doctor in Lexington). They sang the then popular "Around the World" from the motion picture "Around the World in Eighty Days."
But I digress. I kept the radio on WMMT all day Christmas Eve for fear I would miss my radio debut. Just as the program started, my son Steve called from northern Virginia.
"I'm on the radio," I said. "You can get WMMT online." He hung up and I listened to myself. I was a little more nasal than usual, as I still have the remains of a cold, but Pam had edited out the most egregious cold sounds. I thought the interview went well, though I did tend to talk in incomplete sentences.
Steve called back and was complimentary. "You read very well," he said. I thought later that I read the same way I had read to him ever since he had been born. No wonder he liked it. I told him Pam had promised me a CD of the program soon. I was awed to think that the program could have been heard all over the world (if anybody tuned in) through the magic of cyberspace.
He had some questions about his grandmother and grandfather that nobody else had thought to ask. In the story I read, which was based on an incident in the life of my mother and daddy, who, singlehandedly, one Christmas season got the neighbors to donate enough food and clothing to help a widow keep her children instead of their having to go to an orphans' home. This was before the days of welfare.
Steve, whose grandfather died six months before he was born, and his grandmother died when he was three, did not know much about them. He was curious as to why she called him, "Mr. Ervin," and he called her "Miss Lurie."
"Was it a Victorian thing?" Steve asked.
"No," I said. "They lived about ten miles apart when they were courting. Transportation was a problem. Each was on an eight or ten-person telephone party line, and he called her every evening, and their conversations were so interesting that everybody on both party lines listened in. Instead of being annoyed, they enjoyed making the conversations interesting for their audience. He was 28 and she was 18 when they got married. Everybody kept at them to stop calling each other "Mr. and "Miss," but they were used to calling each other that, and they continued it for the 56 years they were married. Even when they were having a hot argument, they still used the titles. Nobody else I ever knew did that."
"Well," Steve said, "You've got to write that story down. That's the first time I ever heard it, and when you are gone , nobody will know it."
I enjoyed my ramble down memory's lane, and to look anew at a courtship that occurred in the early nineteen hundreds.
Other items by this author:
"To Kill a Mockingbird" is Fifty Years Old
A Friend in Need is a Friend Indeed
You Can't Do A Thing About the Weather
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