Dear Boo and Bubble,
When I was a little older than
you, one of my favorite things to do was sit with great granddaddy Schaefer and
listen to him tell stories about how things used to be. He could weave a tale for sure, never afraid
to embellish the details just enough to embolden the story but not so much to
make it untrue. There was one, however,
that he related without any enhancement ….the day he met your great grandmother
Mary. It needed no such prop because his
sincerity in telling it rang through every time.
As you know, he grew up in Greenville, and his best
friend was Steve Stephenson (I mentioned this in the blog called A Debt Paid
Forward). When time came for college,
Steve went to Washington and Lee in Virginia and granddaddy
stayed home to attend Furman.
At the same time, your great
grandmother Mary lived in Houston. Her best friend in high school was Kitty
Lawder. As fate dictated, Kitty went off
to Sweetbriar College
in Virginia while Mamaw Mary stayed in Houston to go to Rice
Institute.
Long story short, Kitty and Steve
met in Virginia
and couldn’t wait to introduce their two best friends. On the occasion of Greek Week at W&L,
they invited Schaefer and Mary to come to Virginia.
Mamaw Mary took the train from Houston to
Greenville and from there, she accompanied
Schaefer up to Virginia.
Granddaddy Schaefer always
declared that he fell in love with Mamaw Mary at the first sight of her coming
off the train. He met her at the station
with a corsage which brightly adorned her fancy dress complete with hat and
gloves. He snapped a picture of her at
that very first moment. The picture
stayed on the table by his bed until he died.
They courted for four years long distance before marrying at the
beginning of World War II in 1942.
Ironically, some 35 years later,
Kitty clandestinely introduced Captain to me.
She had wanted me to meet him for quite a while, but was afraid to set
up a blind date on the pretense that it wouldn’t work. Instead she hatched a plan to put us in the
same place at the same time. From there,
we could size each other up and make the decision on our own. I have to admit that I participated in the
scheme.
She told me that Captain lived
next door to her son, Sam, in Columbia,
SC. They had just finished law school at the time
and were studying for the bar exam. Over
that weekend, they decided to take a break and come to Greenville for some relaxation. Here’s how it went.
Kitty told me she was going to
call me when Sam and Captain arrived.
Then we would hang up the phone and in a few minutes I would call her
back. She would act like it was a spontaneous
call and, after some overblown chit-chat, she would suggest that I come up to
their house on Paris
Mountain to join
everybody in a swim. Okay…the plot was
set.
On that Saturday morning, the
phone rang. It was Kitty. “They’re here!” she whispered emphatically
into the phone. “Okay,” I replied and
hung up. In a few minutes I called her,
she invited me up, I drove up to Paris
Mountain – and the rest
is history, as they say.
As you get older, you’ll find that
family stories are always fascinating, but none as much as how parents meet and
fall in love enough to start a lifelong journey together. This is now and has
always been true. I’m closing with an
entry found in your great, great, great, great grandfather’s journal about the
first meeting of his parents, Thomas Cottrell and Susannah Daniels. What makes this story so precious was that he
was full-grown and she, four years old.
“My mother’s first acquaintance with my father was in this wise. She was quite a young girl, and having a
talent for singing, used to be persuaded to sing for the preachers, as they
assembled at the houses of the neighbors.
On one occasion there was to be a sacramental meeting at my mother’s
grandfather Louis’ (her mother’s father) and my father, though a Methodist,
came, being the first to arrive. It was
common for him to assist the Presbyterians, with whom he was a favorite. He stepped into the door, rather a young
florid looking gentleman, dressed in full Methodist preacher style, and such as
the bearing he had, that it was impossible for them to prevail on my mother, as
usual, to sing. The superior dignity of
my father, had awed her into a silence which she could not break.
In the pulpit, during the meeting, she was not pleased with him. A peculiar shaking of the head was
displeasing to her. This was in Greenville County, NC. She was about 4 years old. The song she used to sing much to the delight
of preachers & friends was
“My Hope, My All, My Saviour Thou…etc.”
She recollected never to have seen him anymore till she was about 19
years of age. This I get from my
mother’s own lips.”
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