When my grandmother Daisy Burnette died, the center of gravity of the whole Johnson clan shifted over to Aunt JoAnn's house. Now JoAnn is the one who initiates any Johnson gathering and celebration. She will be 70 in September, 2000; so the family gathering days are fast coming to an end, I fear.
JoAnn is characterized by warmth, congeniality and charm. She always has something interesting to talk about. People hang on her words, enjoying her company. JoAnn loves people. She is an accomplished hostess, an outstanding cook, and very skilled in all of the decorative arts. Underneath everything is her good heart and genuine caring. She is short, with short, fluffy black hair and sparkling brown eyes.
JoAnn was the baby of a large and loving family, adored and played with by all. Her mother, who was in her 40's, thought childbearing was past, selling and giving away the baby items. Then along came Jack in 1927 and JoAnn in 1930! My father tells me that Sudie became sort of an "assistant mother" to Jack --Grandmama had so many children that she got to the point she delegated a baby to an older sibling-- and Daddy got JoAnn as his baby. She still is. He still nurtures her, and she still looks to him. They call each other several times each week to visit by telephone, and JoAnn invites my parents to her home for a feast on every celebration day.
The tale of JoAnn's float is sometimes remembered during times of telling family stories around the table. Vacations to the beach didn't occur when my father was a boy --there were, however, trips to visit extended family. When Jack and JoAnn were little, Cleve and Daisy to begin taking annual week-long family vacations to St. Simons Island on the coast, renting a cottage there. Little JoAnn loved swimming in the Atlantic when the tide came in. Someone advised, "Get her an inner tube out of a tire for riding those waves better." JoAnn replied, "No! I hold on to my Daddy's belly! That's my inner tube!" I guess everyone enjoyed this story because it tweaked Granddaddy about having a "rubber tire" around his middle, also known in our family as "Dunlap's disease" ("--his belly done lapped over his belt buckle").
JoAnn went through Fort Valley public schools. She had many friends. Virgil Young was her high school sweetheart. When people signed JoAnn's high school senior yearbook, Virgil and Robin were often mentioned. Virgil I know --it was obvious that JoAnn's high school friends expected her to marry her steady boyfriend Virgil Young; but who was Robin? When I asked, JoAnn explained that she had always wanted to have a little girl and she planned to name her Robin. JoAnn said that she still thinks that is the perfect name for a little girl. During the days before graduation when she and her friends were sharing their hopes and dreams, all of her friends knew that JoAnn's dream was to be wife to Virgil and mother to Robin. Robin never came, but JoAnn got her wish about marriage to Virgil. (An aside: my sister Nan has also had a phantom daughter most of her life, just like JoAnn does. Nan's daughter would have been named Nanda Deva, after herself and also after that famous pass in the Himalayan Mountains. My phantom is my son, Paul, who never made it to life. We carry those phantoms with us in our hearts and in our dreams.)
After high school, the Johnson girls attended Georgia State College for Women in nearby Milledgeville, which was only thirty miles above Macon. When JoAnn went away to college and moved into the dormitory, she became terribly homesick, so much so that after a few weeks she returned home, quit college and married Virgil. Virgil had gone to Athens to the University of Georgia. They lived in married housing. JoAnn got a job in the Georgia Creamery, operated on campus by the UGA Dairy as part of agricultural training. It still offers famous, inexpensive, delicious ice cream made right there, as good as homemade. (Aunt Wincie told me that JoAnn temporarily got fat during Virgil's college years, thanks to being around that ice cream.) Virgil graduated with a degree in chemistry.
Virgil and JoAnn moved to Virginia. Virgil worked for Merck Pharmaceutical Company; and JoAnn worked for Maytag in their headquarters, doing very well and earning a promotion to supervisor. JoAnn remembers what a fun time this was for Virgil and her. She said they had plenty of money and took nice weekend trips. It was not uncommon to weekend in New York City to see a Broadway play. Then they were very pleased to finally get to anticipate parenthood. JoAnn quit her job when she learned she had at long last succeeded in getting pregnant.
She lost the first baby. She found out that her RH negative blood type would cause difficulties. They tried again, wanting a child very much. She almost lost the next baby, had to be confined to bed and take medicine to prevent miscarriage. She was able to carry the child to term, and my Cousin Phil was born. His challenges began immediately. He had water on his brain and his head swoll outward like a watermelon. He also had a cleft palate. Phil had to undergo a number of corrective and life preserving surgeries. During the stressful times spent in hospital waiting rooms, JoAnn unfortunately began smoking to get relief.
Once JoAnn entered an elevator with a surgeon who told her his blunt opinion that no corrective efforts should be undertaken for Phil --that Phil should be allowed to die. Aunt JoAnn said she got so mad at him that she could have spit nails. She did not reply (unusual for her), but has fumed over that ever since.
Phil lived, but he was very handicapped. Because he was so top-heavy, he could not balance well and was unable to learn to walk at the appropriate stage of development. Virgil and JoAnn did every single thing humanly possible to assist Phil. They had a special ramp with side rails built to his proportions to help him practice walking, supported by those rails. What finally succeeded in teaching Phil to walk, was Phil watching his little brother Mark several years later as Mark learned to walk. Phil saw how, wanted to compete, and kept persisting so he could keep up with Mark.
Soon after Phil's birth, Virgil and JoAnn recognized a need to be closer to their families so moved back to Fort Valley. Virgil and Dicky Ray, a close family friend, started a pest control business together. After a few years, Virgil sold his share to Dicky and went to work for Woolfolk Chemical Company in Fort Valley, a company well known throughout the region for supplying agricultural chemicals to farmers. Virgil's Uncle Abner was one of the vice-presidents of Woolfolk.
Virgil had an excellent career at Woolfolk, eventually becoming a vice-president. When merger mania swept through trade markets everywhere during the 1980's, a gigantic chemical company in Switzerland acquired Woolfolk in a friendly takeover. Virgil went to Switzerland, trained in that company's methods, and helped them run their Fort Valley plant. When Virgil became eligible for retirement and for Social Security benefits, he made a decision not to retire because he realized that he could not stay at home and have a life centered on lifting Phil, essentially being a nursing aide. After Phil died, Virgil finally retired.
JoAnn has devoted her life to her children and to being a homemaker. She has been an active volunteer with many different organizations and events that try to improve the lives of children and adults challenged by mental retardation. One part of her volunteerism involves public education. She makes moving "firsthand experience" speeches about the needs that result from mental retardation. Also, she spends much productive time in women's clubs activities and in Fort Valley social life. JoAnn and Virgil enjoy entertaining. They give large parties, with JoAnn doing much of the cooking herself. JoAnn has twice planned and orchestrated a major expansion and redecoration of Virgil's and her house. I really like their house --a one level ranch style, comfortable and beautiful, filled with displays of painted china, tasteful but colorful wallpaper, and many green and flowering plants. It centers on an curved porch that opens to the walled backyard so is very light and airy. Art and travel are JoAnn's main leisure pursuits. JoAnn was one of the founders of the Jail House Artists, so named because the group meets at the former jail. JoAnn teaches china painting in her home studio. Once a year she attends an art show at the Greenbrier resort in Virginia and sells her work. She receives many commissions to restore heirloom pieces and to create special occasion gift pieces of china. Her forte' is painting flowers, particularly roses. She stays busy and seems to enjoy it.
Phil was a sweet person, liked by all, and he had a good sense of humor. At first he attended regular elementary school but was later shifted to special education classes, and later still he went to Kay Training School, a sheltered workshop for adults. Phil loved cars and wanted to be a disk jockey who played music on the radio. (--His speech impediment made this unrealistic.) He had the corner back bedroom of the family home. His record and tape player with microphone were set up there, as was a display of his extensive collection of model cars that he had made. Every year I would ask Phil for a wish list before I did my Christmas shopping. He would always ask for specific model car kits that I could never locate, despite exhaustive effort. I found out that he gave me the names of ones he couldn't find in Middle Georgia, hoping that they might be available in South Carolina. Anyone in the entire Johnson family who was considering buying or trading cars always consulted with Phil first and then took him along to do the car shopping. Phil was a "Ford man". He particularly liked Ford Mustangs. Uncle Virgil bought him a restored candy apple red Ford Mustang convertible. Though Phil was unable to drive, that was designated as Phil's car and primarily used to take him on rides for pleasure.
Phil's doctors had told Virgil and JoAnn that Phil's life expectancy was 20 at the most. Phil beat the odds, thanks to his parents' extra efforts. He died when he was in his mid-40's. The downhill slope began gradually, taking a few years, but then in the last two weeks of his life, steepened abruptly with rapid loss. Phil began to lose his hard-won mobility. When he began falling, people like my father and others who would take him on outings had to stop doing this because they were unable to lift him. He had to be helped with bathing. He got too heavy for JoAnn to manage that. She had one bathroom remodeled into a wheelchair accessible bathing area, fixed so he could sit in his wheelchair over tile and a drain and be bathed using hoses. After a while it became impossible to do all of the heavy lifting (he was dead weight, couldn't help) to keep him at home. Virgil and JoAnn made the wrenching decision to move him to a very nice private room in the Fort Valley Nursing Home. Initially it broke Phil's heart not to be in his own home, despite the fact that JoAnn practically moved to the nursing home with him, visiting him for hours every day. Several other devoted friends, including my parents, were also his regular visitors. Every time JoAnn and Virgil passed restaurants that Phil liked, they would bring him his favorite foods, such as fried shrimp and chocolate meringue pie from Len Berg's, to the point that that had to be restricted (but not totally eliminated) because Phil got so fat (he couldn't exercise). It was at this point that Virgil bought Phil the Mustang, to take rides for outings.
In 1997 JoAnn and Virgil took a trip to Mexico. My father encouraged JoAnn to do this, promising her that he would visit Phil frequently and watch over his needs. On the Sunday after they left, Phil became so dizzy it alarmed him. He made the nursing home staff telephone my father. Phil was taken by ambulance to the small local hospital and examined in the Emergency Room. My father went with him. Phil told my Daddy, "Uncle Van, I don't want to die!" My father assured him that this wasn't going to kill him and that my father would stay right there with him. The emergency room physician sent Phil back to the nursing home that same day. My father telephoned Virgil and JoAnn in Mexico to let them know, but he encouraged them to finish their vacation, that everything was being addressed. They came back early anyway. Phil was returned to the hospital under the care of his specialist. Phil's brain was losing its capacity to function. He was dying. Nobody could do anything to stop it.
Two days before Phil's death, Phil asked his brother Mark about that new person in his hospital room. Many family members and friends had come as caring visitors, so Mark named off names of those who had visited. Phil pointed to the corner of the room and asked, "Who is that, over there now?" No one was there, so Mark told him no one was there. Phil firmly disagreed. Mark knew his brother well, knew how concrete Phil was, how orderly and exact Phil was, how Phil "called it just how he saw it" all of his life. Mark realized that Phil did see someone and that it must be a waiting angel. This was the second death in my family's immediate memory that angels came to escort the dying person. On both occasions, there were special circumstances-- first, the tragic early death of Daisy's Burnette's mother, leaving the children motherless, and now this time, with Phil who was handicapped and wishing not to die. Phil and Mark had earnest brotherly conversations that helped Phil in the process of letting go of his fears and trusting God. Mark reminded Phil that there are no wheelchairs in Heaven and talked of them being reunited in Heaven one day. The stranger in the room was consistently seen by Phil during those last two days, and by the end Phil had even begun speaking to that visitor. His passage was not hard. When Phil's body lay in state before the funeral, JoAnn made sure he was wearing his watch because he always consulted it and was uncomfortable without it, and she put his favorite model car in his hand. She did everything she could for him even until the end.
Mark is someone I'm very proud to have as kin. He is kind, very gifted, smart, industrious, decent, totally trustworthy, good-humored (loves to tease), and committed wholeheartedly to his family and his faith, serving as treasurer of the huge Baptist Church he attends in Fayetteville, Georgia (near Atlanta). Mark is legally blind just like my father, and he and I share the problem with weight control. Mark has always been the best at anything he did. He was at the top of his class throughout school, serving as high school valedictorian, reinvited recently to his alma mater as their commencement speaker. He attended the University of Georgia, finishing a degree in business. He married a fellow student, Diane, and both became CPAs. She quit work after their children came. The children Amanda and Michael, are terrific, great to have a conversation with even though they are only in grade school. Both children have won writing awards (express themselves well). Mark is in a field where his job changes fairly often. He audits and invests. He is very successful. My Grandfather Johnson would like the mansion Mark has had built for his family home, and Mark loves his neighbors --some of them came down to Fort Valley with Mark, just like family, to attend the fancy reception Mark gave to celebrate JoAnn's and Virgil's 50th wedding anniversary in 1998.