Bio 4.
D-day. June 7th, 1944.
The news that came in over Boo's and Uncle Maury's church window radio was all about invasion. Scratchy Edward R. Murrow reports about the tenuous success, the impossibly difficult circumstances, misery and bravery, death and blood, but the smell of victory was there, too. The allies had landed on Normandy beach-heads, and Boo and I were to try to get to Lenoir, an annual event. Gas was so severely rationed, a car trip was not possible. So we were going to try to make it on the bus this time. Last year we started out on the train, and ended up being hauled by a mail carrier from Hickory to Lenoir in a US Mail truck.
Breakfast at Boo's was always a treat: batter cakes with home-made syrup, fresh fruit and milk. I didn't have to eat any old boring oatmeal or grits like at home. No burned eggs. Boo and Aunt Bell knew how to cook.
We packed light, Mom and Dad took us to the bus station, somehow, and we got to Statesville, on the crowded greyhound. Crowded with service-men in uniform. Signs on the station walls: Is this trip Necessary? Every thing was bent on getting the war on. Total mobilization. Ration stamps. Calls for recycling. The war came first. First, last, and always. Our trip was necessary. Boo, as saint protector, traveled with Jesus. She existed in the perfect freedom of the true believer. Her selected ward of the moment, me, at her side. The layover in Statesville was marked by a visit to the Presbyterian church for prayer. Many churches were open that day for prayer. The bells rang out for success in battle, and the entrance of so many brave souls into Heaven. All churches still had bells in those days. The brick victorian church with stained glass aglow in the hazy June sun, was a musty smelling haven, and great relief from the evil smelling bus station, which stank with over zealous application of disinfectants and insecticide. The church was only a few blocks from the bus station, and nice sunny walk.
We had to stand part way to Lenoir, I think. The bus was packed with soldiers in uniform. When we finally arrived, Boo called her sister Isabel, Aunt Bell, and somebody picked us up. Her telephone number was 15. Yes, she was the fifteenth subscriber to the Lenoir telephone network. I believe that the operator system was still in place, and you had to verbally ask for the number you wanted, "Number, please?" Aunt Lucy's number was 13!!!! Both Aunt Bell and Aunt Lucy were widows and lived in spacious houses. Aunt Lucy's was a grand brick victorian mansion with gingerbread detailing and gazebo like expansions of the porch, atop a small mountain in the middle of town, the litteral top of College Street. Aunt Bell lived just down that hill, on Hibriten Ave. Hibriten was the name of an impressive free-standing mountain just east of town. Aunt Bell's house was more modern in style, reflecting Frank Lloyd Wright's influential designs, with large windows, uncluttered design details, convenient living areas, grand kitchen and dining spaces. A deep front porch with comfortable chairs and a swing (glider) looked out over Hibriten Street. AND I had the run of the entire upstairs for two weeks. Lenoir in those days was smaller than Concord, and was an alternative universe for me.
Aunt Lucy, Lucy Mayfield Richmond, the oldest of my grandmother's siblings, had attened the Concord academy and after graduation, went to teach in Hiddnite, a tiny burg between Hickory and Lenoir, N.C., named for the mineral found their. There she met at a local church social, a small, dynamic business man. George Lynn Bernhardt was some twelve years her senior, but the bonding and the persuit started and, as a man who knew how to get what he wanted, he talked my future grandmother, the youngest girl in the Richmond clan, to convince her big sister to marry him. The reward was to be a grand tour of the North Carolina mountains. Well, delivery was made on both sides. Uncle Lynn knew the mountains well. He owned a lot of them. In fact, he and his brother owned the rock, later known by all as Blowing Rock. Business prospered. Furniture was being made and marketed. A hardware store was opened with a partner, Jacob Claywell Seagle, who became his brother-in-law, with a marraige to the third sister, Isabel Maury Richmond.
Uncle Jake and Aunt Bell were a fine match, I was told. Uncle Jake had a splended wit, and Mom said the between him and Aunt Bell, Nana and Uncle Maury, they would keep a party in stiches with hilarious ad lib comedy. Aunt Bell was the adventurous, creative girl in the family. The Jo, from "Little Women", type. She wrote poetry, and taught sunday school to the disadvantaged mountain children. Held classes for the depressed Mountain folk. She was well read, had a great library, and knew nature by heart. Her gifts to me of beautiful editions of Audubon, of travel writers, and books of Earth's bounty and beauty, become my favorites, and I still have them. Halliburton's New Worlds to Conquer stirred in me a life-long interest in things Aztec and Mayan. She owned a pre-war Olsmobile, but did not drive. She depended on nephews and a livered black part time chaufer to get about. Gas was rationed severly, but the distances were short. (I remember giving myself a driving lesson at the cemetary one time. The car was parked on a hill while Chaufer and Aunt were placing flowers on the Jake's grave. I slid the gear arm into neutral and the thing started rolling, much to my horror and the screams of the Chaufer. I had enough presence of mind to get it back into gear, as it was a steep hill and there could have been a bad scene. The scolding was effective!)
Behind her house, the Bernhardt mountain went down a ways to a creek. The trail through those woods was cool and beautiful, carpeted with leaves. She would take me on nature walks, and kindled in me a love of the natural world that never left me. She showed me the pitcher hidden at the base of a pitcher plant. She picked wild ginger for her tea. Aunt Bell was a naturalist and did not have formal gardens, like Boo and Nana did. She liked for nature to do the landscaping, but did have a small kitchen garden, if I remember it right.
Aunt Bell's kitchen had a wood fired cook stove as well as a gas range. The mornings in the mountains were cold even in June, and the wood stove felt good to bare legs in the morning. Aunt Bell or her cook, whose name may have been "Lottie", would make buckwheat pancakes, I think she called flap-jacks. They were hearty and delicious, with butter, home-made brown-sugar syrup, or maple syrup from a tin shaped like a log cabin. She would tell me which nephew could eat the most, Tad, Bubba or Richmond, I forget. Ginnie, her stepdaughter was in the running too, I remember. Another specialty was fried apple slices, prepared with cinnamon and brown sugar on that old cast iron stove. The light over the diningroom table had a cloth valanced shade. With fringe or tassels. It looked so old and grand, like from the set of a movie. But their was also a tiffany style lamp in the living room. I had never seen one like it up close. A shade made like the stained glass windows that fascinated me in churches. Our church, First Presbyterian back in Concord, was in a neo-colonial style, with heavy clear glass windows, the one over the chancel was a huge Palladian affair, with ivy growing up a lattice frame on the outside. I felt cheated. It was tasteful, but dull.But it was the color windows that really fascinated me. The one in Lenoir's church had Jesus as the Good Shepherd, a lamb hung around his neck. "And He shall feed his flock, like a Shepherd." These windows were in the Tiffany style, but simpler. The colors were vivid and mixed in the compositions were the donors names, in memory of.... As artists taking the lead of Picasso were incorporating language into the mix of thier paintings and colleges. (I did not know this then.) Later, I came across the lines by P. B. Shelly: "....Life like a dome of many colored glass, stains the white radiance of eternity..." A line that seared my conscience. Stained eternity! Later I got to see the great glass in Canterbury and Chartres. And in Paris, to bathe in the light from Suger's huge wall of glass, the incredible rose in Notre Dame de Paris, where the southern sun stains the 12th centry floors and piers all day long.
Mornings in Lenoir was my time to play. You could go through those woods down to the creek, swing on the rope across to Tad's and Virginia's back yard. John Seagle Bernhardt, Tad, as he was universally called, was Aunt Lucy's youngest. Married to Virginia Renfroe, they had two boys close in age to me. William Lewis was two years older than me, and was considered a bad ass. He cussed like a sailor and I loved it. The first time I saw him, he had been made to pick up something smelly from the back yard, with a shovel. I heard him say something to the effect: "God damn! This stinks like shit!" His mom overheard it and gave him a switching, which obiously did not hurt. A few "ow"'s and another quieter "goddamn". He was allowed to play with rough kids in Norfolk or somewhere they had lived, I was told. I was warned not to let him be influenced! Of course he became my hero instantly. His little brother was great, too. He was a year younger than me, out going and uncomplicated, a sweet disposition. I never heard him cuss. Even when he was a freshman at Davidson College, years later.One day, I ran down there and the creek, to my horror, was bright red! There was a laundry up stream, I was told, and they dumped fabric dye in. The fish disapeared and we could not find any crawdads for a few days.
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