15 - Ben Hogan at the Masters, the Farrells, Grandmother Vivian, and Miss Lillian Carter of Plains, Georgia

Ben Hogan and Arnold Palmer at the Masters (Getty photo)

      News of Arnold Palmer's recent death set off a chain of long-forgotten memories swimming around in my head, stemming from his first Master's Tournament victory in 1958.  As unlikely as it now seems, I was actually there.  But although I was indeed in Augusta for that historic tournament, it was more of a happenstance, and my memories today have little to do with Palmer and all to do with the Farrell family.

     Dan and Faye Farrell were best friends of our family for most of my growing-up years and beyond.  In fact, Mother and Dan had once been serious sweethearts, but that was long before they each married another.

     I always saw Faye as something of a small-town Tallulah Bankhead.  As a child, and especially as an adolescent, I thought of her as a more glamorous, surrogate mother.   Being an especially contrarisome child, I shared this information with my real mother, which would naturally irritate her no end.  

     But Faye did have so much more pizzazz!   

     Margaret was the oldest of Faye and Dan's four children.  When we were teenagers, unlike the other mothers, Faye loved being part of the gang.  When friends would come to see Margaret, they would  sit around with her mother and share the local gossip for far more time than normal politeness might have dictated.  Faye had a real boudoir with wraparound windows and an enormous bed (which has undoubtedly become even bigger in my memory).  She spent a lot of time there, propped up, reading, watching television, talking on the phone, or just receiving.   I would frequently stop in with other friends, and we would sit on her bed and discuss the events of the day.

     In the beginning, they were our neighbors on Wilder Avenue.  Then, when I was eight, they built one of the first luxury homes in Forest Hills --a split-level ranch-style house with a nice expanse of pine trees overlooking the lake.  My aunt Frances assisted with some of the original interior decoration, but Faye's creative independence eventually took the upper hand, and they parted, friends.   

     Margaret and I were just a year apart, we were playmates from an early age, and I was always closest to her.    About the time we started school, she was excessively timid, and would often chew on her pigtails to keep from having to speak.   I wasn't really aware of it at the time, but Faye once told me that when we were five or six, I was about the only person outside the family with whom Margaret felt comfortable enough to talk.
    

Dan around 1936

  Dan was said to be an exceptionally talented salesman.  He had an important interest in Taylor Chemical Company, and he was credited with a big part of its success.   He was the embodiment of a certain American dream, achieving many of the outward signs of success at an early age.   He had his own plane, and he traveled much of the time, often mixing business with pleasure.  The trip to Georgia was a case in point.

      There was just one year after Margaret went away to boarding school and before her younger brother, Frank, left home, that I spent more time with him.   That year, Frank's first in high school, I would sometimes stay with him when his parents were traveling.   Dan announced one day he had a travel plan for the two of us.  He would be flying to Georgia later that week, and proposed making a detour to Cuthbert so that I could see my Grandmother Vivian. 

     Frank was just along for the ride, as far as I knew.   I Later realized that this was all part of an elaborate plan to present McCallie Military School in Chattanooga to Frank in the best light. He hadn't initially wanted to go away to school, but this visit to the campus was probably an important turning point.     

     Like many of Dan's trips, this one was strong on improvisation.  For instance, the Master's Tournament was either a last minute decision or a well-kept secret.   We knew nothing until we were about to land at Augusta's old Bush Field Airport.

     Once at the Masters, Dan went off with some of his business cronies, while Frank and I were left to our own devices.  As I recall, we had top entry passes to all courses and we went wherever we pleased.   Most of the fans crowded around the new stars, Palmer and Cary Middlecoff.  I had no particular interest in golf, but I had seen the movie biography of Ben Hogan with Glenn Ford, and I was more than happy to follow Hogan --then considered an old-timer at 46-- around the course.  Frank and I watched him while the serious crowds went elsewhere.  I think he was about 18th that year, but I didn't care; he was definitely the most famous golfer there to me.

     It was only afterwards on our way southwest to Cuthbert that Dan casually announced  to Frank that they would be flying on to Tennessee and taking a look at McCallie.  I suspect Frank thought he had been duped, but he had a wonderful disposition, and he voiced no displeasure. 

      The arrival in Cuthbert remains a special memory, left untarnished by time.   Dan's Cessna 180 touched down in an honest to goodness cow patch, replete with a few cows.   Grandmother Vivian had come to meet us with two of Mother's childhood friends.  As we were landing, Frank laughingly pointed out the welcoming committee who were jumping up and down, waving us in, like a comic version of ground traffic marshals.

        Stepping out of the plane,  I felt singularly important, aware of the celebrity status to which my grand arrival had elevated me.   Cuthbert is marginally smaller than Aberdeen, and in those days everyone knew everyone else.  My landing provided fodder for major conversation about town, and the fact that the pilot had once been my mother's steady beau did not go unnoticed.

     Like so many of my early memories,  I recall the beginning so well, but then it all sort of fades away, and I remember nothing about the return.  This would have been close to the end of the school term, and I didn't see so much of Frank after that year.  Our families always spent some time together at the beach during the summer, but Frank and I drifted apart once we both went away to school.

     He died much too young, still in his twenties.   It had been years since I had heard from him, and like many of my generation, by the onset of the 1970's I had started a journey into a very different life, in my case one far from Aberdeen.  By then, so many things that I had assumed to be permanent --the interactions you take for granted, so many of the friendships growing up in a small Southern town that you believe will never change-- had begun to recede into the background.

Faye in later years

      

SIDEBAR --Miss Lillian Carter and Vivian

      

    When I took that trip to Cuthbert in 1958, no one had yet heard of future U.S. president Jimmy Carter, let alone his mother Lillian.

      Except Grandmother Vivian, of course, who knew Miss Lillian well.  They started school around 1905 in Richland, Georgia, in a one-room structure, and they continued  together for the next five or six years.  

     They also had a brief contact again as adults when Lillian worked at Andrews College, a small girls' school, just a couple of blocks from our family home in Cuthbert.  

     Lillian Carter, née Gordy, came to international attention during her son's presidency as something of a swinging grandma.  At least one who very much stood up for what she believed.  She had joined the Peace Corps when she was 68, and she served in India near Mumbai nursing leprosy patients.

     When years later I learned of their "connection", I tried more than once to get Vivian to talk about their friendship as little girls.  She had known her well, but Vivian did not like her politics, nor those of her son.  So that was that!   While hinting that she was some sort of a dreadful revolutionary, she always refused to share any precise childhood memories.  

     I suspect my grandmother was a little jealous of Miss Lillian's rise to prominence in the media.  Not Vivian's finest hour, I always thought. 
 
           

Your input is welcomed:  frank.pleasants@libertysurf.fr

CROSS REFERENCING … a look at other postings

 Margaret is also featured in  "Margaret at Le Cirque" from Hotel Musings No. 26; Vivian and Mother and the town of Cuthbert were featured in "Grandmother Vivian, Doc and the Others", Hotel Musings No. 46   (to access, click on highlighted titles).