17 - A Date With Dephie

     

       Dephie worked for our family for a couple of my pre-school years.   We still lived on Poplar Street in a small two-bedroom house with a pretty basic room in the basement for you-know-who.   My parents were young, my father had just returned from the Navy, and his income was modest.  But in those days in the South, you could be fairly poor and still have live-in help.  

     Dephie was a prime example.   She cleaned house, did some of the cooking, all of the washing and ironing, and still managed to be a full-time nursemaid to me and my brothers.  Unfortunately she fell ill.  Very ill.  She was diagnosed around 1949 with cancer, and in those days you didn't much ask cancer of what, the unspeakable C-word sufficed to say the end was probably near!  

     My clearest memory of Dephie was when I was taken to see her at Moore Memorial Hospital in Pinehurst.  The hospital was then fully segregated with a wing in the back reserved for "colored".  Perhaps non-staff "whites" were not allowed there either, or maybe it was just that children --regardless of race-- were not permitted.   Whatever the case, my Aunt Frances' friend Rose (see Goodbye Rose), then the hospital's head nurse, sneaked my mother and me through a back garden where we remained outside, able to visit with Dephie through an open window.

     She laughed and joked with me, and she told my mother that her treatment was going well.  She said that they might not have to operate after all, that she hoped to be returning to Poplar Street back to her job soon.  

     Only she never did.  Rose later reported that Doctor Bowen had indeed operated and had removed her bladder along with other bits and pieces.  We never heard any more, and she was soon replaced in our household by Ethel.  
  

The Pleasants family, Poplar St. 1944

   I certainly cannot claim that Dephie's absence haunted me or that I gave her that much thought in the years that followed.  But as I got a little older, I guess around 13 or 14, I still remembered that hospital visit.  When I asked my parents what had ever happened to her, they explained that she had just disappeared and had undoubtedly died of the cancer.  I didn't feel they were especially evasive, it was just that they didn't seem to much care.  

     When I was a little older, in a mid-adolescent period of social consciousness, I remember seriously angering my father when I asked if he had paid Dephie any sick or severance pay.  In those days it was an insolent and rhetorical question.  

     So Dephie left our family around 1949.  Now let's fast-forward about 55 years.  

     My mother died in 1999, and my father joined her, at least metaphysically, four years later.  In the South, people drop by for condolence visits for several days after a funeral, almost always unannounced.  2003, the day following my Dad's interment, I was sitting on the porch with Dickie and his then-wife Jeanne when an unfamiliar middle-aged black man knocked on the door.  

     He explained that his mother was past 90, and he wanted to make sure he had found the right address before helping her from the car.  Was I the same Frank Pleasants who had once lived on Poplar Street?  It was Dephie, and she was superb.  I couldn't believe it.  Not only had her bladder been replaced by a pouch decades before it was common procedure, but she had given birth to two boys and outlived two husbands in the interim.  She was almost 93 and sharp as a tack.  A posthumous hats-off to Doctor Bowen would seem well in order!  

     She had been living in the country about 25 miles south of Aberdeen all these years.  She had often thought of us, she said.  She recalled what a chubby little baby Dickie had been, and she said that every once in a blue moon when she would come through Aberdeen, she'd see a fat man on the street and wonder if it might not be Dickie (she remembered fondly how Aunt Ruth had called him her little butterball).  She didn't seem to find it incongruous that Dickie had in fact turned into such a slender adult.

     She recalled a day about ten years earlier when she was thinking nostalgically about our family.  "It was raining and I was real blue.  I picked up the telephone book and said to myself, 'I'm just gonnah' call Miz Pleasants after all this time,'" she said.  She did, and they had their telephone reunion, but I had never heard about it.  Mother was probably already sick, herself, and had other priorities.  

     She recounted her life at leisure, and we spent a couple of hours reminiscing.  I was deeply moved and teared up both when she arrived and when she left.  The happy emotion was stronger than the sadness of losing my father.  

     I took her photo, and when I returned to Paris I sent it to her with a heartfelt note.  I never heard from her again.   It wasn't necessary, the pleasure rests intact.  She loved me as a small child, and her affection remained sufficient to search me out over a half century later as I, too, was fast slipping into old age.

-o-        

        

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

CROSS REFERENCING … a look at other postings

Doctor Bowen and Moore Memorial Hospital were featured in "Doctor Bowen and Janette" from  Musings and Meanderings No.1;  Rose in "Goodbye Rose," Hotel Musings No. 61. Mother and Daddy and Frances were featured in "Stanley and Frances or the Guardian Angel," Musings No. 2; and Mother was also mentioned in "Hazeline and Josephine" from Musings  No. 8.  Frances and Rose were featured in "A Two-dollar Hamburger Under A Silvery Dome," Hotel Musings No. 4.  Aunt Ruth was featured in "Renata," Musings and Meanderings No. 4, and "Thanksgiving" from Hotel Musings No. 49  (to access, click on highlighted titles).

This is it, at least for the moment!

     With this, my Musings and Meanderings comes to an end.    I hope I'll find some more creative juice in the future for another blog adventure; for the moment I don't know what form that might take. 
   

     Many, many thanks to those who have followed these posts.  Your support and feedback have given me enormous pleasure.   It has been a special treat reconnecting with those who share a Sandhills connection and for whom there may have been a special resonance with my Aberdeen memories.

     So, it is au revoir for now, and hope to see you soon.

 

12 - The Pinebluff Sanitarium, Doctor Kemp, Robert Mitchum and Aunt Henrietta

    

Bad boy Mitchum (photo RKO)

     I had almost forgotten about the Pinebluff Sanitarium until Johnny Mills, an old family friend and blog supporter, reminded me of its place in local history.   Johnny is a passionate collector of history of the Sandhills, and as a native of Pinebluff, he is particularly fascinated by its heritage.

      Just for memory, my hometown of Aberdeen, North Carolina, is ringed by other little towns of varying interest --Southern Pines, Pinehurst and Pinebluff-- none further away than two or three miles.

     When I was growing up, Pinehurst was a decidedly upscale, rather exclusive privately-owned village, renowned for its golf courses.  We Aberdeenians more often than not had little reason to go there. Southern Pines was more down to earth, but still much more prosperous than Aberdeen, and at that time boasted a number of quaint hotels and golf clubs, of which Aberdeen had none.  Lastly, there was the sleepy little village of Pinebluff, which had once aspired to some of the tourist luster of its other "pine" neighbors.  By my day, it was pretty much an extension of Aberdeen, sharing its school and some of its churches.  It had nevertheless maintained a special, picturesque demeanor with many acres of beautiful longleaf pines, recalling its earlier, mostly unsuccessful ambitions to attract wealthy tourists.

      Pinebluff's most ambitious tourism project was undoubtedly a grand hotel built in 1925, an impressive Tudor structure modeled after a Swiss watch factory.  It was framed by a lush woodland of nearly 50 acres, and built to lure seasonal visitors from the North.

      Whereas restaurants in the South, then as now, have always touted "southern cooking", the Pinebluff Inn distanced itself from its cultural environment by promising in its publicity "only the most refined northern cooking."

      Unfortunately for its investors (which included the aforementioned Johnny's grandfather), the hotel had its fate sealed with the arrival of the Great Depression in 1929.   It limped along for awhile, but soon shut its doors, later declaring bankruptcy.

      A young psychiatrist discovered the property a few years later, and  bought the hotel along with its plush pine woods for what was said to be a song.  Most of the elegant inn's furnishing was still intact, and Doctor Malcolm Kemp --a debonair, chain-smoking lady's man and a Northern transplant himself--  turned the property into a psychiatric sanitarium with a minimum of refurbishment.  When I was growing up, the Pinebluff Sanitarium was to many Sandhillians a mysterious and foreboding institution.  Some of the more uninformed simply thought of it as the loony bin hidden in the woods.

          In fact, although shock treatment was used with a disconcerting frequency and some now-questionable LSD experimentation was carried out long before the hallucinogenic drug was discovered by the hippy generation, the majority of Dr. Kemp's "guests" were there of their own volition for a fairly pampered drying-out vacation.  The clinic was to a large degree run like a sophisticated vacation lodge.

     Some were not so attracted by a Pinebluff vacation.  Like my Aunt Henrietta, who in widowhood had developed an increasingly noticeable penchant for scuppernong wine.   When she showed up tipsy at church two Sunday mornings in a row, it was the last straw for my straitlaced Grandmother Pleasants who reached out to other family members for assistance. 

     When Aunt Henny saw herself railroaded into the sanitarium by one of her equally hard-drinking sisters, she steadfastly refused to cooperate. The first night the nurse brought in a tiny shot of whiskey, part of the drying-out process, and placed it on her bedside table.  She never so much as acknowledged its presence.  She didn't drink it, and she refused subsequent medication of any kind.  Two days later, when she finally obtained a rendezvous with Dr. Kemp, she calmly explained that any further detainment would result in a law suit.  She was released within the hour.

      The sanitarium's most notorious guest was undoubtedly film star Robert Mitchum.  His stay became part of Pinebluff folklore, now difficult to separate fact from fiction.

      
      Mitchum was known as Hollywood's bad boy.  He had served a well-publicized jail term for smoking marijuana back when people cared, and he was generally known as a hard drinking hell raiser whose binges could play havoc with a film's budget.  Producers were wary, but his star power was enormous in 1957 when he came to North Carolina to film "Thunder Road" near Asheville.  

     When he reported for work clearly off the wagon, it was decided by producers and insurance representatives that a few weeks at Dr. Kemp's Pinebluff establishment would be of mutual benefit to all concerned.   Mitchum was not in agreement, but he was given little choice.  Under a certain coercion, he signed himself in for an undetermined period of abstinence.

 

Mrs. Collins circa 1963

   It is at this point that accounts tend to diverge.  The only certainty is that the film star was one of the sanitarium's least pleasant visitors.  He was said to have taken an immediate dislike to Doctor Kemp, and refused to even speak to the sanitarium's occupational therapist, Mrs. Collins, a charming Southern lady who was eager to meet the star and get him involved in basket making.  Throughout his short stay he regularly made fun of the doctor in front of other patients and repeatedly ridiculed Kemp's old-fashioned spats.

     There is no documented evidence of how long the uncooperative actor stayed, though it is generally agreed that he left earlier than planned and against doctor's advice.  All accounts concur that he did not depart entirely cured, as tales of his alcoholism continued throughout his lengthy and successful career.  

     The Pinebluff Sanitarium had a much longer life than the hotel which preceded it.   Dr. Kemp continued to run the institution into his seventies; and by the time he finally retired in 1967, he was unable to sell the imposing property.   Left to abandon and still fully furnished (including a fine concert grand piano in the main salon), it burned to the ground in 1975.   I had my own dealings with Dr. Kemp and the sanitarium in its later years, but then that is another story altogether.

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

CROSS REFERENCING … a look at other postings

 Grandmother Pleasants was also mentioned in Hotel Musings No. 2 "Grandmother Pleasants and Mrs. Kennedy";  Hotel Musings No. 4 "A Two-dollar Hamburger Under A Silvery Dome" and in Musings and Meanderings No. 10 "Ousting Mrs. Oliver".  Aberdeen was earlier featured in Hotel Musings No. 26 "Babe Ruth's 60th Home Run."   (to access, click on highlighted titles).

8 - Hazeline and Josephine

Hazeline and Josephine, Midway 2003

     Hazeline and Josephine were twin sisters who sometimes looked after me when I was a small child.  They were little more than a dozen years my senior, so they would have still been in their teens then, and their job was presumably confined to baby sitting.  They were the children of Leanna who worked for many years for Renata Fairchild (see musings no. 4, "Renata").  Hazel and Jo sometimes worked for Renata also, helping out in the kitchen.

     Growing up in the Sandhills as black females was certainly no bed of roses in the 1940's.  As soon as they were old enough, they headed North where life was supposed to be easier.  In many ways it was, but they were disappointed to discover that the same racism they had grown up with was just as prevalent in Philadelphia or New York as back in Aberdeen.   Prejudice manifested itself differently, often more discreetly, but it was never far away.          

     They eventually found relative financial security, working in a variety of factory jobs, sometimes taking domestic work. They had several husbands between them, and plenty of children and grandchildren.  When I next saw them in the 1990's, Hazel was already a proud great grandmother.

     For as soon as they were able to retire, they had what seemed to me to be an odd dream --to move back to Aberdeen!   And even odder in my view, the first person they thought to reacquaint themselves with was one of their old employers, my mother.

     Mother was never anything of a liberal, but neither was she particularly retrograde.  During the South's difficult period of desegregation, after the federal laws had long been passed, she tended to say that she wasn't against change, just thought it needed more time.  Most of the blacks felt that a hundred years or more was plenty long enough!

     Things may have been tough when the twins were growing up, but by the time they returned as mature women, life in the South had profoundly changed.  More than the North, they told me more than once.  For people like themselves, of modest means, living in the Sandhills now seemed infinitely preferable to the alternative in a big city ghetto.   I think Mother was as happy to see them as they were to see her, and she enthusiastically  piled them into the car, and off they went to visit all the old ladies --Juanita, Gala, Ulma and the others-- who had once been employers to them or to their mother. Everyone was truly delighted to see them and to welcome them back to the area.

     As children, they couldn't do most of the things that I would have taken for granted.   You tend to  read more about separate water fountains or riding in the back of the bus, but these were ultimately minor inconveniences when you think that they couldn't even go into the drugstore to spend their money.  And of course they weren't allowed anywhere near the town lake!  So it must have been a special satisfaction to return to their hometown with all the rights they were once deprived of.

       We went with my friend Judy (another one of their cares) to a deli in Pinehurst some years ago.   Pinehurst is a particularly chic golf resort a few miles west of Aberdeen, and I hadn't realized what an exceptional treat it would be for them.   Josephine told me that, growing up, she would have never dreamed of  one day going to Pinehurst for lunch.

     Their younger brother, Lacy, had also returned to Aberdeen after a successful career as a brick mason.   He had built a fine home for himself, and when his sisters arrived, he had the means and talent to convert Leanna's old run down  cabin into a  comfortable and attractive home, too.

 

    Hazel's pride and joy was Brandon, her five year old great grandchild.  His mother was dealing with her own problems, and Hazel's big dream was to have him start school in Aberdeen where she felt he could have a real head start.

     Though already  over 70, she and Jo brought Brandon  South to begin first grade in the new Aberdeen Primary  school.   The experiment only lasted a year, but he got a taste of  community life and personalized small town schooling before returning the next year to Philadelphia.   He was an especially bright and personable little boy, and the year in Aberdeen seemed to be a success.
 
     Unfortunately, the twins were too old by this time to be raising a small child, and they had no choice but to return Brandon to the care of one of his  grandmothers at the end of the year.  It broke Hazel's heart, but she had the satisfaction of having tried.
    
     When Brenda arrived on the scene, they seemed crazy about her, and we always visited with them when in North Carolina.  I never actually remembered their caring for me as a small child, but I developed a special affection for them in later years.

     Josephine had never learned to drive, and she always depended on Hazel for getting around.  By the time the twins reached their 80s, she was feeling more and more isolated living on the outskirts of Aberdeen.   In 2014, a few months before Hazel's death at 87, she moved back to Philadelphia.   The last I heard, she was missing Aberdeen.  I wish I had a more upbeat ending, but then that's life.



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

CROSS REFERENCING … a look at other postings

Renata is also featured in  "Renata" from  Musings and Meanderings No. 4; Mother in "A Christmas Gift ... or the Little Red Lamp", Hotel Musings No. 51  (to access, click on highlighted titles).

   

1 - Doctor Bowen and Janette

Doctor Bowen, Christmas 1973

      Doctor Bowen was the archetype of a country doctor: he was chubby, somewhat unkempt, and he seemed to perpetually have a wet, half-smoked cigar hanging out of the corner of his mouth.  His bedside manner did not always include an excess of tact, and over the years he had his share of detractors as well as staunch defenders.  I never remember him having any kind of secretary, and his office was consequentially a mess, stacked almost to the ceiling with years' subscriptions of detective magazines and old medical journals.

      Janette was the daughter of Aunt Zadie, my paternal grandfather's sister.   Zadie and Janette and sister Louise and their brother Ralph (see Aberdeen Hotel musing) and their extended families all lived in particularly close proximity in various houses on the same block around Aberdeen's Main Street.   Janette was the only one of the Leach family who never married, and thereby lies the tale.

      Doctor Bowen had done part of his residency at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore, where he had roomed with a Sandhills native.   When Moore County Hospital was completed in Pinehurst in 1929, his ex-roommate enticed him into joining the team as a resident surgeon.   He subsequently found himself one afternoon  at the Pinehurst Country Club in the offices of a certain Mr. Nelson, one of the village's millionaire movers and shakers, seeking advice about an appropriate place to live.    He had begun his employment living in the hospital, a situation he quickly tired of as he felt it too close to work to maintain any kind of decent privacy.

       It so happened that Janette worked as secretary to Nelson.   These were the early years of the Depression, her family had recently given up the Aberdeen Hotel, and she volunteered that her mother would be agreeable to rent a room in the family home in nearby Aberdeen where the new doctor could find a certain anonymity several miles away from the hospital.

      Doctor B. thus discovered both the Leach family and Aberdeen where he soon set up a private practice which he maintained for the rest of his life.

      I do not know if Janette and Doctor B. were already friends before he arrived in Aberdeen.   I suspect not, as the rather draconian rules of propriety prevalent in little Southern towns of the day would have certainly discouraged the bringing of a boyfriend into the bosom of the family, as it were.  Still, at whatever stage their friendship blossomed into something more, it appears in hindsight surprising that townspeople never seemed to raise the slightest eyebrow.

      After a respectable number of months living with Janette and her family,  Doctor Bowen purchased a handsome diamond ring and popped the eternal question.

Janette ... once a little girl

     Janette was a pleasant enough looking young woman, and she had not yet reached an age to be thought of as an old maid.   So it  probably never occurred to her that she had better waste no time in getting herself to the altar.  She was undoubtedly delighted with the ring, but proposed speaking with her mother before making any official decision.  There is no record of Doctor Bowen's response, other than that he acquiesced to await the family verdict.

      Aunt Zadie was of another era.   She had some doubts that the young doctor's financial means would quite come up to her expectations, and she counseled that it might be in everyone's interest to slow down, to wait another year or so before taking the final plunge.   Janette rather obliviously reported back that she was pleased to be engaged, but that she and her mother felt it best to put off making any hasty, precise marriage arrangements.

      Doctor Bowen, who had been exceedingly patient up until this point, reflected briefly on the turn of events, then retorted : "So be it.  Wear the ring as long as it pleases you, we will be engaged, if that is your wish. But make no mistake about it, it will be a cold day in hell before I ever ask you to marry me again!"

      There was of course no cold day in hell, he didn't, and they didn't!

      From that day on, Doctor B. and Aunt Zadie maintained an at-best polite, often frosty cohabitation.  He nevertheless did become a permanent fixture within the household.  By the time I came along (he delivered me, as he did my twin brothers) I never questioned why he was there or quite how he fit into the family.     

     The Leaches changed houses a couple of times over the years, always in the same neighborhood, and Doctor Bowen made the move along with the rest of them.   In later years, he bought the neighboring house of Ralph (who moved with his family a few doors down), but never lived there.  It just sat empty until he decided a few years later to rent it seasonally to a Danish sea captain.

      Little Polly was Ralph's daughter and Zadie's grand daughter.   Her family lived next door, and as a child she would regale me with tales of Doctor B's eccentric behavior.  She used to laugh about watching him pace back and forth in his room clad only in  boxer shorts, with the ever-present cigar hanging out of the corner of his mouth.  But most memorable for us children was the fact that he always seemed to be counting a seemingly inexhaustible wad of paper money which he would then stash  in boxes and drawers around the house.

      (My grandmother's family had owned the local bank which in 1934 –along with many depression-hit monetary institutions across the country-- closed its doors, never to reopen; and to the best of my knowledge no client's money was ever recuperated.    So it was hardly surprising that those with a steady income like Doctor Bowen in the 1930's would harbor a lifelong suspicion of banks.)

      By the time he died some 40 years later,  nothing had basically changed. Janette never removed her engagement ring, though in later life she would voice to family members her humiliation in wearing it throughout the decades, and she once confided that she felt the need to turn the gem side inwards when they occasionally traveled out of town together.

      At the end of his life Doctor Bowen had only one remaining relation, a nephew to whom he intended to leave a modest bequest.   However, in the days following the funeral, no will had been located, and Janette saw fate just about to deal her yet another slap in the face.

      My main source for this part of the family history is Little Polly.   In her recounting, pieced together over the years, the surviving nephew from South Carolina was virtually in the driveway waiting to claim the inheritance while Ralph ordered the house turned top to bottom until the will could be located.  Janette had seen the artisanal document being written, and the family knew it had to be there somewhere amidst the piles of memorabilia and boxes full of cash and general rubbish.   Rugs and carpets were pulled up, mattresses up-heaved.   Janette, who in later years had developed a penchant for bourbon, was in a state of both grief and confusion, but her brother was fully in charge and determined to protect his sister's (and by extension the rest of the family's) interests.

     The will was ultimately located, inexplicably hidden under someone else's mattress, and Janette was declared  beneficiary of the considerable estate.   A lifetime of unfulfilled dreams of a certain officialization of her situation was finally realized, even though it was too late coming and undoubtedly offered her little satisfaction.

TO PAY OR NOT TO PAY ...

     

Doctor Bowen at his office circa 1955

    My mother never dared ask other family members if they were billed for his services, for fear of calling attention to the fact that we were not.

     For whatever reason, he never charged us for a lifetime of medical attention.  Mother would periodically go into a kind of heavy anxiety, fearing he was going to wake up and send us a bill.   That he or his survivors might one day present an invoice for all the years of office visits, house calls and various operations (Doctor Bowen was considered an exceptional surgeon) for our family of five !

     In those days it was just another example of living in a small southern town where intertwining family ties created privileged codes of behavior.   Like many things growing up in Aberdeen, they were thought best left unspoken.

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

CROSS REFERENCING … a look at other postings

Doctor Bowen is also mentioned in "Linwood and Doris" from Musings and Meanderings No. 14 and in "A Date With Dephie" from Musings and Meanderings No. 17; Aunt Zadie and the Leach family are also featured in  "Babe Ruth's 60th Home Run" from Hotel Musings No. 26; Little Polly is mentioned in "The Caldwells Come To Paris", Hotel Musings No. 57  (to access, click on highlighted titles).