My Mother's Mother
Another side of my grandmother…
Some of her early adulthood seems like my grandmother was trying to break away from her own upbringing. She was from the country but moved to the “up and coming” part of Charlotte at the time. She and her husband kept a picture-perfect lawn and their house was much nicer than the one she grew up in. She didn’t take up sewing or canning or growing her own food, though it sounds like she did a fair amount of cooking. It seems like she had at one point dreamed of getting a college degree and having a career. Unlike her mother, she learned to drive. I don’t know if she raised her kids by Dr. Spock’s advice, but she had one of his books on the shelves in the hallway.
They had fancy furniture in the living room for guests and a record player with huge speakers and a sizable record collection. The rooms were all small, but nice. The den had a La-Z-Boy recliner and another sofa in front of “lawyer’s paneling”. That wall is where she displayed professional photos of her children, and later on, me. My uncle had his own room with red carpet that he chose. My aunt and mother shared a room. They had a driveway full of new cars, lined from the street all the way to the carport.
Like her upbringing, her outlook was very religious. Not in the “church every Sunday” sense, because we didn’t go to church, but the “hellfire and brimstone” was ever-present. She looked up to Billy Graham and held onto her Southern Baptist roots. She also thought women shouldn’t have the right to vote and shouldn’t participate in politics. Her reasoning behind this was that if women didn’t vote the same way and their husband, they were “cancelling out” his vote. To this day, I don’t think she has ever voted, even though her second husband died and she wouldn’t cancel out a man’s vote.
She stayed home with her kids for most of their childhood and according to her stories, they all had the perfect life together. She kept the house very neat and the kids pitched in to help on the weekends. The yard was immaculate and they regularly won “yard of the month”, which was a huge bragging point. My grandfather would mow, then lie on the sidewalk to look across the yard to see if he’d missed any blades of grass. He had a broom handle with a nail in one end to pick up leaves as they fell so the yard would stay immaculate. She’d cook dinner and bake cakes with vanilla frosting on one half and chocolate on the other so everyone had exactly what they liked. Eventually once all of her kids were in school, she took a part-time job at a store. I think I remember her calling it the “advance store” but I’m not sure what that might have meant in the late 1960s/early 1970s in Charlotte. I think she was selling tires, but it was before my time.
I don’t know what she was like in the 1970s as her kids got older. I suppose she kept working and her husband worked two or three jobs so they could have the lifestyle they wanted. They had their perfect lawn and a driveway full of new cars, adding another as each child got their drivers licenses. They had dogs and a lot of them. Most of the photographs I have from that time are of every kind of dog, large and small.
There are photos of Christmas gatherings, full of wrapped presents and when the house was filled to the brim of her kids and all of their friends. Some of the very few photos I have of my "father" are of him unwrapping some of these presents at Christmastime. In the den you can see the CB radio in the background and they all had bird-related handles. My grandmother was “mother hen” because the house was always filled with her teenaged kids and their friends. I’m sure life was stressful, especially with her husband working 2 and 3 jobs, but to hear her tell it, those were the happy times.