Private Conversations

By Martha Robinson

Collectively, my essays create a self portrait of me with
Bob Robinson, the defining influence of my life, and the lives of
our children Shirley Lalia, Elizabeth Smith, Susan Threat, Mary
Catherine, Phillip Rease, and their children. They know, through
Bobs book, Doctor Robinson, and his genealogy research, that
one must understand her/his roots to know how the past affects their
futures. Through my writing, they will understand more about the
people and events that have shaped my lifeinfluences that will
also be felt far into the future of Robinson descendants.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: May 4, 2012
• ISBN: 9781468576740

Martha Robinson

I was a news reporter and feature writer for a Capitol Hill news bureau, the Montgomery County Sentinel, Journal, and Bethesda Tribune in Maryland, and a stringer for the Washington News. I represented the Montgomery County (Maryland) Education Association and the Consumer Federation of America for community and government relations. I directed publishing and outreach for the National Library Services for the Blind and Physically Handicapped. At The American University, I directed a large publishing operation. At the height of my career in the nonprofit sector I was best known for creating organizational identity programs. I considered side work as an artist therapy from a demanding life. I was a volunteer in historic preservation and environmental affairs, my church, and Democratic politics. I continue to write, edit, and publish for community groups. I have traveled throughout the Americas and Europe. As a kid, I did not imagine an adult life of working and playing hard and never having enough time to finish my to-do lists. I have no memory of thinking about what I would be when I grew up. As the mother of four girls and a son, I claim four overlapping careers—in the world of communications, as a parent with nineteen grand children, my love affair with Bob Robinson, and being an artist. Staff, employers, and professional organizations have recognized my contributions graciously and in an exuberant spirit. Before marriage and between children, after attending the University of Florida, Upper Iowa University, and the University of Maryland, I earned a bachelor’s degree+ in public administration plus hundreds of hours of specialized training in management and employment practices, labor relations, editorial standards, art and design.

Book preview

Contents

Preface

My Birth: Pure Phipps

My Phipps roots and Mother’s fifty-year-old secret

The Chinaberry Tree

A glimpse of growing up in Texas, a baby sister, and the origins of a lifelong trauma

The Boone Side: True Love

More than babysitters and playmates, the aunt and uncle who taught me to eat with a fork and spoon, cook, grow flowers, sew, read every word of the newspaper

Tiny Vases, Self Discipline and Perseverance

Lessons for life

Painted Windows

Learning a life skill from the best of my father’s two choices

Touching Up Roses

Grandmother, the emerging artist

George

Love and the young college guy who introduced me to presence and presentation

Mother’s On-the-Move Career

And mine as the person who packed for Lalia Phipps Boone

Marriage and Divorce

My grandfather, the closer

A Texas Farewell

Airport security breaches, a dead mouse, and a wedding to remember

My Other Life

Merging art and writing

Fighting Fat

Betty Culotta

Best friend and soul mate in plots to change our world

Saving an Old Tavern

Dared by elitist establishment, a group of upstarts turn an eyesore into an eye catcher

From JFK to Obama

With local and state politics a way of life

Smooth As Silk

Life is a fantasy finish

Porter’s Sewing Machine

Reconnecting

Interlude with a friend and neighbor with important ties to Bob’s career

The Trial of Dean Harold Stone

Prelude To Sentencing

The Sentence

New Beginnings

Love Letters

The Ticking Bomb

When Bob Came Into My Life

Our Courtship

The Wedding

Options

Just You and Me Is NOT the Way It Is

Do as I Say

More Milestones

My Sabbatical

Deliverance

Reconciliation

Just You and Me, Babe

Like a honeymoon

2009—Year of the Dahlia

Love

The Unimagined: Officially Single

and that’s the way it is

Making the Best of Holidays 2009

Unraveling every step of the way

Still Living with Bob

AfterWord

Preface

Collectively, my essays create a self portrait of me with Bob Robinson, the defining influence of my life, and the lives of our children Shirley Lalia, Elizabeth Smith, Susan Threat, Mary Catherine, Phillip Rease, and their children. They know, through Bob’s book, Doctor Robinson, and his genealogy research, that one must understand her/his roots to know how the past affects their futures. Through my writing, they will understand more about the people and events that have shaped my life—influences that will also be felt far into the future of Robinson descendants.

These memories of people, places, and milestones, include meaningful professional and community experiences, the secret turbulence in my long love affair with Bob, the trauma of discovering that a pedophile had married into our family and that recovery from that would continue beyond my lifetime. The backdrop for these stories originates from the locales of my huge Phipps, Boone, and Robinson network in Texas, Florida, California, Virginia, Maryland, and Washington, D.C. Although the essays begin with My Birth, they are not a chronological presentation.

If not verbatim, the quotes attributed to family and friends are faithful expressions, true to the episodes and situations. Mistakes in memory are my responsibility. I can imagine someone saying, That’s not how it was! as I did when I read my mother’s memoirs, despite her lifelong dedication to documentation in her own published works. Recognizing that the best of us have memories that play tricks, I ask forgiveness in advance for all errors.

pdf_Page_008_Image_0001.jpg

Eighteen-month-old Martha

My Birth: Pure Phipps

My Phipps roots and Mother’s fifty-year-old secret

The last time I heard Mother talk about the day I was born was on her eighty-first birthday. She was sitting in her chair, centered to accommodate a crowd, on a long window wall that usually showcased a bank of African violets and tropical plants she had grown from cuttings sent by Texas relatives. She was surrounded by a semicircle of friends and family sitting on cushions, folding chairs, and the floor.

The chair was an aged recliner that had started out upholstered in rough, heavyweight green material—the kind designed to last forever. Over time, it had become softer and more comfortable in blue velvet. By the birthday party, the chair had entered a new era in smooth white fabric with all-over embroidered flowers as petite as Mother had become after eight decades.

This party was important, because we had missed staging a big celebration on her eightieth birthday. She had been in Texas visiting a brother. The flowers we sent were beautiful—but not enough. There was no conscious decision to forego a party that year; it was just that she wasn’t around, and we were wrapped up in our own affairs.

We would not make that mistake again, so invitations were distributed widely. Her apartment was scrubbed spotless. The refrigerator was stocked with food. We made Oklahoma Punch in her own mother’s punch bowl and served it in matching cups, a touch that may have been more my style than hers, because she had passed the punch set to me years before.

My attempts to squeeze in and around the guests to pass food and switch empties with full platters put me in the spotlight. Folks who didn’t know any more about me than I lived nearby in Chevy Chase asked innocent, conversation-starting questions about my children, where I worked, and how I came to live in the Washington suburbs.

Mother would answer for me in this kind of situation, because she knew I wouldn’t spill out much of a story. Her dramatization of my career and achievements was delivered in the style of Sarah Bernhardt from center stage. By this time in my life, I was beyond being embarrassed by her shower of accolades.

Who else saw such perfection in me? I thought. I might as well relax and soak this up.

Sometimes, as if to help explain how such an accomplished person happened, the recitation of my birth would follow.

You know, she said softly, Martha was three-months old when she was born.

"I was pregnant for twelve months," she said in a sobering tone.

After a brief pause to let that register, she would go into high gear. There was genuine excitement in her face as she picked up the pace and ticked off the evidence of my unusual birth.

Her fingernails were so long they cupped over her fingers, she said.

She slept through the night,

She never cried.

She was potty trained. We didn’t need diapers.

Surely, in real time, some months passed before I started wearing panties!

At least the story of my birth was less dramatic than her youngest brother’s claim. In the deep voice of the radio-television newscaster he became, to the day he died he would announce authoritatively that he remembered being in the womb.

Mother and her six siblings had a way with words. They were expert at trading quick-thinking, smart-mouthed remarks among themselves. The object was to score a verbal knockout. They argued. They made you cry. They made you laugh. They lectured. Each had a point of view to press.

Growing up, they entered music, debate, sports, and other competitions. As adults, they worked hard to become a professor, doctor, engineer, and more. One played clarinet with Jack Benny. Three wasted themselves on alcohol: One was a happy drunk, one was a mean drunk, and the other was just drunk.

For the Phipps siblings, it wasn’t good enough to make an A. My grandfather, the Reverend John A. Phipps, wanted an A+. I remember when Mother made a B in German. She was studying for her Ph.D., and she already read or spoke twenty-seven languages and dialects. My grandfather cut no slack. He raised his seven children, girls and boys, to not only excel but to be the best at every task. He surely originated the 110 percent solution long before it became a staple employment requirement. Thus, the path Mother and her siblings took was shaped by the unrelenting work ethic of their father. Failure and losing—anything less than achieving the most and being the best—were not options. Fortunately, they were in the smart as a whip category.

They were all Pure Phipps.

As it turned out, there was a public as well as the real story of my birthday which Mother kept secret for more than fifty years.

I don’t recall what prompted her to break an apparent self-imposed vow of silence by unveiling the most painful and humiliating memory of her marriage. My father, Joe Floy Boone, had refused to pay the doctor who delivered me.

Pay him yourself, he told Mother. I’m not giving him a dime.

With that said he left the house. She told no one in the family. Her own father, she thought, might have judged her to have failed.

To cover the bill, she cashed out her Texas teacher retirement fund—something she would repeat eight years later when my sister was born. Whatever Mother thought about why my father would pay for my older brother’s delivery and not us girls, she kept to herself.

Mother’s postscript, all those years after my famous birth, produced in my head a series of flashbacks—an 18-millimeter, full-color movie of my father hurling insults at Mother, then slamming the door on his way to meet his buddies. The burden of this pattern of abuse by my father was mine alone to carry. Mother’s burden had been the first wrenching, ugly words of contempt that shaped the real memory of my birthday.

It was time to cut her some slack.

I was 110 percent okay with the public story of my birth—the twelve month pregnancy, the cupped fingernails, She never cried, and the rest.

It was Pure Phipps.

pdf_Page_014_Image_0001.jpg

Young Martha

The Chinaberry Tree

A glimpse of growing up in Texas, a baby sister,

and the origins of a lifelong trauma

We lived about five miles outside a small town in Texas down a rough gravel farm road lined by ditches alive with crawfish to fill our buckets. I don’t remember what we did with the crawfish, but we caught plenty. At night, we heard frogs croaking in the ponds, ready to be gigged on Saturday nights. There was a great chinaberry tree in the side yard.

This was a day for waiting, not fishing, frog gigging, or climbing trees. I was waiting for something I had only seen in movies—an ambulance. It would bring my mother and my baby sister Doris home from the hospital. The baby cried a lot and was said to be sick. By the time of this picture, she had improved. Today the problem is known as milk intolerance.

pdf_Page_015_Image_0001.jpg

Baby Doris

My grandparents, who usually came only at Christmas or when there was a special need, were on the scene to help. Ida Phipps, my grandmother, usually brought her oil paints to fix a painting of hers already hanging on the wall. Her works were rarely finished in her eyes. This time, there were no paints. She and my grandfather, the Reverend John Ardis Phipps, were busy in the kitchen. The bottles they were sterilizing and the vats of rice they were boiling to be strained steamed up all the windows in the house. Rice water would be my sister’s alternative to milk for the next eight weeks.

glyph.jpg

Another time my grandparents came to stay was when our first house burned to the ground. Its walls and roof were paper thin, vulnerable to rain, wind, and varmints. That little house, in the middle of an oil field, was where I was born, not Wortham, as is written on my birth certificate.

Here the rats were so bold they would get in your crib and chew on the nipple of your bottles for the leftovers, Mother said. On a happier note, it was also where I saw Santa’s sleigh tracks on Christmas morning, to the delight of my favorite uncle who had been busy all night. My grandparents gave me a life-size baby doll that year and a play table made by my grandfather, using a wood-burning technique that he would repeat on photo albums and other gifts.

The place was so plain and spare, my great grandmother, known as Mama, told Mother when she first saw it, You can’t possibly live in a place like this, Lalia! On a return visit she was armed with blue paint and an old-fashioned fly spray.

Mama, with her youngest daughter Irene, left, watered down the paint and fly specked the entire house, Mother said.

It is now brightened up! Mother remembered Mama announcing.

44361.jpg

Irene Johnson Booth and

Mama Johnson, Martha’s great

aunt and great grandmother

Rats started the fateful fire. At a house shower afterwards, someone gave Mother a metal matchbox container. That container kept the rats out of the matches for years to come but not out of our lives.

Next, we rented a house in town where Mother was principal of the high school. With a population of about 800, it was the home of the Wortham Bulldogs football team. Our small dot on the highway map boasted a main street, a movie theatre, two stone and brick Baptist churches, and a large, brick Methodist church which we attended. Mother led the Methodist Youth Fellowship (MYF).

One day when she was busy with MYF, I went horseback riding with a friend, sitting behind the saddle. When the horse jumped a fence, I was thrown head first into a woodpile. When Mother arrived, I was still unconscious. As she put it, I was, bleeding like a stuffed pig. She had not had time to take the MYF high school kids home or find their parents, so they had piled into the car with her.

By the time we reached the hospital, a half hour away, everyone in the car was covered with blood. Cleaned up, sewed up, and bandaged, I looked a lot worse than many of the injured football players I had seen carried off the field.

Mother always ran the concession stand at Friday night football games. Chili dogs and hot chocolate were the best sellers. Away games were always at night, too. We would drive to towns beyond Navarro County: Grosbeck, Fairfield, Teague, and Kirvin. When I was four, I had a white, silk drum major suit and white tasseled boots. As the football team mascot, I strutted up and down the field with the big girls before and after the game as well as at half time.

I liked living in town in our rented house. It had extra wide eaves and no rats. There was a sidewalk to my music teacher’s house in the middle of town. It was great fun to climb onto a high bed next to my own window to read, play with my toy soldiers, and take naps when it rained. Too soon, I thought, my parents decided to build us a home down the gravel farm road toward Tehuacana, the original location of Trinity University. When Trinity moved, Westminster College took over the facilities. When my grandfather was dean of the philosophy department, Mother and her siblings attended Westminster.

The new house—a square bungalow with front porch, living room, and kitchen on one side and two bedrooms separated by a closet and the bath on the other—was raised off the ground about four feet. That’s where the dogs and cats lived. We had several acres of land—enough for a huge barn, chicken coops, horse and cow pens, fields of corn, watermelon, potatoes, and more. Mother sometimes sold chickens, eggs, and butter.

It was my father’s job to build the house. When he slowed down, Mother would tackle his unfinished work. Her greatest construction moment was when she dragged the bathroom fixtures into place and connected the water and drain pipes. Setting the toilet so it didn’t rock was the most difficult. She built extra concrete supports for each toilet in the crawl space under where they sat, because she was so concerned these fixtures would collapse through the floor. I remember the day the toilet finally flushed properly, and she announced we were moving into the new house.

Around this time, a German POW camp had been built about eight miles down the road. Thousands of U.S. soldiers ran the place. The Wortham Journal, Saturday movie news reels, news from the camp, and mail from my uncles fighting in World War II kept us preoccupied with, When will the war end? We asked the Ouija Board that question every day. Mother was busy helping young men enlisting or those drafted to go to war to change their southern double names. Billy Joe became William Joseph. Jimmy Bob became James Robert. We kids would climb the chinaberry tree to see if the Germans were invading.

Most places in our general vicinity—about halfway between Houston and Dallas—had been boom towns in the 1920s. The money was in oil and cotton. Despite the Great Depression and the onset of World War II, my father’s older brother, Earnest Boone, was one of the richest men in the community. He owned the only remaining cotton gin. It was located in Currie, Texas, at a junction once known as Center Point and Rabbit Hill. Currie never had more than 100 residents and has been at zero for decades. My uncle’s nearby general store was a gathering place for men with children in tow to while away the hours talking and drinking coffee or soda pop. When I was there, I would usually have an audience. For a quarter, I would climb the telephone pole in front of the store. Sometimes I would be permitted to spend my money picking candy from the rows of large glass jars on a shelf inside the store.

glyph.jpg

My grandfather suddenly bolted through the screen door to the porch interrupting my train of thought. In the kitchen he had been startled by the unaccustomed noise of a fast-moving vehicle on the gravel country road. He lived in the city and wasn’t used to the sight and sound of speeding pickup trucks and their trail of dust, dirt, and high-flying rocks.

The ambulance is here, he called out to Grandmother. The driver backed it across the yard so it butted up to the front porch. I watched the driver climb onto the porch, throw open the ambulance door, and there on a gurney were Mother and my new baby sister Doris. Everyone seemed to be in a big hurry. The gurney was wheeled directly onto the porch and through the front door to the living room and beyond to Mother’s bedroom. For the next two months, past New Year’s Day until early February, the house would be full of steam from the boiled rice water and my grandparents would be on duty helping to hold and feed the baby.

Years later, while visiting Wortham, Mother wanted to show Doris’ young daughter, Lani Kay, the home her grandparents had built when her mother was a baby. As Mother told the story, they took FR 27 out of town. Left and right, overgrowth covered the land. No houses or outbuildings were visible. Fence lines were gone. Finally, mother caught a glimpse of something familiar—the chinaberry tree.

"Over