FINDING MY MOTHER, FINDING MYSELF: A Memoir of Three Women, in their own words

By Clynne Churchill Morgan Tilton

Family myths and fantasies often obscure the facts about who we are and how we got here. “Find My Mother, Finding Myself” was going to be about the women who came before me, particularly the mother I never knew. It evolved into a docudrama about the daily lives that three women lived over half a century, complete with illness, romance, scandal, and yes, murder! I came to know Edna, Ide Belle, and Grace intimately through some two hundred letters written by the three women and their siblings. I came to understand, a little better, how my own personality traits formed. Hopefully, this living record will prove the value of knowing one’s family history and how it can lead not only to self-knowledge, but to a powerful feeling of owning one’s own place and purpose.

• Language: English
• Publisher: LifeRich Publishing
• Release date: Oct 25, 2023
• ISBN: 9781489748560

Clynne Churchill Morgan Tilton

Clynne (Churchill) Morgan Tilton is a native Floridian, raised in Miami by her maternal grandparents and, now and then, in Punta Gorda by her father who died when she was 11. The Morgans were a railroad family, who came to Miami in 1902 with Henry Flagler’s Florida East Coast Railroad. Clynne has been writing professionally for more than 50 years in television, film, radio, performing arts, regional magazines, and not-for-profit organizations. She spent little time on her own creative works. Returning to college at age 52, in 1993 she earned a BA at Barry University. In 1996, she earned her MA in English with concentration in Professional Writing. This memoir is a true labor of love, documenting the lives of her great grandmother, her grandmother, and her mother of whom Clynne has no memory; but their letters told their stories. At age 84, she has finally finished her own story.

Book preview

1333_c.jpg

FINDING MY MOTHER,

FINDING MYSELF

A Memoir of Three Women, in their own words:

Edna Sofronia Hall McNaughton 1858-1949

Ida Belle McNaughton Morgan 1880-1965

Grace Edna Morgan Churchill 1906-1940

CLYNNE CHURCHILL MORGAN TILTON

Copyright © 2023 Clynne Churchill Morgan Tilton.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

LifeRich Publishing is a registered trademark of The Reader’s Digest Association, Inc.

LifeRich Publishing

1663 Liberty Drive

Bloomington, IN 47403

www.liferichpublishing.com

844-686-9607

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

ISBN: 978-1-4897-4858-4 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4897-4857-7 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4897-4856-0 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2023913234

LifeRich Publishing rev. date: 10/25/2023

CONTENTS

Preface

Chapter 1 Searching for My True Self

Chapter 2 Edna Sofronia Hall Mcnaughton, 1858-1949

Chapter 3 Ida Belle McNaughton Morgan, 1880-1965

Chapter 4 Grace Edna Morgan Churchill, 1906 – 1940

Chapter 5 Grace Edna’s Letters

Epilogue

Acknowledgements

FINDING MY MOTHER, FINDING MYSELF

A Memoir of Three Women, in their own words:

Edna Sofronia Hall McNaughton 1858-1949

Ida Belle McNaughton Morgan 1880-1965

Grace Edna Morgan Churchill 1906-1940

For my mother, whose letters showed the real woman behind the saint in the photograph. Thank you, Grace Edna, for giving me life and loving me until the angels took you home.

For my son, Craig, my granddaughters Emily and Cassandra, my nieces Cheryl and Caren, and my nephew Charles, Jr., to uncover family mysteries, and myths, then pass them on to the next generations.

For my husband, McLane, or just plain Mac to all who knew him. His love and patience made our golden years into a joyful adventure.

And, finally, for my father, Carl, an imperfect man who must have thought I was strong enough to survive without him.

PREFACE

When I first began to talk about organizing my collection of old family letters into some sort of document or book, family and friends asked, Why? For a long time, decades actually, I didn’t have an answer. Every few years, I’d read a few of the letters – the really old ones, written in the late 1800s by my grandmother and great grandmother – then I’d put them away again.

Over the years, my work in broadcasting and charitable fundraising helped me develop good writing skills. I went back to school and earned a master’s degree in arts, with a concentration in professional writing, in 1996. In 2002, I retired from WXEL, the public broadcasting station in Palm Beach County, Florida, and moved to Georgia. The boxes of letters went with me.

With plenty of time on my hands, I tried to get my thoughts organized around those pesky letters. In 2003, my niece Cheryl and I made a stab at sorting them by author and date – we even made a fairly comprehensive list, including subject matter. But life intervened; I was putting together a new home, and the letters went back into the storage boxes. Procrastination, thy name is mine!

In 2005, I couldn’t seem to get interested in attacking the letter project, so I ditched retirement and went back to work for a couple of years, coordinating and writing grant applications for the regional medical center.

In 2008, at 70, I began interviewing successful women and writing their profiles for Paisley, a monthly news magazine. Occasionally, my letter collection would come up in conversation and I would say, laughing, Someday, I’m going to put those letters in a book rather than keep moving them from storage box to storage box! By then, a couple of my dear old aunts and uncles had passed away, my cousins didn’t want their letters, and I ended up with a substantial chunk of family history, contained in approximately 300 letters.

Three years later, my former husband (we divorced in 1967), McLane (Mac), lost his wife of 35 years. He told me that after the funeral, his sister encouraged him to call me because she always liked me and thought we should hook up once more! We’d been divorced for over 40 years, but remained somewhat in touch, though we lived on opposite coasts, through Christmas cards and sporadic emails. Mac came from California to visit me in coastal Georgia and we realized that we still cared for each other. We decided we would enjoy life as a couple, so in October 2011 we got married and celebrated the joyful event with our family and friends.

Wedding on St. Simons Island, Georgia, October 3, 2011 (Tilton Collection)

The happy couple (Tilton Collection)

That was nine years ago. Our health gave us some pretty hefty challenges in the last few years, and my dear Mac passed away in April 2018. At 80, as I faced my own mortality, I finally realized that if I didn’t finish this letter project, there might be no one else who wanted to do it, who might become the next family memoirist or documentarian. At the very least I’d like to leave something with my son and granddaughters that defines their own ancestry.

It was a challenge for me to write about my mother, who died in 1940 at age 33, when I was a 20-month-old toddler. I have no memory of her whatsoever. Everything I ever heard about her was the legend of a perfect woman, as told by her devoted mother and siblings. I’ve always wondered what my life would have been like if I had known her, if she had been there to help me grow up, and if I would be a different person. Oddly, her sister Eleanor (now with the angels) once told me that my voice sounds just like my mother’s – and even though I learned cursive writing by the forward-slanted Palmer Method in elementary school, my natural handwriting is almost identical to my mother’s, straight up or back-slanted. Genetics certainly do dictate that we are uncanny images of our ancestors.

I had never read all her letters in their entirety, from the earliest to her last letter written when I was a month old. I discovered that she wasn’t perfect at all – just a regular girl – and that I am probably just like her, even the spitting image. I became fixated on finding her turning point and learning how the legend was formed. I hoped to figure out who she really was and what was in her heart.

The letters begin in 1896 after my great-grandfather, Alexander McNaughton, brought my 16-year-old grandmother, Belle, to live with him and his bachelor brother in Augusta, Georgia. Over the next 11 years, Belle wrote devotedly to her mother, Edna, who saved just the few I inherited – 17 in all. There are only three in the collection that were written by Edna to Belle.

Over 100 letters were written by Grace Edna to her mother, father, and grandmother. She is sometimes referred to as just Grace and most other times as "Sister," while her mother was usually called Belle and her grandmother was Edna. Her sisters, Eleanor and Betty, were more than a decade younger than she and usually only added a note to someone else’s letter.

There are about 100 letters written by the men of the family: Charles or Charlie (Grace Edna’s Daddy) whose work as a railroad man took him away from home; her brothers Charles Edgar, Wynne, Kenneth or Kenny, and Francis, mostly written when they were away at college. Another group of letters was written by aunts, uncles, nieces, nephews, and friends.

In addition, there are 38 letters written to Grace Edna over almost six years from December 1926 to September 1932. This correspondence began when her friend, Kitty Goodburn, traveled to Europe where she met Reginald (Reg), a Welshman working in Spain for Armstrong Cork, an American company. Evidently, Kitty gave him my mother’s address so they could be pen pals. His letters were often more than six single-spaced typewritten pages. Whew! Before long, he began to write about their future as husband and wife. I don’t believe that they ever met in person, but perhaps they did – I’ll probably never know unless I can find one of his relatives. I do know that during some of those years she was in the midst of a long-term relationship with a man she hoped to marry.

Now, as I write this story of Grace Edna’s life, I can see her more clearly than ever before, through the eyes of those who loved her. Her brothers and sisters told me that she was charming, fun-loving, and definitely unconventional. She had many beaux, but in the end, she fell in love with my father, 15 years her senior, who was married but separated and getting a divorce. She intended to marry him, no matter what her mother and father thought. I think she was afraid of never finding her hero.

When a person is gone, and all that’s left are their written words, we all hope mysteries may be solved, family myths proved. By merging her letters with many written by the rest of her family, along with some newspaper articles and college memorabilia, I verified events mentioned in the letters. I even found proof positive that one shocking family myth was untrue!

So, this memoir is centered on my mother, Grace Edna – the true her, conveying her own thoughts, unsaintly though they might have been. Hopefully, somewhere among the Morgan, Churchill, McNaughton, and Hall descendants, someone will be curious about my mother and how she might have affected those who knew her. In this family history, I hope their written words show a true portrayal of life by those who lived it.

CHAPTER 1

Searching for My True Self

My intention in writing this memoir was to pass on my mother’s life story to future generations, but my unspoken agenda was to discover how I came to be the person I am, something I’ve been trying to figure out since I first realized I had no inkling of a mother’s love. Yet, as I read hundreds of family letters and wrote the linking narrative, I came to understand that she had a tremendous influence on my life, even though I never knew her.

Grace Edna’s pink jade necklace (Morgan Collection)

My mother’s pink jade necklace hangs from the lid of a large Majolica jar that holds Keurig coffee pods. Every morning, when I lift the lid to get the coffee, I think of her. I wonder how she would have aged and who she would have grown to be. I wonder what she would have thought of my life.

Paul Coelho, in his book The Alchemist, wrote: To realize one’s personal legend is a person’s only real obligation. Most personal legends are built on the experiences shared by those who came before; mine is quite lopsided. Through the unbalanced influence of my maternal grandmother, Belle, I floundered around, caught between the values and ideals held by her generation and the changing morals and ethics of the post-WWII era. She raised me the way she had raised her children, with the same rules and expectations. My aunts, uncles, cousins, and friends lived in a different world than mine. The world was changing at the speed of light, but the Morgan household kept to the old ways.

When I was a child, Grace Edna was the beautiful dark-haired woman in a handsomely framed, hand-tinted studio photograph displayed on top of the upright piano in my grandparents’ living room. From age five, when I began staying there, I saw that photograph every day. I understood she was my mother, but it was only a photograph; there was nothing to touch or smell or recollect.

I had a tumultuous childhood. When my vibrant young mother died suddenly at age 33, from complications of pregnancy, my 48-year-old father recruited everyone he could to help take care of me. My half-sister Constance, his 25-year-old daughter – one of two children from his first marriage – lived with us and took care of me for a while; Uncle Wynne and Aunt Marguerite (known to all as Peg E.) took a turn, as did Uncle Ken and Aunt Harriett (her nickname was Ham derived from her initials, Harriet Anne Morgan neé Moore).

My grandmother was grief-stricken with the loss of my mother.

Then my father did the unthinkable; he married Irene Rose McCarthy only a few months after Mother died. Daddy had a good job and he was probably thought to be a good catch, even though he was no longer a young man.

Mother’s family was shocked and angry. Truthfully, I think he just wanted someone to take care of me. I barely remember my first stepmother at all, but I have a snapshot of the happy couple, sitting on a garden bench with little me sitting on a stool at their feet. It didn’t last long; they were divorced when I was five.

Daddy, Irene, and Clynne (Churchill-Morgan Collection)

I have very few memories of my first four or five years: chasing the dog in the yard and falling face first in the dirt; staying with Constance, who hid a severe drinking problem; jumping in a pile of leaves and slicing my right foot open on a discarded shard of window glass; going to kindergarten at The Cushman School in Miami where I had my first experience with choice – I could select milk or orange juice for a mid-morning snack; wearing a little Dutch girl costume with wooden shoes that were very uncomfortable.

Then Daddy married Florida (Flo) Mae MacDonald, and we moved to Punta Gorda, Florida where he opened a jewelry and clock repair store, Churchill’s Jewelers. Suddenly one day, he took me back to Miami to stay with my grandmother. Flo was expecting a baby and having a rough time of it. I turned six in July 1944, and my half-brother, Charles, was born in September.

I stayed in Miami for part of first grade, then Daddy came to get me and we drove west on the Tamiami Trail through the Everglades – past the Seminole villages where I could never convince Daddy to stop so I could see the Indians – back to Punta Gorda.

The transition from a bustling city to a Gulf Coast fishing and farming community was difficult; I went from wearing dresses with sashes and Mary Jane shoes to bib overalls and sneakers. (Usually I went barefoot.) At school, the kids would bury my socks when I took my shoes off outside at recess, and more than one dress arrived home sans sashes. Flo wrote to my grandmother that I came home with sand in my hair, that she had to put me in a clean outfit, head to toes, every day.

Flo with Clynne (©Courtesy of Bryn-Alan Studios, Tampa, Florida)

I think I started second grade in Punta Gorda’s small wood-framed schoolhouse, but mostly I remember second grade at Highland Park Elementary, six blocks from Grandmother and Granddaddy’s house in Miami. Daddy came to visit every few months, but always left without me. I have one snapshot of such a visit, when he brought Flo and baby Charles as well as my older half- brother, Carl.

Clynne, Flo with Charles in her lap, Connie, Daddy and Carl, Jr. (Churchill Collection)

By the summer of 1946, Flo and Daddy (now 54 years old) were expecting another baby. I’m sure Flo was overwhelmed with my eight-year-old sassiness as well as having a toddler underfoot; taking me back to my grandmother in Miami was the solution. My half-brother, Clifford, was born in January 1947.

I don’t remember exactly when it happened, but I clearly remember listening to my grandmother telling my father that she wouldn’t take me this time unless he left me for good, that it was too unsettling for me to keep going back and forth. In the end she got his agreement. I heard the whole argument and as he walked to the car, I begged him not to leave me – to no avail. I ran on the sidewalk, chasing the car down the block as he drove away, and finally I just sat on the curb and cried. Grandmother and Grandaddy adopted me in January 1947.

One afternoon, I packed up my doll carriage with my favorite dolls, a T-shirt and shorts, a package of sugar wafers, a Moon Pie, and a bottle of Dr. Pepper and off I went. I thought I would just walk to Punta Gorda or maybe someone would give me a ride. I got about two miles from home, over the 12th Avenue Bridge and as far as Flagler Street. I parked the doll carriage, ate some sugar wafers, and thought about it some. I was a little scared of all the cars on the streets, but mostly I was worried about where I would sleep. I had once seen a hobo sleeping behind a large billboard (the term homeless was an adjective in those days, not a noun). I didn’t think I would like sleeping on the ground.

Finally, I decided to go back home to sleep and start out again in the morning. As I walked up our street, a police car came around the corner. The policeman stopped and asked my name and address, then told me to get myself home or he’d take me to jail. I got a stern talking-to from Granddaddy, but no spanking, and I promised not to run away again because it upset him so terribly.

Grandmother, not at all forgiving, told me that if I did it again, she would send the police after me and then send me to live in the orphanage that was just two blocks away. The orphanage was a homely building with a chain-link fence all around it. I never saw any children outside and I certainly didn’t want to live there. (My recent research showed that it was the Receiving Home for the Children’s Home Society, which still owns the property.) That threat was often repeated to keep me in line.

Not the least of my difficulties came from being referred to my mother’s portrait daily and being told what a saint she was – and what a bad girl I was. I knew I could never hope to be as good and as beautiful and as talented as she was, no matter what I did, forever and ever, amen!

Clynne’s school picture, about age 7 (Morgan Collection)

I must report that I was a rambunctious and disorderly child – a rowdy tomboy to the nth degree. I climbed to the tops of huge banyan trees down the block and hid from my grandmother when she called for me to come home. Sometimes, when I was supposed to be taking a nap, or was sent to my room for some misdemeanor, I escaped through the second-floor bathroom window onto the roof and climbed down the loquat tree by the front porch.

I kept my pet snakes in the outdoor snake cage maintained by the three wild young McLachlan boys who lived next door. I was known to drape the indigo snake (a young one, not fully grown to an average five-foot length) around my shoulders and take it in the house – on purpose, because I knew Grandmother would go flying out the back door. Score one for the oppressed, no dinner and sent to bed, but it was worth it. One of my cousins, a tough little boy five months older than I, has admitted that I was the only girl he was ever afraid of.

I realized I was not like the other kids, with no mother on Mother’s Day and a father who lived far away. Adults would coyly ask if I was any relation to Winston Churchill. I began to say that my last name was Morgan – not Churchill. I had no desire to be a relative of the old man usually seen smoking a big cigar.

And I was tall – nearly always last in line, always on the back row. I remember when Robert Frost, who wintered at his home in South Miami, visited our school. As we fifth graders crowded into the sixth-grade classroom where he sat up front, it was standing room only. I intended to get as close as possible, so I sashayed up and sat on the floor at his feet. Other kids quickly followed my example, and he was soon surrounded by excited children. No back row for me that day!

In January 1950, the principal called my sixth-grade teacher into the hallway. She came back into the room and told me to gather up my things, that I had to go home because there was a family emergency. I was terrified that Granddaddy, who suffered from angina, had had another heart attack.

He had bought me a second-hand bike and painted it baby blue with no stripes – it really stood out among all the striped red and royal blue Schwinn bicycles everyone else had, but I was used to being different by that time.

I rode the six blocks home, pedaling like a maniac, hardly able to breathe from fear. I threw the bike down and ran up the front steps and there was Granddaddy waiting for me on the porch. He sat with me on the living room couch and handed me a telegram from Flo – Daddy was dead. He was 59 years old; I was 11.

I adored my Daddy but despite my loving him, he left me. I felt that his dying was the final rejection, and I had no tears to cry for him. My grandparents didn’t take me to the funeral. Decades later I saw the newspaper headline and story about his funeral service, and it seemed like a grand affair, with all the Masonic rituals similar to those held for my maternal great-grandfather Alexander McNaughton. Daddy’s tombstone honored his military service with the 258th Aero Squadron in World War I.

Many years passed before I forgave him, before I realized that he had hard choices to make. Perhaps he thought I was tough enough to survive without him. I visited his grave for the first time a few years ago; then I cried all the way home.

Grandmother and Granddaddy legally adopted me as their child in 1947, so that was that. Flo and the two little boys stayed in Punta Gorda, and I don’t remember ever seeing them again. Charles and I were reunited in 1995 and we are very close today, living just a few miles apart. Charles keeps in touch with Clifford, but I have no memory of him. Flo passed away in 1983. My last name was legally changed when I was 15.

Clifford, Flo, and Charles (©Courtesy of Bryn-Alan Studios, Tampa, Florida)

So, I grew up living in an old house filled with stacks of old things and two elderly folks who had raised seven children during the Great Depression. My grandmother saved everything, not just good things but also worn-out things or things with no current useful life that might be resurrected someday. She and I used to go out after dark and check out the discards waiting to be collected by the next day’s trash truck. We had a small platform dolly and hauled home whatever we could find. It was the most fun I ever had with her, finding trash treasure, until I realized it wasn’t normal behavior.

I remember going home from The Shrimp Place on 7th Avenue, where we usually went after church for Sunday dinner - $1.45 for the shrimp platter. Grandmother spotted a toilet bowl, tankless and seatless, sitting by a trash heap. She ordered Granddaddy to stop the car. He said he wasn’t going to pick up an old toilet, but she insisted, and we carried it home where it lived in the back yard, on its way to transform the one-holer outhouse at the grove into a South Dade spa experience.

That was embarrassing, but there were many such red-faced situations in my childhood. When we went out to Sunday dinner, Grandmother routinely emptied the contents of the bread basket into a paper napkin and thence to her purse. I have always believed that the interesting texture of her famous chocolate bread pudding came from the wide variety of stale breads in it.

On another occasion, my baby blue bike was the instrument of a major choice in my life. The black woman who came to do the washing next door brought her young child with her to work one day. The little thing was sitting on the curb, eyes big, watching Ellen Severson, Nellie Sawyer, and me ride our bikes up and down the street. The child had such a sad look and I felt sorry for her, so I rode over and asked her if she wanted to take a ride on my bike. She nodded yes and gave me a big gap-toothed grin. She was really tiny, perhaps four years old, so I picked her up and put her on the back seat, wrapped her skinny little arms around my waist, and took off down the street. After a few minutes, Ellen’s Mama called her to come home. I continued riding back and forth, but Ellen didn’t come back outside.

After a while, I put the little girl back on the curb and went across the street to get Ellen. Her mother answered the door and informed me that Ellen couldn’t play with me for two weeks because I had that pickaninny on my bike.

I was furious that Ellen and I should be punished for giving a child a ride. I went home, crying at the injustice of it all. Granddaddy questioned me and I told him what had happened. Grandmother’s sister was visiting and broke into the conversation. Well, you should certainly be punished for taking a n….. on your bike! I turned around and said, indignantly, Well, how would you like it if you were born a n…..? Boy, that great aunt hauled off and slapped me so hard she knocked me down. That was my next great epiphany – that I did nothing bad and didn’t deserve to be punished – and I would do it again, if I ever had a chance.

So I learned two important things by the time I was 11: I always have a choice, so choose wisely, and some things are just plain evil and unjust, so try to be fair, no matter what it costs me.

There were few modern appliances at our house. I actually remember Grandmother boiling clothes in a big washtub positioned over a firebox in the yard outside the dining room window. We still had an icebox, not a refrigerator, until I was around 12. The iceman’s horse-drawn truck had sawdust on the floor and wooden sides, with a canvas top and canvas flap across the back. We kids would wait until the huge strapping iceman went into a house, carrying the block of ice with a set of huge pincers, then we’d lift the flap to filch slivers of ice. I know one little girl who climbed up and hid with the ice until the next stop, making the iceman yell a bit. Guess who?

My grandmother decided that I should learn to play the piano, so lessons began when I was five, with Miss Elizabeth Warner who was a contemporary of my mother’s. In the parlor of her large family home, Miss Elizabeth had two grand pianos placed back-to-back. There was room for about 30 chairs that seated the proud families at student recitals. I had a piano lesson every Saturday of my life until I was 18, two per week in the summertime, except for absence from town, holidays, or illness. By the time I was 10, I had to practice an hour every day. Grandmother wanted me to be a concert pianist, but I began to lose interest when I was about 13; there were other things I wanted to do – dance lessons, singing lessons, anything but piano.

Grandmother wrote to her mother about learning piano; my mother wrote to Grandmother about learning piano. I never improved to a concert level, but I still practice occasionally. I did play the piano at church for Sunday school and, during my senior year of high school, I played the organ at a small neighborhood church every Sunday. I sang in the choir at church from age nine until I was 18, and again in the ‘90s when I moved back to Miami.

We had a few cats and occasionally a dog – one was named Donald McGregor, or Donny. Grandmother had a Rhode Island Red hen, named Ida, which she said turned up in the yard after a hurricane. I have a newspaper clipping with picture of Ida and me, winners in the neighborhood pet show. Granddaddy wrote to my Aunt Eleanor for Grandmother:

All my spare time is taken up with Clynne’s educational and social activities. Sunday it’s Sunday School, Sunday afternoon is the training union at the Baptist church near us, which lasts until 7:45 p.m. then after much persuasion she’s finally in bed. Monday it’s play time, either at the neighbors or the neighbors here. Tuesday, a program at the park near here. Yesterday it was a pet show at the park. I helped her prepare Ida for the show, bathed her in the bathtub, plucked a few unbecoming feathers here and there, scrubbed her feet with a cast-off toothbrush and put fingernail polish on her toenails, some perfume behind her ears, used 2 yds. wide orchid ribbon (2nd hand, of course) putting it across her breast and underneath her wings and tied in a huge double bow on top of her back and believe it or not won first prize in the bird class. She rode home (it’s still Ida) in Joe Sawyer’s new car, with Rinso [the dog] with a huge yellow ribbon around his neck, kids and 5 kittens, and -Clynne was simply walking on air. Wednesdays Miss Warner gives her a free music lesson – and – taking her to the courthouse to register for camp. Thursday have to take her to 27th Ave and 62nd St for a physical preparatory for camp. Friday it’s go for a piano lesson at 11 a.m. and 4 p.m. to Jr. Choir practice and Sunday it’s Sunday school in AM and off to camp at 2 PM. Saturdays it’s a movie at the Strand, a serial and 5 cartoons. Right now there are 5 little girls out in the yard raising H… Tell me, did I have to do all this stuff for you & Betty?? Guess I’m getting old so have forgotten! Love, Mother. [Grandmother was about 65 at that time. The camp was a one-week summer camp for underprivileged children at an old army camp down near Homestead, bunk beds and horrible food. I hated it!]

Clynne with Ida (©Miami News (Palm Beach Post) - USA TODAY NETWORK & newspapers.com)

My special pet was my Rhode Island Red rooster, Johnny, or formally known as Sir John McNaughton. He was a day-old chick when I won him in a contest at the Strand movie theatre when I was nine. He grew to become a beautiful bird with 3-inch-long spurs. He would sit beside me on the piano bench while I practiced, though Grandmother scolded about having that dirty chicken in the house. He was an attack chicken who would charge any strangers who dared enter our yard. He spurred Aunt Betty’s suitcase once, when Uncle Bob used it as a shield against the airborne bird.

We came home from church one Sunday and found Johnny sitting on the porch, his head hanging over as if his neck was broken. We suspected someone came into the yard to filch an orange or two, and he attacked so they kicked him. He was still alive, and I was determined to fix him up, so I fashioned Popsicle sticks into a brace and tied it around his neck with gauze. I fed him by hand every day, pushing food down his throat and following up with eyedroppers of water. Grandmother said she was going to wring his neck and cook him, but I threw a fit and she left me to it. I can remember Granddaddy saying, more than once, Oh, Mother, leave the child alone – she’s not hurting anything.

Many days passed, and then one morning I heard a weak little crow. Johnny finally healed and held his head high when he won Most Beautiful Bird and Most Unusual Pet at the Miami Pet Show, posing nicely for our picture in the Miami newspaper when I was 13. When I came home from Methodist summer youth camp a year later, Grandmother told me there was a complaint about Johnny and she took him away to a farm, but she wouldn’t take me to see him. Do you believe her story? No, me neither.

Clynne with Johnny (©Miami Herald, SARS International & newspapers.com)

Then there was the issue of my clothing. I grew tall and skinny. There was little money for clothes, so most of my clothes came from the Salvation Army – long before Goodwill became a shopping mecca. I had long narrow feet, and my saddle oxfords never fit very well. When the soles wore out, Grandmother stuffed in some discarded shirt cardboards. That worked perfectly well until it rained. Holey soles soon allowed my cardboard insoles to become a soggy mess. Grandmother would simply cut more cardboard