Wednesday, September 5, 2012

Campaign Season with Grandma


It is during presidential campaign seasons, and especially around Democratic Conventions that some of my favorite memories of my maternal grandmother come up. After Richard Nixon so brazenly betrayed his office, she never voted for another Republican. She campaigned in the snow and ice for Jimmy Carter in New Hampshire during the 1979 primary. She was so proud when she discovered that Bill Clinton was her 3rd cousin (once removed). She liked to point out that his white shock of hair and ruddy complexion were just like their mutual ancestors the Snellgroves, as was his intelligence and charismatic personality.

Her political ideas grew more liberal and open-minded as she got older and I feel sure that some of that happened because of accumulating life experiences. The experience of having her ideals of the Presidential Office shattered was just one of many, small and large, private and public. She grew up in poor, rural Dale County, Alabama, in a family that welcomed Pentecostalism as well as Missionary Baptist beliefs. Later they moved to Columbus, GA, where her mother and older relatives worked in the textile mill. A favorite story she told was about visiting the mill town's library from an early age and discovering that she could bring home books every week to read. She was thrilled to widen her horizons from the beginning.

She went to nursing school and witnessed life as an emergency room nurse until she met my grandfather who was a newspaper reporter and then editor of one of the city papers. She experienced city, state, national and international events from the inside, like the murder of John Patterson and the Phenix City corruption clean-up; like several newspaper editors' attempts to get Eisenhower to pay attention to the growing strength of Cuban revolutionaries. When it was a much more taboo subject in the 1950s, she researched and wrote a series of newspaper articles about mental illness for which she won an award that led her to be President Truman's dinner partner. She was also the godmother of Bobbi Campbell, who became one of the earliest people to be diagnosed with Kaposi's sarcoma, and an early AIDS activist in San Francisco.

After my grandfather died suddenly at age 63, Grandma lived alone for 45 more years, later working as executive secretary to the newspaper's publisher in the 1970s. After she retired, she traveled all over the U.S. and Europe, alone and with friends and family. Sitting around her den and listening to her vivid stories, I have felt as personally connected as she did to presidents and public figures, as well as to her Irish ancestors and the farming country and mill town she grew up in. Her stories made me feel that the wide world was mine to experience, too, and hearing her tell them gave me the confidence to explore it myself. Her sense of self-worth rubbed off on me in ways I continue to discover. And at convention times, I miss sitting next to her in the bookshelf-lined den, watching political speeches on TV from all across the spectrum, from all over the world, commenting on tone, believability, and memories of other people and places. Thank you Grandma.