Most of us in my generation grew up with grandparents who were little old ladies and men. White-haired and slow-moving, they were hopelessly old-fashioned and epitomized the word “elderly.” We spoke to them respectfully. We had to “mind our manners” around them. They didn’t drink, smoke, or cuss. They had full authority over us whether Mom and Dad were around or not.
Nowadays, I have friends in their 60’s who are grandparents but cut from a completely different mold. I know grandmas, mimis, pop-pops, etc. who take the grandchildren on hikes and bike rides. They say 70 is the new 50, or some such folderol.
My grandparents were cut from the old-school model, born at the end of the 19th century, to Victorian parents who had lived through Reconstruction. My grandparents didn’t smoke or drink or cuss. They went to church every Sunday. I knew I would be held to a higher standard of good behavior around them and that was okay.
I called my mother’s parents Memaw and Pepaw or Papa, and I spent a lot of time around them as a child. I adored them, and they adored me, and made me feel very loved and secure. I had literally no idea about the hard times they endured in their first ten years of marriage.
My latest novel, Return to Marietta, was inspired by my grandparents’ lives, and it’s available on Amazon in Kindle, paperback, or hardback. You can order it here.
Sometime around 1990 (the year my grandmother died, after 14 years in a nursing home, incapacitated by a massive stroke in 1976) I asked my mother why my grandfather had stopped playing baseball. She told me shortly after he married Memaw, he and several other men were accused of being part of a KKK mob that beat up a woman. Although he was innocent and that was proven in court, Connie Mack benched him for an entire season [1924] and then sold his contract to a minor league team in Oregon, and effectively blackballed him from playing major league baseball. I was shocked. Anyone who knew my grandfather would have known he was a very upright, decent man. He didn’t smoke, drink, or curse, and he taught Sunday School for years. He was the most gentle soul in the world. People would often assume since he was so big [6’4, 220] that he was a brute, but nothing was further from the truth.
I was very blessed to have had a mother who had an astonishingly vivid and accurate memory. Over the next twenty years we spent hours talking about her childhood and about what happened between 1923 and 1933. My grandmother was raised in a wealthy family, and she was anticipating an easy life, married to a handsome and famous baseball player, a celebrity. When he was arrested six months after they married, she must have realized that her privileged life was not going to happen. She loved him and she stuck by him, though. When Mom told me the story of what had happened I was struck by how strong she was, and how hard she fought to keep her family together.
After the trial, Papa spent years in the minor leagues, first out west – where there were no major league baseball teams in the 1920’s – and then in Birmingham with the Barons and in Atlanta with the Crackers. He went to New Jersey in 1933 and the minor league team he was supposed to play on and manage went under due to the Depression. He didn't return home. He stopped writing my grandmother. My grandmother somehow learned where he was, packed up her car and her two little boys [my 4- and 6-year-old uncles] and set off driving to New York while very pregnant with my mom. She told Mom about it years later. I can only surmise that Papa was very depressed at that time. Nonetheless, he returned home with her and started working for companies that wanted him to manage and play on their company baseball teams.
I cannot imagine packing up two small boys and driving, while nearly 8 months pregnant, to New York City. There were no interstates. There was no GPS. There were no McDonald’s and nice hotels every 20 miles. The car was likely unheated. Cars often got flat tires. It was the darkest part of the Great Depression so there were undoubtedly families on the road, homeless and broke. My grandmother was 4’10 and always had to sit on cushions to see over the steering wheel and drive.
She was a crack shot, however, and she always carried food on trips.
I had to fictionalize their story because my research failed to turn up exactly WHY my grandfather was accused of a crime in 1923. My book is filled with details I learned from my mother about my grandparents during that 1923-33 time period. They were young people, in love, trying to raise a family. As I wrote, they became Lillian and Will, not Memaw and Papa. That’s okay. That’s as it should be.
It's a rare honor to be able to learn so much about one's grandparents and to appreciate the many hardships and sacrifices they made before they became the little old Memaws and Papas we knew.
My book honors them in spirit, even though it's fiction.
My book is not simply a love story or a sports story or Bookclub Fiction. It could easily fall under all those categories, but it’s much more than that, too. It’s a story about faith, courage, and family. It’s my attempt to honor two people I loved very much. I hope you will read it and enjoy it.
left, my grandmother Wilma Butler, in her youth. Middle, her and Papa [Bob Hasty] when they were "courting." Above right, Memaw and four of her grandchildren in 1974. We all adored her. She was cute and funny - a real character.
