Flannery O'Connor: Georgia On Her Mind

Magical Mystery and Manners Tour

Maybe I’m just whistling past the Guttenberg Graveyard, but I still like to read black ink on white paper. I am not completely computer illiterate, just a little semi-literate, but gadgets and gizmos and wading through the flotsam in the internet surf just harden my arteries. Entering “Literary Tours” in my browser, I located advertisements for Chaucer’s Canterbury ($3,950), Shakespeare’s Stratford ($6,895), and Proust’s Paris ($5,555). Mark Twain’s Mississippi must include some riverboat gambling ($5,495). Pilgrims for Flannery O’Connor’s Georgia ($1,800) can choose to arrive in Savannah or Atlanta, met by guides who speak the local language and know the roads. Luther’s Literary Landscapes beat that price by half and drove to the front door of my home in the Atlanta area. Luther picked me up in a silver station wagon, large and American.

“Looks comfortable,” I said.

I guessed that Luther had taken to heart a famous book jacket photo and had done his best to present himself after that image, with white beard and bulky turtleneck. As if reading my thought, he said, “Dans argent.” He opened the rear gate of the vehicle and pointed to the third-row seat, which faced backwards. “In case someone wants to take a lingering look at somewhere we’ve already been,” he said. “I call this my frizzled chicken seat, in honor of Flannery O’Connor’s pet chicken that she taught to walk backwards.” Luther guided my small bag to the floor and deftly set-up his laptop computer on the red velour seat. He popped in a shiny disk, pointed and clicked, and the computer screen time-traveled back to 1932. The Pathe newsreel titles identified the adorable, cute five-year-old girl as “Mary O’Connor of Savannah, Ga.”

We drove to a neighborhood not far away, the home of the second pilgrim for the trip, a high school English teacher at a private school with a reputation as a very progressive, anything goes, free-school. “Summerhill,” I said.

Luther said, “We’ll ask her.”

The teacher carried a backpack strapped to her shoulders. Her hair style would have been called a crew-cut on a man, its color peroxide blonde on anybody. Taking the backpack from her, Luther again played the computer disk of Mary O’Connor’s backwards walking chicken.

As the English teacher settled into the car, we introduced ourselves, and I responded to her name, “I lived in Brussels for two years on a beautiful square named for Marie Louise, the second wife of Napoleon. I believe she was born the daughter of the last emperor of the Holy Roman Empire”.

“I am the middle daughter of U.S. Army Master Sergeant Guadelupe Luiz of Ft Benning, Ga.,” the teacher explained. “You can call me Maria.”

I pointed to the small electronic gadget above my ear. “My hearing is provided by a cochlear implant, a miracle but far from perfect, almost human,” I said. “You can call me Rayber, if you want.”
“Tarwater’s uncle, the schoolteacher,” she noted.

“The deaf guy,” I said.

“Why do you think Flannery O’Connor had a pet chicken?” the English teacher asked as we drove off. “Why not a puppy or a kitten, something you could cuddle and hug?”

“Her mother thought dogs and cats were dirty,” said Luther.

“Compared to a chicken?”

“My mother told me throughout my childhood that we could not afford canned tuna,” I said. “I believed the kid I envied in grade school must have been rich, because he brought a tuna-salad sandwich for lunch every day. My mother liked salmon, which she stocked regularly. Imagine my surprise when I grew up and began shopping for my own groceries only to discover canned tuna on sale at a fraction of the price of canned salmon.”

En route to age 90, my mother, without a second glance at a second-opinion, had journeyed as a faith healer, unlicensed counselor, and mystic, but when she arrived in the nursing home involuntary and incontinent, she converted to x-rated declarations of love for Nurse Mary, announcements ever after known in the family as, “Mother coming out of the closet on her walker.”

I entered this long sentence about my mother in the ZIRDLAND.COM ThatFirstLine Writing Contest. When the judges, whose terrestrial address is Oakton, Va., announced the results, I was a top-ten finalist. I congratulated the writer who won first prize and admitted her First Line was more subtle, with powerful aftershocks. First prize was $500. Second through tenth prize was not.

I sent my First Line to the contest just for the fun of it, although I certainly would have cashed the check. If you can’t stop yourself from writing something, nobody else will, but if you are going to let somebody else read it, pray for thick skin and an unbreakable funny bone. According to the rules of the contest, the First Line could be from an essay, novel, poem, anything. Only First Lines were submitted, so strictly speaking, how would anybody know if there was no second line, just a one-liner joke, or another clever opening line with no where to go. Every word of my First Line entry was, as Huck Finn says, “The truth, mostly.”

My mother lived most of her adult life in Atlanta, Georgia. She had five children, including a set of twins, one of whom died as an infant. I was the only boy and the youngest. After her children were grown, my Mother set out to see the world. She traveled coast-to-coast several times via Greyhound Ameripasses, visiting everywhere from the Grand Canyon, the Grand Tetons, and Grand Rapids. She came to Europe, while I was living in Brussels, and we took her to Paris and Amsterdam. She was, as I pointed out in my First Line entry, a person insatiably interested in religion and spirituality. Throughout my childhood, she was a Christian Science Practitioner but was eventually excommunicated from the church due to insubordination, if not outright heresy. For a while, she studied the teachings of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh. She wanted me to buy her a ticket to Puna, India, to visit him there. This is probably the only thing my mother ever asked me for that I refused. At that time, I was living in Cairo, Egypt. I believed that my mother would be genuinely shocked and inconvenienced by the absence of automatic washers and dryers in Puna. Even more, I knew in my heart she had no intention of studying at the feet of The Master. She would want to point out to him a place, here and there, where he had not gotten it quite right. The followers of Rajneesh eventually founded a settlement in Antelope, Oregon, accessible by Greyhound. However, by then, my mother had moved on to other things, a fortunate circumstance for her, as the Antelope, Oregon, followers fell very seriously afoul of the U.S. judicial system.

My mother later was involved with a group of free thinkers who mixed health food and mysticism, and their headquarters was in the very part of Maryland where I was then living. They planned a retreat in the serene Maryland woodlands in small cabins for single occupants, several days long of fasting and solitary meditation. I drove her to the remote location and carried her bags inside the cabin for her. One of her bags was accidentally dropped upon entering the cabin, and out spilled dozens of jumbo packs of Snickers Bars, one of her lifelong favorites.

“OK,” Luther said. “So what was a good ole Georgia boy doing in places like Belgium, Egypt, and Maryland?”

“I was working for the U.S. Department of State,” I explained. After I graduated from college a long way north of Georgia, I felt like a stranger in all 50 states, so I figured I might as well go ahead and live in foreign countries.”

“Like Calhoun’s aunt said in The Partridge Festival, he’s homeless.”

“Like all of Flannery O’Connor’s college educated characters.”

“Welcome to the club,” Luther said.

Near Macon, we diverted toward Savannah, taking I-16 South, which goes east. We played “My Favorite Flannery O’Connor Character” as 20-questions. The first few pro forma questions narrowed down male, female, evangelist or prophet without honor in his own country shack, Catholic or protestant, farm dweller, traveler to or from the city, college graduate too old to live back home, suicide below the age of reason.

“Does your favorite character have some sort of physical handicap, mark, or blemish?”

“Don’t they all?”

“Careful, now. You’re talking about all my friends and relatives.”

“Does this character have a notable tattoo?”

“An artificial leg?”

“I think that’s ‘Checkmate’,” I conceded.

“Why would a girl be your favorite character?” the schoolteacher asked. “I was actually going to pick Hulga myself.”

“The first time I read Flannery O’Connor, I thought her snotty, college-educated characters laying around mocking the tenant farmhands and small-town southerners had too much of a superiority complex for my taste,” I explained. “When Hulga meets the Bible salesman, she gets what’s coming to her, and Flannery O’Connor wins me over.”

Luther said, “I think a large contingent of Flannery O’Connor admirers are Hulgas and Calhouns, suffering from a little too much education, maybe, too far from a Georgia hometown. There’s us, the academics, and the Catholic intellectuals.”

“I was born a Catholic,” the school teacher said. “I shouldn’t have told you that. Now I can’t select my favorite character from Temple of the Holy Ghost.”

“Flannery O’Connor says in her non-fiction writing that the grandmother in A Good Man Is Hard To Find and her killer ‘The Misfit’ experience ‘grace.’ What is she talking about? All I see is a babbling old lady and a blood-curdling psychopath.”

“Me, to,” said the school teacher. “When Flannery O’Conner says ‘grace’ and ‘mystery,’ I just think she is full of holy water. Her fiction writing speaks for itself. Whatever she or anybody else says about her writing is pretty much beside the point.”

Luther said, “I believe every work of art exists on three levels. May I call it a trinity? First is whatever is in the artist’s mind. Then comes whatever makes it onto paper, canvas, any artistic medium. Finally there’s how the work is experienced by a world full of people exposed to it.”

“I wouldn’t ask Van Gough exactly what he had in mind when he started painting some flowers. What matters is how I react to them.”

GALLEY PROOF, “a program about books,” broadcast by WRCA-TV Workshop, dramatized scenes from “The Life You Save May Be Your Own” and interviewed its author the week of the 1955 publication of her collection A GOOD MAN IS HARD TO FIND. The actors wore cornpone costumes, and their acting was 1950’s stage style. Between scenes:

Q: Flannery, would you like to tell our audience what happens in that story?”
A: “No, I certainly would not. I don’t think you can paraphrase a story like this. I think there’s only one-way to tell it, and that’s the way it is told in the story.”

…I can’t make any intelligent comments about this book any more than I could about the others; but I can register my sensations.
You suffer this like a dream. It seems to be something that is happening to you, that you want to escape from but can’t…..I don’t know if you intended any of this but it’s the feeling I had when the book was happening to me.-- 1960 letter to John Hawkes.

We picked up a bucket of fried chicken, biscuits, and cole slaw and a gallon of sweet tea at Metter, about 65 miles short of Savannah, and made a picnic at the Guido Gardens, three miles from the Interstate. We sat in the gazebo and enjoyed the peaceful view of the waterways, fountains, and bridges set in a nave of pines. After lunch we walked the paths of azaleas, camellias, and shrubs, including a featured shrub sculptured in the form of “The Sower,” theme of the Guido Evangelistic Association, owner of the gardens, who had also stationed tablets with the Ten Commandments and The Beatitudes, as well as Christ figures along the walkways.

To a lot of Protestants I know, monks and nuns are fanatics, none greater. And to a lot of the monks and nuns I know, my Protestant prophets are fanatics. For my part, I think the only difference between them is that if you are a Catholic and have this intensity of belief you join the convent and are heard of no more; whereas if you are a protestant and have it, there is no convent for you to join and you go about in the world, getting into all sorts of trouble and drawing the wrath of people who don’t believe anything much at all down on your head. –1961 letter to Sister Mariella Gable.

“That was great,” I said as we drove away from Guido Gardens.

“Flannery O’Connor would not have missed it,” Luther said.

Savannah

An hour later, we arrived in Savannah, where Flannery O’Connor lived until she was 13, in a townhouse at 207 E. Charlton St., overlooking Lafayette Square. Next door was the home of Cousin Katie Semmes. Cousin Katie was a generous and lifelong benefactor, Lafayette Square a genteel, almost old-Europe urban landscape. Newborn Mary Flannery O’Connor was named in honor of Mary Flannery, mother of Katie Semmes.

We climbed the stone stairs to the front door and entered. The living room of the O’Connor house is formal, with antiques and family photos on display. Toby Aldrich, resident manager of the Flannery O’Connor Childhood Home greeted us. He was a writer himself, and we exchanged Flannery O’Connor anecdotes and conclusions, as he showed us around: the books, school report cards, the backyard immortalized by Pathe Newsreel.

Flannery O’Connor referred rarely to her life in the Savannah house of her father Edward O’Connor, who also died young of lupus. For an autobiographical sketch in college, she described herself in Savannah as “pigeon-toed,” having a “receding chin,” and “exhibiting anti-social tendencies of an only child.” Her mother Regina O’Connor maintained a list of acceptable friends for little Mary Flannery, and admission to a regularly scheduled Saturday morning social event at 207 E. Charlton St. was restricted to that list. In the living room, the children listened to the radio broadcast of Let’s Pretend. Then Regina herded them through the dining room into the kitchen for refreshments.

Also on Lafayette Square was the parochial school and The Cathedral of St. John the Baptist, a short walk from home for an impressionable little girl. The parochial school is no longer there. The cathedral, once the congregation for more than half the Catholics in Georgia, still dominates the square. On the sidewalk in front of the steps of the cathedral, an artist had set up easels with paintings of the church from different angles, through the live oaks dripping with Spanish moss, a concrete urban street-scene, and a spectacular view unavailable at street level but looking down at the spires, the God’s-eye view. One painting depicted a lady ascending the stairs to the cathedral on silver crutches. She wore a gray cloak spread wide at the bottom and layered with festoons of brown, gold, and blue peacock eyes.

“You must be a big fan of Flannery O’Connor,” I said to the street vendor.

“Who?”

The painting was signed, “Wyatt.”

“Are you Wyatt?”

“Nah, but I sell a lot of those for him.”

After supper, I borrowed Luther’s computer and collection of Flannery O’Connor video disks and took them to my hotel room. In addition to the Pathe Newsreel, he had movies and pirated downloads from the internet, including John Houston’s version of Wise Blood, the PBS production of “The Displaced Person,” an adaptation of “A Circle In The Fire” directed by Victor Nunez, and the 1955 WRCA-TV program featuring an interview. There were also some audio-only recordings, but I knew I would be lucky to get anything out of any videos without captions, even if I backed up parts and played them over and over.

In the interview, Flannery O’Connor wore black, or so it appeared in the grainy black and white tv recording. Her shirtwaist dress had short sleeves and pointed collars. She kept stiffly posed, her left hand resting on her right forearm. Today, all the authors appear on tv so glib and relaxed. In 1952, Flannery O’Connor did not even own a television set. She answered pretentious questions with a seriousness they did not deserve but a sardonic edge, from behind which a smile flashed, surprising herself and checking if the listener might smile back. It was a beautiful smile, explosive, deeply believable. I could imagine her sitting at her typewriter occasionally breaking into laughter, shamelessly cracking herself up.


Milledgeville

Three hours drive from Savannah via I-16 West and U.S. 441 North took us to Milledgeville. The designers of Milledgeville intended it to be the capital of Georgia, with a broad quadrangle of government buildings, including a Governor’s Mansion, all of which is now part of the college campus that dominates the town. Before the Governor’s Mansion was completed, the large white columned house next door on Greene St. served temporarily as the residence for the Governor. The Green St. temporary Governor’s Mansion a few generations later became the family home of Flannery O‘Connor‘s mother Regina Cline. When the O’Connors moved from Savannah to Atlanta in 1938, Flannery was 13. The adjustment was not successful, and before long Regina and Flannery took up residence in the house on Greene St. in Milledgeville. Edward O’Connor became increasingly incapacitated with lupus, then died still young. Unmarried aunts and her widowed mother lived at the Greene St. house while Flannery O’Connor attended high school and college virtually in the backyard. There were no other children in the house, except in summertime. First cousins Margaret, Louise, Catherine, and Francis Florencourt, visited Milledgeville from Massachusetts every summer, brought by their mother, Agnes, Regina’s sister. Flannery O’Connor was an only child in an old-fashioned Catholic family, extending from 24 siblings of her mother and father.

The Peabody School, which Flannery O'Connor attended on the campus of Georgia State College for Women, left her hostile to progressive education.

Anything having to do with this “learning for life” stuff turns my stomach permanently. I had to attend a “progressive” high school here, one of those connected with a teacher’s college. In the summer all the teachers went to T.C. and sat at the feet of an old boy named William Heard Kilpatrick and those who couldn’t afford that went to Peabody and sat at the feet of somebody who had sat at the feet of William Heard Kilpatrick. In the winter they returned and asked us what, as mature children, we thought we ought to study. At that school we were always “planning.” They would as soon have given us arsenic in the drinking fountains as let us study Greek.--1957 letter to Cecil Dawkins.

Party chit-chat Flannery O’Connor to Russell Baker:
“I read old William Heard Kilpatrick died recently. John Dewey’s dead too, isn’t he?”
“Yes, thank God. Gone to his reward. Ha ha.”
” I hope there’re children crawling all over him.”—1955 letter to Betty Hester.

“She missed the point,” said Maria, the Atlanta progressive-school teacher as we wandered the heart of Milledgeville.

“What was the point?

“She was the point.”

The only embossed one (sweatshirt) I ever had had a fierce-looking bulldog on it with the word GEORGIA over him. I wore it all the time it being my policy at that point in life to create an unfavorable impression.—1955 letter to Betty Hester.

As a young woman in her early 20’s, Flannery O’Connor tried to live in New York City, in an art colony upstate, in guest lodgings with Connecticut intelligentsia. She was driven home by the illness that would eventually claim her life, back to Georgia under the watch and care of her mother, on the farm she called Andalusia, as if this were in fact God’s plan. An argument can be made. Otherwise, can you imagine the work of Flannery O’Connor without Georgia, expatriated to New York and Connecticut? “Tarwater in Tinseltown” or “A Perfect Day for Banana Loaves and Fishes” by M. F. O’Connor.

The farm Andalusia is located on U.S. Highway 441 North, about four miles north of town, a quarter-mile north of the Wal-Mart. We walked the grounds surrounding the two-story white frame house, worshiping at the stations of its relics: the water tower, the rust-colored hand-pump, several piles of collapsed lumber where outbuildings once stood, the tenant house ever-closer to the same state, despite the best efforts of the under-funded Flannery O’Connor Andalusia Foundation. Peacocks, absent from Andalusia for some years, recently have been re-introduced. The burro in the pasture is descended from the one Flannery gave her mother as a birthday present. The barn has a loft, a challenge to climb with a wooden leg, a dangerous descent hard to explain, without it.

We entered the house via the large welcoming porch, screened for Southern comfort, roomy enough for many rocking chairs. We had barely entered the front hallway and closed the door behind ourselves. Looking immediately to our left, we stopped in our tracks. Behind a brown rope was the bedroom where Flannery O’Connor wrote every morning, with her back to the window and her desk and manual Royal typewriter walled behind the clothes chest. Aluminum crutches leaned against the clothes chest. We stood silent as prayer in church. Broken by sobs. I looked around. There was nobody there but us.

I walked on to the dining room across the hall, then the kitchen. At the kitchen table Flannery and her mother took their morning coffee was served from a thermos, which Regina prepared each night to serve the next day.

Flannery O’Connor maintained a lively correspondence with the outside world. Letters to Betty Hester of Atlanta, identified only as “A.” for anonymous at the time of the letters’ original publication. Their discussions of Catholic theology and the art of fiction from the gospel according to Paul Engle’s Iowa Writers Workshop have fascinated appreciative readers. Often pedagogical in tone and content, Flannery O’Connor certainly would not and could not have communicated the same things in exactly the same way to her literary sponsors and celebrated friends like Caroline Gordon and Robert Lowell. Even so, there was warmth and compassion in their correspondence, as well as Flannery O’Connor’s irrepressible sweet tooth for the taste of southern sarcasm.

I have decided I must be a pretty pathetic sight with these crutches. I was in Atlanta the other day in Davisons. An old lady got on the elevator behind me and as soon as I turned around she fixed me with a moist gleaming eye and said in a loud voice, “Bless you, darling!” I felt exactly like the Misfit and I gave her a weakly lethal look, whereupon greatly encouraged, she grabbed my arm and whispered (very loud) in my ear, “Remember what they said to John at the gate, darling.” It was not my floor but I got off and I suppose the old lady was astounded at how quick I could get away on crutches. I have a one-legged friend and I asked her what they said to John at the gate. She said she reckoned they said, “The lame shall enter first.” This may be because the lame will be able to knock everybody else aside with their crutches.” -- 1955 letter to Betty Hester. (Historical notes: Davisons was a department store in downtown Atlanta. Throughout Flannery O’Connor’s life Georgia ladies shopped at Davisons wearing Sunday hats and gloves. The first draft of “The Lame Shall Enter First” appeared in 1961.)

A parade of visitors came to see Flannery O’Connor at Andalusia, including townsfolk, established literary figures like Katherine Anne Porter, not-yet known James Dickey, admirers, academics and critics. Ted R. Spivey, Professor of English at Georgia State University, Atlanta, himself a multiple Andalusia visitor and Flannery O’Connor correspondent, writes in his book Flannery O’Connor, The Woman, the Thinker, the Visionary: “…at the time of Dickey’s first visits with Flannery O’Connor in 1958, Dickey had not published a volume of poems, …was receiving no great attention. Dickey also in 1958 was aware of her presence as a serious woman of letters. He told me in 1986 that, when he began to write, she was the only writer in Georgia who was doing anything.” (When Dickey looked her up, neither knew they had attended simultaneously, briefly, and unnoticed the same Atlanta public high school, she a new student who never successfully adjusted there and Dickey an upperclassman, football player, and Buckhead Boy.)

Flannery O’Connor shared Dickey’s opinion of other well-known Georgia writers of her day, Erskine Caldwell, Carson McCullars, certainly Margaret Mitchell. At a Vanderbilt symposium, Flannery O’Conner was asked “are you familiar with the work of Carson McCullars?” She hedged, “vaguely.” Elsewhere she minced no words. “I dislike intensely the work of Carson McCullars,” she admitted in a 1963 letter to Janet McKane.

Maria said, “Carson McCullars was one of the first Georgia writers I noticed, partly because Ft. Benning was near Columbus. By the time I discovered Flannery O’Connor, I realized that I had outgrown being a 12-year-old girl, but I would be a freak for the rest of my life.”

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution sent its most cultured and literate writer Frank Daniel to interview her in 1962 for an advertised Sunday feature. Among the most frequently published photos of Flannery O’Connor are those by Joe McTyre that accompanied the article. They include poses of Flannery O’Connor standing on the screen porch steps with crutches and peacocks and sitting in front of her self-portrait with a pheasant:

More and more she must interrupt her daily writing to deal with visitors who seek an understanding of her extraordinary talent and insight. Their visits do not much distract her.
“….I write every day. But often nothing comes of my efforts. They don’t lead anywhere. I rewrite, edit, throw away. It’s slow and searching. I’m not sure until it’s down on paper.”
Paintings by Miss O’Connor hang in several rooms of her home. Asked if painting is a relaxation, she said it isn’t—that is hard work.
I painted those pictures when we moved into the house, because the walls needed pictures. When I’d filled up the space, I stopped, until we added on a couple of rooms a couple of years ago. The new sitting room needed a picture in a wall space, so I painted one. That done, I’ve painted no more.—Atlanta Journal Constitution, July 22, 1962.

Versions of this description of herself Flannery O’Connor repeated, as with her backwards walking pet chicken story, in a repertoire used to establish her bona fides as a wry Georgia cracker barrel wit.

In addition to the self-portrait with pheasant, Flannery O’Connor painted farm scenes, the cows, the rooster, the tenant farmhand shack. The only one of her paintings currently on public display depicts three male singers in choir robes with hymn books before them, the face of the singer to the right unfinished or painted over, like a ghost. We saw this painting at the Flannery O’Connor Museum of Georgia State College and University, Milledgeville. (Notes about Georgia higher education: Georgia State College and University in Milledgeville (GSCU) was called Georgia State College for Women (GSCW) when Flannery O’Connor attended it. Georgia State University (GSU) is in downtown Atlanta. The University of Georgia (UGA) is in Athens.)

Flannery O’Connor, who originally entered graduate school at Iowa as a journalism student, maintained a file of clippings from Georgia newspapers, as well as from the Farmers Bulletin. The Atlanta Constitution described a bank robber who went by the nickname of “The Misfit.” She wrote in a 1961 letter to Ashley Brown, “I am a receptive depository for clippings. The latest I have got to add to my collection is one of a man who has just had Christ tattooed on his back. This is obviously for artistic and not religious purposes as he also has tiger and panther heads and an eagle perched on a cannon.”

Before we left Andalusia, Craig Amason, friendly and knowledgeable executive director of the Flannery O’Connor-Andalusia Foundation, asked, “Do you plan to attend the program tonight in Greensboro?” He handed us the flyer: “Meeting Flannery O’Connor, a visit with her family and friends. Louise and Frances Florencourt, First Cousins, Bill Sessions, Authorized Biographer. Christ Our King and Savior Catholic Church. 7 P.M.” Nothing like a last minute change of plans.

“I could still have you back in Atlanta before midnight,” Luther told us. Flannery O’Connor’s letters often refer to Regina as “my parent.” In fiction, Flannery O’Connor created a club of mothers, Mrs. Cope, Mrs. Fox, Mrs. Hopewell, and Mrs. McIntyre, operating farms on their own, women without husbands. Whatever anybody called her, Flannery O’Connor’s mother was the most significant other.

Maryat Lee, playwright and flamboyantly liberated 1950’s woman, wrote that her friend Flannery “avoided opposing her mother, who could not be opposed—who was, she (the mother) told me, Mayor, Sheriff, judge, treasurer and boss of this little state—a feudal state where she was feudal queen. Regina was her name.”

After Flannery died, Maryat Lee, whose brother was president of the college in Milledgeville, visited Regina. According to Maryat’s hand-written notes, Regina said, “The Library of Congress wants her papers. You wouldn’t believe all the people I’ve heard from, wanting this or that. Do they think I’m going to bare the house? Now the such and such would like a painting & something else.”

Maryat broke in, “Don’t let them have The Rooster. She wrote me that it was to be mine.” When Regina “looked surprised… suspicious,” Ms. Lee said, “But you may keep it for a while if you prefer.”

Regina “ did not seem to hear me. She veered off,” Maryat wrote.

“You never know what to do,” Regina said, then after a while continued, “About this ridiculous pathetic hero worshiper X who came down calling her Flannery. After she was here she began calling her Mary Flannery…. Only Mary Flannery’s family and close friends called her Mary Flannery. Everybody else she preferred to call her Flannery. And you can quote me to anyone else. This X woman kept saying ‘Do you know the passage in such and such where she wrote blah blah. Finally I said to her, look I have so much to do to keep her able to write, that I don’t know one passage from the next.”

When her health permitted, Flannery O’Connor traveled, speaking and giving public readings at colleges and universities. Maryat Lee remembered in a 1965 Memorial Tribute, “She complained about speaking engagements and writing speeches—complained acidly, saying it was the money.  But she loved talking in front of people—she had a gift…” Flannery’s father Edward O’Connor had served as Commander of the American Legion for the state of Georgia and spent much of his time away from home to make speeches.

I am about at the tail end of my present travels—first the Sisters at Rosary College outside of Chicago for two days & now here. The good Sisters really know how to get it out of you. I had 5 classes, a public lecture, read two mss. And underwent a tea in which each student was determined to ask me an intelligent question (400 students). Notre Dame is entirely opposite—much liquor and male companionship, both of which I could stand more of more often. –1962 letter to Betty Hester.

“I was raised by my grandmother and have lived most of my life in Athens,” Luther said, driving the two-lane county road to Greensboro. “After my freshman year at UGA, I transferred to the University of Minnesota. Flannery O’Connor came to Minneapolis. My English professor told me about the event, said I should go, that I would probably be the only one there able to understand her thick Georgia accent. I had never heard of her. She read “A Good Man Is Hard to Find.” When she mimicked the grandmother’s voice, my blood froze and I stopped breathing. I was so shaken I could not think of any questions to ask her afterwards and was afraid to even speak to her.”

We arrived in Greensboro at the Christ Our King and Savior Catholic Church with time to spare and took seats quietly in the pews. Louise Florencourt introduced William A. Sessions as “biographer of choice.” Dr. Sessions, professor emeritus at Georgia State University, Atlanta, scholarly, personable, long-time friend of Flannery O’Connor, frequent dinner guest at Andalusia, read from the authorized biography he is currently completing. Throughout the Flannery O'Connor Friends and Family presentation in Greensboro, the sound system was at cross-purposes with the electronics of my cochlear implant, so I was able to understand only the few minutes of the question and answer period during which Professor Sessions spoke without any microphone.  Responding to a question from the audience, he said that too much was made over personality conflict between Flannery and her mother. He recalled Regina O'Connor as a "dear lady," although she had said when he announced his marriage plans, "You're no great catch." I asked Dr. Sessions for permission to interview him by e-mail, and he gave me his address but said he would be traveling to Europe for the next weeks.

Louise Florencourt, a charming octogenarian, wore a purple suit with skirt to the tops of her shoes and a black Cossack hat. “Don’t you live in Milledgeville,” I asked, stooping to address her at eye level and better read her lips.

“Yes.”

“In the Cline house?”

“Cline-O’Connor-Florencourt house,” she corrected me presenting each name with an emphatic gesture of her hand in the air as if displaying captions just for me. Louise Florencourt practiced law for over thirty years before moving from Virginia to Milledgeville to live with Flannery O’Connor’s mother for the eight years before Regina’s death.

Flannery O’Connor wrote that she learned from her Florencourt cousins that people from Massachusetts discussed ideas, while Georgians told stories. “You all were like the sisters she never had,” I said to Florence Florencourt.

“Yes,” she agreed. An elegant New Englander, she speaks with enough Boston in her voice that even I can identify it. I asked her if it was true that her mother never lost her Georgia accent. “Absolutely,” she confirmed. Frances Florencourt consented to an e-mail interview:

Q: Can you clarify for me the age differences between your sisters and Flannery O'Connor? I believe you explained to me that you were five when she was 12.

A: Margaret and Louise were closest in age to Flannery, Catherine and I four and seven years younger, respectively.

Q: I have read that the older two sisters were the models for the girls in "Temple of the Holy Ghost." Do you agree with this? If so, how did you and they feel about this?

A: I really can't say whether or not Margaret and Louise were the models for Temple of the Holy Ghost. We really never talked about it. But I did hear that there was a fair such as that that came through Milledgeville. although I never went to it--too young probably. I suppose F. did pick up a few ideas during our summer visits to Milledgeville as she picked up ideas from all and everything around her.

Q: Other family members sometimes mentioned as likenesses of Flannery O'Connor characters? Aunts Katie and Mary Cline in "The Partridge Festival," great aunt Julia Cline and the grandmother in "A Good Man is Hard to Find." Can you confirm and/or comment?

A: I don't know the story "the Partridge Festival" that well. But of the three aunts you mentioned (and by the way Julia was not a great aunt, but just an aunt), Aunt Mary, whom we called Sister, and Aunt Kate were very well grounded people, nothing foolish about them. I would say and I've heard many people say that the grandmother in Good Man is like Aunt Julia. The character wearing the purple hat in Revelation we think might be my Aunt Cleo only because of the hat. Aunt Cleo loved hats.

Q: Do you know exactly how long Flannery O'Connor lived in Atlanta. I have seen six months, as well as over a year, and reports that she attended both North Fulton High School in the Atlanta Public School System, and/ or the Catholic school, which I believe would have been Sacred Heart in those days. Can you confirm any of these facts?

A: I cannot confirm which schools F. attended in Atlanta, but I do know she went to school there for 2 years--Bill Sessions confirmed that during a discussion in Greensboro. And I did hear that she went to 2 different schools, one public and one Catholic.

Q: Where are the paintings of Flannery O'Connor, and are there any plans to make them available for public viewing?

A: Flannery's paintings are in climate controlled storage and are taken out from time to time for special exhibits.

Q: Maryat Lee wrote in her journal notes that "Regina was not to be opposed." I have also read in a 1962 report in THE ATLANTA JOURNAL CONSTITUTION of a visit to Andalusia by a writer I knew personally and respected that "Regina O'Connor's empathy for her daughter is patent." Additionally, Regina O'Connor brought her sister Mary to the Andalusia farm after a heart attack and cared for her at the same time as the last months of Flannery O'Connor's life. Can you offer any observations about this?

A: Regina and Flannery were both strong personalities. My sister Margaret said it well on a documentary that Chris O'Hare made some years ago. Margaret said they forged some kind of an agreement that they would not interfere with each other as they each carried out their life's work. It seemed to work out very well. They both had great respect and love for each other.

In fact that was true of all the Clines. They all looked out for one another. They recognized each other's warts, and enjoyed them really. But in the end there was great love and respect for one another. Yes, Regina did bring Sister to Andalusia to take care of her after Sister had a heart attack. Sister recovered well there and returned to the Cline house in town and lived a year after Flannery's death. My sister Catherine who was living in Kansas City at the time went down there to help them.

Q: Have you read the Brad Goch biography of Flannery O'Connor? What do you think about it? How about other members of the family?

A: I have read the Brad Gooch biography and enjoyed it. I thought it was very entertaining. Some of my friends thought it was wonderful. I cannot speak for any others in the family.

Atlanta

The Sister Superior of Our Lady of Perpetual Help Free Cancer Home in Atlanta contacted Flannery O’Connor in 1960 through mutual friends at the Trappist Monastery in Conyers. In a letter to Robert Giroux, Flannery O’Connor described the home for incurable cancer patients run by the Dominican congregation of nuns that was founded by Nathaniel Hawthorne’s daughter. “The Sister Superior there wrote me about a child with a face cancer whom they had kept for nine years….The Sister Superior is determined that something must be written about her. Fr. Paul thinks it's quite comic that they have lit on me to do this.  He asked them which of my murder stories gave them the idea I should help them with it.”

“I wrote her that this was not the sort of thing that made fiction and that if it had to be written, the Sisters should write it themselves and it should be a factual account of the child's life and death in the Home.  I told her if they did happen to write it, I'd be glad to go over the manuscript and would supply a little introduction if that would help.  I thought that would be the last I'd hear of her.  Never underestimate them.  They forthwith sat down and wrote it and they are hell bent to see it through.”

When Flannery O’Connor wrote the introduction to A Memoir of Mary Ann, “The Sisters were very pleased with it and even Regina liked it which means something as she is usually bored by my productions.” Flannery O’Connor mailed Robert Giroux the address for Our Lady of Perpetual Help Free Cancer Home, 760 Washington St Atlanta, Ga. The street is now called Pollard Blvd., and the Our Lady of Perpetual Help Free Cancer Home has been dwarfed and crowded by the Atlanta Braves Baseball Stadium butting up against it on one side and the media parking lot on another. Atlanta is like that. The street address for Our Lady of Perpetual Help Free Cancer Home was still called Washington St., and there were no encroachments when I visited my daddy there.

There are lots of things fathers cannot do for their sons. Nothing they can provide is more enduring and powerful than their genetics and their own example. Often when I am working, concentrating intensely, perhaps even straining with some physical effort, I suddenly become aware of holding my mouth in just such a way that I recognize immediately from my daddy, who looked like John Wayne. As a lanky young man, he could have passed for the handsome star of “Stagecoach.” In the fullness of his life, he looked like “The Quiet Man”. He grew old at John Wayne’s pace, all the way to the pot-bellied, one-eyed has-been of “True Grit”. In my mind, John Wayne and my daddy might as well have been the same person. My daddy was a Marine Corps veteran of WWII in the Pacific. He was very much the strong, silent type. Still waters run somewhere nobody ever knows. Although he only graduated from the seventh grade, he took great pride in the fact that he could read and write. He enjoyed working the jumble word puzzle in the newspaper. He loved a good joke. He loved a bad joke. He took me to Atlanta Cracker games at Ponce de Leon Ballpark. On hot days and nights, he would say, “They need to turn on the fans.” My love for baseball made me a reader.

One Saturday, my sister and I sat at his bedside in the Our Lady of Perpetual Help Free Cancer Home with the Dominican Nuns scurrying in the halls, as he lay dying. There must have been some serious carelessness in his admission interview. My daddy, the anti-Papist and past master of the Grant Park Masonic Lodge. Every time I visited, he lay without movement or speech. My sister and I were remembering the women’s softball games on summer nights in Piedmont Park long before the days of Title IX requirements of equal opportunity for women’s athletics. “What was the name of that team that was so good?” my sister tried to recall. “The one with the pitcher that looked like Little Orphan Annie.”

“And the catcher that looked like Yogi Berra,” I added.

After a long silence of neither she nor I being able to think of the answer, from Daddy’s pillow came the last words I ever heard him say: “Dixie Darlings.”

We drove back from Greensboro later than we had planned. Luther turned on the heater of the big car against the cold night. We said goodbye to Maria the schoolteacher. “Don’t let the children dance on the grave of John Dewey.” As Luther headed to my house, I asked him, “Have you ever thought about adding some Atlanta landmarks to your Flannery O’Connor tour?”

“Everything I’ve ever heard of connected to her no longer exists.”

“That’s Atlanta. Mostly ghosts. Vacant lots and other places where something interesting used to be. I could show you some sights. How would you like to see the route she outlines in “The Artificial Nigger” as the boy and grandfather wander around town lost? It ran right behind Sacred Heart Catholic School for girls, which she attended for a while, and is just about the only way you could get from the downtown train station to the suburban station, which was near where she lived in Buckhead.”

“Sure. That was her favorite story,” Luther said.

“Mine, too,” I said. “There’ll never be another one like her.”

Luther disagreed. “Somewhere between Raybun Gap and Tybee Light, there’s a geeky kid with a dose of attitude and a Red and Black UGA bulldog sweatshirt destined to be somebody special.”

I said, “Wouldn’t it be pretty to think so.”

Copyright 2009 by William C. Cotter

PERCEPTION

. . . Something to Think About. . .



Washington, D.C. Metro Station on a cold January morning in 2007. The man with a violin played six Bach pieces for about 45 minutes. During that time, approximately two thousand people went through the station, most of them on their way to work.

After 3 minutes a middle-aged man noticed there was a musician playing. He slowed his pace and stopped for a few seconds and then hurried to meet his schedule.

4 minutes later:
The violinist received his first dollar: a woman threw the money in the hat and, without stopping, continued to walk.

6 minutes:
A young man leaned against the wall to listen to him, then looked at his watch and started to walk again.

10 minutes:
A 3-year-old boy stopped but his mother tugged him along hurriedly. The kid stopped to look at the violinist again, but the mother pushed hard and the child continued to walk, turning his head the whole time. This action was repeated by several other children. Every parent, without exception, forced their children to move on quickly.

45 minutes:
The musician played continuously. Only 6 people stopped and listened for a short while. About 20 gave money but continued to walk at their normal pace. The man collected a total of $32.

1 hour:
He finished playing and silence took over. No one noticed. No one applauded, nor was there any recognition.


No one knew this, but the violinist was Joshua Bell, one of the greatest musicians in the world. He played one of the most intricate pieces ever written, with a violin worth 3.5 million dollars. Two days earlier, Joshua Bell sold out a theater in Boston where the seats averaged $100.

This is a true story.

Joshua Bell playing incognito in the metro station was organised by the Washington Post as part of a social experiment about perception, taste and people's priorities.

The questions raised:
*In a common-place environment at an inappropriate hour, do we perceive beauty?
*Do we stop to appreciate it?
*Do we recognise talent in an unexpected context?

One possible conclusion reached from this experiment could be this:
If we do not have a moment to stop and listen to one of the best musicians in the world, playing some of the finest music ever written, with one of the most beautiful instruments ever made; how many other things are we missing?


Here is one of the best lines I have read recently:

Life is not about waiting for the rain to stop,

Rather, it is about learning how to dance in the rain.

No Left Turns

By Michael Gartner, editor of newspapers large and small and president of NBC News. In 1997, he won the Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing.

My father never drove a car. Well, that's not quite right. I should say I never saw him drive a car. He quit driving in 1927, when he was 25 years old, and the last car he drove was a 1926 Whippet.

'In those days,' he told me when he was in his 90s, 'to drive a car you had to do things with your hands, and do things with your feet, and look every which way, and I decided you could walk through life and enjoy it or drive through life and miss it.'

At which point my mother, a sometimes salty Irishwoman, chimed in:
'Oh, bull----!' she said. 'He hit a horse.'

'Well,' my father said, 'there was that, too.'

So my brother and I grew up in a household without a car. The neighbors all had cars -- the Kollingses next door had a green 1941 Dodge, the VanLaninghams across the street a gray 1936 Plymouth, the Hopsons two doors down a black 1941 Ford -- but we had none.

My father, a newspaperman in Des Moines , would take the
streetcar to work and, often as not, walk the 3 miles home. If he took the streetcar home, my mother and brother and I would walk the three blocks to the streetcar stop, meet him and walk home together.

My brother, David, was born in 1935, and I was born in 1938, and sometimes, at dinner, we'd ask how come all the neighbors had cars but we had none. 'No one in the family drives,' my mother would explain, and that was that.

But, sometimes, my father would say, 'But as soon as one of you boys turns 16, we'll get one.' It was as if he wasn't sure which one of us would turn 16 first.

But, sure enough , my brother turned 16 before I did, so in 1951 my parents bought a used 1950 Chevrolet from a friend who ran the parts department at a Chevy dealership downtown.

It was a four-door, white model, stick shift, fender skirts, loaded with everything, and, since my parents didn't drive, it more or less became my brother's car.

Having a car but not being able to drive didn't bother my father, but it didn't make sense to my mother.

So in 1952, when she was 43 years old, she asked a friend to teach her to drive. She learned in a nearby cemetery, the place where I learned to drive the following year and where, a generation later, I took my two sons to practice driving. The cemetery probably was my father's idea. 'Who can your mother hurt in the cemetery?' I remember him saying more than once.

For the next 45 years or so, until she was 90, my mother was the driver in the family. Neither she nor my father had any sense of direction, but he loaded up on maps -- though they seldom left the city limits -- and appointed himself navigator. It seemed to work.

Still, they both continued to walk a lot. My mother was a devout Catholic, and my father an equally devout agnostic, an arrangement that didn't seem to bother either of them through their 75 years of marriage.

(Yes, 75 years, and they were deeply in love the entire time.)

He retired when he was 70, and nearly every morning for the next 20 years or so, he would walk with her the mile to St. Augustin's Church. She would walk down and sit in the front pew, and he would wait in the back until he saw which of the parish's two priests was on duty that morning. If it was the pastor, my father then would go out and take a 2-mile walk, meeting my mother at the end of the service and walking her home.

If it was the assistant pastor, he'd take just a 1-mile walk and then head back to the church. He called the priests Father Fast ' and 'Father Slow.'

After he retired, my father almost always accompanied my mother whenever she drove anywhere, even if he had no reason to go along. If she were going to the beauty parlor, he'd sit in the car and read, or go take a stroll or, if it was summer, have her keep the engine running so he could listen to the Cubs game on the radio. In the evening, then, when I'd stop by, he'd explain: 'The Cubs lost again. The millionaire on second base made a bad throw to the millionaire on first base, so the multimillionaire on third base scored.'

If she were going to the grocery store, he would go along to carry the bags out -- and to make sure she loaded up on ice cream. As I said, he was always the navigator, and once, when he was 95 and she was 88 and still driving, he said to me, 'Do you want to know the secret of a long life?'

'I guess so,' I said, knowing it probably would be something bizarre.

'No left turns,' he said.

'What?' I asked.

'No left turns,' he repeated. 'Several years ago, your mother and I read an article that said most accidents that old people are in happen when they turn left in front of oncoming traffic.

As you get older, your eyesight worsens, and you can lose your depth perception, it said. So your mother and I decided never again to make a left turn.'

'What?' I said again.

'No left turns,' he said. 'Think about it. Three rights are the same as a left, and that's a lot safer. So we always make three rights.'

'You're kidding!' I said, and I turned to my mother for support 'No,' she said, 'your father is right. We make three rights. It works.' But then she added: 'Except when your father loses count.'

I was driving at the time, and I almost drove off the road as I started laughing.

'Loses count?' I asked.

'Yes,' my father admitted, 'that sometimes happens. But it's not a problem. You just make seven rights, and you're okay again.'

I couldn't resist. 'Do you ever go for 11?' I asked.

'No,' he said ' If we miss it at seven, we just come home and call it a bad day. Besides, nothing in life is so important it can't be put off another day or another week.'

My mother was never in an accident, but one evening she handed me her car keys and said she had decided to quit driving. That was in 1999, when she was 90.

She lived four more years, until 2003. My father died the next year, at 102.

They both died in the bungalow they had moved into in 1937 and bought a few years later for $3,000. (Sixty years later, my brother and I paid $8,000 to have a shower put in the tiny bathroom -- the house had never had one. My father would have died then and there if he knew the shower cost nearly three times what he paid for the house.)


He continued to walk daily -- he had me get him a treadmill when he was 101 because he was afraid he'd fall on the icy sidewalks but wanted to keep exercising -- and he was of sound mind and sound body until the moment he died.

One September afternoon in 2004, he and my son went with me when I had to give a talk in a neighboring town, and it was clear to all three of us that he was wearing out, though we had the usual wide-ranging conversation about politics and newspapers and things in the news.

A few weeks earlier, he had told my son, 'You know, Mike, the first hundred years are a lot easier than the second hundred.' At one point in our drive that Saturday, he said, 'You know, I'm probably not going to live much longer.'

'You're probably right,' I said.

'Why would you say that?' He countered, somewhat irritated.

'Because you're 102 years old,' I said.

'Yes,' he said, 'you're right.' He stayed in bed all the next day.

That night, I suggested to my son and daughter that we sit up with him through the night.

He appreciated it, he said, though at one point, apparently seeing us look gloomy, he said:

'I would like to make an announcement. No one in this room is dead yet.'

An hour or so later, he spoke his last words:

'I want you to know,' he said, clearly and lucidly, 'that I am in no pain. I am very comfortable. And I have had as happy a life as anyone on this earth could ever have.'

A short time later, he died.

I miss him a lot, and I think about him a lot. I've wondered now and then how it was that my family and I were so lucky that he lived so long.

I can't figure out if it was because he walked through life, Or because he quit taking left turns.

Life is too short to wake up with regrets. So love the people who treat you right. Forget about those who don't. Believe everything happens for a reason. If you get a chance, take it. If it changes your life, let it. Nobody said life would be easy, they just promised it would most likely be worth it.'

Panoramic Photo of Inauguration

Click Here

Use the wheel on your mouse to zoom in and out.

The clarity is unbelievable!

Check out the statue on the dome.

Click on the link at the bottom to open picture. The control for the picture

is in the upper left. Press the + sign to zoom in, or the arrows to move right,

left, up or down. If the picture looks fuzzy give it a second to clarify.

This is a remarkable panorama of the inauguration. It might not work well with a dial-up modem,

but you can actually focus in on faces near the back of the crowd- nearly 1/2 mile!

For fun, focus on Obama (center stage) and then look behind him. There's Clarence Thomas seemingly asleep,

Dick Cheney in his wheelchair, Clinton, Gore, Bush 41 and even Dan Quayle! Scalia is sitting there looking like

the Grand Inquisitor. The clarity is amazing!

The technology is truly amazing- and it's unclassified! Imagine what our spy

agencies can see with classified technology...


This picture was taken with a robotic camera and weighs in at 1,474 megapixel.

(295 times the standard 5 megapixel camera)

It was a Canon that pulled together over 200 individual shots.

Each zoom in takes a second to focus ...and then you can see some amazing reactions.

REMEMBERING WWII FROM A RESIDENT’S PERSPECTIVE

Pine Lake PLAINTALK

By Paul Jasionowski

Mr. Paul Gumz has been a resident of Pine Lake since 1963. We know
him as the man who decorates his front yard with lighted displays for just
about every holiday. Within the last few years, I have gotten to know him
as a gentleman and a World War II veteran.

Where are you from? Chicago, Illinois. I was born in 1922.

Were you drafted, or did you volunteer? I was drafted into the army. I finished high school in 1940; worked in a foundry/steel mill- Linkbelt was the name. They made ship propellers for the U.S. and British Navy. My draft was deferred until January, 1943. Basic training was at Fort Jackson, South Carolina.

What did you do in the army? I manned a heavy, 30- caliber machine gun. In September, 1943, I joined the 15 Regiment, H Company, 3 th rd Division of the 5th Army in Italy. We fought in the Monte Casino Campaign. In December I developed frozen feet, otherwise known as trench foot. Went into the hospital December 24th. Christmas Day I was sent to a hospital in Naples. Christmas evening, the German Luftwaffe bombed the hell out of Naples. They were trying to destroy the docks in the harbor. The U.S. Air Corps didn’t have air supremacy at that time. We were evacuated by hospital ship to Oran, North Africa. I spent two months in the hospital, then another month to rehabilitate. I was sent back to Palermo, Sicily, on limited duty and trained as a front line medic with the 56th Medical Battalion. After I was sent back on duty, we traveled from Berzite, North Africa, to Palermo on an LST, (land ship trucks/tanks), large ship where the bow opens up to enable the trucks and tanks to drive out right onto the beach. While traveling from North Africa to Palermo, a German u-boat shadowed us for the entire trip. The ship’s crew fired at the surfaced u-boat to keep it at bay. The u-boat needed to get close to the LST. The LST had a shallow, flat hull which a torpedo could not hit. As we arrived in Palermo, a liberty ship, (transport ship), left Palermo and was sunk by the same u-boat. Ships were sent out to rescue the survivors. We crossed the Strait of Messina by ferry into Italy. Mount Vesuvius, near Pompeii erupted, spewing ash and smoke while we were traveling up the Italian coast. That was quite an experience. I was sent back to Monte Casino.

What campaigns were you in besides Monte Casino? I was in the Anzio Campaign, then Rome. We went 100 miles past Rome, then pulled back. We trained for an amphibious assault. We were in the first wave of the invasion of Southern France near Cannes. The Germans were completely surprised. We came in on an LCI (landing craft infantry ship). Our ship was hit many times by German shells; otherwise, resistance was sporadic. We joined up with the 7th Army. We traveled close to the Swiss border, mountainous terrain. Continued through Lyon, Grenoble, Moulhouse, then over the Rhine River and into Germany, treating casualties along the way. In April, 1945, we were traveling toward Munich and ran out of gas. All the gas went to the tanks. After receiving gas, we traveled all night. We received an intelligence report that there was a train load of prisoners arriving at a concentration camp near the town of Dachau. The train arrived a day or two before we arrived. The guards machined- gunned and killed everyone on the
train. The prisoners were from the Balkan States. We went in with the tanks and infantry as they smashed through the gate. It was a horrible sight. Dead bodies stacked like cordwood. The inmates were in bad shape. They were walking skeletons. We could not feed them; it would have killed them. We had a soldier who could interpret for us. He asked where the guards were. The inmates pointed to the cellars of the guard houses. We found six or eight of them. One guard was pointed out as a specially mean one. He was very arrogant to us. We handed him over to the prisoners and they severely beat him. One G. I.. handed a pistol to an inmate to finish him off. We stayed for two days until the hospital unit arrived to relieve us. We traveled on to Munich. The Germans threw the Volkssturm (Homeguard) at us. They consisted of children and old men. General Patch, commander of the 7th Army didn’t want to expend any more American lives. He was a good general. He sent in the artillery, and they blasted the outskirts of Munich. It wasn’t much of a fight. The battle lasted three to four hours. We went through Munich three
or four days later. The buildings were bombed out. We traveled through Bavaria to
Bad Reichanal, Austria. It was a resort town. We were the occupation force, so we stayed in the hotel and slept on featherbeds. It was terrific, almost like going to heaven. During that time the war ended. I went into the army occupation force stationed in Heidelberg, Germany. It was a beautiful city. It didn’t get bombed during the war. I did this until October, 1946, when I was discharged.

What was the worst experience for you during the war? There were a hell of a lot of them. The Southern France Invasion. Our ship was hit many times. When I returned to Casino as a medic, the German Luftwaffe dropped an antipersonnel bomb. An antipersonnel bomb is one bomb which opens into little bombs. The Germans dropped the bomb from an airplane. It landed amongst our tents. Everyone hit the deck. Miraculously, no one was wounded. Most of the tents had lots of holes in them or were completely shredded. Getting straffed by German airplanes was pretty awful.
Getting trench foot: In Monte Casino we had to stay in our foxhole during the day because the Germans had the high ground and they could see right down on us. Water was always in the foxhole, no matter how much we bailed it out. That’s how I developed trench foot. The food: It was usually hash/beans or stew. The stew caused diarrhea. The hash/beans caused gas. The German jet: One day I watched one fly by. I didn’t know what it was. If the Germans had gasoline for their airplanes and jets, they would have had a time with us. As we traveled through Germany, the autobahn was lined with miles of airplanes and jets.

What was the best experience for you during the war? Touring Rome. Touring the Vatican. Seeing the beautiful paintings in the Sistine Chapel and the cross that Christ died on. Seeing the sights of Rome. That was the best experience.

Where were you at the time of the German surrender? Bad Reichanal, Austria.

What did you do after the war? I went back to Chicago. I worked on the El as a motorman. Later, I joined the post office as a letter carrier. My feet couldn’t take the Chicago winters. I moved to St. Petersburg, Florida, at the end of 1949, where I met my wife Dorothy. We were married in 1952. I worked for W.T. Grant department store. I transferred to Atlanta in 1963 and went back to work for the post office. That’s when I moved to Pine Lake. We both retired in 1992.

Any reflections on the war 60 years later? It took a long time to get over the war, especially Dachau. I didn’t quite get over it until I sat down after I retired and documented my memories. Then it eased it somewhat. Prior to that, I would never watch any war movies or documentaries. Now I do. I was thankful to be in the European theater instead of the Pacific theater. The Japanese were crazy as hell. When you’re 21, you think that you’re invincible. The Germans had far better firepower than we did. We just had more of it, that’s all. It was a war we had to win. We were unprepared for it, but we all had patriotism.

Copyright © 2005 Paul J. Jasionowski

Paul Jasionowski is a music specialist for the DeKalb County School System, musicdirector/conductor for the Atlanta Musicians' Orchestra, and Principal Percussionist/Assistant Timpanist for the Gainesville, Ga. Symphony Orchestra. He enjoys interviewing people in his areas of special interest, and has had the opportunity to talk with Jaime Escalente, the famed math teacher on whom the movie “Stand and Deliver” is based; and Saul Goodman, timpanist for the New York Philharmonic for 46 years. World War II has been particularly meaningful to him as he lost two relatives in the death camps in Poland, and most of his male relatives are veterans of that war.

Tinnitus

From the Georgia Peach Cochlear Implant Association Newsletter

By Al Laframboise

PRELUDE
Well, I don’t know how to start this. I want to help people who have Tinnitus. Certainly
we all know that Tinnitus is the existence of sound that a patient hears, but which does not
appear to have an outside source. I want to quote the ‘Mayo Clinic on Better Hearing and
Balance’ maybe more than once so I will just refer to that book as the Mayo clinic.
The Mayo Clinic says tha t ‘Tinnitus may develop from multiple causes. Some
researchers believe that tinnitus results from damage to the hair cells inside your cochlea.
Turbulent flow through your blood vessels may produce a sound sensation’. I have read another
book from the Boston area which strongly suggests that stress is what is causing this turbulent
flow. I do not have that book handy to provide you with a title.
So, although I admit to the possibility of the existence of other causes to tinnitus, I am
planning on providing you with some personal background on my tinnitus and its cure. I also am
writing this article in hopes that the readers would accept a challenge to prove me either right or
wrong.
The Mayo Clinic points to the possibility that hearing loss is the initial source and when
added to the high stress in the patient will produce tinnitus, but you knew that. There is some
suggestion about the use of hearing aids, masks, and drug therapy in order to manage the
problem.

PERSONAL BACKGROUND
I lost some of my hearing back in 1954 as either exposure to loud artillery noises from
155mm cannons or the ingestion of the drug Streptomycin. After that my hearing progressively
decreased until I no longer heard sound. In 1996, I was given a cochlear implant which has
proven to be more than a miracle. The implant is not the subject here so I will proceed to the
subject of tinnitus.
While attending Fordham University between 1956 and 1960, I lived with various
roommates in different apartments in New York City. Living in a New York apartment in low
cost rent areas leaves one subject to robbery on a regular basis. We were robbed at least once a
year during that period. But we lived where we could afford to live. On a daily basis, when I
went to bed at night and my roommates also were in bed, the room should have been quiet, but I
could hear what sounded like someone scratching the keyhole in the door. I did not realize that it
was the sounds of tinnitus raising their ugly appearance.
In 1961, I was married and we moved to New Jersey. When we went to bed at night, I
could hear what sounded like footsteps. I arose more than once until we purchased a dog. My
logic was that if there really was a person making the scene, my dog would provide enough noise
to alert me to that occurrence. It did not make the noise go away, but I felt that I could sleep with
the noise that showed its ugly head when my head hit the pillow.
It was in the late 1960s that I was finally fitted for my first hearing aid. I did not mention
the bed time noises to the Beltone distributor as I did not know it was associated with my loss.
Multiple hearing aids followed, but none were successful in application. In 1978, I moved to
Marietta, Georgia. About a year later I joined ‘Self Help for Hard of Hearing’ (since named –
Hearing Loss Association of America). This was the start of my advocacy to help others with
hearing problems. It was not till then that I found out there was such a thing as Tinnitus. It was
strange to find out about condition that I had conquered the year before.

HOW DID I WIN THE BATTLE?
Let’s back up a little: We were still living in Massachusetts. I was not looking for a cure
for tinnitus. I did not know what tinnitus was. I accepted that I was just one of those weird
people who had noise in their head. But I was subject to high stress. I knew that. The stress was
high as an accountant. It was high as a computer programmer. It was high as a person with
hearing loss. It was also high as a husband and father. I knew that if that stress continued, I
would be another one person considering suicide.
Then, I heard about a thing called Transcendental Meditation (™). A free class was
available and I brought my wife with me to that class. Eventually, I paid for the entire family to
have exposure to TM. The rest of the family did not continue the meditation practice, but I
continue today. Today, I live a stress free life devoted toward helping others where I can.
The important thing about this story is that in the process of lowering the amount of stress
within myself, I discovered that the tinnitus I had been experiencing since 1956 was gone. Well,
maybe not 100%. On occasion I experience it but it lasts less than 5 minutes. Of course, I believe
that if the meditation would remove the tinnitus for me, it could be of use for others.
I know that I cannot expect anyone who is in the practice of treating tinnitus to just take
my word that meditation might produce these same results for their patients. There are many
reasons for that. Probably the most popular reason is that there exists a certain lack of belief in
the usefulness of meditation. There are enough jokes about meditation for anyone to conclude
that it is something for people who are also the type who use type drugs that produce
hallucinations. There are jokes about the requirement to assume a lotus position. I know that I
never would have committed to meditation if I had to assume a lotus position. Out of curiosity,
once, I assumed that position for about 10 seconds when I bowled over backward.
Perhaps it would help if I briefly described the way I meditate. I sit upright in a chair with
no support for my neck and for 20 minutes close my eyes and repeat my mantra. A mantra is a
fancy sounding word for a sound that has no meaning to the meditator. If I find that I am
thinking and not repeating my mantra, I return to repetition of the mantra.
I recently suggested to an audiologist about meditation for the management of tinnitus. I
told him how I had been meditating since 1978 and I have not had any serious amount of tinnitus
since. His response was less than favorable.
Now after Reading the above, I expect that you may have one opinion about my
suggestion that may differ from mine. But allow me for just one minute to offer this. Suppose,
just suppose, that I am correct. Suppose that meditation could offer you something that you have
not considered before. How could you determine whether this is true or not?
Of Course, you can ask a bunch of people. The kinds of answers you can expect are
really related to what the individual thinks about meditation. That makes sense. What I am
suggesting is that you consider pursuing the practice of meditation solely for the purpose of
reducing your stress. Nothing more, just to reduce stress will be your objective. Once you start,
allow yourself 3 months of practicing meditation. Then question yourself, ‘How is my tinnitus?’
When you have the answer to that, email me and let me know what you think. Negative
comments are encouraged as well as positive ones.
If I am wrong, we have proven that meditation is not a management tool for tinnitus. If I
am right, we have changed your world. Either result makes for something worthwhile. What do
you think?
In almost every city, there are meditation centers that are anxious to reduce your stress.
While I can recommend Transcendental Meditation, I am led to believe that other forms of
meditation can work also. It is just that I am not familiar with them to recommend them to you.

My email address is a.laframboise@comcast.net. Hey, tell me how you did!

Paradign Shift

By Dennis Crews

Friends - having watched a screening of the documentary Uncounted the night before the election, my mood was less than optimistic on Tuesday morning. "Grimly determined" to fulfill my civic duty was more like it.

After having received countless anonymously written emails (and a few personally written ones) slandering Barack Obama for months on end, from acquaintances who forwarded them relentlessly to every name on their computers, as if attempting to jam America's collective capability of critical thought, I was dubious about the outcome of this election. It was easy to methodically debunk the claims made in this smear campaign, but doing so day after day would have required so much time and effort it seemed as if its intent was simply to bring everything to a grinding halt. Throw so much sand in the gears that to clean it all out would leave time for nothing else.

There were two remarkable things about this email campaign. The first was that otherwise fully functional, seemingly smart people could buy into such demonstrably false ideas (i.e. Obama is the anti-Christ, a Muslim, a baby-killer, a socialist, not an American citizen, etc); the second was that so many people I know carried such intense vitriol and resentment for a man who has never done them any harm. Unlike the current occupant of the White House, Barack Obama's actions, demeanor and policies have not cost an iota of loss or damage to the well-being, reputation or livelihood of any person I know. He has run a campaign remarkably free of mud-slinging and character attacks. From whence comes all this resentment, this need to diminish the character and accomplishments of a decent man and pour scorn all over his campaign for the presidency?

I'm not willing to call it racism, but it certainly is bigotry of some kind. Maybe it's reverse snobbery. The otherwise good, smart and funny woman who cuts my hair sneers at Obama's education and calls it of no practical use. After eight years of George W. Bush it seems a sizable segment of America wants another Joe Sixpack to be their leader - or lately, Joe the Plumber. The idea of a Constitutional scholar sticks in their craw. Anybody who's traveled abroad, who has studied foreign policy and, heaven forfend, been a Harvard Law graduate is unthinkably elitist. And if they bear a non-European foreign name and have a multi-cultural personal history - quick, somebody call Joe the Plumber and flush the guy.

Maybe I'm immune to this because my earliest memories are of growing up in India, as a child of missionary parents. We lived in Pakistan as well. My uncle was both a devout Christian and an Islamic and Arabic scholar. As an adult I've traveled on four continents and found real value in the experience. Foreign exposure is beneficial, a multi-cultural outlook replaces irrational fear of the "other" with appreciation for the complexity of life and the interconnectedness of all humanity. It is one thing when the primitive fundamentalists of Islam choose xenophobia and hatred as their default attitude; it is quite another when educated Americans do the same. To me this is unacceptable; we are capable of better and we need a leader who will help America be better than this. We need someone quite a bit smarter than Joe Sixpack, Joe the Plumber or Sarah the Moose Hunter.

As I have said before, God holds the ultimate destiny of nations in his hands - but we bear collective responsibility for our civic destiny. We suffer consequences when we make mistakes. After the manifold ill consequences of the past two botched elections, I feared even worse this time. But thankfully we got something better this time. As Martin Luther King once said, citing an old preacher and former slave: "Lord, we ain't what we want to be; we ain't what we ought to be; we ain't what we gonna be, but, thank God we ain't what we was."

Here's part of a much nicer email I got this morning (subject line - "My instant paradigm shift"):

[Obama's] speech was … well, everything a speech should be but often isn't. I honestly believe he will tap into the volunteer and patriotic spirit of America and inspire all of us to contribute to our collective well being. This is the person I want leading our children in their politically formative years. The lessons they will learn from his inclusiveness: equality, pride, and volunteerism… instead of feeling hopeless and apologetic for our leader and his policies of aggression and ecological rape.



Basking in this glory today, I have realized how negative I had grown about this pathetic time under Bush’s reign. I felt no pride in his American agenda but felt mountains of fear about his followers… It was really very peaceful waking up this morning with hope. It occurred to me that the majority of Americans DO feel like I do… I am NOT part of some disgruntled, disenfranchised minority! That in itself makes me feel hopeful.



That said, this poor man is now in charge of a HUGE bag of crap, which is also apparently on fire. But ‘experienced’ or not, he will absolutely do a better job than his opposition could have even dreamed of. I have no doubts he’ll be great.



The talking heads are absolutely right tonight: we are watching, we are a part of, history with a capital “H”.



Congratulations to all of us!


Well said! All the best d