Day 8: Mama was a Rock Star…
I know I said I might take the weekend off, but it feels like I’m on a roll, so I’ll keep going.
All the McIntyre children, Mama’s side of the family, were over-achievers from everything I can tell. If you remember, I said that both Poppy and Nonna (that’s what we called our grandparents on Mama’s side) were college graduates. Now please consider we are talking about two people born in the late 1800s. Of course, Nonna went to a girl’s school as all the women did in those days, but still an amazing accomplishment.
There were 9 McIntyre children, all amazing in their own right. Three boys and six girls…there was a standing joke I heard many times, that if you gave the McIntyre girls half a chance, they could take over the world. I think it was my uncle Kenneth that said it (he would know, being one of the brothers) but know those women, I’m sure he was right.
These were smart, well-read, go-getters. For example, my uncle Kenneth was too short to qualify to be a pilot in the American Air Force in World War II, so rather than take it, he went to England and joined the RAF and flew for England. So, you can imagine how competitive it must have been at home even though the children were spaced out a bit.
As I said earlier, Mama had to leave school because she became pregnant with me, but that didn’t stop her. Because of her Home Economics background from what she had taken in college, she became a dietitian at a school in Mississippi when we lived there. But the career I remember most was her job as the Executive Director of the Eastern North Carolina Tuberculosis Association, while she also did a TV show called Hospitality House, where she interviewed guests, cooked recipes, and had her own “Today Show”. I didn’t think much of it…it was Mama and that’s what she did, but other people thought she was a TV star.
On one show, she sat in a raft on the front lawn of the TV station while the US Coast Guard flew over and “rescued” her by pulling her up into a helicopter. Looking back, she was pretty amazing with all she juggled while putting up and Daddy and raising my sister and me.
She didn’t back down from anything and made no excuses…just took it on and did whatever she could do. My sister Debby is like that, driven and unstoppable. To this day, Debby will not take a nap during the day and still runs circles around her grandchildren.
Divorce was a BIG deal in the South in the 60s, you just stuck it out and that was your lot in life. But Daddy was getting too volatile, too angry and even though she had been physically hurt several times, maybe she thought it would be me or Debby at some point. The last house we lived in on Memorial Drive had been visited by the police several times because the neighbors heard the fighting and call someone.
Mama had a lot of friends around town and a number of them knew how bad it was, so in the spring of 1966, she had the sheriff come to the house and tell Daddy he had an hour to pack and leave. There was a restraining order against him that said he could not come back to Greenville and so he left…I say more about this later.
It all worked out for Mama in the end. About three years later she met a wonderful man who would become my Stepfather Swede Nixon. I’ll say more about him and how much he blessed our family later, but Mama finally had a man who loved her and treated her like a Queen. Swede was financially well-off, as they say, so Mama didn’t have to go back to work, although she helped Swede in his private business later in their marriage, she was as happy as she could be cooking, canning, and being a wife and mother.
When Mama died, I did the funeral…not an easy task by any stretch of the imagination, but it did give me a very public platform to once again thank Swede for taking such good care of Mama.
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