In my last column, I described my two 1,000mile round-trip train rides on Amtrak, from Savannah to Richmond, VA, when I was a freshman at the University of Virginia, in Charlottesville, my mother’s hometown.
This column is about that town, and that year at UVA, which did not turn out like I expected. But, Life is often like that; it was a “Learning Experience,” as the old saying goes.
This column also happens to fall right in sequence, alphabetically, after my three-part series on Charleston, SC, so would have been my next column to write, anyway!
Good timing.
My mother’s family was from Virginia. Her grandfather on her dad’s side was a Methodist minister in Richmond; her dad moved to Charlottesville when she was 5 years old, in 1934, and became a Funeral Home Director, in a small two-story red brick building on East Main Street. The family lived upstairs; the funeral home business occupied the first floor and the basement, where the embalming was done.
That first floor had a small business office, a big room with caskets on display next to it, and a large room with folding chairs and a piano in it for services, across the corridor. (I still have one of those folding chairs, with its dark red embedded cushion. My mom saved it, as a remembrance of her childhood.)
That room was where I saw my first dead body, an elderly woman, in her casket, the morning before the afternoon service. I was just a little boy then. It did not bother me then.
I later served as an altar boy at Sacred Heart Catholic Church in Savannah, and served at a number of funerals when I was in 7th and 8th grade, in the school next door, so saw more dead bodies then, That building sat at the top of a steep hill, just a couple of blocks east of campus, and just a couple of blocks west of the town’s railroad station – which, though small, still had two parallel tracks, running east-to-west.
Charlottesville was still a very small town, back then, maybe 3,000 souls, and there was very little money to go around.
The family joke was, between “The Minister and the Undertaker,” it was a “One-Stop Shop” – you could get “baptized, confirmed, married, and then buried, all by folks in the same family!”
The other joke was, my granddad didn’t think “Undertaker” was a very “prestigious” job title; so he preferred to be called a “Southern Planter.” (Bill Cox, of the Richmond Hill Funeral Home, once told me that was a common joke among undertakers.)
My mom also told me that, back in those Depression days, both her dad and granddad sometimes got “paid” with chickens and eggs, or an occasional side of ham; or sometimes, not at all.
There just wasn’t much money to go around, so folks just did the best they could. It often wasn’t much.
My granddaddy also sometimes just wound up burying folks “for free.”
That’s just what happened, back then. (Today, you’d get your wages garnished, or have a collection service breathing down your neck in 60 days; but those had not been invented yet. I am not sure that’s an improvement. People just took care of each other, as best they could.
Still, communities were close, and folks just helped each other out, when people needed help. There was no “federal government” to step in, back then; Franklin Roosevelt had not yet gotten Congress to pass legislation setting up Social Security; let alone FEMA or anything else. So when disasters struck, folks really were “on their own” back then. And Life Was Just Hard.
My mom also told me one time that, when she was growing up, the town was so small that it couldn’t afford an ambulance! So, Granddaddy’s hearse also doubled as the town’s ambulance.
“The only way folks could tell if the body in the back was alive or dead,” she said, “was, if the person was dead, he S PORTS would just turn on the rotating orange light on the roof, to tell other cars he was coming. But if the person was alive and he was in a hurry, heading for the town’s hospital, he would turn on the siren too.”
(Bill Cox told me that was also a common occurrence in small towns, back then.)
I don’t know exactly how my parents met, but it was while my dad went to UVA, in the late 1940’s, after he’d completed a short stint in the U.S. Navy, towards the end of WWII, after he graduated high school. They got married in 1950, after he graduated from UVA, and then they came back to Savannah, where he’d mostly grown up, and then inherited partial ownership in his dad’s wholesale hardware business, after his parents both passed into spirit when he was just 14.
As I said, Life was often hard back then. You just had to “make do, and move on.”
Next up: My year at UVA.
Rafe Semmes is a proud graduate of (“the original”) Savannah High School and the University of Georgia. He and his wife are both long-time Rotarians, and live in eastern Liberty County with their passel of orphaned rescue cats. He writes on a variety of topics, and may be reached at rafe_semmes@yahoo.com.