Remembering my mom

Growing up on the farm

My mother, Mildred Irene Real, was born on Feb 8, 1911, in English, Indiana.

• There is some nice writing about where my mom grew here also!
• Hospitals weren’t really an option for country people back then,
  even the doctor’s office was too far away.
  I think she was born right there in the family farmhouse.
• The closest settlement big enough to have a post office and a school was English Indiana.
• She thought of herself as coming from Temple Indiana, a tiny unincorporated collection of 4 or 5 farms centered around the Southern Railroad tracks and a county road and the creek.
• They walked to school in English, 3-ish miles away. They walked on the railroad track rather than the road. The tracks were straighter and graded better!

• She had five full brothers from her mom and two half-sisters from a different mom. They were a lot older.
  • Four of her brothers were older, one younger.
    • I think that was rough for her, being the only girl with 4 older brothers.
    • She learned early to keep her own council and how to get along with big, not-very-sensitive men.
      A valuable skill in her life as a nurse and then as a single mom.
    • As she remembers it, her brothers teased her a lot.
  • I remember a very vivid story that on a frigid winter day walking to school on the tracks and her asshole brothers tricked her into putting her tongue on the rail. It froze to the metal instantly and she has a very painful time getting it unstuck. The brothers got the tanning they deserved when she told her mom!
  • One brother, Charles was younger. He was spoiled be everybody.
    • She felt she had to mother him and protect him from the older boys.
  • When I was young, we would drive over to that part of Indiana at least once a month, often more. There were two brothers we would see every time.
    • Uncle Omer lived in a nice little house along the highway in Temple.
      • About a mile or so away from original family farm where she was born.
        • The original farm was across the railroad tracks and a creek. The old road is long gone, so nowadays it’s reachable only with 4-wheel drive.
      • The sign for unincorporated Temple was still right there, at the edge of their front yard!
    • My other uncle, Uncle Temple (named for the little town I guess) lived “in town”, in English, on the same highway as Omer, but a few miles further west at the edge of town, right where the highway makes a sharp right turn from going past the high school to being the main east-west street.
  • Where were the other brothers and sisters?
    • Uncle Charles, the youngest (the spoiled one), lived in New Albany.
    • Uncle Wayne (the quiet one) lived in Marion Indiana.
  • As to the two older half sisters:
    • Aunt Vada (the nice one) and her hubby John Ike lived in a little house in Terre Haute IN. They were super quiet.
      • I really enjoyed visiting them!
        It was kinda slow, but very pleasant.
    • Aunt Hurcel (the crabby one) offered the opposite experience. She would start complaining about something as soon as we walked through the door and did not stop complaining til we left. The subject was usually her husband Ellis.
      Ellis Toney was the owner of the Mobil gas station next door to their house in Marengo IN.
      • By the time I was old enough to notice things, Ellis and Hurcel had settled into a mutual non-aggression pact where she had the house to herself and he lived in his “fishing cabin” outside of town on the Blue River.
      • He would drive in from the fishing cabin every day to work at the gas station literally 50 yards Hurcel’s house.
      • Every day Ellis would walk up the path from the gas station to the back door of the house, Hurcel would fix him lunch.
      • She would bring him a sandwich and he would eat in silence while she bitched about his shortcomings and every little thing in the world until he was done eating … when
      • He would trudge back to the gas station for the afternoon, and then home to the fishing cabin … then do it all again tomorrow.
      • He was a nice enough fellow at the gas station, but he pretty much stayed mute at Hurcel’s table. Who could blame him!
        He didn’t argue or respond, he just took it and went back to work.
        I dare say she had worn him out years ago.
      • Their grandkids (my second cousins) Richard and Rita Ann lived with their parents (my first cousins) a mile or so away down the highway in Marengo.
        Richard and I were born on the very exact same day – Nov 4, 1948!
• The highway went through Marengo, past the gas station and Hurcels’ house, past Omer’s place in Temple, then past Temple’s place in English . It was old State Route 64.
  • Google maps shows that the state has improved it and moved it north, so it bypasses all these places except Marengo, which evidently has grown while English has shrunk … which shows what effect the highway has!
    • I guess the road where my uncles live is no longer a highway, it’s just an under-maintained county road. 🙂
  • Back in my day, which was the 50’s and early 60’s, my mom and I must have driven that road 20 times a year.
    • Drive more or less north to the George Rogers Clark Bridge to New Albany.
    • Bear left through the western suburbs of New Albany to pick up …
    • SR 64 to Marengo/English and all those relatives,
  • OR maybe we went to Corydon first SR 62.
    • To visit more relatives
    • or to get our Chevy sedan serviced at Parks Chevrolet
      • Always a sedan, always a Chevy, always huge back then.
    • Estel Parks was (I think!!) an old boyfriend. In any event they had a little something going, and he always hooked her up on a real nice late-model Chevy sedan

Everybody liked my mom, and she had a way of enforcing her “ways” without making a big deal of it.

Leaving the farm

As far as I know, my mom was the only sibling that escaped Indiana, and for sure the only one that got any kind of degree beyond high school.

She left and went to the Louisville General Hospital Nursing School. Not sure what years somewhere in the early 1930’s.

She met my dad who was in University of Louisville Medical School – Hal Elson Freeman. He became an MD in 1934. His story is here.

They got married right after graduation.

I was the last of three children:

• brother Butchie (Hal Jr), born 1937.
  • He died 1949 of rheumatic fever.
  • My father was never the same, and it broke up our family.
• sister Milly, born in April 1940.
• me! born November 1948.

My dad had heart issues all the way back then.

We know this for sure because the Air Force would not take him even though he was an MD and World War 2 was going on.

The Army however, would take anybody with a pulse, especially a doctor!

So that’s how my mom, my dad, my sister and my brother (and the idea of me 🙂 ended up in a little bungalow in Long Beach CA somewhere in the early 40’s!

I know no details, but Butchie died of rheumatic fever in 1949. I was 1½ (Nov 4, 1948), Milly was 9, and he must have been 10 or 11, which must have been just heartbreaking for everybody!!!

Milly was old enough to be scarred by that for life.

Family lore is that my dad was a high strung person anyway, and the fact that he, a medical doctor, couldn’t stop this from happening to his oldest son was devastating to him.

I always told myself I was too young to have been much affected, but a little therapy in the 90’s showed that I was old enough to pick up that folks greeted my cute little toddler self with a smile but they were otherwise very sad all the time, no matter how cute I tried to be. So I became something of a “pleaser”, trying to make sure everyone in the room is happy.

Here in the hellhole of the Trump Era, my social media still has a lot posts about how women have a tough time in the world, and makes me think about my mom and what kind of crap she may have gone through as a single mom in the 50’s. I know nothing about it really, but I do know that respect for women is bred into my bones, maybe even to the point of messing up my relationship life a little….

After WW 2 – Back to the midwest

I lived with my mom in a rental house in some nice suburb, and my dad was ended up in a third floor walk-up apartment on Cherry St around the corner from his office.

I think Dad lived in the same place from when we moved back in 1950-ish until he died in 1963. A nice 3-story red brick building, he had the right hand half of the top floor. His office was in a “professional building” right around the corner. He lived on Elm ST, but worked on Cherry as I remember it. But all traces if both building seem to have been wiped out by a massive expansion of Southwest Missouri State. 🙂

We moved to Louisville in 1954. The story of what all these moves meant to me is here.

Working as a nurse in Louisville

When we moved to Louisville my mom entered the working world at her old alma mater – Louisville General Hospital – as a regular RN.

She worked in a clinic, not ward. It was on the 3d floor as I recall. I think it was the Hand Clinic. All the doctors that I remember were quiet, polite Indian fellows. They loved her steady, un-racist presence!

When I was in 2nd grade I would take the city bus from outside my grade school downtown to the Hospital, and go hang out in the hospital coffee shop (they had one of those back then 🙂 until my mom got off work and we would drive home together. That’s how she solved the daycare problem!!

Somewhere in the late 50’s (late in elementary school), she switched jobs to be a different kind of nurse! Instead of a staff nurse at the hospital, she went to work for the government as a visiting nurse!
I think she did it so she could control her schedule a bit and be home when I got home from school! No more bus rides to downtown Louisville! 🙂

It may have paid more . .. it should pay more because it carried quite a bit more risk!

Driving her own car around the mean streets of the West End of Louisville, trying to run down folks who had a concerning result on some kind of cancer screening to convince them to go to the hospital for follow-up. A unknown white lady knocking on your door is not a welcome thing in some parts of town.

Really, it was a very brave thing for her to do! Just her little ole late 50’s self:

• white nurses uniform,
• white nurses cap
• white skin,
• gray hair (she was prematurely gray as long as I can remember),
• cruising in her big ole 1957 white Chevy Impala …
• which she would park in the sketchiest parts of Louisville to go knock on doors.

The cutest little part of it was that she carried a golf ball in her purse as part of her standard equipment! 🙂
She used it to save her knuckles since she had to knock on so many doors!

She was a kind of a super star at what she did in her quiet way. The hospital loved her, she had a very high success rate compared to the national averages. She was successful because the patients they visited also mostly loved her!

Visitations

It was court-mandated (I think) that I see my dad at least once a year. In practice that meant I visited Springfield or he visited Louisville every summer.

• He visited us at our house in Louisville a few times.
• Mom and I drove to Missouri as our summer adventure a couple of times(?).
• One special summer I actually flew there unaccompanied(!) on one of those puddle-jumper prop-jets. It was so cool being fussed over by the stewardesses for the whole trip!
• More on my dad’s side of all is this here.