In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Mary Helen’s FianCé After my great-aunts Mary Helen and Eloise graduated from Mount Saint Joseph Junior College near Owensboro, Kentucky, both secured jobs with the U.S. Department of Agriculture, working in one of its Kentucky offices. During World War II the federal government decentralized its operations by moving many offices out of Washington, D.C., and the headquarters of the Department of Agriculture moved to Cincinnati, Ohio. By the time the war began winding down and government agencies returned to Washington, my great-aunts worked in the Cincinnati headquarters, so when their jobs moved to Washington, they moved too. After the war Eloise moved to New York with her husband, Ray Martinson, a returning soldier she had married before his three-year overseas assignment. Mary Helen stayed on in our nation’s capital. One day Mary Helen called home and announced she was getting married. Naturally, her mother, my great-grandmother, began asking questions about her intended. Mary Helen explained his name was Charles Ferrara. He was Italian, a U.S. Army veteran, and a native of the Washington, D.C., area. My great-grandmother listened to all Mary Helen said as best she could, given that her phone service was a party line shared with several other families. Chances were also excellent that she was not the only one hearing the conversation, because when the phone rang all the houses on the party line heard the ringing. Each house had its own ring—maybe two longs and one short, or two shorts and one long—with the idea that you would only pick up if you heard your ring, but in reality many folks picked up and listened to every phone call. So, that combination of multiple people listening in and poor phone lines to begin with made conversing by phone a challenge. Nevertheless, my great-grandmother persisted in learning all she could about the man her daughter was going to marry. Mary Helen’s Fiancé 181 “What does he do for a living?” my great-grandmother asked. “He’s an electrical engineer,” she heard Mary Helen reply. Now, my great-grandmother, like most folks in her rural community, had no idea what an electrical engineer did, but it sounded impressive. After she and Mary Helen completed their call, my great-grandmother began calling her friends, telling them about the electrical engineer Mary Helen was going to marry. Even her friends who shared her party line agreed with her assessment of the phone call. So, you can imagine my great-grandmother’s surprise when Mary Helen came home with her husband who owned his own business—a store selling liquor and beer! CoMMentary This is a family story—one that I had never heard until we had a Hamilton family reunion in 2009 at which the descendants of the great-grandmother in the story, including my great-aunt Mary Helen, gathered. One of my father’s first cousins, Charlie Hamilton, told the tale. If you doubt such confusion is possible, try saying aloud “he’s an electrical engineer” and then “he sells liquor and beer” and imagine hearing either phrase over a crackly phone line. Yep! You could confuse them too. When I heard this tale, I realized there was a multi-generational thread in the family stories I had heard over the years—mistakes! We tell the stories that evoke laughter at our mistakes! “Jeff Rides the Rides” is another example of the same type of story. So is “A Place to Start,” about my Uncle Sammy’s sandwiches. Both of these were stories I had first heard from my father. I was aware that he told stories that had humorous mistakes as a common theme, but hearing the story of Mary Helen’s phone call at the reunion was the first time I realized that theme had begun before his generation. For years I thought my daddy just took some sort of unnerving delight in retelling tales of funny errors made by his children and his brother, but then I was interviewed by Pamela Petro for her book Sitting Up with the Dead: A Storied Journey Through the American South.1 When Petro first contacted me to arrange the interview, she told me she wanted to talk with me about how I had grown up to become a storyteller. I insisted that if she wanted to understand, she needed to meet me at my [52.15.63.145] Project MUSE (2024-04-16 17...

Share