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1 Beginnings A life is made up of a great number of small incidents and a small number of great ones. —Roald Dahl, Going Solo (1986) Patsy Louise Neal was born at 4:40 a.m. on January 20, 1926, in the small mining town of Packard, Kentucky. Packard, which at its peak had about four hundred residents, thrived for nearly fifty years, until its coal was depleted shortly after World War II. Founded as a mining camp soon after the turn of the last century by the Thomas B. Mahan family of Williamsburg, Kentucky , it took its name from a popular local schoolteacher, Brooklyn-born Mary Amelia Packard. It lay in a hollow lodged deep within the southernmost range of the Appalachian Mountains, in the lower southeast corner of Kentucky in what is today Whitley County. The family houses in Packard were modest, their foundations camou- flaged during warm months with scrub poplar, ash, and maple trees; pea vines; the white blooms of bloodroot; and bursts of purple Jack-in-the-pulpit . Front-yard gardens sported roses and chrysanthemums. Homes had no indoor plumbing and no electricity until the 1930s. Water had to be carried inside from outdoor wells for cooking, cleaning, and bathing, and oil lamps were used at night. Toilets usually were located in the garden. Packard families worshipped together at the only house of prayer in town, the Free Will Baptist Church. On warm, lazy afternoons, miners would gather outside of the commissary store to play checkers, chat, or strum guitars. There was even a hometown string band. “The way of life in Packard had much to recommend it. It was a closeknit community whose citizens cared about one another,” recalled Dr. Jo 3 Facing page: Patsy Neal at age twelve, 1938. From the Patricia Neal Collection. Shearer฀book.indb฀฀฀3 3/16/2006฀฀฀12:13:50฀PM 4 Patricia Neal: An Unquiet Life Anne Sexton, who grew up there. “Former residents of Packard make no claim of objectivity regarding this little community. . . . [M]any harbor the irrational opinion that it was one of the finest settlements in all the history of the human race.”1 Today Packard is gone. Just the crumbling foundations of a few buildings are left on what is now privately owned property. One must have permission even to visit the area. The lone town doctor was Pascal Gennings Petrey, a friendly, rotund man. His wife, the former Flora Jane Siler—a descendant of one of the first families to settle in the area—was a rather distant and apparently none-too-affectionate woman. The Petreys had four daughters, Della Tople, Eura Mildred, Ima Victory , and Virginia Siler, who all adored their father and spoiled him with attention. Eura, their second child (born September 21, 1899) was an extremely tenacious, determined, and attractive young woman. Very well liked and quite popular around Packard, she had left boarding school at the age of sixteen when her beloved eighteen-month-old sister Virginia died. She returned to Packard in 1917 and soon after encountered the new transportation manager of the Mahan Jellico Coal Company (later known as the Southern Coal and Coke Company), William Burdette “Coot” Neal. The two met at a social gathering to play the popular card game Rook. The hostess was a local schoolteacher named Bertha Snyder, who had her sights set on the handsome Neal. Eura, however, made it firmly known that Neal was for her, and the couple began dating. Coot Neal was the third child of W. D. (William David) “Willie” Neal and his wife, the former Mary Lucy Fitzgerald of Shockee, Virginia. Their marriage produced five sons and one daughter. Lucy Neal was a very loving, extremely attractive, and very large woman who “worked like a man and ate like a man.”2 In 1914, still young, she died of a heart attack while sitting at her kitchen table. Soon after, W. D. married Mollie Cox, a rather homely, goodhearted woman. “Miss Mollie” was the grandmother that the Neal children would remember. Coot was born in Shockee on January 29, 1895, and attended high school at the Hargrave Military Academy in Chatham, Virginia. He had beautiful brown eyes and as an adult stood six feet tall. He was heavy like his mother and eventually weighed almost 260 pounds. Blessed with a terrific sense of humor, Coot did have a temper, which would flare up on rare occasions. He was best known, however, for his kindness...

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