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Estelle Shea Walker / 93 After Susan did well in school, married Ed, and created a wonderful marriage with five children, Dixie relented. “Eventually he told her he had been wrong on both counts,” school and marriage, Ed said. “He didn’t mind admitting he was wrong and he offered apologies.” Estelle, like much of the United States, avidly followed the story of the English king Edward VIII and his Ameri­ can sweetheart. When the king fell in love and abdicated his throne in 1936 to marry “the woman I love,” the twice-divorced Wallis Simpson, Estelle, who was a true romantic , saw certain similarities to her own situation. After Ed and Susan moved to New Jersey and began their own family, Estelle often drove up from Birmingham alone, helping Susan with the endless chores of early motherhood, yet discreetly managing to stay in the background. “There were times,” Ed recalled, “when she would arrive at the house unannounced, spend a few days helping Sue get organized after one of our children was born, and stay just long enough to see that things were going well. Then she would quietly take off in the middle of the night for home. We would wake up to see her bed made, her bags gone, and her room as neat as if no one had ever been there.” When Dixie left for spring training, Estelle allowed the children more freedom in their Birmingham home. Things were always tougher when Estelle drove north with their family to meet Dixie. This was especially true when the children were young—during his playing days in Chicago, Detroit, and later Brooklyn. “She had that heavy foot on the gas pedal,” laughs Susan Walker. “She always arrived in the town where he was playing a lot sooner than expected . I remember when I was little and we were living in Rockville Centre, New York. These were the days before cars had seat belts. We all threw our shoes out the window, and my older brother put his smelly feet out the window.” Estelle and Dixie’s first child, Fred (Dixie) Walker, was born in 1937; their second child, Mary Ann Walker, was born early in 1940. “Dad was playing for Brooklyn then and they had taken this small house in Brook- 94 / Chapter 6 lyn, I think in the Bay Ridge section, and he would drive to Ebbets Field which was about fifteen or twenty minutes away for the games,” Susan Walker said. There was a rare night game and Dixie needed to sleep late that day before leaving for the park. Baby Mary Ann, now six months old, was restless and cranky. She cried for a long time in the small house until Dixie woke up. “As my mother told me many years later my dad was very tired that day and he asked my mother to take the baby to another part of the home so he could get his rest before the game,” Susan said. “She took the baby downstairs where it was probably damp and let Mary Ann sleep there. By the time my dad left for the park, Mary Ann was coughing and wheezing. There were no antibiotics then for children. That night, after the game, she was in a bad way and they took her to a nearby hospital. She had contracted pneumonia. She was gone in a day or so. My father never really got over that her death.” In 1941 another girl was born to Dixie and Estelle. They named her Mary Ann in memory of their lost child. Susan came along in 1943; Sean Casey was born in 1949; and Stephen Vaughn, their sixth child, was born in 1954. Mary Ann, Susan, and Stephen are the only surviving children of Dixie and Estelle Walker. As a youngster growing up in the towns where Dixie Walker played, managed and coached—Atlanta, Houston, Rochester, Toronto, and Milwaukee—Susan Walker had two separate lives. “We always lived in the city where my dad was working for the team and then when the season ended we would go back home to Birmingham. He loved to hunt and fish with his brother Harry while my mother really ran the house. He had a farm where my great uncle Ernie lived and they, Harry and my dad, also owned a small construction company. They also operated the hardware store downtown where my grandfather Ewart always worked. When my dad came home things would go back to...

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