Coming Home to Mississippi

Mary Ann Mobley

221 MaryAnnMobley Mary Ann Mobley, Miss America 1959 from Brandon, Mississippi, has won many awards for work in the entertainment industry and for her work on behalf of war and famine victims. Her numerous honors include a Golden Globe Award from the Hollywood Foreign Press Association as “International Female Star of Tomorrow” (1965), Mississippi Woman of the Year (1979), the first woman voted into the University of Mississippi Alumni Hall of Fame (1981), and Mississippi Musicians Hall of Fame (2002). Mobley and her husband, Emmy award–winning talk show host Gary Collins, have one daughter, Mary Clancy. I just can’t do it—Lord knows I’ve tried! I’ve tried so many times and it just never seems to come out right no matter how hard I try or how long I anguish over it! I simply can’t seem to put my feelings of home and Mississippi to paper. When you feel something so intensely, you want to write it down—if anguish to stanch the bleeding, if love or happiness to prolong the moment and share it.You want to let the ones who made it all possible, the ones who literally shaped your life know that you haven’t forgotten them or their amazing gift of unconditional love. What is owed simply cannot be repaid. I am overwhelmed! Maybe if I pretend that we are all sitting here talking then I can just tell you. I would tell you how the big cane rocking chair came to sit on the front porch of the house in Beverly Hills. It came from the porch at Stockett Stables. I used to sit and rock on that porch with“Mr. Robert .” It was a wonderful gathering place where great stories as well as a few lies were freely swapped. Many people boarded their horses there, 222 mary ann mobley and it seemed that almost everybody stopped by at some time or another . The stories and the coffee never ran out, and magically there were always enough rocking chairs. I loved that man and will always miss him. I can tell you about the love that surrounded me as I grew up in Brandon.At that time the population was around twenty-five hundred good people and a few old soreheads. It was not the kind of love that’s talked about or analyzed, but the kind of love that’s just there. It’s like a physical condition that has no cure. It’s a love that sits so comfortably and naturally deep inside you, never questioned, as I said, it’s just there—like when my little dog, Prissy, was attacked by this big dog up the street. She was bleeding so badly and I wrapped her in one of mother’s best towels and ran all the way up to our town square with her in my arms.I ran straight to Dr.Watson’s office,past the receptionist and right into the examining room where he was seeing a patient. I stood there crying hysterically with Prissy bleeding in my arms. He simply said “excuse me” to the patient and gently guided me into the next examining room, put Prissy on the table, and proceeded to carefully stitch her up.When she was all bandaged, he wiped my face, gave me a hug (I think there’s a huge shortage of hugs in our lives today), and then he called my mother to come get us. Did I mention that Dr. Watson wasn’t a vet, but the doctor for most of the town of Brandon? This is a true story, as all my stories about home are true. You can’t lie about things like that! This was my growing-up place, where most everything revolved around the church and the school. I joined the church there, I was married there, and our daughter was baptized there. If the church fed my soul, the school and my teachers fed my mind. From them you didn’t just learn a subject, but you learned about life as well. To this day, I can remember most all of their names. I remember Miss Jessie Wilshire, who decided she couldn’t teach us history until she taught us to write. She said she couldn’t read our writing. So she taught us the old Palmer Penmanship Method where you go up to the top line, come down to the middle line. It’s too complicated to...