Year One, Week One A Short Introduction

It is true that when God closes one door another opens. If you are reading this article, you are seeing evidence.
I was privileged for three years to write a weekly article for the Union County Shopper. That paper’s last issue was on April 26, 2017. My good friend Aaron
Russell has graciously invited me to make a weekly contribution to this website, www.historicunioncounty.com. After a few months of rest from weekly writing, I accept the opportunity he has provided and open a new chapter in my life.
I chose to title my contributions “Mincey’s Musings”. My Shopper column was titled “Teacher Time”, but I’m older now, and I see in myself the beginnings of the rambling so often associated with elder years. “Musing” does seem to have a more pleasant sound than “rambling”, at least to me.
It is definitely not my intention to ramble tediously each week. As I did in my Shopper column, I pledge to keep my musings positive. I hope each of you will find my musings a short pleasant weekly visit as I share with you my thoughts and memories of things mostly past, some present, and perhaps a few to come.
I appreciate reader feedback. Feel free to drop me an email at minceyr@ucps.org. Best wishes for the New Year 2018—may it be your best ever!

The Best New Year’s Day Ever

I am writing this on January 1, 2018. My mind goes back 35 years to January 1, 1983, the best New Year’s Day of my life.
I was seventeen years old, a senior at Horace Maynard High School, and though I didn’t know it, just beginning what would be the last full year I would live in the house in which I grew up, Jack Warwick’s rental house on Old Luttrell Road.
My father died just about ten months earlier on February 26, 1982. Dad had many good qualities, but “good” is a term relative to those who experience it. Dad did not like a junky house, and he kept a neat yard. Dad was not fond of anyone giving either Mother or me anything, unless of course it benefited him or was his idea. He was not very tolerant of unnecessary litter.
Mother, on the other hand, was always equally glad to give what she could to others and happy to receive anything anyone gave her or me. Mother always taught me to take anything given to me, to genuinely thank the giver, and if it happened to be something I didn’t want to just pass it along quietly to someone else in need.
Imagine my surprise when my cousin Bertha Lay and her husband John brought me over a hundred hardback books on New Year’s Day, 1983! Oh, the pure rapture! I had received some wonderful gifts over the years, most usually at Christmas, but nothing so overwhelming! I proudly wrote my name in ink in the front of each of those books and dated them, January 1, 1983. I have each and every one of those books to this day in my home library. Only theft, fire, financial calamity or death would cause me to part with even one volume.
My Cousin Bertha was an avid reader and a member of at least one prominent (and I always suspected several) book clubs. She was a voracious reader on practically every subject. Most of the books were fiction by the most popular writers of the day. There were also classics, one on suicide, and a few that opened my eyes in ways that would make pastors blush even today! Some I’ve read, many I haven’t, some I probably never will, but each reminds me that I had a cousin who loved me and wanted to share her literary world with me.
Had Dad been alive, I doubt Cousin Bertha would have brought me these books. I’m sure Dad at the very least would have thrown a fit (worse if he had been drinking) and would have tried his best to have made Cousin Bertha take them back. He might even have thrown them away himself if all else failed.
But it didn’t bother Mother one bit. She was happy because I was happy. I helped her by neatly alphabetizing them by subject and author’s last name and neatly stored them away in the bedroom.
This great influx of literary wealth led me to establish my first home library in the upstairs west room of the old Jack Warwick house. My brother-in-law Buddy Foulks provided me with scrap lumber for the shelves from his work at Schubert’s Lumber Company. I purchased the shelf brackets from the hardware store, and my good friend Earl Tolliver helped me hang the shelves. I also purchased varnish for the old rough floor. Later, Jack Warwick replaced some of the carpet in his house, and he gave me some of the old carpet to use on my library floor. My very elderly cousin Lizzie Norton gave us a carpet runner which I used on the stairs.
Before Cousin Bertha, I didn’t have many books at home. The first books I remember owning other than the Bible were teacher editions of an old reading series that Ms. Hazel Butcher gave me in first grade. Sadly, I was manipulated into loaning those books to two “friends” who never returned them. I wouldn’t trust either of them today with a canteen in the desert, though they have supposedly become respectable citizens as adults.
Next was a dictionary that my saintly fourth grade teacher, Wanza Sharp, gave me. The backs were gone, and the first and last few pages were missing, but I still have that treasured old reference. Our class also received new math books that year, and Ms. Wanza also gave me a copy of the old math book. I played school with that book for six years. Ms. Wanza knew that I wanted a reading book with which to play school, and a short time later my second grade teacher, Ms. Leah Wolfe, brought me one. Oh, the wonderful stories and pictures in that book!
I increased my home library by continuing to ask many teachers for old textbooks. I became good at knowing which teachers to ask for what, and rarely was I disappointed. I also bought several paperbacks at school through the Arrow and Scholastic Book Clubs. Also, I had a few first volumes of encyclopedias, as publishers would sometimes mail the first volume free to encourage a family to purchase an entire set. By the time Cousin Bertha provided my New Year’s windfall, I owned probably forty to fifty books.
Eventually, Cousin Bertha moved to Black Fox Hollow (formerly the Thomas “Holler”), just a few miles up the road. Throughout the years before Cousin Bertha passed away, she gave me many more books. Just a year or two before she died, she gave me two overflowing bookshelves that she had custom made for her home in Knoxville. I picked them up on a cold winter day that was “spitting” snow. My good friend Mark Martin built me two companion shelves so I could increase my collection.
Today, my home library is in its own building which is about the same size as the entirety of the first house in which I remember living. Today’s generation has access to “e-books” and other electronic print media—but for me, there is nothing to equal the joy of holding an actual book and caressing its pages while reading, unless it’s watching the size of my collection grow!
What kind of furniture did you have in your house when you were a child? Next week I’ll tell you about our fine furnishings.