The Captain's Wife

 

The captain's wife, my mother, Loys Marie Howell Vollertsen, died February 23, 2012. Today is February 17, 2022. Her second son, Vernon, the computer whiz, asked me to put together a companion piece to last week's blog titled "The Captain." They say that behind every great man is an equally great woman. Hooo, boy, I'm going to try and count the ways.

To do this you are going to have to understand both the geography and the history of the times in which her character developed. If that sounds boring, then you need to get out of here right now because I'm going to do it anyway, whether you like it or not.

Loys Marie was born a twin to Loyd Pete in Seminole, Oklahoma on August 9th, 1924. Seminole was as rough an oil boom town as Oklahoma ever produced, and there were a lot of them. In that time and in that place no man's life was worth one-tenth of the black gold being sucked out of the ground around them. Men, called "roughnecks," a perfect description for both the nature of their work and their character, were killed working on the rigs every day.

Men were murdered every night in boomtown bars and mud filled alleys. Oil rigs were drilled and raised so close together that the wooden derricks literally touched the bases of each other so that when the sun came up you could not see the horizon for the multitude of drilling rigs. The rush for "black gold" was on and if you were not one of those in the hunt for it, you had better get out of the way.

Loys' dad was a roughneck for the Magnolia Oil Company. Grandpa Austin Howell told me a story when I was a boy of how he was working the rigs near Cromwell located in the eastern corner of Seminole County, the day the county sheriff from county seat Wewoka shackled fourteen prostitutes together by their ankles and made them walk all the way to Wewoka, a distance of over ten miles. A 1920's era movie was made about Cromwell titled "The Wickedest Town On Earth". Famed wild west Marshall Bill Tilghman, a man that survived the Indian wars of the nineteenth century, was killed by drug runners in Cromwell.

Loys was about ten years old when Austin and Grandma Lillie pulled their four sons and three daughters out of the mayhem when Austin's dad, Wilson Howell, offered to sell the county general store he and wife Viola ran in Boggy Depot in the southeastern corner of the state known then and even today as Little Dixie because of its proximity to Louisiana, Texas and Arkansas. It is more like, culturally, that hard part of the Old South than any other part of the state. One of the other reasons for its name was because it was largely populated by both former confederate veterans of the Civil War, and former slaves. Mixed in were numerous Indians that had been forcefully moved there from their ancestral homes east of the Mississippi River.

All these people lived together peacefully, more or less, because they had to. Groceries had to be bought at the few general stores that existed in the rough, mountainous country where a black man or an Indian's money was as green as anyone else's, but that's as far as community socialization went. All schools were segregated.

Indians, if they went to school, went to Indian boarding schools as did my wife's maternal grandmother. My mother saved for me from her antique store a posted sign from Durant stating that "No Liquor Will Be Served To Indians After Sundown." She remembered reading such signs in her youth. Little Dixie.

On the city limit edge of every town of consequence were posted billboards stating bluntly the prevailing notion of Little Dixie, "Black Man Don't Let The Sun Set On You Here." They were called "sundown towns" and lasted right up to the edge of the 1950's. Little Dixie, where the captain's wife came of age.

If there was a racist bone in Loys Marie's body, nobody ever found it. When Austin and Lillie took over Wilson's store in Boggy Depot, the famed old stage stop on the old Butterfield stage line to California was dying on the vine and no longer harbored enough rural population to make the store profitable. Austin moved it to Wilson (no connection to my great grandfather) an equally tiny but more prosperous community south of Wapanucka.        

There her best friend was a little black girl she and Pete chummed with named "Sweet'nen". That was her name and that was the way she spelled it as both Loys and Pete remembered it. She undoubtedly had a last name, but neither Pete nor mother could remember it when I asked. There were too few kids of any color in that rural place not to play with whatever kids were available, regardless of their color.

They loved her. The three of them ran the dusty little community's roads together and shared the snacks their mother's gave them to make it through the country's hot, dusty days. When school started, or the sun went down, they separated and went back into their own worlds. Little Dixie.

One day Sweet'nen moved away. Loys and Pete told me they heard to family in Chicago, and that sometime later they heard she went to college and made an entirely new and different life for herself, and never came back.

Mom's life had been changed by the friendship, indelibly. She told me that if she ever heard me using the "N" word that she would wash my mouth out with soap. She was strong and athletic enough to do it.

When the captain's wife was about eleven years old, Austin and Lillie took in a boarder, an abused full blood Coushatta Indian boy of about sixteen who ran away from an alcoholic father. The boy, George Abbott, loved baseball, and knew that Austin sponsored a summer league semi-pro team to advertise his general store's wares. Small business owners all over Little Dixie did the same thing. Many major leaguers of note had their beginnings in those small venues. Dizzy and Daffy Dean? The Waner brothers, Big and Little Poison? Pepper Martin? Allie Reynolds, the "Big Chief", all got their start playing town ball. Some of them made it all the way to Cooperstown.

George, a catcher, was "found" in Little Dixie by a scout for the Yankees and signed to a contract. He could hit for both power and average. He ran like a deer, and you absolutely could not get a wild pitch past him. He had it all and lost it one night playing AAA ball in upstate New York when a poolroom brawl put a metal plate in his head. The next year the Yankees called up another AAA kid named Yogi Berra. There's a lot of luck in life, good and bad.

Mom told me one time that during the years that he lived with them she idolized George to the point that she just didn't want to be like him, she wanted to be him. He treated her like a baby sister. The Howell's treated him like a son. Loys treated him like another brother. She had four, and all of them that hadn't already left for The War were getting ready to.

Wilson didn't have a high school. It was a seven mile walk or a horse and wagon "school bus" ride of the same length to Wapanucka. There she excelled in basketball as a guard playing old school girls rules under legendary coach Chick Maxey, and of course, as a catcher on the girls softball team. As a senior she made her division's all state list in both sports. Like her mother she could and would talk to anyone, knowing no strangers, certainly not in a small business atmosphere like the Howell General Store where customers liked to josh and be joshed in return. She learned how to do that from her mother, and her laugh, perfectly pitched and not giddy, lit up every room she walked into. She was popular, and knockout beautiful.

Phillips Petroleum sponsored a women's basketball team to help advertise their product. Mom signed on right out of high school and played for them just long enough to see she was not going to make any money at it, nor get a chance to follow up on any of the ambitions that were beginning to materialize, formless though they were. Someone told her of the famed Skirvin Hotel in downtown Oklahoma City. They were hiring. At the time it was one of the best known hotels in the American Southwest.

The captain's wife got her first real job out of high school as a cocktail waitress at the famed Skirvin. Her looks did that for her. Men young and old didn't mind a bit calling her over for an order, a little light banter, to be followed by cash- money tips the likes of which she never saw down yonder in Little Dixie in Howell's General Store.

Not just her looks but her ability at light palaver, "joshing," got her a promotion to hostess. This was the exact point at which the pretty little redneck girl began to put her rural ways behind her. As hostess she had to learn which side of the plate the knives and forks went. What, there was more than one? Dip the soup spoon towards you or away from you? You mean you just don't turn the bowl on its edge and suck it all in? Really? She was taught to eat, and like, foods she did not know existed.

All the niceties generally referred to as "proper etiquette" became second nature to the captain's wife. She memorized all of them. Being the oldest of her four sons by seven years, I had the agony of their full implementation until Vernon, Bruce, and Jon came along. I was never able to resist slurping the bottom of a milkshake with my straw. She hated that. I still do it.

An old Little Dixie friend of hers, Mildred "Mitt" Richardson, soon to marry Loys' brother "Hap" Howell, invited her out to San Francisco on the prospect of an even better job. Mom took her up on it, moved in with Aunt Mitt, and liked the change of pace. One night on a bulletin board where she worked, she saw an ad for a USO serviceman's dance, common all over the country during wartime in way of giving servicemen a chance to beat the homesick blues. That's where she met the captain, then a lowly seaman recruit that really could dance unlike so many of the others.

Old, old wartime story. Dad was shipped out of San Francisco to Bremerton, Washington on Puget Sound. He called, proposed, and she went there and married him. They notified no one until it was over, and then only family. There was a problem. 

The Navy had lost lots of officers in various sea battles, was going to lose lots more in kamikaze attacks off the coast of Okinawa (Uncle Pete was in the first wave to hit the beach at Iwo, and the same at Okinawa), and was beginning to think that the Japanese were going to force an invasion of their entire country in order to bring the war to a conclusion. Literally millions could die on both sides. Dad, seaman first class Russell Armin Vollertsen, tested out the top of his group when given the OCS test, and was immediately shipped to Annapolis, the problem being you weren't supposed to be married in the service academies, let alone have a new baby son.

They hid me out in Little Dixie until Dad graduated. Mom continued to work in California to send money home help raise me. Austin and Lillie raised me until I was nearly four years old. I was "grandmother raised". When the captain and his wife gathered me up, Grandma cried.

In those early years as an ensign, and then a lieutenant, we moved all over the country. Once we lived in four different places in San Francisco Bay in under two years. Mom was such a good cook, but she had to be a resourceful and creative one as well. I remember once somewhere in the middle of the U.S. she produced a can of Sterno, jellied alcohol, opened a can of pork and beans, put a match to the can of Sterno, and put the beans on top between her feet so nothing would spill at sixty miles an hour. Then she brought out a loaf of white bread. Voila, lunch and dinner.

The road trips never ended. It was the nature of the job. The Navy moves more than any of the other service branches. After the brothers started arriving, Dad bought a Coleman white gas stove. We'd stop alongside the road (desert, mountains, seaside, it didn't matter) fire the stove up, and Mom would cook actual bacon and eggs, even toast out of the white bread slices crisped to perfection on the stove burners.

I hear some of you snickering out there. You're not paying attention. I told you she was resourceful and good. She had to be both in the early days as the captain's wife, and she was. As the captain gained rank, the movements were more spread-out allowing Mom to really spread her culinary wings.

Our moves tended to place our many homes next to foreigners come to America for assorted service training before heading back to their own countries. When we lived next to the Patels in D.C. she learned how to fix chicken curry, a spicy dish that I love. She taught Pam how to make it, and it became our daughter Sarah's favorite as well. In Monterey our next-door neighbor the Fajals Saudis, taught Mom how to make a great boiled chicken, okra and tomato dish that I made a pot of two nights ago. Mr. Musso, a Sicilian immigrant who was our landlord living right next to us in Newport taught mom how to make raviolis and manicotti. One of mom's last great meals she made for us was a pan of deer meat manicotti from a deer the captain shot in Texas.

Sometime in the mid-1960's after I had left home, Dad encouraged Mom to enroll in a college course being offered in one of the colleges there in San Francisco where they were living yet again. She took it and thoroughly enjoyed it. When the captain retired and was hired to run the NASA facility in Slidell, Louisiana, Mom picked an old, deserted building in a rundown part of "Old Town" Slidell close to the railroad tracks, talked the captain into buying it (it was his idea, right?), and opened an antique shop. One year of getting her feet on the ground and garnering kudos from the city pols for renovating one of the worst parts of town, and her shop took off like a Mardi Gras parade. Within three years there were five other antique stores clustered all around hers, bars, nightclubs, and a dinner theatre which we attended whenever we were in town.

Where do you think she learned how to do that? Think back to the beginning(s). I told you, I told you, I told you. Little Dixie. Sure, Mr. Wolfe. You can't go home again. But you can take along the best pieces of it with you wherever you go. 

Mom's stunning good looks served her and the captain-to-be well. At the Admiral's Ball, the admiral and other officers lined up to dance with the gorgeous lieutenant's wife, the one who taught the country girl how to dance, and he smiled and smiled and smiled.

When we buried Grandpa Austin in 1974 in Calvin, George Abbott showed up out of respect for his second father. Mom got to hug her girlhood idol, and he hugged back. So many years. So many years. It was like yesterday, right, George? Right, Loys? I had a camera taking family pictures and got one of the sincerest family hugs you will ever see. If Vernon can make technical sense out of my meanderings, that picture should be in this piece somewhere. You'll know who you're looking at if it is.

Stroke and heart disease stalks the Howell branch of the family. It's what got Grandpa, Grandma, Aunt Gertrude, Uncle Hap, on and on. All of them practically. It's going to get me, and sure, it got Mom.

There's a ghost story in our family that my mother told me involving her grandmother, Elizabeth "Lizzie" Taylor, née Keener, and her own mother who died when Lizzie was nine years old leaving her with a baby brother and sister (Lillie) to raise by herself, which she did. In the story, sometime after her mother's death (dad was "gone") her mother appears to her in the moonlight of a hot summer night with the moon shining through the window curtain next to the the bed where she lay next to her sleeping brother and sister. Lizzie's mother stepped between the moonlit curtain and the edge of the bed, reached out her hand and stroked her daughter's forehead, and then spoke briefly, one sentence, and disappeared.

When Mom had her second stroke the captain called in hospice so that she could spend her final days at home on the bayou she loved. Pam and I made the drive from our home here as quickly as we could. Dad said she might pass at any time. About nine or ten of the morning after we got there Pam served her a breakfast of scrambled eggs, hash browns, and toast topped off with the strong coffee she loved all of her life. She was in good spirits, sitting up in bed, and without a hint of slurred speech said, "Oh, Pam, that was wonderful!" and lay back and went immediately to sleep.

Pam and my brother Bruce's wife, Tonya, who lived in Slidell at the time pulled up chairs next to mom's bed and began to talk quietly about past events, sometimes laughing gently at a remembered incident, other times speaking in hushed tones about incidental matters and kid news. The hospice lady, a large black woman, would stroke mom's hand and speak of her own kids' news as well. Were it not such a meaningful moment, you might have imagined the three women as meeting like this often as friends are won't to do at some nice sidewalk café in the French Quarter.

I went into the kitchen to fix a breakfast of my own. Maybe two hours after I went into the kitchen where I was reading a book at the kitchen table, I heard Mom scream in as strong a voice as she had ever possessed, "Mother!" I jumped from the table and ran to her bedside.

"What happened! What happened!"

"We don't know! We don't know!" Pam and Tonya were yelling over one another.

Pam gathered herself unsteadily and said, "She sat straight up in bed like she'd been shocked, her eyes couldn't have been more open or wider. She was looking past the foot of her bed and above it as if she was looking into someone's face!"

By the time I got into the room, Mom's head was back on her pillow, her eyes closed. She was asleep, peaceful. During the next hour Pam leaned close to her right ear and sang her every gospel hymn she knew. She knows many. Tonya held a computer tablet to her other ear and played "Ave Maria" into the other. Mom was a converted Catholic. The hospice lady picked up Mom's right wrist and began counting heartbeats and the number of seconds between breaths drawn.

Towards the end she said simply, "She's gone." And so she was. Gone a lot further than anyone would have guessed a little girl from Little Dixie, might have gone. I don't think she ever doubted it.

I think she knew where she was going. Both times.

© 2022 Conrad M. Vollertsen