Mary Carolyn Runyan Fuchs, (Would Have Been) 80 Years Old Today

Today is the date on which my mother was born, back in 1931. On the other two significant May birthdays in my immediate family – Jackson’s on the 7^th, and Diego’s on the 16^th – I discussed their birth stories. Both were first-hand accounts, with varying degrees of accuracy, but, generally speaking, both were the truth. I was not around for my late mother’s birth, obviously, but I thought it would make for an interesting exercise to write the story anyway…

Just two days after Memorial Day, and it is already feeling like August in Little Rock. I am grateful to have been transferred, a few months ago, to an office job that requires no travel and comes with an electric fan that cuts the heat some.

I believe the transfer may have been Mr. _______’s doing; he is one of the railroad’s Vice Presidents, and runs the Little Rock regional office. Mr. ________ is a kind, church-going man, and when I mentioned to him in passing that Hazel was in a family way a few months back, he became very interested, making a point to tell me the story of his first-born, a son named James, whose acquaintance I have made. He will be attending West Point in the fall and Mr. _________ is very proud, and rightly so.

Less than a month later, I received the letter offering me my current position of Assistant to the Director of Human Resources at the Rock Island Railroad’s Little Rock office. The day I was unpacking my things at my new desk, Mr. __________ happened to be meeting with the Director. He greeted me warmly, congratulating me on my new post, before I thought I detected a little wink, as if to say, “Glad I could do this for you, Herman.”

This morning I receive a telephone call before I can even take my hat off. It is from the maternity ward at St. Vincent’s Hospital. Hazel is doing well, and the baby should be arriving soon.

I head on down there as fast as my old Model T will take me, which is not very fast. I find my way to the maternity ward and am met by a colored nurse who pats my shoulder in a reassuring manner and lets me know everything is going “just as it ought to be.”

The seats nearest the electric fan have all been taken; they’re filled by nervous-looking men of around my age and general appearance. They nod at me, as I hang my hat and jacket. I have managed to sweat through my shirt. To cool off, I fan myself with an abandoned copy of the Gazette. I try reading a story about the new invention of something called a wind tunnel, which will allow scientists to test aircraft on the ground. I am interested – having been a navy man during the Great War – but I find it difficult to concentrate under the present set of circumstances.

I am napping when the same nurse calls my name. She leads me through a door I hadn’t noticed before, and down a bright corridor. We stand before a window and look at a room full of newborns in bassinets.

“Can you guess which one is yours?” she smiles.

“I don’t believe I can,” I answer in a way that makes her laugh so loud the babies seem to hear it through the glass of the window.

She points to one of the cribs, and I see my little girl, Mary Carolyn, for the first time. She is a thing of beauty – pink and sparkling clean. I close my eyes and thank the Lord for His blessing. Then I tap the glass, attempting to get Mary’s attention, all the while trying to imagine how much my world has been changed.

I Know, I Know: Everybody's Irish on St. Patrick's Day

My maternal grandmother's maiden name was Hazel Ferell, and try as I might, I cannot locate any photographic evidence of the Ferells in my mother's scrapbook, although she does mention her grandmother, "Momma Ferell," in a couple of her letters. (I did, however, find proof in our family geneology Tracking Barefoot Runyan: Descendants of Isaac Barefoot Runyan, compiled by Marie Runyan Wright.) Anyway, I mention it because it means I have some Irish in me. I believe my mother was a quarter Irish, so I guess that makes me an eighth. And my kids would be one-sixteenth, right?


Saint Patrick's Day is actually a holiday I've never really gotten into on any level. I'm sure I've worn green most years, (I'm wearing muted olives and camo as I write this)but I don't believe, for example, that I've ever drunk -- or vomited up -- green beer.


In fact, for the past eleven years (wow) since my father's passing, I've had my own, personal reason for having a negative reaction to this holiday. In March of 2000 my father was dying of cancer and was an in-patient at Greenwich Hospital. I was living in Brooklyn at the time and did not have a car. In order to visit my father, I had to take a Metro North commuter train about one hour each way -- not a pleasant experience under normal circumstances. But when you're going to visit a dried out and yellowing version of your once vital parent while surrounded by people euphemistically referred to as "revellers," the reality becomes nearly unbearable.

The memory of visiting my father on St. Patrick's Day gives me no ill will toward the Farrell sliver of my genetic make-up, nor to the Irish as a people. (This is where I'm supposed to say "some of my best friends are Irish" or "my favorite band is Irish," or "I just love Conan O'Brien!")

I will say that when I think back to my time in Europe in the late 1980's, Ireland was one of the most welcoming places we visited. I don't know whether Sue Barney will remember it this way or not, but as I recall our arrival in Dublin, I picture us with our tourist map open, riding the DART (Dublin Area Rapid Transit). We are immediately surrounded by a group of kindly older men, poking at our map with their pinkies and pointing in various directions. They were literally elbowing each other out of the way in order to help us, and none of them had their hand held out for payment. I don't know whether we offered; I'm sure they would have refused it, and strongly.

I realized some time later that the reason they may have reacted to our presence that way could have been -- aside from their generally generous nature -- our age. We were in our early 20's, and in the Dublin of the late 1980's you just see people our age. They all left for England, America and elsewhere, hoping for better prospects. It's changed since the tech boom of the 1990's, but back then it was like a reverse Peter Pan or Logan's Run situation.

Well now, this rumination on Saint Patrick's Day has brought me halfway round the world and back! I suppose one of the things that makes us human is our ability to hold a plurality of meanings for a variety of things at one time. This holiday may very well be one of those complex things in my heart for years to come.

So Much More Than Just "Things and Stuff"

The pages of my mother's scrapbook are yellowed and crumbling fast. The photos, like this one taken in Des Moines, Iowa at 3 years old, are black and white, and they too are beginning to fade. My hope is to preserve this book, innocently titled "Things and Stuff," by scanning its pages and saving it digitally. I'm not sure how well this will work, but it's certainly worth a try. I've talked about doing what Jeanette suggests -- having it restored and/or preserved by an expert in this sort of thing -- but I've never actually gotten around to it, and I'm not so sure that I ever will. Scanning just seems more likely to me.

The title is ironic, in that the things found inside this scrapbook are so much more than mere stuff, and I don't just mean this from my entirely biased point of view as my mother's son. Rather, I believe, the more I study its contents, that this book is an important historical document. My mother was born in 1930, just at the start of the Great Depression. Her father worked extremely hard in the maintenance department on the Rock Island Railroad throughout those lean years, just to keep from going under, the way he'd seen so many of contemporaries do. It makes me wonder how much it cost him to dress his young child in this dress and baby shoes, what kinds of discussions he and my grandmother had to have about whether or not to buy her the doll in this picture, and if they ever considered selling the cast iron Jack Russell terrier doorstop, which I still have today.

As the pages progress, you find newspaper clippings declaring the end of World War II, when my mother was fifteen years old. ("Peace! Remember how it came on the night of August 14, 1945? No matter where it caught you -- on Times Square, Market Square or Main Street -- the big news made a noise like the birth of a bright new world.") Suddenly, the world had changed completely. A new era of prosperity came about, just as my mother was graduating from high school, in 1947. She had no way of knowing, of course, that exactly ten years later, that school, Little Rock Central High, would become the first integrated public high school in the south.

The book has many of the other usual items you'd find in this sort of compilation. In fact, my mother checked off the "rough outline" provided in the book's introduction:

• your pet dance programs
• goony telegrams
• menus from your favorite haunts
• place cards from fun parties
• dreamy birthday cards
• snapshots of friends and fiends
• gift and corsage cards
• items from the school paper
• funny valentines
• a page of autographs from the gang
• invitations

In addition to these items, there are some other interesting things, as well. There are pencil drawings my mother did of her teachers, parents and friends. There is evidence of various honors, including mention of "first place in the statewide short story contest of the Little Rock chapter of the National Society of Arts and Letters," "The Distinction of Being the Most Gorgeous Girl, awarded to Carol Runyan on the night of the Delta Phi Omega spring dinner dance, June 23rd in the year of our Lord, 1949," and her signed membership card to the National Junior Honor Society of Secondary Schools. There is a letter from a German pen pal and former soldier named Klaus, dated June 28th, 1948, in which he states, "I was wounded [in Holland] and came to a hospital for three weeks. Then I came to the Air Force headquarters in Berlin. I often saw there Herman Goering, Hitler and Goebbels." Enclosed with his letter is a studio portrait, date stamped April 1943, in which he looks like a boy, leaning forward, perhaps a little bit scared of what his future may hold. Like a movie star, he has signed it "As ever, Klaus." She has several letters from a sailor in the British Navy named Arthur, with whom she also corresponded.

I'm both thrilled and sad to learn new things about Carol as I flip through the decaying pages -- that she was a member of a Masonic girls' group called the Rainbow Girls, that she lived in Trenton, Missouri, Rock Island, Illinois, Des Moines, Iowa, and Molline, Illinois, all before the age of four. I say sad, only because I'd love nothing more than to be able to ask her about all these little gems I've uncovered here.

I believe what I'd like to do is this: I would like to contact someone in Little Rock, some sort of Historical Society archivist, and see what the interest would be in restoring and/or preserving the items in my mother's scrapbook. They might be able to help me find someone in my mother's family or group of friends who is still alive. And if that were the case, maybe I could have some of these questions answered after all...