I was born into a rural large extended family. My dad came from the farm and my mom was a city girl. We were considered middle class in this small town. Both my parents attended college, but WWII interrupted their educations and neither graduated. My maternal grandfather had been a school teacher, including teaching in a small teacher's college in Mountain View, Arkansas. My grandmother married him after she graduated from his senior class at Mountain View.
My dad taught school for a few years (back then a teacher did not have to have a degree), but stopped teaching when he couldn't earn a living on rural teachers wages. His brother and sister in law were teachers and became prominent educators in that area with both serving on the Board of Trustees of Arkansas College, now Lyon College.
My mother became very ill and nearly died when I was a small child, and it was several years before she gave birth to my sister and brother. I was seven and eight years old when they were born. I treasured my many cousins on the farm. There were three houses on my grandparents' farm, but within five years after the war was over, most of the family had moved up north to earn a living, and I missed them terribly. My big extended family had shrunk to a couple of families.
My family believed in honesty and hard work and instilled those values in all us cousins. In the 1950s women returned home from jobs they's occupied during the war to keep house and raise their families. My mother had worked in a federal government office that was under the direction of Rep. Wilbur Mills. Her sisters had worked elsewhere, Washington DC, the Little Rock Air Force Base, and one had been a WAVE, which was a division of the U.S. Navy. Likewise, mother's family scattered all over the country. Unlike my dad's family, her brothers decided to make careers of the military. So I never really got close to my mother's large family, but I felt lost without my uncles, aunts and cousins from the farm.
My dad was science minded, and he encouraged me to be a chemistry teacher, although women were encouraged to be stay at home mothers. In high school I discovered that my aptitude was in the arts, not the sciences, and to my dad's disappointment, I rebelled and went into broadcasting.
My family were honest hard working people whether it was tilling the land or teaching school. Education was important to them, although my paternal grandmother was illiterate. We kids were taught to be honest, not to steal, and to be good neighbors. My dad set a good example for us by giving away much of the vegetables and fruit he raised in his two big gardens.
At one time there was such a thing as a conservative Democrat, and that was what our family embraced. The schools were segregated when I was growing up, so I never had the opportunity to become acquainted with black children or their parents. However, as a child my mother lived in an integrated neighborhood (yes, there was such a thing in our Southern town), and played with African American youngsters. She taught us that prejudice was wrong and that although they fought just like children of the same race do, the very next day they, black and white, were out playing together again. My dad sometimes talked a little racist, but when a black family moved in next door to them, he became the first person in the neighborhood to welcome them and become friends.
My first marriage was to a rabid conservative Republican who wanted to become a John Bircher, but he was afraid to. Partly because his father was a politician, a Texas Democrat (now there's an oxymoron). My head was turned for a little while, but after our divorce I got out from under his influence and decided there was more to life than what he was spouting.
Working in the broadcast medium, I learned a lot that my sheltered rural life had not taught me. I've learned that many people get down on their luck and need help to get back on their feet. Not all black people are on welfare, and not all women on welfare are lazy welfare queens.
Contrary to what some people on HP think, I am not a flaming liberal, and I am pretty much middle of the road. I agree with a some things on the right, but I also learned that in today's society it is impossible to be totally self sustaining all the time. Sometimes we need to help our neighbor or ask for help ourselves. But when it comes to health choices and reproduction, bureaucrats are not qualified to make decisions. Those belong to the woman involved and her doctor. Government should stay out of personal medical decisions and people's bedrooms. That is the one area in which I consider myself liberal.
