RECALLING REBA MAE

Reba Mae on her 50th wedding anniversary

 May is my mother Reba Mae’s month. Her birthday and Mother’s Day are within a few short days of each other. I began writing this on the eve of her birthday. The idea was to publish it on her day, May 16^th. But as often happens with a piece like this, it took a lot more thought and effort than expected, when the idea first popped into my head.

She would have been one hundred two this year. And she would have been aghast. She was already wondering “how she’d gotten so damned old” when she was seventy. In July, it will be twenty-two years since her death. I’ve always wished she had decided to stay a little longer.

It’s not like she was vain, though. I mean regarding the age thing. On the contrary, she was self-conscious, even self-effacing. She thought of herself as “so big and ugly and awkward” and felt that small-boned, petite women like my wife were really fortunate. She said she always felt like “such a big, clumsy, German cow” around them. At social gatherings, which she was loath to attend, she sought to “stay out of the way,” and blend with the wallpaper, unless she could be of use in the kitchen, in which case she would withdraw to that safe haven and remain there for as long as possible.

Her shyness garnered her a reputation—in general but particularly in my father Whitie’s patently verbose family—as “tight-lipped”. As in, “a tight-lipped kraut,” coming as she did from the Weber-Lenninger clan. They were hardy rural folk who were more prone to action than to talk. They knew what they knew and the rest was “none of their damn business.” Despite that fact, if someone managed to coax her out of her self-conscious trance, they would be surprised to find a woman with a fun-loving, even zany bent, somebody highly articulate, with a sharp wit and often even sharper tongue.

Age 18.

Reba Mae was beautiful. I mean that literally. Not because she was my mother. I mean, I’m not being a dutiful son here, not like some guys I’ve known who would say their mother was beautiful even if she looked like Winston Churchill. I’m saying it as  someone who has always been able to deeply appreciate the artistic and aesthetic value of beautiful women. Usually not the ones widely touted as beautiful—certainly not the plastic Barbies—but the ones with a rare natural beauty, with uncommon traits, and the ones whose inner beauty forms an inseparable part of their outer attraction.

She was, I suppose, a clear product of the rural Ohio of her time. A mix of the German and Scots-Irish bloods that prevailed in the state back then, but, according to accounts from her mother’s family, with a dose of Native American blood to temper her European genes. She put her prominent cheekbones, thick, dark hair, and almond-shaped eyes down to that heritage. Those eyes were indescribable. On her driver’s license they figured as “grey”, But that doesn’t begin to describe their color, which I can best depict as “varied”. They changed with the light, and the conditions of the surroundings—sometimes grey, sometimes green, sometimes blue and sometimes almost violet.

Reba Mae and older brother
Gene (right) with Father and
mother (Vern and Myrtle), and 
two younger siblings, Ken and
Marilyn

That Native streak was said to come from Great-Grandpa Job Cavinder’s side of the family. Although proud of it, no one in the family that I know of has ever produced proof of our ties to the Indians, nor is anybody very sure of the tribal origin of our alleged predecessors. But the most plausible story concocted so far has pointed to the possibility that Job’s mother, “Zura” (called that because she hailed from Missouri), who was a Kennedy, may have been the daughter of a Native American mother and an Irish immigrant father.

Whatever the case may be, Reba Mae ascribed to that family theory and said it was the reason for the apparent “Indian traits” in her Aunt Ruth, her Uncle Jesse, her brother Gene, and even her own mix of Teutonic and supposedly Native features. Whatever the case might be, it was a winning combination.

As I say, Reba Mae was of rugged rural stock. Folks on both her father’s side and her mother’s farmed for a living. Her father was a first-generation American whose parents immigrated from Germany. As his daughter,  Reba Mae grew up in the rural Ohio of the nineteen-twenties and thirties, when there were few frills. Even fewer since she was raised on a series of three tenant farms that her father operated for a major local landholder, also of German descent, Charles Herbst.

Oddly enough—thanks to relatively advanced telecommunications in the two counties (Auglaize and Shelby) where the farms were located—her family always had a phone, but never had electricity or running water until they moved to town when she was a teen. The toilet was “out back”, water came from a well through a handpump in the kitchen, meals were cooked on a wood-burning range, baths were taken in a tub in the kitchen with water heated on the woodstove, and Reba Mae did her homework by the light of a coal oil lamp.

That spartan lifestyle made Reba Mae cringe at any suggestion of things “rustic” throughout her adult life. She coveted modern conveniences and if she was traveling, she wanted good hotels with comfortable beds and proper linen sheets. The word “camping” didn’t form part of her vocabulary. And she found nothing “charming” about the log cabins we stayed in when we vacationed on Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, where she was, of course, the only one who knew how to build a proper fire in the pot-bellied stove.

Despite that, she remained in intimate touch with nature, and made sure that her children developed a deep appreciation of their natural surroundings. She knew the names of every tree, plant and flower, and those of the many birds of rural Ohio, and she knew the traits and habits of a wide range of animals, both wild and domesticated.

Reba Mae (right of the teacher in the second row
from the top), with her class at the one-room
Lennox School in Auglaize County

Reba Mae was a good student and, like her mother, loved to read. She was an assiduous patron of the Auglaize County Library from the time she moved to town, and for her entire life after that. But she also frequently joined book clubs and loved to visit bookstores. In her latter years, she read upwards of fifty books annually.

Before she moved to town and enrolled in Wapakoneta’s Blume High School, she received her education at a series of one-room schoolhouses. These were typically sturdy red-brick buildings about the size of a small family home. Prior to the advent of regular school bus routes, schools went to the children rather than the children traveling to schools. With the proliferation of buses, bigger more centralized schools could be built and rural children could be bused to them. But from the nineteenth to the early twentieth centuries, the one-room schoolhouse was the solution for ensuring that rural children received basic, compulsory education.

Back then, there were about two hundred one-room schoolhouses in Auglaize County alone. The idea was for schoolkids to never be more than two miles away from one. Most kids made their way to class hiking cross-country or on horseback. Reba Mae was one of them, depending on the season, either walking with her older brother Gene, or riding her Shetland pony to school.

She loved school, and excelled in her studies. Today it almost seems incredible that anyone could get even a basic education in a school with a single classroom, where one teacher taught six to eight grades. But when Reba Mae entered Blume High School in town, her teachers and fellow students were amazed to find that she had no catching up to do. She was always grateful to the incredible rural schoolteachers she’d had, such as Miss Yvonne Cannon or Miss Jessie Rue Crawford, women who would still be teaching in Wapakoneta City Schools by the time Reba Mae’s own children were in grade school.

Reba Mae got saddled up young with a husband and family. Married at nineteen, her new husband off at war, she took on the task of saving for their future. She waitressed at first, taking a job at Lyman’s Restaurant—which would later become a self-service cafeteria—in downtown Wapakoneta. But she eventually got a better-paying job in the defense industry, working on the line at the Tank Depot in nearby Lima, Ohio, where the M3 Sherman tank, the M5 light tank, and the M26 Pershing tank were all being manufactured for use in World War II’s European Theater. 

It didn’t take long for her bosses to figure out that Reba Mae was smart, industrious and meticulous. And before she knew it they had promoted her to inspector. Very shortly, she was promoted again, this time to line supervisor. All very daunting for an inexperienced young woman who was barely twenty years old when she stopped being a simple line operator.

According to the journal she started keeping in her senior years, the responsibility of the supervisory post got to be too much for her. Especially the part of it that involved giving orders to her peers. Ever shy and self-critical, far from making her feel empowered, ordering her workmates around made her feel embarrassed and uncomfortable. She apparently asked to be put back on the line as a regular assembly worker but her request was refused. She was needed where she was and her bosses had every confidence in her.

So she quit, went home to her parents-in-law’s house, and tried to figure out what her next move would be. She had secretarial and bookkeeping skills. Perhaps she could find a job like that.

But before she even started her job-hunt, her immediate boss from the Tank Depot showed up at her door. She was sorely needed at the plant, he told her. She had to come back. Her country needed her, and so did the boys overseas. Besides, he told her, there was a new assignment waiting for her. He couldn’t tell her about it, except that it would mean more money and a higher position on the organizational chart. She would be briefed if she took the job, but the details were top secret until she decided.

Known as "the duck" this was the secret
amphibious craft Reba Mae was to work on for D-Day

He argued so convincingly that she said she would  take the job under one condition: that it didn’t involve giving orders to others. No, no, he told her. It wasn’t a supervisory job, but a key post in a top-secret project, in an isolated sector of the plant. According to her journal, however, two weeks after taking the post, she was already being placed in charge of specific production teams, something to do with weather-stripping and waterproofing. But it was too late to back out now. Reba Mae’s guiding rule was that, no matter how tough the going got, the worst thing you could be, once you’d made a commitment, was a quitter.

It is noteworthy that, even half a century after the war, Reba Mae refused to write in her journal about what the top secret project had entailed. She had taken an oath, had been sworn to secrecy, and for her, a secret was just that. If you had given your word not to reveal something, you died with whatever it was, and didn’t tell another soul. It didn’t matter that it had already come out in the post-war era that the super-secret project the Tank Depot had been working on was the building of advanced amphibious assault vehicles, specially designed for the D-Day landing. It might not be a secret anymore, but if it wasn’t, it was not Reba Mae who was going around blabbing about it. Loose lips sink ships, as they say. Her code was like that of the Mafia: two people could have a secret…as long as one of them was dead.

Reba Mae with Darla and Dan

From this sort of responsibility as a defense worker at a very tender age, when the war ended, she was out of a job. It was, “Thank you for your service, but the men will take over now.” But she took all of that sense of responsibility and put it into creating a home for her Army veteran husband and the three children that they would produce over the course of the next eight years.

Reba Mae was, obviously, a Taurus. Taurus, the bull. And she lived up to the name with her quiet bull-headedness. She was quietly stubborn and serenely passive-aggressive. And once she had made up her mind about something, there was no veering her off her path. The only one who could manipulate and control her was Whitie. And he did, consistently.

When we were still young enough to get too big for our britches, she was, like a lot of mothers of her time—obviously, she had been brought up that way as well—a great believer in the old adage, “spare the rod and spoil the child.” You always had fair warning, but when she picked up her yardstick, you knew she meant business and it was often too late to “fall on the mercy of the court.”

Our family (Whitie in the rear), Reba
Mae, Jim, Darla and Corky in the middle, 
Dan in the foreground

After a certain age, my older sister Darla had grown too smart to ever merit a whipping. My little brother Jim (Dennis to his friends) was just too cute and simpatico to spank. Eight years younger than Darla and five years younger than I, he was clearly, like a lot of youngest children, her favorite. He was, in fact, everybody’s favorite—a towheaded little guy that was a ringer (in looks and character) for the comic book personality Dennis the Menace, and whom my sister once described as “weighing thirty-five pounds for like four years.” So more often than not, his mischief (of which there was plenty) prompted laughter, while mine (as someone who was anything but cute—equally well-described by Darla as “never a child, always like a little old man”) tended to generate irritation. 

But as I say, at a certain age, when we got too old to cane and old enough to reason, her tactic changed. For me, it was when I grew taller than she was in about a year’s time, and when she once whacked me with the yardstick and it snapped in two. I laughed so hard that it infuriated her, and she grabbed her broom instead. And still, I laughed, so it was obvious I’d outgrown corporeal punishment—unless Whitie decided to dispense it.

I was always respectful (scared spitless) of Whitie’s temper. Darla once said she never was scared “except when he moved really quickly.” That’s a good description, because once Whitie started moving like greased lightning, it was too late to get out of his way. And he remained dangerous like that for most of his life. When he was seventy and I was forty-four, I once said, “Y’know Dad, I must be one of the very few forty-something men who aren’t very sure they could whip their old man of seventy.”

“Oh hell, Dan,” he said, “you’re a helluva lot stronger than I am.”

“Maybe,” I said, “but you’re faster, and you’re meaner.” 

Anyway, from that time on, Reba Mae developed a wonderfully passive-aggressive way of making us do what she wanted us to. Whenever we hinted that we might like to do something that sounded like fun but that could be construed as morally, socially, or ethically questionable, she never prohibited us from doing whatever it was, never yelled, never grounded us. Instead, she would say, “I know I never have to worry about you kids, because I know you’ll always do the right thing.”

But what was the right thing? Was everything that was fun the wrong thing? Ah, there was the rub. If we went to her, it wasn’t for advice, it was for approval. And she knew that, whatever iffy thing we were thinking of doing, we already knew what the right thing to do was.

With Jim, well, it didn’t take. That boy was so full of life, and so free of convention, that he was going to do whatever the hell he was going to do and consequences be damned. In short, he was the healthiest of us all with regard to living life on his own terms as a teen and youth.

But for me, as well as for Darla, that dictum of Reba Mae’s weighed on us like a battleship’s anchor. Our mother was the person we most respected in the world, and knowing that she was expecting us “to always do the right thing,” made every secret adventure either of us chose to realize a source of profound guilt that was almost equal in the balance to whatever fun we derived from it. And that guilt followed us right into adult life, so that, at the backs of our minds, we imagined Reba Mae looking on as we did whatever we were doing.

I’m sure that helped me, at least, to be a somewhat better person, since there was no ethical code higher than Reba Mae’s. But it didn’t help me to be freer, or to live life as it came without regard for the moral consequences of my actions. It put a self-activated bridle on me that reined me in whenever I sought to step out of bounds. It made me a highly responsible person, but played hell with my narcissistic dream of living the artist’s life.

Still, it wasn’t like she was imposing anything on me that she hadn’t imposed on herself. For the decade that I made a living as a professional musician, she used to always say that she just didn’t know where I got my musical talent. “It sure didn’t come from me,” she would say. But that wasn’t true.

The Andrews Sisters

Maybe she didn’t think I was listening when I was a little boy and she told me how much she loved the music of the swing era, and how she’d dreamed of being in a group like the Andrews Sisters, a trio of three saucy chicks singing in the coolest of harmonies. She had a huge collection of 78rpm records with every major swing band and singer of her time. And she indeed had a nice voice and a good ear.

But if she felt like singing along with her records or the radio, she always kept it to a quiet hum and a random lyric, because she was, rightfully, afraid of the derision of her children, or comments from Whitie like, “What the hell are you so happy about?”  To which she would answer, “I don’t know. Just stupid I guess.”

Over the course of the rest of her life, Reba Mae was a mother, restaurant manager, school cafeteria cook, insurance agency secretary, and law firm office manager. She had a good and artistic eye for home décor, and always dreamed of starting an interior decorating business of her own, but it was a dream that was never to come to fruition. It was that enormous amounts of her energy were taken up by a consistent labor of love. Taking care of Whitie.

For more than forty years after returning from that war, Whitie suffered from what was known back then as “manic depression”. Reba Mae was always there to try and rein him in when he hit impossible highs and to attempt to catch him when he fell to abysmal lows. But it was a tough way to live. When a member of the family has severe mental health issues, the whole family suffers from the illness. And that was certainly the case at our house. But it was Reba Mae who lived it every minute of every day.

She followed him through a series of psychiatrists and a series of hospitalizations over the course of decades. It created a kind of symbiosis that they were both powerless to break. It locked them into a small, dark, secret world that only the two of them could comprehend. A world that shut out others including their children. In the end, they came upon a psychiatrist who was willing to call what Whitie had “a chemical imbalance”, and to keep him in a drug-based state of mild but tolerable depression for the rest of his life. By then, the psychiatrist had prescribed a “happy pill” for Reba Mae as well.

Whitie and Reba Mae, sixty years together

When Whitie died at eighty, after a prolonged illness, it was at home, alone with Reba Mae. I’ve often wondered what their last words a to each other were. He had always warned her that she couldn’t die before he did, because he wouldn’t be able to get along without her. His death seemed to release her to finally give in to her fatigue of years and die herself. Shortly before she passed away, six months after my father’s passing,  Reba Mae told me that she wasn’t sure how to go on any longer. She said that she “had been Whitie” for so long that she no longer knew how to find Reba Mae.

After a few months of progressively crueler illness, she was released into my brother Jim’s care at a rest home. Her stay was quite brief. Darla and Jim were with her when she died. All she wanted to do was rest. When Jim, her favorite, her baby boy, tried to talk quietly with her on her death bed, her last words to him were, “Just leave me alone!”

Clearly, she was ready to move on.

She seldom comes to me in dreams anymore. When she does, she’s quiet and aloof. She has nothing to say to me. I moved far away, and she moved on.

I try not to dwell on these things. It seems like such a waste of a smart, creative spirit, and it breaks my heart.

But then I remember the good times. A sunny kitchen where I watched her bake and ice beautiful Christmas cookies. A road trip on which we all played My Father Owns A Grocery Store and ended up laughing until our sides hurt. She and Whitie dressed up in clothes like Roy Rogers and Dale Evans to go square-dancing with The Spinning Eights. Her cutting up with the girls at the sandwich and coffee shop she and my father owned together, or joshing good-naturedly with the men who came in to get their morning joe there. My mother and little-boy-me planting a garden together. Reba Mae pruning her roses. Everybody but Whitie working together to redecorate a big, beautiful house we once lived in on the main street in town. Reba Mae teaching me how to pitch a ball. Reba Mae, getting up at the crack of dawn on wintry Sunday mornings to cheerfully take me on my paper route when temperatures were just too low, and the snow just too deep for me to deliver my newspapers on my bike. Reba Mae surreptitiously slipping me her list for the liquor store whenever I was home because it embarrassed her to go in herself. She, Whitie, my wife and I driving down to Tennessee together for a weekend at Opry Land. Reba Mae and I shopping together, lunching together, having pie and coffee together. My mother and I sitting at the kitchen table, a pot of coffee between us, swapping stories about people and events in our small town, she, instilling in me my love of books, my love of storytelling, and my penchant for chronicling the past of personalities the rest of the world had never heard of.

I think about her almost every day. But never more than in May.