A Penny a Kiss

by Judy McConnell

  * * *

  My parents, Juanita Fought and Harold Bradford, were born in 1903 and 1904 and grew up in a small town of three thousand huddled in the hills of West Virginia.

  The town of Pennsboro was a pinprick on a map. It was a typical southern town, I suppose, with a one-screen movie house above a five and dime, one hardware store, and a corner drugstore with a malt machine and stools. A railroad passed through the little town and young people in fur coats walked along the tracks on sunny Saturday afternoons. Its steep hills gave off the smell of warm oil and dust. In the early days, before paved roads, the streets of Pennsboro were covered with carefully laid out stones so the wheels of the horse-drawn buggies could roll through more easily. On Sundays, bells in the Methodist Church tower pealed brassy Winchester notes that echoed across the three downtown blocks and over the hills to the cemetery where scores of Bradfords, Yateses, Wileys, and Kennedys were buried beneath cement markers.

  Although Mother and Dad grew up together and certainly attended the same school, all we know about the early years is that Dad attended Mother’s tenth birthday party. After that the record is mute. When her mother died of breast cancer when Mother was twenty-two, she and her father moved to an apartment on the street below the Bradford house where Dad’s large family resided. The two families became fast friends.

  * * *

  As the oldest of seven, Dad was expected to help keep order in his family’s household under the silent, no-excuses command of his strict father. A photo of Granddad Bradford in his Shriner uniform shows him looking preacher-stern, with a grim pencil-straight mouth, a chalk-white Anglo-Saxon face and pin-point eyes, his expression grim and unyielding. Watching the way his brown and white pointer crept around his feet, lowering to its stomach, tail pulled between its legs, I became terrified of him myself. It didn’t help that Granddad Bradford rarely spoke, often turned his hearing aide off and walked around ramrod stiff without turning his head.

  From his high school days, Dad was driven with searing ambition. Being a summer clerk at the corner grocery was not for him. He was a go-getter, an instigator with a magic touch. Early on, Dad decided that Pennsboro was too small to hold his dreams and upon completing high school in three years, he made up his mind there were lands out there to conquer and he was just the guy to do it. Maybe he was influenced by his future father-in-law’s worldliness, or his own glimpses of higher distant things. Maybe swimming at the top of a small pond Dad caught whiffs of remote seas, propelled by his I-can-do-anything attitude.

  Although no one in the family had ever attended college, and Granddad Bradford, an insurance salesmen who traveled constantly, had neither the interest nor the finances to help, Dad set off in 1919 for the University of West Virginia. After completing his degree, he was determined to enhance his career by obtaining further credentials and the place to go was Harvard. He applied for a post-graduate program. An automatic letter of rejection shot back in the mail. Ignoring this response, he showed up at Cambridge and was denied admittance by the watchdogs at the registrar’s office. Undeterred, my father applied to higher authorities, showed up hat-in-hand and somehow talked his way in.

  With no money and no connections, Harold Bradford was admitted to Harvard Business School.

  Dad thought it may have been his ambition and humble, small town background that sold him to Harvard’s officials. Unknown candidates from remote West Virginia towns did not often show up at Harvard’s doorstep. Years later, as he related this story to me, I had to wonder if it was not his manner of earnest honesty that sold him.

  Dad explained that although as a student he was wooed by fraternities and invited to parties in Cambridge by the local society—the Bradford name was held in some esteem in that part of the country due to the Massachusetts Governor Bradford and others—he turned them down. With his meager funds he could not afford the wardrobe necessary to appear at the old-name homes and felt he did not fit in with the Ivy League standards upheld by the other students.

  One by one his siblings followed in his footsteps, going on to college and settling in Charleston, Clarksburg, and Huntington, West Virginia. There is not a Bradford remaining in Pennsboro today.

  After Harvard, Harold married his love, Juanita Fought, the daughter of a Pennsboro landowner and publisher of the Pennsboro News. Mother was twenty-two, beautiful and flirtatious. When Dad left for the University of West Virginia in 1919, the letters between the two glowed with passion and yearning. They dated in Baltimore, where Mother was attending Goucher College. As Dad built his career, they started a family and moved to a remote northern state. Their love endured, tightened by common roots, and they stayed together for fifty-seven years.

  Early in his career, Dad received unexpected publicity. The securities industry in West Virginia had for years evaded the National Association of Security Commissioners regulations, undercutting industry standards for their own advantage. In his position as security commissioner for West Virginia, Dad, president of the NASC in 1935, challenged the crooked bankers. Local newspaper articles Scotch-taped into our frayed family scrap book give various accounts of the determined efforts of a Harold K. Bradford to clean up the underhanded practices that had been tolerated in West Virginia for far too long. Reports of his efforts spread through the investment world, written up in papers like The Chicago American Financial and the Charleston Gazette. Al Quinn’s column, dated May 1935, described Dad’s promotion to the Federal Securities Commission in Washington, D.C..

  There goes Bradford.

  Today the soft-spoken young man who put a wallop in the erstwhile little-known securities department of the state auditor’s office will leave for Washington to take an important post with the Federal Securities Commission.

  That might be good news to crooked stock dealers who used to find a fertile field in West Virginia were it not for two facts. And one of them is Bradford, who will be in a position to keep an eye on the goings-on in the home state.

  When Simms took office in 1933, he looked over the field of candidates for a post with the federal Securities Exchange Com­mission. He reached into Clarksburg and got Bradford, the W.Va. cleanup man.

  Bradford went right to work. New legislation stiffening regulatory laws was passed. Some of the companies showed signs of rebellion. Bradford informed his boss that some of them were big names. Sims replied that none of them were bigger than the state of W.Va. If they had something to hide, let them hide it elsewhere.

  That was all Bradford needed to know.

  My father’s reputation paved the way to a post with the Security and Exchange Commission in Washington, D.C. Two years later an offer came all the way from Minneapolis, Minnesota, offering him an outstanding position in the growing company of Investors Syndicate (later Investors Diver­sified Services, then Ameriprise Financial). Mother claims they had to consult a map to find out where Minnesota was. Before long the two West Virginians from the sleepy south were transplanted to the cold north, and their children became bona fide Minnesotans.

  Dad’s arrival at Investors Syndicate was written up in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune. In those days, with the population of Minneapolis at three million, there was a small town interest in every tidbit of news. A photo of Mother and me appeared in the society section of the paper announcing our move from Washington, D.C. Mother was dressed up in blue velvet, and I in a print seersucker dress and yellow hair ribbon.

  Mother and me newly arrived in town, from the Minneapolis Star Tribune—1939.

  The picture showed only one of my two sides; the one Mother dolled up in cute print dresses, curls, lamé ribbons and Mary Jane’s for church, visiting, and other special occasions. The other side, the real one, a girl in jeans scrambling for frogs in a vacant lot, hair stringing, skinny arms smeared with dirt and smelling of hard-boiled eggs, was nowhere to be seen.

  The following year Mother’s picture was published unde
r the headline: Retrieve Retriever or I’ll Be in the Doghouse. The text explained that our Labrador retriever had run off, and Mom was in grave trouble as it was her husband’s hunting dog. The serene young woman in the picture didn’t look like she was in trouble at all, seated upright in the carved chair with her shoulders back, her hands poised gently on her lap, and her face smiling unselfconsciously into the camera. I guess the paper wanted a story, not just a picture of a wife.

  Over the years my parents kept in close touch with their southern birthplace. The Pennsboro News that came to our house regularly from West Virginia detailed card parties, engagements, out-of-town visitors, and described how Jake Myers’ three-legged pig adopted a blind chicken that had wandered off the Macgregor farm. Also in the News was a photo of Mr. and Mrs. Simpson’s Hoover wagon, a stripped Ford newly rigged and pulled by two horses, a form of transportation popular during the Depression when no one could afford gas.

  Every summer at 5:00 a.m., Dad corralled the family, grouchy and sleepy-eyed, into the car, and we set out over the 1,500 miles across country to West Virginia. My brother and I squirmed the entire two days, counting cows (pure blacks were two points), watching for the lineup of Burma Shave road signs, reading comic books, and arguing and punching each other to fill the long hours caged in the back seat. Such imprisonment was the most grueling thing I’d ever endured and I fidgeted, whined, and stared peevishly out the window at the dry, monotonous mounds of trees, streaks of wild grass, and barren fields. This, I imagined, was where life ended, the final destination, a wasteland, where somewhere we were to destined to land, desolate and alone.

  Our arrival in Pennsboro brought a flurry of festivities. Everyone knew each other. Grandma and Grandpa Bradford’s house was crowded with aunts, cousins and neighbors; there were dinners and cocktails on the front porch and spontaneous visits. Sometimes Mother and I climbed the steep hill across the street to drink lemonade on Lucy Wiley’s porch, or pass by the homes of Icky and Lena King, Mabel Kennedy, Creed and Katie Cling. People sat exposed on front porches in those days, and if you walked by chances were you would be invited in for a visit.

  While the grownups made merry, I spent hours nosing through the dusty attic above the garage where Granddad Bradford kept his black, 1920s Ford. It was in this attic that Granddad Bradford plied his taxidermist skills, which he had picked up on his own. Besides the stuffed heads of fox, deer, and a muskrat with green glassy eyes, the attic was loaded with hunting and fishing gear: khaki pants, plaid hunting shirts, and shotguns. There were trunks full of old photo albums and stacks of Victrola records. On one wall hung a photo of the four Bradford boys and their father: Granddad Bradford, Dad, Bert, Bob, and Tom, standing side by side dressed in hunting shirts and ankle boots, shotguns perched vertically in front of them like an infantry lineup.

  My favorite place was the swimming hole. I watched the older kids leap on a swing-rope, arc far out over the water, and drop flailing and shouting into the brown depths. When later in my teens I spent a summer in Pennsboro, this became my favorite pastime (along with playing casino with Grandma Bradford until midnight in the upstairs bedroom). I loved the breathtaking fling into the air and plunging into the dark mystery of the warm water below.

  * * *

  Mother, Dad, Harold, and me in Pennsboro, West Virginia—circa 1939.

  West Virginians don’t know the meaning of winter. When snow arrives, they act as if they’ve never seen it before. The schools are closed and cars tucked into garages. Even up north, no one was prepared for the Armistice Day Blizzard of 1940 that hit Minnesota and North Dakota. The mild weather had extended the hunting season and, in the early afternoon of November 11th, duck hunters out in their boats were removing their hunting jackets. The first threatening sign was swarms of ducks the hunters saw blackening the sky overhead. The winds were rising and gaining strength, and within hours reached eighty-five miles per hour. Thousands of birds scattered over the sky and funneled into the Mississippi River Valley, seeking protection from the swirling snow.

  Without warning, hundreds of duck hunters were trapped. The storm cut a 1,000-mile path through the middle of the country, killing forty-nine people in Minnesota and 150 nationwide. The storm didn’t let up until the next day, burying cars, rendering passenger trains snowbound, and leaving Minnesotans stranded throughout the state.

  When the blizzard hit, my mother was downtown shopping. As the snow drifts accumulated, she was barricaded, along with hordes of others, inside a department store. No one could get in or out. The snow fell all night in large crisp flakes that fluttered down from vast reservoirs hidden in the dark sky, dropping silently, relentlessly, insidiously. Hour after hour they came, accumulating in banks of up to twelve feet tall, up to the second stories of buildings, burying buses, creating white towers of shrubbery, and stretching across landscapes in glittering ocean waves. The next day bulky machines charged out into the stark brightness and plowed into snow banks, piling mounds that stretched across roads and walled driveways until there was no place left for the snow to go.

  Dad hung on the phone trying to locate Mother at her favorite stores and bombarded authorities to obtain information on the state of the downtown streets. We sat glued to the radio as the announcers revealed the extent of the unexpected storm and the total immobilization of transportation. Was Mother stranded in her car? Was she buried inside some store or filling station? Why hadn’t she called?

  My brother Harold and I sat motionless on the couch, not feuding for once. I held my chin while nursing mixed feelings of worry, curiosity, and expectation. We could see nothing out the snow-blasted windows, and the radio announced that throughout the Twin Cities driveways were blocked. Dad paced up and down, then called a number for the fifth time and still failed to get through.

  A tinge of fear edged along my spine. Something terrible must be going on. Dad walked over and spoke soothing words. He said if Mother didn’t contact us, it must be for a good reason. But he continued to stand by the phone table, twirling a pencil around one finger, balancing on one foot, then another. We waited, cut off, powerless, stranded like castaways on an isolated island. Finally, he sent Harold and me to bed and stretched out fully clothed on the couch next to the telephone.

  The following day about noon, Mother showed up at the front door. She looked frazzled and worn. Her wool coat drooped on one side with moisture, there were shadows under her eyes, and strands of hair hung over her forehead. In place of her hat she had a long neck scarf wrapped around her head with the ends tucked into the collar of her red coat. I wondered what happened to the hat.

  Behind my mother a strange man towered in the doorway. I stared at him. He looked like he might have materialized from a snow bank himself. His wool overcoat was moist and wrinkled as if slept in. The cold had burned his cheeks red, and under the brim of a fedora hat wide brown eyes looked out at Dad, Harold, and me, full of anxiety, gratitude, and evasion. I didn’t trust him.

  We got the story in a rush of words alternating between the two of them: they had been stranded at Young Quinlan’s along with a mass of other shoppers, and crowded into a back lounge where Mother had spent the night in a stiff wooden chair. She hadn’t slept a wink and didn’t know if she were coming or going. She calmed down as she spoke, even laughing as she described the stench of sleeping bodies and the piercing sound of clogged nostrils from those lucky enough to drift off. She glanced coquettishly at the stranger as if to corroborate her words.

  “Mr. Mathews was kind enough to drive me home, bless his heart,” she said. “He was standing next to me when the store manager announced that we would have to spend the night until the plows got though.” She turned to Dad who was standing immobile, taking all this in. “Thank heavens for this nice gentleman.”

  She laughed again, with a soft lilt, and unwrapped the scarf while her goulashes dripped clusters of snow on the hall rug.

  “We were
worried sick,” Dad said. To him this was no laughing matter. “The phones were out.”

  “Yes, indeed. No one was able to call in or out. We figured our families would hear it on the news,” Mr. Mathews replied.

  Dad reached out his hand to the stranger and thanked him for his assistance. The stranger’s hand was cocked and smooth, as if made from clay. In fact, it hardly looked human. It was then I noticed wet fabric in Mr. Mathew’s hand, which he now handed over to Dad.

  “Say, thanks for the protection. Nita let me use this to cover my head. Would have ruined my hat.” Now Mr. Mathews was all amiability, looking at Mother.

  “Nita is full of kindness,” said Dad dryly.

  “Oh, those are the pajamas I bought for Judy,” chimed Mother. “It was the least I could do. Judy won’t mind.” She gave another jingling laugh, accompanied by a wave of eyelids.

  Judy did mind. Who was this guy anyway? What right had he to be here? I eyed my pajamas, patterned with little daffodils and pink ferns, now stained and ruined. Mr. Mathews, who had brightened, continued telling his version of the previous night. Dad shifted from foot to foot, and I willed Mr. Mathews to go. He had no place here. He had no right to corral Mother when we needed her at home.

  I blamed Mr. Mathews for keeping Mother out all night, for her outlaw condition, and for the storm. The truth was I didn’t want to share her, even for her benefit. I was also angry at her for giving my new pajamas to this overbearing, over-smiling man. The next thing you knew he’d want to stay for supper. Well, there was just enough for us, so there!

  It wasn’t the storm that upset me, it was Mother. Flurries were raging in my stomach, ice tingling through my blood. Part of me wanted to protect her, to save her from the rages of the storm that had stolen her in the shape of this snow-coated demon with the scheming eyes. Part of me was furious at the amiability, the gratitude she lavished on him. I wanted to be lavished on. I knew like a biblical fact that she had only so much caring to dispense, and it was being used up on this stranger.