Will You Miss Me When I'm Gone?

by Mark Zwonitzer

  “It was really Grandma Carter who put an end to his drinking,” wrote June. “Daddy would sometimes go into the mountains and stay all afternoon. I remember him out late one night with Uncle Grant—both in their panama hats—and Daddy’s red eyes gave him away. It was then I realized that the terrible bottle I’d heaved away with great gusto had been his. Soon after that, Grandma Carter fixed Daddy good. She went into the mountains one day and came out pulling a big copper kettle hooked over the end of a stick, dragging it downhill all the way, calling, ‘Ezra, Ezra, come here, Ezra. I’ve found the dandiest copper kettle for making apple butter.’ She neglected to mention all the copper tubing that went with the rest of that still. But Daddy’s still days were over, and we had dandy apple butter that winter.”

  Maybelle’s ways, of course, were subtler. In the push-pull tug-of-war for Eck’s soul, Maybelle was the gentle pull. She wasn’t one to chide or lecture. But she had a way of making Eck understand what was expected, without actually saying it. He’d watch her take the girls to Mount Vernon Methodist Church, or dress them up and hand them off to Ma and Pa Carter and Aunt Sylvia for the trip up the hill to the church.

  He had to hear Maybelle’s cries of joy when one of her daughters was saved and announced her intent to be baptized. “My heart is so happy!” she’d shout through the house. But until deep into the 1930s, Ezra avoided Mount Vernon like the plague. He refused to cross its threshold because, among other things, it was a noisy place for a nervous man. “We had preachers who were called to preach, from the community,” June remembers. “Neither one of those had ever learned to read, but when they were saved, they could read the Bible. They would preach hellfire and damnation. There would be shouting in the church; there were women in the church who shouted ‘Praise the Lord!’ and ‘I’ll see You, Jesus!’ They would praise God and their hat would sometimes fall off the back of their head, and the only thing that would hold it on would be a little hat pin. And that little hat would flump up and down. People would come to the mourners’ bench and get on their knees and grieve and ask God to forgive them until this conviction they had on their hearts was lifted. And when God lifted that, it was as though the top came off that church, and the whole church would be shouting and singing!”

  It must have sounded like an army of Anitas to poor nervous Eck. Even so, he began moving toward the church, literally. On Sundays, he’d follow the congregation up the hill to Mount Vernon but stand outside underneath a window, listening to services. “Once Eck went to church revival when there was snow on the ground,” remembers Ruby Parker. “And he crawled under the church and laid there listening to the sermon, but he would not come in.” All of a sudden, one Sunday, Ezra Carter entered the church, accepted Christ, and was baptized. And he had made Maybelle’s heart truly happy.

  Of course, Eck being Eck, he went about religion in his way. To begin with, he started reading up on it. Along with his books about science and electricity and aviation, Eck began adding to his library religious tracts from the publishing house in Dayton, Tennessee. But despite his born-again status, he was still the same old Eck: nervous, busy, prideful, and competitive. (In fact, he quickly collected the most religious books in the Valley.) He was also, as always, generous in his way. As the Depression settled deeper and deeper in the Valley, Eck’s father, Bob Carter, intensified his prayers. “I can remember Grandpa Carter putting his walking stick in the air and standing up and praying,” said Helen. “During the Depression he’d pray for all the poor people, pray for better times.” Eck was still not comfortable in that raucous church, and even when he was there, he was too shy to start making speeches before God or any man. But he was like a one-man New Deal in the Valley; what money he had was on the circuit. He ran his grist mill on Saturdays, grinding corn for anybody who needed it, and for the neediest, he forgave them the 10 percent toll he usually took. And he was always inventing new work, and new ways to pay wages to the hard-luck Valley men who had little more than a small tobacco crop and an occasional government handout that many refused to take.

  Eck had plenty of ideas about work to be done, and he had money to pay workers. He’d hire some local men to haul river rock up through the gap to wall off his new basement and undergird the house, or rent extra land and send a platoon of young men out to work the fields. He even tried to conduct a little agriculture on his land way on top of the mountain. Of course, there was almost no way to get there. So he bought himself a bulldozer, and his crew scraped out a new road—which turned out to be such a triumph that Eck could drive his new Packard all the way to the top. The farm itself was less successful. In fact, at first it was less a farm than a forest. Eck’s crew had to start by clearing a field. The way his nephew Ford McConnell remembered it, they were literally pitching timbers off the side of the mountain until they finally got a workable plot and planted acres of beans. “We didn’t take a single bean,” Ford said of the adventure. “I guess it was too dry up there. . . . But we didn’t know beans about beans.”

  Ezra didn’t have extra beans that year, but he did have a bulldozer, which he put to use clearing his front yard of rock and ledge. And when he was done with his yard, well, he still had a bulldozer. “Then he went around and moved the neighbors’ yards around, getting the rocks up out of their yards,” said Anita Carter. “He just couldn’t stand rocks.” All the while, Eck was keeping the Valley in coin, and he was an equal-opportunity employer. “There were men who were known in the Valley as chicken thieves,” says Vernon Bays. “And he took them because nobody else would hire them. Eck was the most generous-hearted man I’ve ever known.”

  But for Eck’s grandest plan, he needed all the manpower he could get. He was always fretting over his feeble creek-driven power plant. “Just about every big rain that came, that dam would go out,” Maybelle once told her friend Dixie Hall, “and I remember one day we were in Bristol and my husband says, ‘Oh, we’ve got to get home; my dam’s fixin’ to go out, and we’re up here in Bristol.’ Well, we took off like mad, trying to beat that storm home. I think he just hit the high places [on the road], and I was scared to death down those crooked roads. When we got there, sure enough, it had washed out, clean to the bottom of the hill, and we had no lights.”

  “Every time it rained, the lights would get real dim,” says June, “and he’d cuss that thing and he’d say, ‘I’ve got to have a bigger power plant.’ Well, he dammed up the blamed Holston River.” Now, the nearest spot on the Holston was across the Knob, and well over a mile from Eck’s front door. But he was undeterred.

  “My father owned a sixty-acre farm we referred to as the ‘River Farm,’ ” says Fland Bays’s son Vernon, “and Eck went down there and put in a turbine wheel under the water.”

  “He paid Dad twenty-five dollars for the rights to put that turbine wheel in there,” says F.M. Bays Jr.

  Once the wheel was secured to the bottom of the Holston, Eck’s crew had to sink big twenty-foot-high electrical poles along the entire route from the turbine engine back to his house, then string the electrical cable. But with help, he got it done. “Ezra was going to furnish electricity to himself and us,” says Vernon. “He put in a transformer and ran lines to his house. He was coming to our home with a line when the Appalachian Power Company, of Bristol, bought him out.”

  Eck drove a hard bargain with the power company, a bargain as singular as Eck, and just as odd. “When the power company came through, Dad told them he wanted all the appliances from the World’s Fair in Chicago—what was that, 1933?” said Anita Carter. “He said, ‘I want all the electrical appliances that were displayed at the World’s Fair. And they said, ‘Oh, we can get you some of those.’ He said, ‘You don’t understand. I don’t want [replicas]. I want the ones that were at the World’s Fair.’ And he got them. I don’t remember not having a dishwasher.”

  “Eck come over here one day and he told my dad, ‘I’ve got some extra poles,’ ” says Clyde Gardner. “ ‘I’m going to sell it out to the TVA. Hau
l those poles up there, and we’ll put the line in and it won’t cost you nothing.’ We hauled them up with horses. That’s how we got electricity.”

  * * *

  It wasn’t so hard for Eck to be generous. It was as if bad times never even scratched Ezra Carter. The Depression didn’t set him or his family back a bit; in fact, it had the effect of separating them further from their neighbors. They just weren’t like everybody else. Some Sundays after church, Eck put Bach or Beethoven or Mozart on his phonograph and piped it out into the Valley over the big ballyhoo speakers he’d attached to the front porch. Even without indoor plumbing, Eck Carter’s home was the finest spread in all Maces Springs. His daughters were the best-dressed, best-scrubbed, best-fed girls in all the Valley. Once a week the light-bread truck came to Neal’s, and Maybelle would press two nickels into June’s hand—one for bread and one for salad dressing—and ship her off to the store. To Janette, every meal at Eck’s house looked like Sunday dinner. Maybelle always had young women in her house to help with the cooking and cleaning and baby-sitting. Ruby Parker was around quite a bit, and Ruth Hensley practically lived there, doing household chores for a dollar a day.

  For her part, Maybelle could concentrate on the sweeter things in life, such as music, or learning to ride a motorcycle, or dessert. She’d make homemade candy—chocolate fudge and Seafoam, a confection of boiled syrup and egg whites that practically floated above the table. In the kitchen, as in the recording studio, Maybelle was particular. “She was always telling her help what to do,” says Ruby Parker, “showing us how to do things properly.” So even when Maybelle had to be away recording or performing, things were done just so, and meals didn’t suffer . . . unless maybe Ezra decided he’d cook, which he effected by making a heaping broth of every vegetable, meat, and marrow substance he could find in the kitchen. “Sons-a-bitchin’ Stew,” he called it, though rarely in front of Maybelle. “Now, Daddy!”

  By 1938 Eck’s daughters were like royalty in the Valley. Helen, June, and Anita knew no lack in their own lives, except what they saw around them. When they got new school clothes every year, their cousins might get their hand-me-downs. But none of the cousins seemed to be bothered. In fact, when June’s cousin and best buddy, Fern Carter, got a secondhand coat from her one winter (Fern’s dad gave June a nickel for it), Fern was thrilled. “I was living in the Little Valley and walking a mile and a half to Maces Springs School every day. So that coat came in handy.” Some of the cousins might also have to stay back a year in school so that they could start with a younger sibling and share a set of textbooks. Who could afford two new sets? Well, Ezra Carter could. And in the fall of 1938, things were only getting better for his family.

  The radio job came out of nowhere, but Eck was all for it. An adman in Chicago named Harry O’Neill made the offer. His client, the Consolidated Royal Chemical Corporation, would buy time on the biggest border radio station of them all, near Del Rio, Texas, and the Carter Family would do two shows a day, for six months. They’d be paid seventy-five dollars a week, each, with six months of paid vacation. For appearing on XERA, O’Neill was guaranteeing almost four thousand dollars a year, per person. Eck was still riding the mail rails, and Helen and June were in school, but the opportunity was too good to pass up. So they started making arrangements. Maybelle’s mother and Eck’s sister Sylvia agreed to move into the house to take care of the older girls, while Anita, who was just five, could go to Texas with A.P., Sara, and Maybelle. By October of 1938, the Carter Family and little Anita had arrived in Del Rio, Texas, and were met at the city limits by a welcome sign that reflected the spirit of Val Verde County’s first great law-giver, the renowned Judge Roy Bean: YOU’RE IN GOD’S COUNTRY, SO DON’T DRIVE LIKE HELL THROUGH IT.

  * * *

  Soon after, the Carters were invited to the home of XERA’s founding owner, Doctor John Romulus Brinkley. For worldly goods and hired hands, this man put Eck in the shade. The renovation of the Brinkley estate was so grand that its completion had transformed plain old Hudson Street into Del Rio’s own “boulevard,” for what else could the dustiest Texan call a thoroughfare lined with palm trees, an ornamental iron fence, and a row of five-globe lights that burned through the night? The day of their visit, the Carters drove onto the sixteen-acre grounds through a big arched gate that held the sign DOCTOR BRINKLEY. From the circular drive, the Carters could see Doctor’s flourishing greenhouse (“Just a Little Bit of Heaven,” he called it); his two fountains shooting thirty-foot-high sprays of water (at night the sprays were illumined with colored lights, all controlled by a single General Electric switchboard in the front hallway of the house); and his prize statuary: a marble copy of Three Graces and a bronze reproduction of Romulus and Remus. Doctor had forked over more than two thousand dollars for the bronze alone. And he delighted in telling visitors how he’d commissioned it while on his European tour of 1937. The statues were the work of Italian masters, he said, Chirazzi and Frilli (late of Florence and Naples). Even in Doctor’s uninflected and mangled pronunciation, the sound of the sculptors’ names alone was jaw-dropping impressive. Behind the main house were a tennis court and a swimming pool. The pool had state-of-the-art underwater lighting, a ten-foot-high diving tower, and was surrounded by palm trees, evergreen shrubbery, and a dozen Italian cypress trees. Doctor had successfully transplanted the palms in the Texas desert by burying four-hundred-pound blocks of ice at the roots. Inside the greenery, the pool was ringed by a ten-foot-wide tiled walkway. Doctor had kept a team of a dozen tilers busy on the property for months. The year before the Carters arrived in Texas, Doctor had nearly two dozen people on the payroll at the mansion alone—cooks, gardeners, tilers, masons, laborers. A chauffeur looked after a fleet of cars, the jewel of which was his sixteen-cylinder fire-red Cadillac limousine, with a “Brinkley” hood ornament and JRB scrolled into each polished stainless-steel hubcap. Then there was the staff at the radio stations and hospitals, his yacht crew, complete with a chef and a wireless operator, and the pilot for the Lockheed Orion monoplane, which rested comfortably inside the Brinkley Hangar at his airfield outside town.

  Inside the house, the Carters could see Doctor’s collection of Italian mirrors, Swiss grandfather clocks. There were chairs from the Holy Land, Persian rugs, a six-hundred-year-old Chinese tapestry, a Reuter electric pipe organ. In his vivid and seminal biography of Brinkley, Gerald Carson described the living room thus: “From a single vantage point a visitor could see six photographs of Doctor Brinkley, including the top eye-catcher of them all, illuminated with the soft glow of its own indirect lighting. It was five feet tall, hand-colored, showing Doctor full figure in his naval uniform, with gorgeous epaulets, the tunic laced with gold braid, bicorne hat and ceremonial sword.” There was also a photograph of Doctor in a more modest uniform of the sea, in front of a gaggle of admirers, keeping a proprietary grip on the back fin of a 788-pound fish that hung limp beside his yacht. He claimed that this catch was a North American record, eclipsing the mark of western writer and adventurer Zane Grey. Two Octobers previous, he had paid Knicklers Studio fifty-eight dollars for enlarging and hand-coloring the photograph, which he referred to as Tuna Fish and Self.

  Had Eck been there, he might have done cartwheels amid such splendor. Here were rooms paneled floor to ceiling in bird’s-eye maple, and others in oak; cedar closets big as a bedroom; a dining-room set carved out of Panama cedar. There was a Holy Bible, bound in wood, with the inscription “Bought by me in Bethlehem.” But it was the systems of the house that would have awed Eck. There was a furnace the size of his entire basement, a gas-fired Sunbeam made by the Fox Furnace Company. The unit didn’t just heat the house in winter; it also blew cold air through the very same set of ducts, providing a cooling system equal to the hottest day of a Texas summer.

  Five-year-old Anita would never forget that day, for nothing she’d seen—not even the huge Galápagos sea turtles out by the Brinkley fountains—had prepared her for Doctor’s actual person. Nothing had prepar
ed her for the small, goateed, bespectacled man, led ever so slightly by his round paunch, dressed in a tailored three-piece suit, with his numerous diamonds asparkle even in the soft glow of his indirect lighting, as he descended his grand marble winding staircase. “He came down the stairs and he had a monkey on his shoulder,” she remembered, “with its tail around his neck. I certainly had never seen anything like that.”

  “I met Doctor Brinkley once when I was down in Del Rio,” Joe Carter says. “You could tell he was upper crust.”

  Tuna Fish and Self—Doctor Brinkley with a prize catch (Whitehead Memorial Museum)

  Coy and Sara in Texas (Carter Family Museum)

  XERA

  Like his person, Brinkley’s radio station was a dramatic presence. XERA was a five-hundred-thousand-watt powerhouse unlike any radio station that came before it, and unlike any that has come since. For the Carter family, that station would be a metaphysical being like unto God, part natural phenomenon, part celestial; power, providence, and fate all rolled into one. XERA was a giant pinwheel whistling in the Texas desert; by sheer centripetal force, the station would suck in the entire family, but as that force diminished, the Carters were released into a set of separate hurtling trajectories that—for good and ill—none would escape for the rest of their days. That transformation owes much to John Romulus Brinkley, for station XERA would never have existed without his singular capacities.

  Doctor Brinkley was an American success story suited to his times. When the Carters met him, Brinkley was not only fabulously rich but as famous as a movie star. He had overcome humble beginnings—a lack of breeding, of inheritance, of formal medical education—to become one of the nation’s most successful businessmen and best-known surgeons. “For a poor boy, up from barefeet in Jackson County, North Carolina,” Brinkley liked to say, “this, dog me, is something.” Even at the pinnacle of his career, while insisting on being called Doctor, Brinkley never forgot where he came from. And he didn’t want anybody else to forget, either. Brinkley was a champion of the common people, he said, and it was only in their service that he flourished. Dr. Brinkley was a man of the people in the same generously accommodating mold of the other “Great Commoner” of the day, Louisiana’s Huey Long. Long was once taken to task by the Louisiana legislature over his extravagant spending at New York City’s finest restaurants, nightclubs, and brothels. At a hearing, he calmly explained to Louisiana legislators that he wasn’t spending the taxpayers’ money for himself. He’d visited New York once before, he told them, as a poor country hick, and was happy enough staying at the YMCA and eating in cheap diners. But on this trip, said the governor, he had been representing the people of the great state of Louisiana. “And the people of Louisiana,” he said, “deserved the finest.”