Will You Miss Me When I'm Gone?

by Mark Zwonitzer

  That was the least of the losses. Stella was left behind in Linden, California, after the growing season of ’34 to marry one of the scions of the profitable DeVincenzi ranch. She was just eighteen when she got engaged, and as the wedding neared, Stella realized she wasn’t ready to be a wife. But the rings were bought, the wedding was planned, and she didn’t want to break her fiancé’s heart. Besides, if she married, it would mean one less person for her parents to worry about. So Stella said “I do” to give her parents a small break.

  After Stella’s big ranch wedding in November of 1934, Charlie and Mary left the Sacramento Valley for the mountains of northeastern California. The party was lighter than ever. Elva and Alma had good-paying jobs in Stockton and decided to stay behind, leaving Alma’s children to be raised by Charlie and Mary. So Coy and Stanley piloted the Chrysler roadster and the big Cadillac north into the Feather River Valley, ascending more than three thousand feet from the little town of Oroville into Greenville. Greenville was next to nowhere, 180 miles from Sacramento, 250 from San Francisco, and ringed by seven-thousand-foot-high mountain peaks. But Charlie watched with a pang of recognition as the flatlands began to roll and climb and the scrubby chaparral and manzanita bushes gave way to a fragrant mix of pine, fir, and spruce. It reminded him of home. “Dad ran into this Seventh-Day Adventist family [in Greenville],” says Stella Bayes, “and they said to my dad, ‘If you would like, I do have a little ranch house down here. I won’t charge anything for rent if you think you can live in it. Go look at it.’ It was heaven to them.”

  If Greenville was next to nowhere, the Bandy ranch was nowhere. The ranch house was not much more than a cabin, and well out of town. It had no electricity, no running water, and the well was a long haul. But it was in the mountains and there was a daytime chill in the air, which Charlie reckoned would be good for Charmie and Stanley. Unsupported by any doctor, Charmie clung to the notion that she still had one good lung, and if the doctors could take out the bad one, she’d survive. But the constant movement—and the tuberculosis itself—had dimmed Charmie’s hopeful gaze. In the first weeks in Greenville, she was weaker than ever, and Mary was worn thin with worry. She and Charlie even started going to the Adventist church, whose members took the Bayes family on faith, without rebaptism.

  Christmas Day, 1934, was Mary’s fifty-sixth birthday and her thirty-fifth wedding anniversary, but it was hard to celebrate. Charmie was so weak that one of the Adventist members, Dr. Morrell, suggested the sanitarium at Weimar. After the New Year, Coy offered to take his sister on the hard two-day drive south toward Sacramento. But before Charmie left Greenville, the entire family gathered at the little wood-frame Adventist church on Main Street, where elders heated the water so Charmie could be baptized.

  She had her twenty-first birthday at the sanitarium. It was her last. “Charmie only lived three weeks after she got [to Weimar],” says Stella. “Stanley and Coy were both with her when she died. She knew she was going to die. She felt it. She said, ‘You all meet me in heaven.’ And my brother said it was sort of a stormy day and there was a little almond tree in full bloom right out her window. And he said the sun came out just as she was passing.

  “We could not afford a casket, only a little redwood box. I think they put a lining in it. She was taken to the closest mortuary, about two or three miles away in just this little village of a place. They put a little shroud on her. And we viewed her little body and they put her in a hearse and took her back over to the sanitarium. There was a big cemetery on a hillside. In fact, it covered two hills of a little valley; when you walk out there, you would think you was in a military cemetery. There were hundreds of white crosses there. They were all TB cases. But we didn’t have the money, and it was too stormy to take her to any other cemetery to bury her, so she was laid to rest there under a little pine tree.

  “Stanley said, ‘I want to go home to die.’ So Stanley went home [to Greenville]. He lived all through that year, and then he passed away the beginning of 1936. Stanley had it in the bone and he had big sores that would come up, boils. He got the boils in the last stages.”

  When the eight-year-long siege of sickness and death was finally over, Charlie decided to make a clean start. He bought a lot in Greenville, where he and Coy built a new cabin for the family and a big garage with a loft above for guests. Coy was nearing thirty-five, but he was still living with his parents. It was his duty, he figured, because he was now the only son on whom his aging parents could depend. For a while, he and his father worked up in the mountains, cutting firewood to sell, but then he took a regular job at a sawmill and continued his pinched existence in that far-flung California valley. “We tried to get him interested in other girls,” Stella says. “There was a beautiful girl up in Greenville. Her father owned a little store up there. And she would come out to the ranch quite a bit, and she liked my brother real well. So we tried to get him to go with her, but he wouldn’t. Didn’t have any interest. Didn’t seem to care about getting romantically connected.”

  At the time, Stella didn’t know exactly what Coy was waiting for. By the time Stanley died, Coy had stopped talking about Sara, because somewhere along the way, her letters had stopped coming. This was because somewhere along the way, Coy’s mother intercepted them. “Once in a while he’d get a letter from Sara, but among the family it didn’t get to him,” says Stella. “Mama and Papa were opposed to it. They loved Sara, but . . . this was a very sad thing in our life. It was a very embarrassing thing, because it was their nephew [A.P.], and their son. And both loved the same woman.”

  In 1939 Coy hadn’t seen Sara in six years, and they hadn’t corresponded in nearly that many. As far as Coy knew, Sara had simply lost interest. So he was just like any of the thousands of people who tuned in every night to hear her on XERA’s Good Neighbor Get-Together. At least, that’s how he felt until that cold February night, when he heard her call out to him from across twelve hundred miles and six years. “Coy wasn’t sure that Sara still cared for him,” says one of Coy’s nephews, “until he heard her dedicate the song on the radio.”

  “Sara dedicated a song on the radio,” says Stella. “She said, ‘I’m gonna dedicate this to Coy Bays in California. ‘I’m Thinking Tonight of My Blue Eyes.’ I think he said, ‘Mom, I’m gonna go get Sara.’ And Mama says, ‘Well, Coy, I guess you better go get her.’ ”

  * * *

  Coy sent news back to California right away. He and Sara were married February 20, 1939, in Brackettsville, a little town just outside Del Rio, and he kept the family informed with buoyant little postcards to Greenville, like the one dated March 8, 1939: “Sat. Nite. Hello Folks. Here in Mexico having a good time. Harry [Steele], Mae Bell, Sara and I are eating at the cafe on the other side. Love. Coy and Sara.” It was cherry-blossom time before Coy finally carried his new bride back to Greenville. They arrived in the fire-engine red ’39 Dodge that Coy bought new in Texas. That regally streamlined new coupe was a car fit for his new wife, the national radio star. Coy also had a new 8 mm camera, and his own movies of Brinkley’s place in Del Rio, of the zoo in San Antonio, of him and Sara just clowning around. After so many years, so much distance, so much loss, the Bayeses were thrilled to see Sara again, especially Mary. “They didn’t come as soon as I thought they was going to,” says Stella. “But when they did arrive, it was welcoming. All of us loved Sara. It was nothing but joy.”

  “Coy would tease her,” says their niece Barbara Powell. “He would sometimes kind of kiss on her, and she’d say, ‘Oh, go on now.’ Or he’d pinch her a little bit. And she’d say, ‘Oh, go on. Go on.’ And she’d just laugh a bit. He was affectionate with her.”

  “This was not a fling thing,” says Stella. “It was not just an affair. It was deep love. If she sat on the couch, he sat down with her. And they would talk. My brother liked to tease her, talk baby talk to her. Sometimes she’d get a little embarrassed or something. They loved one another. It just showed.”

  Helen, June, and Anita in Sa
n Antonio (Lorrie Davis Bennett)

  XERA, circa 1938 (Whitehead Memorial Museum)

  A New Act

  A. P. could never say how he felt about Sara, or demonstrate it in a way that showed. In fact, it was hard to tell exactly what A.P. felt. When people who worked with them on radio saw him passing notes to Sara in the studio, some saw it as evidence of animosity between the two. But their children always said they got along better after the separation and maintained a constant watch on each other’s well-being. And maybe the studio missives were meant as a nod to their courting, to the time when A.P. tied a handwritten note of apology to a dog’s collar and sent it scurrying down to Uncle Mil’s porch. It was hard to know what exactly was in Pleasant Carter’s mind, until Coy showed up in Texas. “When Sara left him, it broke his heart in two,” says his granddaughter Rita Forrester. “In Texas, whenever he’d see Coy coming down the street, he’d cross to the other side.”

  “He had no zeal, it seemed like, after that,” says Joe. “He was lost.”

  Sara and Coy had married so fast it made A.P.’s head spin. “He became nervous and ill at ease after Sara’s marriage to her second husband,” the announcer Harry Steele told Ed Kahn, “and the agency for which we worked decided that he was transmitting his mood unwittingly over the air.” Harry O’Neill’s agency actually sent A.P. home a month early, leaving Sara and Maybelle to finish out the last month of the contract. Eck was in Del Rio visiting Maybelle at the time, so the two men drove back to Virginia, together with Anita. “Oh, my Lord, that was a trip,” Anita remembered. “To put a little kid in with those two! My dad just jerked my pants on me and put them on backwards. Well, I had a zipper up the back and couldn’t hardly sit down, and it was hurting and I kept hollering and Daddy was nervous and A.P. was nervous. Daddy’d say, ‘I don’t wanna hear it, Wimp.’ (I loved hamburgers and he’d call me Wimpy.) Oh, Lord. It was not a time to travel.”

  Eck and Anita’s homecoming was a bright day in Maces Springs. Eck presented Helen with a two-dollar guitar he’d bought for her in Mexico, and Anita handed June and Helen crisp dollar bills from the stash Harry Steele had given her for her “Little Buckeroo” performances on XERA. Of course, Anita held back eighteen dollars for herself. The most exotic gift of them all was the big Mexican sombrero Anita had bought in Villa Acuña for Grandma Addington. “She thought it was a rug,” remembered Anita, “put it down on the floor, and tried to stomp it down in the middle.” To Helen and June, that sombrero might well have been a flying carpet, exotic merchandise brought back from that great secret world Anita had seen for herself.

  After Maybelle got home there was news. Big news. Consolidated Royal wanted the Carters back in Texas. All of them. Harry O’Neill was willing to let Helen, June, and Anita perform on the show, for pay. Eck could see what was coming. Sara’s marriage to Coy and her removal to California might mean an end to the Original Carter Family, but this meant opportunity for him and his girls. As Helen said years later, “When we started out as little girls, our daddy said, ‘Don’t let the name die. There’s something there. Don’t let it die.’ ”

  Eck had long been nudging his daughters to think outside the bounds of the Valley, sending them to piano lessons with a local preacher’s sister, or making them practice the Hallelujah Chorus on Sundays after church. More than fifty years later, those girls would still get together and marvel, without regret, at what their father demanded. “Daddy was a classical-music lover,” said Helen. “We had to listen to Beethoven and Bach and Tchaikovsky, so we all learned to play Minuet in G and all that stuff. Daddy put us on the train and sent us down to Hiltons to play the piano.”

  “I was just six when we had to learn the Hallelujah Chorus,” Anita said. And June chimed in. “It hurt my throat somethin’ terrible. [Here were] these little peepy voices singin’ the Hallelujah Chorus.”

  “Daddy’s one ambition for me was to learn to play ‘Moonlight Sonata,’ ” said Helen. “He loved ‘Moonlight Sonata.’ ”

  “Sometimes the girls would be out trying to play, and Eck would make them come in and practice,” remembers their cousin Lois Carter Hensley. “Maybelle was more easygoing. Eck always enforced it.”

  By 1939 Helen, June, and Anita were already learning to negotiate Eck’s expectations, but in their own ways. Nearing twelve, Helen was a lot like her father, shy and nervous at once, and desperate to please her mother. She was anxious to master any musical instrument that came her way, from piano to guitar to accordion. Helen was a homebody. She’d happily cook for a dozen-man threshing crew but wouldn’t go within twenty feet of a milk cow. She was also a bosom companion of Ma Carter, who still carried her to church Sundays—and even took her to clean the graves out behind Mount Vernon. Ma Carter was still diligent about cleaning and decorating Ettaleen’s grave, and she took care of Dewey’s, too, with his mother all the way off in California. To Helen, Mollie Carter must have seemed part pal and part living history, a real mountain woman, with her long plaited hair still wound tight in its bun, her straight ankle-length dress covering a pair of mismatched socks. She was so modest that Helen figured Ma Carter never once undressed in front of her own husband. She was scandalized when Gladys had allowed Milan to touch her dress when she got it caught on a barbed-wire fence, and to kiss her on the night before their wedding. “Grandma Carter was like an explosion,” Helen said of her. “She would have whipped you before you knew what happened to you if you didn’t mind her, you know. But I loved that old lady; I think it was because I lived in the house with them when I was little. She always said that you had to be a lady, you had to conduct yourself as a lady in all things. Your reputation’s all you have. Once your reputation’s gone, you’ve lost it all.”

  With an early interest in boys, Helen began to understand that she wasn’t going to be protecting her reputation all by herself. For Eck, it was inconceivable that his daughters would live the whole of their lives in the Valley, the way his own mother had. “All the young men in the Valley were scared of my daddy,” said Helen. “Daddy always said that he wanted us out of that valley. He just didn’t want us to get involved with any of the men in the Valley. He just didn’t want us to get married and stay there. He always used to say that there was a world out there, and we should see it before we died. . . . He always told us, ‘There’s so much out there you haven’t seen.’ ”

  Anita was still the noisiest, and the most contrary, and in the midst of her own racket, she was willfully oblivious to her father’s insistent demands. Anita was the most gifted singer of the entire Carter family, Sara included, but she shared Sara’s trademark unconcern. “You could never get Anita awake or singing,” says Fern Carter Salyers. “Anita just didn’t have the want-to. It was hard to tell whether she really liked music that much.” Says Lois Carter Hensley, “She’d rather be playing with her friends, always doing cartwheels, walking on her hands through the house. I believe we saw her butt more than we did her face.”

  June was the boy Eck always wanted. She rode airplanes and motorcycles, walked a plow, drove a truck. “Either June would stay with me, or I was at her house or at Grandma’s house a lot,” says Fern. “Before we started to like boys, we would go up the mountain and go climb trees. We tried to get up to a crow’s nest once, almost fell out. We’d do that kind of thing. We’d go to Grandma’s across the creek, and we used to climb on the rocks in the creek at a place called Breakneck Place. June was the first one up to milk the cows. We’d go to the river and go fishing, go swimming. We were tomboys.” June also had Eck’s eye for the main chance. She seemed to be channeling every ounce of his ambition, and her own besides. “Someday,” she confided to Fern, “I’m going to dine with queens.”

  Now, that was Eck’s ethic boiled down to its essence, and as much as he loved his standing in the Valley, June understood how her father chafed under its limitations. The radio show gave them a way out, but it had its complications. As much as June wanted to please her father, and as anxious as she was to get o
ut into the wider world, she wasn’t sure exactly what she could do on the radio program. That summer, June took inventory of her talents. She could shoot a rifle, climb a tree, harness a mule. She could drive a tractor. She could make her stomach muscles move in eye-popping contortions fit for a carnival sideshow. But XERA was no sideshow. This was a real radio program, heard throughout the entire country. Anita had already sung on radio. Helen had been singing with Janette for a couple of years, and she could play a passable guitar, even if she was a bundle of nerves. And June? “Mama looked at me like, What in the world are you gonna do?” June remembers. “And she said, ‘Can you sing?’ I said, ‘I don’t know.’ ”

  At the end of September, Ezra and the family loaded up their new Packard and headed west for Texas. Along the way, the girls sat in the backseat running through the dozen or so songs they’d prepared for radio. June would sing lead, because she couldn’t be counted on to carry a harmony part. So Anita did the tenor part, and Helen the more complicated alto. June didn’t have much of an ear, but she always knew when she got off-key. Helen would give her the tragic look (it was just like Maybelle’s), and Anita could pinch like old Uncle Mil. Sometimes even Eck would turn around from the steering wheel and screw up his face. By the time they hit the Texas state line, June was getting scared. She didn’t know what she was going to do, and it was beginning to look like they were entering an alien land. “It was a time when there was cotton rows as far as your eye could see,” says June. “And then it just got so flat we couldn’t believe it, and it was dry. We just died for green grass.” The roads turned into long straight ribbons of pavement, the hills flattened out altogether, and the horizon came up unbroken; it was like looking at forever. Like the land itself, June’s new fears seemed to stretch on without an end. Of course, it didn’t help when Anita would get up in June’s ear and blare out a song in perfectly rendered mimicry of her sister’s off-key vocal stylings. “If you’re going to be on the world’s largest radio station with us,” Maybelle said to her middle daughter, “we’ll need some kind of miracle.”