Читать книгу Becoming a Counselor - Samuel Gladding T., Samuel T. Gladding - Страница 11

The World Into Which I Was Born

Few people enter the world at an ideal time, and my birth was no exception. I was born on the morning of October 5, 1945. World War II had been officially over for about month, and American military personnel were returning home. Although the end of the war might seem like an ideal time to arrive on earth, especially in a nation that was on the winning side, other circumstances were afoot.

My parents, Russell Burton and Gertrude Barnes Templeman Gladding, were 35 and 34, respectively. They already had two children: Margaret Northam (Peggy), who was 3 (May 21, 1942); and Russell Burton, Jr. (Russell, Jr.), who was 13 months (August 17, 1944). Although my parents had talked about a third child, family history has it I was unexpected. To make matters more complicated, I was born with dislocated hips. I spent much of my first 2 years in Scottish Rite Hospital, where I had three operations to wire my hips back in place. My parents visited on Sundays and brought me a Hershey’s chocolate bar when I was old enough to eat one. My brother also had dislocated hips, and both of us had plaster of paris body casts from the waist down at times. We were later informally described as “heavy Chevys.” Because my mother, Grandmother Templeman (whom we called “Pal”), and sister, Peggy, could barely lift let alone carry us, they pulled us around the living and dining rooms of our house in a Radio Flyer red wagon modified with a platform and a hole for the bedpan underneath.

My mother was the oldest daughter of four children of Samuel and Inez Templeman. Her two younger sisters were Inez and Ruth, and her younger brother was Samuel II. She was petite, about 5 feet tall, and probably never weighed more than 100 pounds. She was attractive, with a good figure, a sharp mind, and a religious focus as the oldest child of a Baptist minister. What she lacked in size she made up for in spirit—determination, perseverance, and even a bit of feistiness.

She met my father in 1931 at a boarding house owned by her maternal grandfather, Robert Leonard Barnes, in Richmond, Virginia. She had gone to Richmond after graduating from Salem College to study for a master of arts at Westhampton College—the female campus of then Richmond College—because she could not get a teaching job during the Great Depression. Unbeknownst to her, my father and his brother, Randolph, had rented a room at the house at 3300 Monument Avenue in exchange for money and help with the yardwork. My parents waited 3 years to tie the knot because of the accidental death of my dad’s father and because my mother insisted that my dad make a $100 a month before she would marry him. Their wedding took place in November 1934. My mother’s father, Samuel Huntington Templeman, a Baptist minister for whom I was named, walked her down the aisle and then performed the wedding at Brown Memorial Baptist Church in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.

My mother and her father were close. He died in March 1945 and my grandmother, Inez Barnes Templeman (“Pal”), came to live with my parents soon thereafter. Thus, in October 1945, my mother was dealing with the birth of an unplanned child, grief surrounding the recent death of her father, and the arrival of her mother into the couple’s modest three bedroom, one bathroom house at 957 Church Street in Decatur, Georgia, a city outside Atlanta. After that came the discovery of the dislocated hips and the stress that her two youngest children needed operations and hospitalization if they were ever going to walk.

My father was a bit of a contrast but a complement to my mother. He was the third of four children—two older brothers and a younger sister—born to Henry Arcemus and Maggie Lena Northam Gladding. He stood about 5 feet 10 inches but was thin, weighing around 135 pounds. Like my mother, he wore glasses and had since the age of 4 because of what was described as a “lazy eye.” He had a high school and a business school education. He would likely have gone to college, probably Virginia Tech, had it not been for the Great Depression. His family had made a living as farmers on the Eastern Shore of Virginia in Accomack County since the mid-1600s, but 18 months into the Great Depression the farm was foreclosed on and the family became sharecroppers for a few years. Free from the constant labor of being a farmer, my father nurtured his love of the soil by having a large garden—about a third of an acre—behind our house in Decatur. There he grew many of the vegetables our family ate.

As mentioned previously, the ancestors of my father’s immediate family had settled on the Eastern Shore in the mid-1600s. In 1945, he found himself an office worker at the Virginia-Carolina (V-C) Chemical Corporation, a company that made fertilizer, in Atlanta. V-C, for whom he worked 27 years, had transferred him from Richmond to Atlanta in 1942. The transfer may well have saved his marriage, because my father’s mother and his younger sister, Mildred—both of whom my mother did not like—had moved into my parents’ apartment in Richmond in the 1930s, and the atmosphere in their flat was “uncomfortable.” Regrettably, in the mid-1940s, my father’s oldest brother, Hilton, who owned a general merchandise store on the Eastern Shore, was fighting lung cancer; he would die in 1946.

Thus, in addition to dealing with an unexpected birth, hospital bills, the arrival at the house of his wife’s mother, three children under the age of 5, and stress from his wife’s loss of her father, my father was dealing with the imminent death of his oldest brother. Overall, October 1945 was a bittersweet time for the Gladdings, with gains, losses, and uncertainty.