Anita Garner

By Anita Garner

 

 

When we're ready to gather again,  a potluck is worth gathering for.  Potluck meals are the best reason for church basements, community centers and multi-purpose rooms everywhere to exist. Any space that'll hold rows and rows of folding tables covered with makeshift tablecloths is instantly inviting.  And over there, along that wall,  more rows of tables laden with the best food in the world brought by home cooks.

 

New York Times photo

 

Growing up in the Deep South in the 1940s and 50s, bouncing back and forth on tour with our gospel singing family then settling down briefly while Daddy pastored a church, potlucks were the highlights of every stop for my brother and me. 

 

Daddy was a great natural cook. Mother, who didn't bother with preparing day to day food, was a superb baker during her middle of the night creative sessions but both our parents were as excited as Leslie Ray and I were to meet local cooks.

 

Churchpeople brought their specialties.  Washtubs were filled with sweet tea or lemonade.  Tables like the one in the photo above featured all kinds of desserts.  Kids swarmed while cooks soaked up  praise for their best recipes.

 

In New England, where every picturesque town seems to have one or more equally picturesque churches, I heard about bean nights.  Though they started in the basements and social halls connected to churches, they weren't intended only for church-goers.  They were also important fund raisers.  Anyone could buy a ticket and eat their fill (two sittings per night) of beans and franks, salads and breads and, of course, desserts.

 

The New York Times ran a story featuring
community potluck nights.  This is their photo.

 

 

 

That picture looks like many church basements I've visited since leaving my parents' traveling ministry. The churches Daddy was in charge of were either small or in the process of being built.  Growing a congregation was his specialty so we didn't always have social spaces inside.  Our potlucks became "Dinner On The Grounds," providing opportunities for kids to run around from table to table asking for samples. Ambrosia for me.  Fried chicken and deviled eggs for Leslie Ray.

 

Potlucks were already perfect the way they were decades ago and they don't need much changing, though many churches I've attended now have big sparkly kitchens.  I'm still a fan of crepe paper streamers if you've got them and if you can get able bodied volunteers to drape them.  An old piano in the corner where anybody can play, and there's always someone who can.

 

The best part then and now is joining the people around the buffet lines carrying our plates to our tables and stopping to ask, "Who made this?"  then seeking out the cook to get the recipe. There's a good chance you'll see multiples of that casserole at the next gathering and every casserole dish will be carried home empty by a satisfied cook.

 

I can't wait for the next time we'll be standing around talking about how good these beans are.

 

 

 

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By Anita Garner

 

 

Here are two things that happened for the first time when we moved to California in the 1950s.  Daddy pursued recreational gardening.  Mother got a Cadillac to celebrate her recording contract.   She never wanted to drive but she wanted that car so she got a driver's license.

 

 

Brother Ray's California dream.  Delicate dichondra planted up the edge of the driveway and in the center.   These two-lane designs were called "ribbon" driveways.

 

A bit of background.  Daddy, the oldest of ten, was recruited to work the cotton fields with his sharecropping family all through his childhood.  After he became a parent himself, when we stayed in one place for a while he planted vegetables to help feed us.  When we got to California he indulged in the joy of growing things just for the beauty of them.

 

We didn't see much dichondra In the South. We saw lawns with hard-working grass like St. Augustine, so sturdy a farmer bragged, "You can park a tractor out there, move the tractor and that grass pops right back up."  But Daddy wanted the fragile stuff and that's what he planted around their Glendale, California home.  Dichondra isn't really like growing grass.  It's more like raising a baby.  Grown adults down on their knees trimming it with tiny clippers. He was willing to put in the work.

 

Picture that giant pink Cadillac operated by an uncertain driver, approaching lanes even thinner than the driveway pictured here.  My brother, Leslie Ray, and I had moved into our own apartments but when we stopped by to visit we speculated about how the struggle between dichondra and Cadillac might go.  We felt sorry for the green stuff.  We figured If you were  an innocent lawn growing right up to the edge of the driveway and you spotted that giant pink fishtailed hunk of metal coming at you, you'd probably be terrified.

 

It's a wonder the dichondra didn't die from Cadillac fright. It was obvious it was in some distress. Examples of previously missed driveway attempts by the Cadillac were starting to show when Mother parked.  There were streaks of brown dirt where green once grew along the edges of the driveway.  Tires had obviously wandered a bit. Mother didn't mention it.  Daddy didn't mention it.  We stopped by to visit, saw the damage and we didn't mention it either.

 

Daddy took to watching the driveway when he expected her home.  As soon as the pink chariot approached, he was out the door, gave her a big smile and held up his hand to stop her as she was about to turn in.

"Just a minute, Doll-Baby.  Let me get that for you."

 

She pretended it was normal to exit her car at the far end of the driveway out by the street.  He pretended it had nothing to do with his lawn.  He drove the car all the way to the rear when garages used to be  behind the house.  Backing out again?  She never did.  If there was no one around to back out for her, she'd wait.

 

Later, as she drove less, he finally persuaded her to sell the Cadillac and when she did she stopped driving completely. That seemed to work for both of them and the dichondra and we never heard Daddy complain about taking his Doll-Baby anywhere she wanted to go.

 

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By Anita Garner

 

My brother, Leslie Ray, and I were the new kids in school all our lives.  We'd enroll, stay a short while,  then hit the road to tour the gospel circuit with our parents, sending homework back in the mail.  At every new school, I'd stand in front of the class while the teacher introduced Nita Faye Jones, just moved here from…fill in the blank.

 

In California in 1957 I was new again but this time shouldn't be as hard since Leslie Ray had been there a year already, living with Gramma K because he and Mother couldn't occupy the same house without eruptions. Similar dispositions, Daddy said.

 

Mother signed a record contract and we headed out west. This time it wasn't just a new school.  This time the language was also unfamiliar.  Nobody else drawled.  The clothes were different.  Even tougher to understand was California culture, where teens seemed to have so much control.  No yessum and yessir.  These kids were in possession  of more than just spending money. They were confident.  By the time I arrived, Leslie, who was already tall and good looking to start with, had shed his Southern accent, was a big man on campus and evidently expert at assimilation.

 

Observe the ritual of Senior Spring Break, 1957.  The talk in the halls among seniors was, "Are you going to Bal?"  That would be  Balboa Island (also Newport)  where groups of seniors piled into rented houses for a full week of drinking and tanning all day, partying all night, and capped it off at the end of the week by bleaching their hair blonde to prove, on returning to class, that they'd really been to Bal.

 

Leslie Ray and I were  both redheads with fair skin.  Not meant for tanning.  Not safe on California beaches.  In the Deep South, tanning wasn't done on purpose. It happened because of work.  We saw tans in churches and in the crowds at revivals and Singings, hard-working tans with shirt-sleeve marks.

 

Tanning for a redhead happens only through a lengthy process, if at all, and often involves a couple of trips to the ER on the way.  Both of us had over-sunned more than once and paid the price. It must have taken Leslie a long time to build up that color a little bit at a time, but he did it. The very thing we'd avoided in the South was his Southern California Senior Spring Break badge of honor. Of course he bleached his hair.  He had to prove he was at Bal.

 

I was invited over to Balboa just for the day if I could find someone with a driver's license and a car to get me there.  I lied to my parents about where I was going.  Leslie's friends treated me like a mascot as long as I didn't cramp their style or tell stories later.  For my day at Bal, I didn't even pack what we then called suntan lotion.  I packed a hat.

 

 

 Nitafaye and Leslie Ray Jones 1957 high school Spring break

 

 

 

 

 

I never tanned until self-tanning lotion became manageable years later, and then I applied it mostly for events.  But I bleached as soon as I got out of high school, blonder and blonder for several years.  I think the bleaching part made me half-assimilated and you can shorten that last word if you want to.

 

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