Mattie’s Corner
Editor’s note: (Editor’s note from Dixie Dellinger: There will not be the scheduled columns for the weeks of January 9, 2012, and January 16, 2012, in that Mattie didn’t write any. Her son Dan Dellinger died on January 5, 2012, and she didn’t write one to honor him. Then the following week her best friend Kate Kimbro died, and she honored her by not writing one. I hope the readers will enjoy these old columns until the next one in series for January 23, 2012, is printed. —Dixie”)
From a Wise and Otherwise column dated May 27,1970 Kate, Nellie, Harry, Paul and several others in our 1929 bunch were talking today and we just can’t figure out why it is that we in Center have not shown our age like those who have made other places their homes.
I guess that most of us have added about 40 pounds to our weight is perhaps the only change since 1929. And we do all wear glasses, some of the bunch wear dentures and bridges, wigs and hair pieces, use hair dyes and rinses. Kate’s bothered with arthritis in her right arm, and she and Paul can’t hold out to dance the Charleston but a few minutes at a time. But actually, we can’t see that we have changed.
We were talking about the Wheeler Sanitarium in Center. I guess it was the first hospital for our town. We all called Mrs. Wheeler, “Miss Mable.” She had a heart of gold, and many acts of charity were done by her that none knew about. Her father was a Shelby County pioneer, W.T. Riggs and the street where she last lived was named for her parents, Riggs Street.
I can remember going to the Wheeler Hospital to see friends who had had surgery or were confined with broken arms or legs.
Some of my school friends were always there with broken arms, or for having their appendix cut out. How I envied them!
The doctors or nurses preserved the appendix in bottles of alcohol for the patient to show to their visitors.
I was jealous of my friends who were patients in the hospital, because when they returned to school, the teachers bent over backwards to be kind to them and protected them (it seemed) from daily lessons, which I hated. To have a broken right arm was my secret dream. I climbed to the top of trees, barns, jumped out of windows, always volunteered for the end of a “Popping the Whip” game in hope that I would be flung outward into space and get a broken right arm. But Bonnie Fuller (Mrs. Cleve McSwain now) was usually the one who held onto my arm — she was strong and never let go.
It had to be a right arm, because I wrote right-handed, and I knew I would be excused form writing the dreaded daily lesson assignments.
I walked sharp pointed picket fences in hopes of falling off and get a broken arm. The nearest I ever got to being injured was falling off the Brittain’s picket fence onto a broken brown Garrett snuff bottle.
My left foot still bears the long scar that the bottle cut. I fainted when the blood poured out and my mother soaked my foot in coal oil a long time to destroy the germs. She tore up a clean old white sheet for bandages. I was able to skip school for about a week with that injury.
Kate said that she had her appendix cut out at the Wheeler Sanitarium when she was 11 and that she kept it in a jar for years. She said that she too was envious of anyone who got to skip school on account of broken limbs, measles or chicken pox. She remembers the time the O.L Witherspoon had the chicken pox and lived next to her Gryder family. Their mothers kept them apart so that Kate wouldn’t take the pox. But Kate wanted to take it so that she could miss school. She would slip over to the Witherspoon house and knock on the window and have O.L. stick his head out the window to expose her.
However, it didn’t work, and it was years later before she got to miss school with the chicken pox. I tried hard to take the mumps, and didn’t until the week before we graduated from high school, just when I didn’t want them!
– Mattie
(Editor’s Note: Mattie Dellinger’s “Party Line” column was a regularfeature in Center newspapers for decades before her death in 2013. The original columns are reprinted today without editing to reflect her style and commentary. All references are to the original date of publication noted at the beginning of each column, not today’s date. Send letters and comments to: Editor, The Light and Champion, 137San Augustine Street, Center, TX 75935.)