Evans “Buddy” King Columnist
Last week the power in my neighborhood went off while the city was placing new waterlines underneath Main Street about a block from my home. They said it was a “planned outage” but I guess I was not part of the plan. I wasn’t informed.
I was doing my morning chores and getting ready to go into the office when the lights went out. I was thinking they would be back on in a matter of minutes, but it actually took five-and-a-half hours.
Fortunately, I have a gas water heater and was able to shave and shower and head out to work. I walked out my back door and across my deck to my garage. I live in an old neighborhood and there is no such thing as an attached garage. If you are lucky enough to have one at all, it is free-standing and has its own door or doors. I entered mine on this day from the side door, as I always do, pushed the button to activate the garage door itself, and nothing happens. Then I remembered that the power was off.
I’ve encountered this a few times over my years on Stanley Avenue, so I know enough to open the door manually and back my car out in the alley, put it in park and go back and close the door, and then get back in the car and get on with my day. This is probably as close to “roughing it,” in the spirit of my pioneer ancestors, as my life gets.
But the moment brought back a flood of memories of my late Aunt Maggie. For around 40 years, she lived in a home in Christiansburg across from the old primary school of my era, originally the building that housed Christiansburg High in my father and his siblings’ days as students, later the “school board offices” in my dad’s days as superintendent. Her house shared a driveway with the next-door neighbor and she had an old garage with no automatic door opener. In fact, I remember heavy metal coils as critical to its function and that the darn thing weighed a ton and a half – at least 15 times more than Aunt Maggie. So, from the early 1940’s until the mid-1970’s, she spent nine months of the year, five days a week, walking out her back door, on cold winter mornings or blistering hot late summer days, in snow storms or brilliant fall foliage, opening that door and driving to Christiansburg High where she taught.
Aunt Maggie was part and parcel of the lore of public school teaching of her time. She was an “old maid school teacher”, a phrase not used any more. She never married and pretty much devoted the best years of her adult life to taking care of her mother. Raised on a dairy farm in Riner, she was the youngest of the three “Weaver sisters”, all of whom graduated from Radford College and became teachers.
As was common in those days, taking care of aged parents usually fell to the youngest daughter, as it did in Aunt Maggie’s case. My mom and the other Weaver sister, Aunt Mary Alma, married and had families. Aunt Maggie taught school and took care of her mother, not an easy task, as my grandmother had, I’m pretty sure now, early onset Alzheimer’s. They called it “hardening of the arteries” in those days. My only memories of her are not good ones – she was mean and made life miserable for everyone around her. Aunt Maggie endured and took care of her mother and immersed her life in her teaching. And in me.
I spent many a weekend and summer night at the house on Junkin Street when I was a young child. I think I was a break from the sadness and the fatigue of Aunt Maggie living with someone in my grandmother’s condition. I’ve had people ask if my parents were that anxious to get me out of the house (they would have been justified), but I think they knew she wanted and needed the company. She was truly a second mother to me.
Aside from the dangerous garage door and the frightening grandmother, I have wonderful memories. Aunt Maggie was an excellent athlete, the best of the three sisters and a star on the girls’ basketball team at Auburn High, and we played whiffle ball in her backyard and a game called “Annie over” where she stood in her front yard and I was in the backyard. She would throw the ball over her tall two-story house and I would try to catch it, not knowing the angle from which it would be coming. I became a decent fielder at age six if I say so myself.
I also remember that she loved to go barefoot in the yard in the summer and that she had an old-fashioned push mower she used to cut her grass and how there was a certain weed, we called it a grasshopper, that the blades on the mower would not cut. She was encouraged to get a power mower but that was luxury beyond her means.
I also remember that she had a chicken coop and a garden and a grape arbor and a tiny pond stocked with big goldfish. I would help her in the garden and watch her collect eggs, although I stayed out of the henhouse because there was the occasional blacksnake she had to throw out.
But most who remember my Aunt Maggie will remember her for another term that we don’t hear much these days. As CHS grew in enrollment, she became a full-time teacher in the subject she loved. Technically, it was called “government”, but it was old fashioned “civics”. Aunt Maggie loved (and lived) to teach about “how a bill becomes a law,” how a federal system of government works, how “checks and balances” are critical. She taught a couple of generations of Christiansburg kids about how government works. Not every student liked her or the subject or both, but by the time they graduated, they darn well knew they had been in a civics class.
You can only imagine how proud and excited I was when my first grandchild was named for her. Maggie turned 13 last month.
