Her Name was Ollie Belle
Have you see The Help? I read the book and saw the movie, so when Octavia Spencer won her Golden Globe and brought the house to tears I remembered a day when I was little. I was probably 4 years old, and since my Mamma was busy writing and I was alone I decided to go lie in the ditch beside the road and pretend I had been dumped there, a sad, lost child. I was in my nightgown and no one noticed. I lay there for what seemed like eternity until finally Ollie Belle, who was our help at the time, called for me to “come see the poach”…..(the porch, which she took great pride at scrubbing and making pretty). Only Ollie Belle seemed to notice that I was missing, and saved me from certain death from wild wolves or boogie men. Like most children I had a pretty wild imagination, still do. My Mamma was preoccupied with her writing and I was feeling lonely and alone and wanted some attention.
Perhaps I was a little spoiled in those days. After all I was Daddy’s little girl and he had gone off to work, leaving me at home to fend for myself in those days when Mamma just couldn’t stop typing, as the words flowed so effortlessly off her fingertips onto the crisp white typewriter paper, loaded carefully into the typewriter along with the slick black carbon paper.
I awoke each morning to the sound of her typewriter, and I went to sleep to the sounds of the black and white television. I loved watching television while sitting on the sofa next to my Daddy. I would drift off to sleep while Jackie Gleason made Daddy laugh, or while the June Taylor dancers entertained us on Lawrence Welk.
There was a lot of black and white, in those days, there was a visible distinction between the two. I loved my Ollie Belle and was fascinated in trying to understand our differences, and why there were differences, and what it meant. Why did she eat a moonpie and an RC Cola every day? I was not allowed those things, and when Mamma wasn’t looking sometimes Ollie Belle would let me have a sip or a tiny bite. She ironed our clothes with a sprinkler top put onto a cola bottle, and she had a clean fresh smell about her that I can still smell, this very day. She was strong and efficient, she dressed with an apron, and she didn’t talk the same way my Mamma did. She didn’t have a car. She made our sheets clean and she made our pillowcases smooth and soft and when I went to bed in my comfy little bedroom she was the one who had tidied it up and had folded my clothes.
I grew up where two small towns came together, and at the center line there was a building where only Colored were allowed. I remember that handpainted sign, black paint on a white board. What did “colored” mean? I asked my Mamma. In my mind I thought that it meant colors, like crayons, and I thought the place must be filled with vivid wonderful colorful toys and art and beautiful things. I so badly wanted to go inside, and couldn’t understand why my Mamma said that we weren’t allowed. On the outside of the building were two water fountains. A sign over each one, one sign said colored and one sign said white. What did that mean?
Ollie Belle was our help and I am certain that my mamma liked having her around as much as I did. I don’t know how she got to our house or how she got back to her home. I do not know how much she was paid. I do not know if she had children at home, or if she was married. I am going to ask my Mamma what she knows about Ollie Belle, what she may remember about this help of ours, who rescued me from the ditch and who made Daddy look good at work with starched and ironed shirts and saved my mamma from household chores so she could write. Ollie Belle, who ate moonpies and drank RC Colas, made my world a better place and for that, I am thankful.
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The Turquoise Kitchen Didn’t Make Her Betty Crocker
He closed the door to her home, she closed the door to her heart. It sounds like a country music two stepping tune but it was more like a one step tango. She taught dance and after she danced her way into his heart she took hold of his wallet. That is putting it mildly.
I am blessed. I have several children, a close-knit family with lots of siblings,
family vacation
both of my parents are living, and we all live within a small radius of each other. We take care of each other when necessary and since there are doctors and lawyers we straighten each other out when it is appropriate. Together we spend holidays and vacations, celebrate birthdays
Dad's Birthday
and anniversaries. But not every family is like that. Perhaps I grew up feeling a little bit lucky.
Lucky little girl
When I cleaned out the cabinets in the laundry room of the house in Starmount Country Club I found some little boys clothes. There was almost a ton of clothing that had already been removed from the home prior to my involvement, and I myself had already cleaned out several carloads of clothing from the 5,000 sq ft home. But I had not seen any sign of anything childlike until I came across these cabinets. The clothing, from the 1950s and 1960s had been washed and ironed and folded inside out and stored neatly inside boxes. There were cute plaid cotton shirts, pressed whites with detachable bow ties, Davy Crockett westernwear, Rob Roy gabardine windjackets, Health Tex knits, Buster Brown shorts sets, suits, and tiny skinny ties. There were several of these boxes, and they stored clothing that fit boys up to a young teen age. Then there was nothing. No other sign that boys had inhabited this home. These boys would be about the same age as me. 
My first thought was how cute the clothing was
westernwear for boys in the 1950s
and how someone like myself would love to dress their boys in such swanky vintage clothing. Then I started to question the origin of the clothing. I found out a few things about this woman who I thought had lived alone.
Mildred had become a compulsive shopper and eventually she had lost her ability to do anything else, as she filled her home from floor to ceiling. She had purchased day dresses, sportswear, and party clothes, along with shoes hats scarves and purses. I could date her clothing as far back as about 1950, but most of her clothing was from a period of 1965 to 1975. 
This would have been the time that her two sons were coming of age. This is about when they walked away from her. They obviously had all they could of her, and her obsessive compulsive shopping habit, and that drove them away. Just as she drove herself from store to store
in her blue cadillac searching for the next sale.
During that time there were sales at stores such as Laurie’s, Thalhimer’s, Rosenthal’s Bootery, Prago Guyes, Brownhill’s, and Belk’s. Mildred’s turquoise kitchen
Mildreds kitchen was like this, but all turquoise
was barely used. The cake pans and the mixers were pristine, no signs of ever having made a chocolate layer birthday cake. Betty Crocker she was not. Shopping a sale became an obsession for which she did not seek help, it grew and grew. Her husband moved away first, and then her sons. 
The compulsion prevailed, and as Mildred aged her compulsion expanded to include appliances and home accessories, Christmas decorations and cooking supplies. It was during the nineties that Mildred was eventually reduced to sleeping on half of a mattress in the basement, while her beautiful home was packed so full that she could barely find space in which to walk, and the only remaining spare areas were half of a bed and a narrow walk to the front door and the tiny guest bathroom.
This woman, who had once been impeccably dressed, with her beehived hairdo and her tiny feet, and her purses that matched her shoes and slips to match her dresses, had begun slowly and quietly. She would slip around town during school hours. At first she filled her large master bedroom closet so full that the clothes rack collapsed and it shut the bi-fold doors from the inside. That was about the time her husband left. She hadn’t opened the doors since then, she just moved to another area of the home. When I pried the doors open I found a time capsule of clothing that had been hung so tightly together that the pert collars and accordion pleats were still pressed as if they had just been placed there fresh from her ironing board.
The large basement, with its original dance floor, 
was full of collapsible clothing racks and when the racks were full she had piled more clothing on top of the racks. Often there were multiples of an item. I suppose she thought that if the dress fit why not buy it in every color offered, and if the blender came in harvest gold, orange, and avocado green, she must get them all.
Mildred alienated everyone who loved her, and in the end she fell on the basement steps and cracked her knee. She was found by her former lover, when he couldn’t get her to answer the phone. He was the lover who paid her bills but she never allowed him past the threshold. He closed up her home, and placed her in a nursing facility, and there she died, with a suitcase of nightclothes and underwear, and one baby blue bathrobe. Mildred, who had enough clothing to possibly outfit every woman in the state of North Carolina, had died with nothing more than a suitcase of clothing beside her bed. No family came to visit, they had been replaced long ago with sales tickets and shopping bags. Her specials involved a shopping center 
and those who had once been special to her had long since left. Mildred had loved Sears more than her sons, and had used her lover, for his line of credit.
The last few years have found many of us in tough situations. The recession has caused some of us to lose our jobs and our homes and give up our possessions. Some of us have been lucky enough to have families to take us in, and to help us get through these difficult times. If there is a lesson to learn from this it is that love and family have nothing to do with what you look like. It has nothing to do with the clothing on your back, or the hat on your head, but it has everything in the world to do with what is inside your heart. A shopping trip or a sale is worthless, compared to time spent together, which is priceless.
*Digging around to get my design archives inventory has produced stories based on my imagination and on true experiences, but names locations and facts have been altered and any resemblance to a person or persons is purely coincidental.
Christmas 1934
As Bob Dylan said, the Times They Are A Changin, and I mean this in the nicest sort of way. As a historian of sorts, a scavenger, an urban archeologist, a hunter and gatherer of remnants and particles of the past, I have seen how change has left family homeplaces….. in odd places.
Sometimes they crumble and cave in, and sometimes they get lucky and get loved again, found by a new family building their own history.
Amityville horror home, it got a new owner
Luckily, this is what happened for the sprawling Dutch colonial that had been built on a long rural road in the county, in 1920, and abandoned in 1990. What happened in between is speculation and this is where I use my imagination.
it may have looked like this at one time
the home probably looked a lot like this in the 30s
Baking bread made the family their dough, and distributing the brand all over the state made them millions,
bread delivery trucks like this
but in the end all that was left was cat litter and pigeon droppings, liquor bottles and movie star magazines, or so I thought.
My initial visit to the remains of their homeplace left me cold. It was winter, the house was creaky,
abandoned dutch colonial
yet it beckoned me to come back and explore and I accepted the challenge.
The house had basically been closed and locked, and what vagrants didn’t take, was what I found. There were lots of movie magazines; they were waist deep in the den. They buried an old maple rocker and a bakelite paneled rabbit eared television set. The magazines dated from the 1930s. There were covers with portraits of starlets with rosy cheeks, and blue tinted eyes. Magazines like Picturegoer 
and Photoplay, with images of Joan Crawford, Bette Davis,
Bette Davis
Olivia de Havilland, Dorothy Lamour. They brought the Golden Age of Hollywood to a house in Guilford County. There were scandalous covers on magazines like Movie Star, Photoplay, 
and Photo Screen. There were photos of Natalie Wood, Elizabeth Taylor, Doris Day, Debbie Reynolds and Julie Christie.
The front foyer, as large as most living rooms,
imagine this, with crumbling wall paper and the floor filled with cat litter
was filled with cat litter. The holes in the ceiling gave way to pigeons in the rafters and there were droppings throughout.
What happened, where did this family go, why did they leave this behind, and what made them vanish? As I dug deeper I learned a little and I imagined a lot.
Mother and father had doted on their 3 children. 
I could see it in the old photos. In the twenties and thirties they were children of privilege. While many suffered and struggled to find food, they had miniature horses and play houses and fur hats and snowboots, sleds and dogs and kittens and dollbabies. 
Mother loved to shop and she had her purchases delivered to the estate in the county, and her invoices delivered to her husband’s office in the city. There were 143 pairs of shoes in their original boxes,
shoes like these
their matching dresses and suits and coats and hats remained in the home, long after Mother was gone. Montaldo’s and Meyer’s loved Mother. The store boxes held tissue and taffeta, felt and feathers, and rhinestones and receipts.
Her three devoted children had worked in the family business, although two got married and had adventures away from Greensboro, they eventually returned to operate the business.
But one, a daughter, never married nor left, until she had to be forcibly removed for health and sanitation reasons and she was placed in a facility. This is when the doors to the mansion were closed and locked.
Research tells me that the family business shut down around 1974, and the building itself burned in 1989, about the time the mansion was closed and the daughter carted off.
I imagine that Mother’s glamourous outfits, her metallic trimmed platform shoes and sequined dressing gowns
dressing gowns fit for movie stars
reminded the daughter of Hollywood, of starlets she read about in her magazines. Stars like Shirley Temple, Katherine Hepburn, Myrna Loy, Marlene Deitrich. She had been a curly haired princess growing up in the south. A little girl who’s holsum childhood had been filled with dance lessons and voice lessons,
voice and piano, make a good child, or a child good
piano and ponies. A little girl who never grew up, who never left, who never trusted anyone but herself, who never left her magazines and her homeplace and her mother’s closets. A girl, a woman, who must have had dreams of becoming a starlet herself, at one time.
On my second explorative visit I went into the attic, up a dark narrow set of stairs that opened into a huge third floor former playroom of sorts.
playroom toys like trains
Hidden in the eaves were old toys
toys like this doll carriage
and surveying the floor I discovered a square of dirty red plastic. It was a purse, and inside it I found a label, “Shirley Temple” was the logo and there was a mirror and comb, all with Shirley’s signature.
a logo like this one
This might have some real value I surmised, so I carefully cleaned it and photographed it.
I spent the next 4 weeks cleaning out the remains of the home, and eventually I made myself and the home’s new owner enough money to get us both through our first winter, his in his “new” home and mine in my new business.
the home was almost as bad as grey gardens
Going through the family photos I found so many wonderful images. Father and son in front of the business, of the girls playing in the yard, of flowers and children and parents and automobiles. But one grabbed my attention. It was one of a cute little girl with curls, standing in front of a gigantic tinsel tipped spruce pine Christmas tree.
similar to this photo
Standing in her nightgown she was surrounded by toys and with a twinkle in her eye and she was holding the Shirley Temple pocketbook that I had found on the attic floor.
The little girl who stood in front of the tree that Christmas, 1934, holding her new Shirley Temple pocketbook, well, her good ship never came in, and liquor replaced her lollipop, 
as she spent her days daydreaming and drinking and watching tv.
I imagine that Christmas of 1934 had been a special one for the girl. The girl who had Hollywood dreams, and Greensboro nightmares. The girl who grew up but never out, of the house, that sat on the rural road. The house that ironically sits near the new by-pass, that now ……heads out of town. The homeplace, that ended up in this odd place, the homeplace…….where no one knows what really happened…… if only those walls could talk!
WLLSqpYyPD8 ( listen and watch the adorable Shirley Temple sing ” On The Good Ship Lollipop” )
