Graduation letter stirs up memories

As I was searching for a photo over the weekend, I came across an old letter that I had forgotten existed. It was a graduation letter from my great aunt, Florence Mills, to my father, David Self, congratulating him on graduating high school.

She wrote that she hoped he enjoyed spending the enclosed “gift.” My guess is probably it was a $10 bill or maybe even a $5 bill, either of which would have been quite generous at the time.

The envelope had a 3-cent stamp on it and was postmarked June 4, 1937, in Detroit, Michigan. Besides my dad’s name in the address, only the name of the town, McCalla, Alabama, was listed. Down in the lower left corner was written: c/o Rev. J.T. Self.

Envelope of graduation letter my great aunt sent to my father in 1937.

That was my grandfather, an itinerant Methodist preacher. I’m sure McCalla was small enough that the mailman knew where to find the family of the Rev. J.T. Self.

Lucy Childers Self, my grandmother, was Aunt Florence’s oldest sister. These two and another sister, Ila, lived close together in Bessemer when I was young. Whenever we went to see Grandmama Self, we also saw the sisters, full of life and lots of fun. It took me the longest time to figure out how they were connected.

The last time I saw Aunt Florence, she was celebrating her 100^th birthday in Rogersville, Alabama, at the home of her oldest son. This was Sept. 9, 2001. She was still joking and talking up a storm about whatever subject came up.

She particularly talked a lot about Daddy and told my brother he looked so much like David, she kept thinking it was him. She thought they were both so handsome.

“Oh, did I love that David,” she said more than once. She occasionally referred to him in the present tense even though he had died in 1986.

Aunt Florence cutting the cake at her 100th birthday celebration.

She called my grandfather, Lucy’s husband, the preacher man. When Daddy was a young man getting ready for college, she had thought he was going to follow in the preacher man’s footsteps and be a preacher, too. He didn’t.

Most of Florence’s letter to Daddy in 1937 described her concern about her husband’s health. He had been sick and she was afraid it might be tuberculosis. One of her sisters had died from it as a teen. She bemoaned how devastating it would be to lose her Percy.

But she couldn’t and didn’t suppress her sense of humor that stayed with her through all the years.  She wrote that Daddy was no longer the only one in the family with a dimple. Her fast-growing baby, who “of course was spoiled,” had one, too, and she hoped it would stay.

Apologizing for being so late with the letter, she said “but that’s your aunt, never on time.” And she ended it with a P.S.

“Now isn’t this a nice graduation letter? And do you still go to see the same girl?” I don’t know who that would have been. This was six years before he met my mama.

It was fun reading the letter and thinking about Aunt Florence and Daddy as a much younger person. She lived another year and four months after we saw her. She had outlived all of her siblings and all but one of Lucy’s children.

She joked about being named Florence Omega Childers. As the sixth child, she was supposed the be the last. The doctor had suggested naming her Revelations, insisting her mother stop having children.

“But she went ahead and had the twins anyway,” Florence said. Ila, the sister I remembered was one of the twins. The other died in early childhood.

Florence died on Jan. 11, 2003, the same day my father had died 17 years earlier.