Since it’s Mother’s Day, I thought I would share three stories my mother, Shirley Lovelace Williams, has told me over the years.
One of my mom’s earliest memories comes from when she was about eight years old. She had been looking forward to traveling with her family from Brownsville, Tennessee, to Memphis to visit their cousin, Elsie McBride, who was in a tuberculosis hospital.
On the morning of the trip, my mom came down with a fever. The rest of the family went to Memphis without her. She stayed home and missed the adventure.
If you ask my mom about one of the great disappointments of her life, she will likely tell you that story.
Elsie McBride survived tuberculosis and lived most of the rest of her life in Haywood County. She remained close to my mom’s family throughout her life.
Since the visit took place in the mid 1940s, the hospital may have been Oakville Sanatorium, later called Oakville Memorial Sanatorium, at 3335 Old Getwell Road. Memphis had operated the facility since 1902 for tuberculosis patients, and by 1945 Tennessee law referred to it as the Shelby County Tuberculosis Hospital.
My mom at the Mid-South Fair around the time she worked at Plough.
After my mom graduated from high school, my she left Haywood County for Memphis. She got a job as a secretary in the accounting department at Plough. In the late 1950s, Plough sold products such as St. Joseph Aspirin for Children, Maybelline cosmetics and Coppertone skin care products.
Abe Plough (1891–1984), a pioneering Memphis entrepreneur and philanthropist, founded Plough Chemical Company in 1908 at age 16 with a $125 loan. From a one-room operation above his father’s store, he built Plough, Inc. into a major pharmaceutical company known for products such as St. Joseph Aspirin and Coppertone. His civic legacy continues through the Plough Foundation, which has supported numerous Memphis projects.
During her years at Plough, my mom earned a special award for helping come up with the name “Coppertone.” For many years, she kept a Coppertone trophy featuring the classic Coppertone image of the little girl and the dog pulling down her swimsuit bottoms.
My mom in her office at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary.
Like Gutenberg, my mom helped put part of the Bible on paper.
Between the invention of the printing press and the home computer came the typewriter. Since I grew up in the 1960s and 1970s, I have very specific memories of typewriters. Speed mattered. People measured it in words per minute, and a fast typing speed counted as a genuine flex. I remember my parents competing to see who could type the fastest.
Now that computers are replacing typewriters, that very practical skill is going away forever.
When my dad attended Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth, Texas, my mom worked as an administrative assistant for a group of professors.
Some of those professors were helping produce sections of the W.A. Criswell Study Bible. My mom typed and corrected commentary for the project, and I specifically remember seeing corrected sections for the book of Jeremiah.
The Bible she worked on belonged to a major Southern Baptist study Bible project connected to W.A. Criswell, the longtime pastor of First Baptist Church in Dallas. Criswell was born in 1909, became pastor of First Baptist Dallas in 1944 and served there for 50 years. His published 54 books and founded Criswell College, First Baptist Academy and KCBI Radio.
Another childhood memory of my mom includes the Bible. Many mornings, I would wake up, walk into the den of our house in Parkway Village and find her sitting under her giant hair dryer with a cup of coffee in one hand and her Bible in her lap.
None of those details tells her whole story, of course. But they tell part of the story I love most: that my mom moves through life with faith, humor and resilience. Happy Mothers Day to all the moms out there, including mine.
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