At 2:00 a.m., on the morning of Wednesday, September 6th, 1950, one month after the Korean War began, George R. Howard, 25, from Walnut Cove, N.C. and recent graduate of Bluefield State Teacher’s College, with his friend, Arthur Froe, driving, took his young wife, Delores, a recent freshmen at Bluefield State, from their home in the coal fields of Gary, West Virginia. Their destination was Stevens Clinic, in Welsh, West Virginia, six miles away.
According to my grandfather, Robert F. Williams, Cleveland Ohio, “Your father came back from the hospital and said ‘it's a boy!’” Grandad says that Delores was like all young moms, enjoying the great feeling of the gift of a child. At thirty-seven, he says that he surely felt young being a grandfather. The boy was named Arnett Douglas Howard, after a brother of George’s that died in childbirth.
Our family lived in the coal mining village of Gary, West Virginia, where my maternal grandfather, Robert Fulton Williams and his parents, George Wesley Williams and Fannie Kate Hairston Williams had been since 1915. Fannie had died in 1928.
Myrtle Hairston, my maternal grandmother, did not desire motherhood and my grandfather raise my mother, with the help of John and Nan Harrison, Myrtle’s brother and sister-in-law. I only saw Myrtle once; at my mother's funeral in 1963.
My parents met at Bluefield State, a historical black college in West Virginia. He was a young veteran from World War two from North Carolina; she a freshmen, eight years younger. He graduated with a degree in chemistry, with aspirations of going on to Meharry Medical College in Nashville. However, with my mother's pregnancy, there was a need to marry and provide for my little hungry mouth. They married on February 25th, 1950, four days after mom's seventeenth birthday.
The Howard's moved to 175 Chicago Avenue, Columbus, Ohio in 1951 and the second baby, Gerald was born in June 22nd to 1952. After an extensive job search, George began a thirty-three year career as an industrial chemist with Westinghouse Appliance Division on Columbus's West side in 1953. After the twins, Keith and Kevin, made their appearance on September 17th, 1955, Delores began employment with General Motor’s Delco plant.
When I was six or seven, a Christmas gift for Gerald and I were ice skates. Mom took us to Franklin Park several times during cold winters to try them out; she had a pair also. I remember getting scrapes on my ankles from skin chafing against skate leather, but I have a vivid picture of being on ice with my mom.
I also have first memories of accompanying her to the beauty shop on Mount Vernon Avenue, the heartbeat of Columbus's Negro business during the mid 1950's. And there are recollections of women, gossip, hot steel combs resting over flames and the aromatic bouquet of smoldering hair being style; the decorous rituals of African women through the ages.
The first Church our family became aligned with in Columbus was St. Paul A.M.E. on Long Street. The Howard's desire to raise their four boys away from Columbus's poverty plagued West side and after their evacuation when floodwaters ravage “The Bottoms” in January, 1959, they were even more determined to escape to a higher ground. The family purchased an acre in a new development in Union County, Ohio, Frazier Estates and spent the summer of 1959 constructing their dream home.
My father labored over nearly every inch of our new home, contracting excavators to dig the basement, assisting a work associate who laid the foundation block. When the house was under roof and hardwood floor was being laid, he gave me my first job as his assistant. I apprentice in the building trades at age eight and some of the most treasured memories where the home cooked meals that Mom would remove from our picnic basket on Saturday or Sunday.
The Howard’s and their four boys moved into 8564 Frazier Road, Plain City, Ohio, on November 9th, 1959, next door to the Thomas Crumps and their four girls, who had preceded our move by one month. Frazier Estates was to grow into a neighborhood of twenty-four homes occupied by African-American families.
Soon after moving to Union County, our family joined Allen Chapel A.M.E. Church in Marysville, Ohio. Delores sang with the choir, George supervised the Sunday schools and we boys first tinkled on the church’s piano. I do remember very clearly as summer's day in 1960 when she came home hauling a used, upright piano in a rented trailer attached to her Chevy. We unloaded the huge instrument and installed it in the recreation room of our new house.
Within an hour of the piano being attached by eight hands, I had composed a blues tune. She started Gerald and I on lessons with Mary Liggins, wife of our minister, Reverend Tom Liggins. Mrs. Liggins says Mom traded piano lessons for church work and Mrs. Liggins instructed us from a book by John Thompson entitled Teaching Little Fingers to Play.
Within months, our home was filled with not only a piano, but drums, a guitar, bugle, xylophone, whistles, bells, percussion instruments and Mom's prized reel recorder, where we first heard George Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue.
The Howard house soon became a magnet for musical instruments; a bugle from Billy Leftwich, a guitar and field from Uncle Al Turner, a classic drum set from Mrs. Cornetta Palmer whose late husband, Pete, played with 1930's jazz bands. We had a home reel tape recorder that was mom's pride and it was from that recorder that we learned to love George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue.
Delores had drive. She was a church leader at Allen Chapel A.M.E. Church in Marysville, Ohio. Hearing her sing in the choir on a Sunday was a treat for all. I remember a Sunday in 1962 when an afternoon program featured a young Columbus attorney, Robert Duncan, who she had met during a governor's campaign that brought James A. Rhodes into office in 1963.
Bob Duncan became a landmark federal justice and Jim Rhodes became governor of the century in Ohio. I vaguely remember that she was appointed to a state office by Governor Rhodes after his inaugural in 1963.
My mother, Delores, who planted of the seeds of music in her four boys died in the early spring of 1963. I was twelve and one Sunday April, 7th, when we return home from Sunday services at Allen Chapel, my brothers Kevin and Gerald raise the garage door and saw mom’s arms dangling out of the door of her Chevy parked inside. She had stayed home from church many mornings during the previous months, suffering from depression that we children knew little about. Her self-asphyxiation was the end of a difficult time for her.
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