My siblings, their spouses, Grace, Jim and his mother, and me

We remaining three Overholsers moved to Laurinburg, North Carolina, in the late summer of 1964. Dad had taken a job teaching philosophy at St. Andrews Presbyterian College. I was a junior in high school. Grace was able to go back to her previous work, instructing Sunday School teachers in the region.

Grace writes from Laurinburg that all the family gathered for Christmas 1964. She especially loved the caroling: “I enjoy this part of our family life more than almost any other. It is so GOOD to hear someone playing the piano and different voices singing.” While North Dakota’s Christmas dinner had been pheasant and wild duck, North Carolina’s was rock lobster tails and shrimp-stuffed crab. Friends and colleagues came over to meet their family, and Grace speaks of her pride and delight afterward upon hearing compliments about their children.

In March 1965, Grace reports that she has taken a job at Laurinburg High School, teaching advanced English to 80 students, grades 9–12. (I’m one of them.) The teacher who had planned this new program was experiencing a difficult pregnancy, and Grace was brought in as her replacement. She describes the teaching as “absorbing, challenging, exciting — and something that never stops! So far I have done nothing much except work constantly, only stopping to sleep. For days our breakfast dishes go unwashed. We eat out at night. Geneva cleans the house and does all her ironing.”

In a letter to her wealthy benefactor-friends in Grosse Point, Michigan, she writes: “ Our lives here are busy and full of education, mainly. Jim is making a good teacher, just as he did in Jamestown — though he hates the every-morning 8 o’clock classes and committee meetings and paper grading. I don’t believe he will ever unpack and live life where he is at the moment, but he certainly does contribute a lot to others in spite of his own inability to accept his life and himself and what he has.”

In April 1965 Grace goes to Washington to “assemble with other U of Texas journalism graduates to tour the White House and be with our fellow-student Lady Bird.” The first lady was at the ranch and LBJ was off viewing terrible flood conditions. But “that loss didn’t dampen my enthusiasm” because what she wanted most was to see her former journalism professor “and renew acquaintance with newspaper people who are doing interesting things and whom I knew at school.” Liz Carpenter, then Lady Bird’s press secretary, hosted. “We went through the White House in a way I’d never dreamed of doing.”

Grace sat on Lincoln’s bed, enjoyed the superb views of Washington and relished the “huge Texas shrimp.’ After dinner, they adjourned to the library to hear their professor, DeWitt Reddick, “talk about the writing most people are doing.” He was kind enough to introduce Grace, “tying in her church curriculum writing with her former responsibility as Church Editor of the Daily Texan.” Then it was on to the National Press Club for a drink. Grace chatted with “an editor of Time, two writers from the National Observer, a top advertising man from New York, a correspondent for the New York Times and DeWitt. Sigh.”

Another letter to Teena Wilson in Grosse Pointe: Grace will soon send her a copy of Jim’s newly published book, “A Contemporary Christian Philosophy of Religion.” While the subject is challenging, “he writes easily and clearly and I think you will get a lot of it since you are interested in the very things he deals with. He tried to show that religion must have meaning for our whole lives and that modern Christianity must recognize the values given us by music, art, philosophy, drama, other literary forms, psychology and similar contributions of mankind. We must not remain an isolated church, isolated from where man is, where he lives, where he is in this century.”

Grace writes to A., who is to be married the following summer, to say that he should buy his fiancée a ring (with the money she and Jim are giving him as a graduation gift). “She is thoughtful to agree with you about the WISDOM of saving money, but I can say with passion that she will wear your ring with feelings far deeper than mere wisdom.”

Next, a report that I am in Cuernavaca that summer of 1965, living with a local family and studying Spanish, Mexican art and history, archaeology and guitar. I had traveled by bus with Dad, by way of New Orleans, switching to the Azteca train at Nuevo Laredo. I would be flying from Mexico City to Memphis for A’s wedding in mid-August at Dad’s former church. The preacher who succeeded him had generously invited our family to move back into the manse for the occasion.

In the fall of 1965, Grace reports that they are “finally replacing the Black Chariot” — the ’55 Chrysler that had carried our family on trips to Mexico, Florida and the Keys, and throughout the West and New England. They bought a used Plymouth. Mom put “all the last of my writing money into it as down payment, $550.”

Grace is teaching again this school year and “I like it better than anything I have ever done except the writing.” Her seniors had each chosen a country whose literature they were “to read extensively in, including examples of all literary types.” One student wrote that he had dreaded the idea of this intensive study, some of the reading was hard, and he had had to make himself keep on. “But now I have an entirely different understanding of people I had known nothing about and of literature I didn’t know existed. I intend to read in other areas now.”

Spring comes, and N. is expecting Grace’s first grandchild, due in early summer. Grace faces a scheduling dilemma. She is now pursuing a master’s degree at the University of North Carolina and hoping to attend two summer sessions in Chapel Hill. She also wanted to be in New Haven with N. and the new baby, but snow days have extended the teaching year. And, at the end of the summer, she “should belatedly behave as a proper mother” and help Geneva get ready for college. Grace concludes: “I am too busy, but I love learning and I’m enjoying life and I hope you will all forgive me for neglecting each one of you.”

Neglected or not, I set off for my camp-counselor job in the mountains near Asheville — with only a slight premonition of how dramatically our lives would change that summer.