For three months, Grace and Jim traveled, from Edinburgh to Vienna, Paris to Rome. By tube, by Métro, train and boat, they took in opera, theater, ballet, museums, castles and mountaintops — as well as hot cross buns, gateaux and crusty baguettes. (How could they afford it all?!)

When it was over, Jim headed to Basel for studies in theology and philosophy with the likes of Karl Barth, Karl Jaspers, Martin Heidegger. Grace headed home to pick up the children and move in with her mother.

Throughout the summer, the three of us kids lived with Jim’s parents. Tales of those months live on: We played under a live electric line felled by a storm. We ran barefoot across wet tar. One morning, my brother poured my “Grapenuts.” They tasted funny: Gaines Meal, our grandmother determined (with the aid of their dog, Lady). There were many long drives in the country, with the classic backseat squabbles — sometimes followed by switchings from our grandfather.

Meanwhile…

June 8, 1951, shipboard letter: “Dear Big and Little O’s, Mother, Family and Kind Friends: “This is our last day in the big, wide endless ocean, for they tell us that late tomorrow afternoon, we shall see first the French, and then the English coasts. There are many Germans on board the SS Homeland, as few ships go to Germany now. We have nice table mates, two from Hamburg (now living in Staten Island), one from Austria (Hartford, Conn.), and one from Bremerhaven (Iowa). It makes one’s heart sick to hear how many are going back to Germany, hoping, by some good fortune, to get to see their relatives in the Russian Zone. Our tablemate from Austria is hoping to buy his mother out of the Sudetenland.

“There is much going on in the way of singing, eating, dancing at night, movies when the weather permits, meeting and talking with people from all over the U.S. lying in our deck chairs watching the sea when the boat dips down and back.

“There are many different ‘characters’ on this boat. About 120 students are going to Paris to study and some are quite Bohemian in dress and action. Lots of entertainment, too. Last night, a Spanish girl and an Indian (complete with turban, tunic, etc.) did a Balinese dance. I know the three little lambs will be interested in hearing this: there is a New Yorker who is quite a good dancer and singer. I had danced with him several times and found his dancing easy to follow and quite exciting. Imagine my surprise last night when he, after being asked to sing and receiving an encore request, announced: ‘Now, if my favorite dancing partner will do me the favor, I would like to dance my encore.’ And then he came to me. Jim insisted I accept, and we danced before the whole crowd — several hundred people! It was quite an experience, I can tell you.” (Jim was not – yet – a dancer.)

“There is a surprisingly large number of children on board. They make me miss our own three sweet ones. I look at your pictures and think of you every day. We miss you but know you are happy and having a good time, as we are. We seem far away from America and yet very close to our family and dear friends in Greenwood. Thank you and everyone for helping to make this trip possible. Love to all — Grace (Jim, too)”

June 16, 1951, Waldorf Hotel, Aldwych, London: “London is the most interesting place I’ve ever seen. The British Museum alone is so staggering that it leaves you wondering for hours about the long history of civilization. They have dug all over the world and preserved things from almost all civilizations known. And the concerts, ballet and plays! We saw Vivien Leigh and Laurence Olivier in the Festival production of ‘Caesar and Cleopatra’ and tomorrow we hear the Royal Philharmonic with Sir Thomas Beecham. Monday we see ‘Parsifal’ with Kirsten Flagstad. And we saw Danilova dance Thursday.

Note to Big and Little O’s: “In London there are so many things to remind us of you. We saw London Bridge and the Tower of London yesterday. Yesterday we saw the changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace and Whitehall — a most colorful ceremony with men on black horses, the men all dressed in red uniforms with polished breastplates and waving plumes. Daddy said he meant to tell you that the pennies here are as big as our half dollars! It costs three pennies (threepence, they say) to ride the bus (coach, they say), and the subway (tube, they call it) costs the same except for long distances. Some day you all can come here and marvel at it all.” (Imagine if she could have known then that her son would spend a postdoc year here.)

“You are having a good time. Please mind Grandmommy and Granddaddy so they will find things easier. We are grateful to them for helping us make this trip by taking care of you 3 little hullabaloos. Mother loves you all three so much. Wish I could hug you right now.”

July 5, 1951, Hotel Oxford & Cambridge, rue d’Alger, Paris (a 10-minute walk from where I was to live a quarter century later, where our older daughter, Laura Grace, was born — one of many grandchildren whom she would never know). “Paris — ah! It is indescribably beautiful. The buildings, the statues, the parks, trees, flowers, symmetry and again lack of it in boulevards and ‘places’– all of it is equal to all you read. We’re glad we chose to stay here 2 weeks. We have gone constantly, day and night, for 4 days and have just touched the surface. We are just at the Tuileries Gardens, and our Métro (subway) station is at this garden. It is hard not to understand French. But we can read it all right. Jim is out now exploring the Sorbonne and will end up at the Seine bookstalls. Yesterday we spent in the Louvre. I’ll go back again at 2 because I didn’t see all I wished. The Venus de Milo, Mona Lisa, Winged Victory are all there — not to mention other art treasures. Tonight we go to the Casino de Paris — a Folies Bergère type of musical revue, and tomorrow we have tickets for a gala night at the opera to see an Italian ballet corps and Naples Orchestra in ‘Romeo and Juliet’ and ‘Giselle.’

“The French women strolling on the Champs Elysées Sunday afternoon were indeed the most fashionably dressed I’ve ever seen. They have a definite flair and a chic all their own. This goes down to much less wealthy areas. The materials are most beautiful. I’d love to buy a lot of clothes from them. Ah! for a lot of money!

“We’re pleased you 3 little lambs are doing so well. Love and kisses to all of you in our dear families, Grace and Jim”

Bastille Day: ”You should see how we devour your letters — while we sit at a sidewalk café and drink citron pressé (lemonade) or at a restaurant table where we eat delicious fish, grilled meats, cold melons, fresh fraises (strawberries), gateaux (cakes) or wonderful patisseries (French pastries). Once we went to the Tuileries Gardens which are right across the Rue de Rivoli from us and ate cheese and crusty bread and cakes and read our mail.

“We leave Monday for Germany and then Switzerland. Tonight we shall go out to see the Bastille Day celebrations, dancing in the streets, lights, fireworks, etc. Tomorrow we shall go to services at another reformed church and then to see the Versailles Palace in the afternoon. There are museums of every kind and we’ve seen 4 different art museums alone. We saw ballet at the magnificent Opéra, which must be the most beautiful building inside in the world. And a Bach Organ Concert at St. Eustache Church was outstanding.

“We love you all and are more grateful every day for your making this trip possible for us. You are all wonderful!“

This is the last letter from Europe in the file; their travels continued through Germany, Switzerland, Austria and Italy, with postcards from each. In Naples, in late August, Grace boarded the Saturnia for New York City. The trip home was a downer.

Grace would not see Europe again.

Back in Greenwood, things seem to go along nicely. Jim’s ministry is flourishing, Grace moves more deeply into church work and their home life features all the familiar juggling of a young family. Also: Grace gets her hair cut short, with bangs. Church members tell her she looks 15 years younger. “Jim likes it all right, but said I have lost my natural dignity.”

In a November 1949, letter to the parents, Grace writes of Jim’s article in a journal published by Union Seminary: “To me it is the high point in Jim’s career. This article is the result of all the reading and clear thinking he has done since he was in college. He has an unusual ability of absorbing and assimilating what he reads. He puts it through the mill of his mind, mixing it with ingredients from many books and magazines and conversations, letting it simmer, and then produces thoughts and ideas of his own. He thought this article out one night when he couldn’t sleep. Went to the church next morning and wrote it all down without having to struggle too much over the phrasing. The editors accepted the article, writing him, ‘We certainly want it; it’s tops.’”

In a Christmas 1949 note to herself she reflects on their decision not to travel to Ohio to be with Jim’s parents, staying at home instead and getting “modest gifts” for the children. “But our wise buying was not enough to stretch our meager funds. We have had a difficult time this last year trying to make our finances satisfy our simplest needs. A week before Christmas, we were faced with the undeniable fact that there wouldn’t be enough money to go through until our next check came. We figured what our expenses would be, counted our money, and we lacked about $6 having enough. The only thing we could do was to borrow from the Lord — which meant going to the tithe box, opening the church envelope already filled for next Sundays offering, and taking out the $8. One thing which had taken the last of our funds was a ton of coal. The national mining situation affects people like us in ways John L. Lewis isn’t bothered about since we are not his particular flock.” Their own flock, she notes wryly, has sent eight different fancy-fruit baskets.

February 1950, to her parents: “We were down in the dumps about a month ago when we heard Evans Brown, our friend over here at Anderson, say with great excitement that the Corpus Christi church was to call him. He is about Jim’s age and certainly no better preacher than he is — about average I should say, although he is very friendly and affable. We hadn’t really thought about going a lot, but it did seem sad for the church to go within 43 miles of us and get someone, didn’t it?” On a happier note, Jim and Grace have been enjoying local outings — to Columbia to see foreign films, to Anderson to hear the Buffalo symphony, to Greenville to hear the Cincinnati symphony.

Then comes a February 1950 letter to her mother, with arresting news: “Jim wants to finish his thesis next summer if he possibly can, the two months we are in Richmond. He has been able to write some of the first chapter. Most of it was done by his staying at the church until 11 two nights a week, because all day the interruptions are almost constant. If he does this and gets through with the comprehensives, he should get his Th.D. in 1951, May. Then, we want to go to Europe for him to study and get the continental background for the theology he sorely needs. If he has a doctor’s degree plus training, even for a few months in some of the European universities, he can be in line for teaching in a seminary if the call comes.

“In order to go we will have to sell almost everything we have except dishes and silver — even the car, or mainly the car. We hope to be able to save a little something, but what it will be I can’t see now. Jim has written to the Board of Education in Louisville asking for a try at a $500 scholarship. He would probably spend about six months in Europe. He doesn’t want to go without me; perhaps the best thing to do would be to prevail upon you and the Overholsers to help take care of our children during one summer; I would come back in September and live with one of you all and send the children to school while Jim lived over there more cheaply than we all could. This is just theory yet, of course.”

What a theory.

Meanwhile, their lives perk along. April 1950, to her parents: “Thursday we will have Dr. Miller (a visiting church official) for dinner. Tomorrow Jim has a luncheon engagement and I have my garden club luncheon. He will go for A. at 12, taking G. along and dropping me at the luncheon. Then he will come back and let them eat the lunch I will prepare before I go. When they finish he loads them in the car and takes them to Mrs. Lucia Smith’s where they will stay until I pick them up after my luncheon at 1:45 or 2. Thursday he has a Salvation Army luncheon and meeting. Friday I have to go to Newberry for Presbyterial. My final report as Secretary of Assembly’s Home Missions I must do tonight if I can find the necessary hours after church.” Meanwhile, her ”children’s work in the Synod has taken up a lot of time lately.” Grace ends with the thing she says she’s proudest of: She has made coats for both her daughters — although she confused “interlining” and “interfacing,” leaving the collars “a bit limp.”

The visiting minister, it seems, was satisfyingly complimentary: “His comment Sunday night during the service really endeared him to us, gratitude-starved as we sometimes say we are. Dr. Miller said something like, ‘It has been a real pleasure to be more closely associated with your fine pastor and his lovely family this week. And I want to tell you something — whenever a man has been in a place 3½ years, he is free to move. Before that it’s too short and a church is just stealing that calls a man sooner. But that timing is legitimate, and whenever any good church asks me where a good pastor is, I’ll know where there is one. Now you better be watching out and take care of them, because churches are going to be casting eyes on your pastor. And I want to say this, too. The minute I laid eyes on that girl [referring to 37-year-old Grace] I knew there was something extraordinary about her. And then I knew what it was when I found she came from Texas. You here in South Carolina are going to have to send a lot of people out West to take the place of this one you have gotten from Texas; they don’t make them any finer.’

“It certainly does make your heart feel good to hear things like that. And we can tell the difference all this week. People had been taking us more or less for granted. We have one member of our staff who blows her own horn and no one is in doubt of her good qualities, but we seldom hear anyone say what a fine pastor and his family we have. We were walking on air for a few hours.”

When Grace received word of her brother Joe’s death, Jim was in Richmond, working on his doctorate. In her letter to him, Grace seems to waver between yearning for Jim to be at home with her and urging him on. August 1944: “Dearest Jim, I can hardly stand it without you to lean on, but I’ll manage if you won’t worry. Somehow I knew all the time that Joe wouldn’t come back. He was just in too much danger. It’s terrible for Mother and Daddy; they have lost their oldest and youngest sons now. Be sure and write me soon. I can hardly see how I can get by these few days until Mother and Daddy come.”

A few days later, Jim left Richmond for several days of travel on his own. Grace wrote, “Now you are in New York and I have been trying to imagine what you have been doing all day. I am glad you went and I shall be interested in hearing all about your doings. I notice you plan to stay until Monday p.m., and I am glad you can stay that long.

“Josephine left his morning…I took her to the station and then came back and visited awhile with Daddy and then took him to catch his train. We have managed to regain some of our composure, but it has been hard. There is such a vacant feeling and somehow I don’t even want to see a newspaper. Thanks for the nice cards — shows you are thinking of us, too. Have a good time, darling.”

A couple of days on, she writes of how much she’d like to be with him in New York — a city Grace will later delight in and describe in delicious detail. Here, her references to their different tastes in travel feel discomfiting: “Dearest Sweetheart, Well, I feel almost like I had been to New York, thanks to your most interesting letter. I think you have had just the kind of trip to the Big City that you have always yearned for — no female along to make you stay at a place you couldn’t afford, nor slow you down in your marathon trek around the pavements, nor make you eat at a strange place where you had too little to eat and it cost too much! I confess I still wish I had been along, especially to walk on Times Square early in the morning and to ride atop the bus and go to Coney Island. Think of your having done those things! It’s hard to believe here in my everyday existence of baby baths and potty sessions.

“I feel very lost and forlorn this morning. Mother left at 5:30 A.M. and I was sorry to see her go. I haven’t been able to settle down to anything I need to do. I’ll write to you instead. I’d much rather. Don’t think too much about us but go ahead and have a good bachelor time while you have a chance. Next February or thereabouts you may wish you were there again. Family troubles are a burden, remember. And now’s your opportunity to give way to that submerged desire to ‘be single again.’” It’s hard to know what to make of this seeming selflessness. It doesn’t bode well.

A few months later, Grace writes to Jim’s parents: February 1945: “The Overholser fortunes are at the lowest ebb in history, except for some of those red, red days early in Blytheville. Early in January we decided that it would be best to figure out the Income Tax and send our check at that time instead of waiting until the 15th. Shortly after that, we had to buy our automobile license, and that took $20 just like that. We were beginning to see that we must go deep into our reserve pantry, which consists mostly of beans and tomatoes and jellies and preserves which the congregation gave us. Then Jim had his final appointment with the dentist and what do you suppose the bill was — $172.80!! Well — he had saved the Christmas money planning to pay that bill with it, but all he had was $100. He wrote a check for that amount and cleaned us out. All we had at home was enough to buy the baby’s milk for the remainder of the week. It was then just after the 15th and no more money until Feb. 1. Well, there was my nice little amount I had saved to buy a washing machine. We ‘borrowed from it’ and paid everything we had to, and bought only groceries we needed from the two places where we have accounts.”

October 1946, Grace writes to her sister in California. Josephine is newly pregnant. “I am sure you know that we are speaking from the heart and from experience when we say how happy we are for you. There are many things that will be different for you now; Jim has always said, ‘When a child comes into your home, peace flies out the window.’ And being married and living in a home without children is not the same as marriage with children. You can’t expect a child to fit into your home just like something else new does, adding variety and beauty and interest and charm. A child changes a home because everything has to be fitted to his needs.”

Well, maybe not everything. “Lately we have been doing some interesting reading in the new anthologies of modern British and American and French and Italian poets. Robinson Jeffers (who lives in Cal. at Mt. Carmel-by-the-Sea) is one of the interesting. Also John Crowe Ransom, Ezra Pound (I wonder what the U.S. will do to him?) and the tragic Hart Crane. About 11 o’clock some night, read Edna St. Vincent Millay’s ‘Renascence’ again. She certainly wove a spell with her words.”

Finally, Grace writes, “we have lately devoured travel books because we have the traveling urge again, and no telling where we’ll go, once given the chance. But we will take our family with us and enjoy it with them and let them enjoy it through our help

In fact, Grace and Jim did have a big trip coming up — a trip on which they would decidedly not be taking the children. Before that, though, there’d be yet another move — and one more baby.

Grace McSpadden married James Arthur Overholser on March 30, 1937, in Austin.

Back at the manse in Smyrna, Tennessee, she writes to her parents of her happiness: “We have a great deal of fun every day playing and singing on the piano, washing and drying dishes, going out and seeing how the flowers and the garden is growing, and just being in love. I don’t miss anything — I’m having the time of my life and enjoying it immensely.”

For the next dozen years, her life would be a series of moves from one small southern town to another while Jim sought to move up in the ministry, to conclude his graduate education — and to find escape from his disappointed hopes. Meanwhile, Grace would give birth to three children, sing in the choir, seek to be a model minister’s wife, keep house in one new home after another, and struggle to make ends meet.

Still prone to self-reflection — and a touch of judgmentalism — she continues to write notes to herself. She hears some mothers complaining about their children marrying and being “gone forever,” and writes, “Things I am anxious to avoid doing when I grow old and have children and grandchildren: losing all interest in everything except what my children do and say; talking unless I am in conversation with some person about some special thing; and getting into the middle-age habit of looking backward instead of finding renewed joy in what life holds — if not for me then for the world. I am not the only thing in it.”

Grace and Jim soon moved to a new ministry, in Blytheville, Arkansas. Their first child, a daughter, is born. Grace’s letters, now to both sets of parents, mostly recount routine details of their daily lives — and, before long, reports of Jim’s efforts to find a new pulpit.

She also writes of packages she is sending to Tommy and Joe, her two brothers, both in the armed services.

September 30, 1942: “Here it is my twenty-ninth birthday — the last one of my twenties. I remember rather well when I first hit them because I was thrilled to have attained that ripe old age. And now I am almost at the thirty mark. Doesn’t seem that I am ready to be that old yet.”

November 1942: “Our church services are growing every Sunday. Our music has become so lovely that visitors come each Sunday to hear the choir the whole town is talking about. And Jim, being inspired by all these crowds and just naturally getting better and better all the time, is preaching such sermons that they are brought up and talked about at meetings of every sort. He preached once on Reasons for Not Going to Church, and you should have heard the comments.

“Tonight Jim and I will go to the high school to hear a lecture sponsored by the Rotary Club which is on the general subject of the settlement of postwar problems. The lectures have all been fine since they give us a chance to get different opinions and ideas about things we hear and read about. Since Christmas, we spent $1.50 on a three- month subscription to the Sunday New York Times. I surely do enjoy that paper, even when I have to read two weeks’ copies together like I am doing now. It takes time to read it and that is something I have very little of now.”

A March 1943 letter to her parents tells of visiting a church in Memphis (small and disappointing) that was considering calling Jim. She begins the letter by noting that they are about to celebrate their 6th anniversary. (They’ve already served in two churches.) “I’d rather stay here, because I think Jim is destined for something better and this isn’t it. Besides, we’ve just had a raise and I want to see how it feels to get $2400 for a while.”

Not long after: “Well, at last it has happened. If everything goes along as Jim believes it will, we shall be leaving Blytheville in about a month. For Texarkana — the Arkansas side. There seems to be large growth in that city now, the church has over 400 members, and they are thinking of paying $3300 salary. We will probably go as soon as we can after the 12th of March since I can’t be moving around much after that time. And here I’ve got not only moving ahead of me but also a change in doctors and worry about whether I can get into a strange hospital with so little advance notice, and the prospect of facing a new and strange congregation looking like a second cousin of an elephant!”

Late in April, my brother is born. According to family lore, his birth comes in an inferior hospital on the Texas side of town because Grace wants Texas on her son’s birth certificate. Her Texas roots are not the only thing Grace takes pride in. She tells her parents that, at the church’s welcoming reception, she overheard a Mrs. Booker saying, ‘Why she just doesn’t look like most people. She’s different looking. Like a movie star or somebody you don’t see around every day.’”

In a letter dated two days after D-Day, Grace writes of having missed the siren intended to alert people to the invasion of the Normandy beaches. “I didn’t know anything about it until I saw the big headlines in the paper. It is a terrible thing and hard to face when I think of all the boys going through hell. Being able to hear about events almost as soon as they happen is a wonderful thing but I find the radio stimulates and prolongs my upset feelings. I want to hear it and yet I want to turn it off.”

Meanwhile, a letter to a friend back in Blytheville describes the new church and manse, adding: “Can you see why I feel very happy? There are many difficulties, but where wouldn’t there be? I am glad we could move to such a pleasant place. I really hated to leave some of the people in B., but I know that it was best.….I could go on and on, I suppose. I like to visit with a typewriter. I guess it’s a good thing I have diapers to fold and mending to be done.”

A July 2, 1944, letter to her parents discusses what she hopes will be an upcoming reunion of all the McSpaddens: “Josephine wrote such a nice letter — written on her streamliner away up in the clouds (Grace’s sister is now a stewardess) and said she was planning to come home in September and hoped I would be able to come then, too. But I didn’t know whether Joe could come. I hope he does get to. I certainly shall come, if you have room for all of us, because I want so much to be all together again.”

Twenty days after that letter, Grace’s brother Joe is killed in action over Italy. He was 22.

First, Grace had to take care of that previous relationship. “Bill” — I wish I knew his last name — seems to have come up from Texas to see her in Louisville.

“One of the hardest things I ever had to do was to tell Bill goodbye,” she wrote in a note to herself. “It is almost 2 o’clock now and I imagine his train is just leaving. Last night when he asked me if I was footloose and fancy free I told him about my interest in Jimmy. He made it easy for me by his sympathetic kindness, but later he showed me how hard it was after all. I have never seen anyone as sweetly honest as Bill is. All my life I shall be grateful for his friendship and for his love.

“As he left today Bill made this request: ‘If I don’t see you again, tell the young man I think he is getting the thing nearest to perfection on this earth and to govern himself accordingly.’

“He’s gone now. I wonder when we shall meet again.”

Grace turned her attention to the wedding date. She wrote to a friend that Dad was yearning to be married sooner than they had agreed upon, and that she had resisted the change at first. “After we had been together, and after I had talked things over with him and with his mother, somehow I decided that I wanted to go ahead myself. There are so many things in favor of our going ahead — indeed almost as many as those I had thought prevented our doing it now. He will have a raise in salary when he is married, and he will be so much happier than he is now — at least that’s what he says.

“The two things that have been in my mind as paramount objections are the fact that I will have so little money, and that I hate to leave my work so soon after Dr. Sweets brought me all the way from Texas and gave me a position in the office.”

Shortly before their wedding, she wrote a long letter to Dad recounting a lunch conversation she overheard between two women she didn’t know who were seated at a table nearby.

“Apparently, they had not seen each other for several years, and this luncheon engagement was sandwiched between a trip to Yellowstone Park, Seattle, Vancouver, lower Canada and the Great Lakes which the single woman was taking beginning Sunday, and the very busy life of the married woman. They had grown up together in a small town, both had become successful in their work, and each was still interested in what the other was doing in her life.” The married woman was a writer, completing a biography. “Miss Iva, not as pretty, yet more vigorous, teaches foreign languages of an indefinite sort in a university or college, probably at Lexington.

“Each had her own ambitions in life, the married woman to finish her book and get her mother settled in some resort in Virginia; the single one to take this trip which would be her first pleasure trip since 1930 and to really enjoy herself on the money which she was spending. They spoke of some books they had read, some of the things each had done this past winter — other little and important things. Nothing was unpurposeful in their entire conversation. Their lives must be well-ordered.

“And why was I grateful? I think it was because of the impression they gave me. I have heard so many table conversations that consist of nothing except trivialities. So many people discuss people. These two women were examples of two people who were living carefully and busily. They were doing something with their lives and were achieving more than they probably realized, not because one was a writer and the other a teacher, but because each was apparently trying to do her best and make the most of what she had.

“Whenever I have the feeling that I am not worth much, that my life has had little direction, that I am accomplishing little, I can find a great deal of stimulation in something like this. What others are doing, what use they are making of life, their outlook, how broad is their life — all of these things are in a great sense a challenge.

“How great a relief, and what a sense of security, it is to realize that one has within himself that which will stimulate and challenge and re-invigorate. To have within, a source of mental and spiritual energy — that helps tremendously, doesn’t it?”

Grace seems suddenly to become aware that Jim may not know what to make of this. “Thinking back over what I have just written, the thought comes to me that I must often sound like someone who is just discovering what life is like. These impressions come to me so vividly at times that I feel the strongest urge to put them down and see what I can make of them. I hope you will realize that I have thought through much of my life, more than some things I say might indicate, but nevertheless, something is always giving me a surprise. I thrive on thinking through some impressions and experiencing for myself, and in trying to figure out their meaning for me and others, I like to tell them to another person.”

Then comes a new topic — beginning with a paragraph that makes me itch to shout, back across the decades, “Mother! WAKE UP!”: “Today I filed some more material for Dr. Sweets, and in some of the items I came across a folder on ‘The Minister’s Wife.’ In it were three articles written by wives of ministers who were discussing the attitude some people seem to have toward that part of a minister’s household. Somehow I had never thought so much about being ‘different’ just because of the man you married — I don’t want to be so much and I really don’t see much need in it. I am copying, when I have a stolen opportunity, these articles, and I’ll send you carbons so you can see what I have been reading — perhaps you’ll tell me to throw it away and forget it.

“I love you very much. Each day I want to love you so much again and I always do.”

Next among her papers is a clipping from a booklet called “Typing Tips,” from December 1935, featuring this ditty called “Success:”

“Once upon a time I planned to be

An artist of celebrity;

A song I thought to write one day,

And all the world would homage pay;

I longed to write a noted book, —

But what I did was learn to cook.

For life with simple task is filled,

And I have done, not what I willed.

Yet when I see boys’ hungry eyes

I’m glad I make good apple pies.

— By Elizabeth A. Thomas

Grace put a checkmark by the third verse (italicized here)

I am puzzled. This was published two years before she married. Why did she clip it and why keep it among her papers

And when did she add the checkmark?

The closest Grace came to the hoped-for post in journalism was a secretarial job in the publishing branch of the Presbyterian Church administrative offices in Louisville. As her daughter, as a lifelong journalist, I yearn to know more about her search; I never heard her talk about it. (How many of us heard about our mother’s early yearnings, I wonder?)

Within a year, she became engaged to my father, James Arthur Overholser (“Jimmy, she calls him below”), who was completing his graduate work at the Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary. Thinking about this new future, she typed a note to herself:

“There are certain things in my life which I want to do. I want to keep up with progress and development in the movies and on the stage….Friends are necessary to my happiness, and I want to cultivate the attitude of constantly being on the lookout for new friends…Letter writing has always been a joy to me, but somehow I have always exercised my talent for procrastination more directly in this line than in any other. If I find myself relapsing into it again, I hope I can have enough common sense and some of Daddy’s ‘horse sense’ to cut down the number of people to whom I am writing so that I won’t be inclined to ‘put-offness.’”

When she moves to her expectations for the deepening relationship with Jim, she soars. So high were her hopes for mutual personal growth. So determined she was that “material hindrances” should not dominate their lives. So confident in the prospect of seeing these things come true.

What I’d give to have Dad’s letters in response. No one, apparently, kept them.

“I want my correspondence with Jimmy to be one of the most productive and inspirational things I can find. I don’t know what sort of letters he is likely to write, but I know what I want to do and I shall not hesitate to express to him my wishes and desires. He is a source of challenge and help to me and I want him to know when he has helped me. Today, the day after he left for his church in Smyrna, the thought came to me as I sat at my desk in the window that our correspondence could be one of the dearest things we could ever experience. Even though we hate to be separated, if we can keep in mind personal development of ourselves, with the ultimate purpose of future development together — the more satisfying and happy because of what we have accomplished apart — then I think we have no need to worry about our lives together.

“It isn’t necessary to be thinking of the actual material hindrances all the time; why can’t we let this period be dominated by a desire to work and read and cultivate and develop something into our lives which will be the means of furthering our happiness later? I like to think of preparing myself for something big that is to come in my life; certainly I wouldn’t attempt to make a speech or write a book — a small book! — without long and intensive and adequate and thorough preparation — therefore, why should we want to rush into something which could be all the fuller and happier if we had fitted ourselves for it? We have just begun to know each other. I think he is in sympathy with these attitudes and wishes of mine which may have a tendency to lean toward the idealistic, yet I think I am practical enough to realize where idealism must stop and let realism come in to guide things — and because of his complete, I hope, understanding, he will want to develop himself to fit his own life for a greater life with another.”

Looking back over the three decades of their marriage, reading this makes me sad.

In the note, she returns to her hopes for her own growth — specific indeed. “I want to read a newspaper daily. I also like to hear the news broadcasts. Books I must choose more carefully, and I must read at least one each month, varying them to include novels, philosophy, science, biography, poems, drama and history.” She vows to exercise daily, keep flowers in her room and “be on the lookout for beauty in the street, in the windows, in the park, and wherever I go; and when I think of the moon it will be so easy for me to think of its beauty when Jimmy and I saw it together.

“I will spend only enough money to keep me up and up and not buy anything just because I happen to want it very much. When I go home Mother and Daddy will need that money to help pay for the wedding expenses.

“I want to regain the feeling I had begun to have that spiritual development is necessary in a full, productive life. I don’t want to consider it a duty and an obligation; rather, I want to do it because of its intense meaning and inspiration in my life. I want to rely on God’s help in directing my life, and if I don’t depend on Him, I can’t expect Him to see my needs and wishes.

“These are the things I want in my life — personal development along the above lines. If I carry out my aims, I should be a Grace McSpadden I can be proud of.”

But there was one more thing she needed to take care of: “I must work out and clearly understand my feelings for Bill, and I must explain everything to him so that he will understand our relation to each other. I need help and strength to do this.

Bill? Who was Bill?

Her brother died of appendicitis when she was six, another baby was stillborn, and Grace became the oldest child of Joseph Knowles McSpadden and Eleanor Porter McSpadden. They lived in the small Texas Hill Country town of Clifton. As an adult, Grace wrote reflections on her childhood. Reading them now, I am struck by how many themes would be repeated from one generation to the next.

“Daddy was a Texan all the way: He was outspoken, individual, had strong feelings, a hot temper which he lost quickly and got over quickly, moving from loud denunciations to equally loud declamations about how he loved Mother or us, whichever was the object of his wrath. He was most affectionate and loved to have us around him. He was sensitive and his feelings were easily hurt. He was an avid Bible reader and was outspoken about injustices and discrepancies in the Word and in life. He was given to saying, ‘I want to ask the Lord about…’ and then giving some instance of something he wanted to have explained.”

At first, the family were comfortably well off. “He was on the way up as a successful business man; made rather good money. We had a Baldwin baby grand piano, Mother had a real pearl necklace and a fine diamond ring. We had built our own home, which was attractive and well-furnished. But things went bad and he lost the zip and punch.”

Joe lost more than punch. Amid the Great Depression, he spent the little money the family had on a losing run for county judge. In the wake of that loss, Grace’s brother Tom later told me, Eleanor sold the diamond ring (and a lot more) to move the family to Austin. This made it possible for each of the children (by then also including Josephine and Joe Jr.) to go to the university, while Eleanor ran a boarding house.

“Daddy loved Mother and admired her. He was hard to live with, I’m sure, and I have seen him hurt Mother a great deal. She had a wonderfully patient and sweet and enduring nature and most of the time would put up with his outbreaks and vituperations,” Grace wrote. Uncle Tom told me that one day, when the family were all at home and the parents had been arguing, Eleanor walked out the front door, saying, “I can’t take this anymore.” A good while later, she came back. “I can take it,” she told her children. “I come from good stock.”

Eleanor, wrote Grace, was “wonderfully skillful in making a meal out of practically nothing. I can remember once in Clifton before we moved when there was no money and nothing much to eat in the house. We wondered what kind of lunch we would come home to find at noon. We found delicious pan omelet with chili. I never shall forget the feeling of ‘marveling’ that I had for her.

“Mother came from a family dedicated to learning and proud of its educated sons and daughters. Every one of them pursued higher education [this in the late 1800’s and early 1900’s}, and each was constantly aware of the need to make the best of himself through constant improvement of mind, body and spirit. Mother’s sister, my Aunt Pearl, was vigilant in seeing that we read the right things and said the right things and acted the right way; Mother was only a little less so. We always had the feeling we could do anything we set our minds to.”

It didn’t always go quite that smoothly. At the University of Texas, Grace majored in English and journalism. She was religion editor of the Daily Texan. She was inducted, together with Claudia Taylor (later Lady Bird), into the journalism honorary society. But she had had some readjusting to do, in the wake of the family’s move. She reflected on this when, just after graduation in 1935, she went to a leadership session at Geneva Glen Camp in Colorado, where she wrote:

“When I graduated from a small town high school I felt, as I think most high school graduates do, that I knew a great deal about everything. Because the school was small I had had an active part in most every event or activity the school offered. I think I must have tried my hand at everything!

“Yet this ability to do a great many things even on this small scale had the unfortunate effect of developing in me a feeling that I could do most anything I wanted to and, through this ability to do a lot, ‘get by’ with other things. This attitude prevailed until I had completed the first semester of my university work. When my grades came in my pride went plop! Because of my financial conditions I was unable to pledge a sorority and, since our family had just moved into the university town, I was almost wholly lost. Here I was doing nothing and I had thought I was able to do and know everything.”

Her disappointment in herself jolted her. “After a summer away from home, and after I had had my first college love experience, I began to see more clearly what had been wrong with my attitude and to resolve to make it healthier. And now, after four years and four summers of college, church work, study, reading, friendships and self-study, I feel that I am nearer finding my place in life than I have been since I left high school.”

Still, she added, “I know so little, yet I have the most burning desire to learn more. I realize that I am very emotional, and because I feel such a need for friends, I have to be doubly careful in physical control. With this greater self-realization and equipped with a stronger and deeper faith in myself, which has come chiefly through reading, religious experiences and friendships, I feel much more sure of my life. And even though I cannot see my way clear to obtaining the work in religious journalism which I want to go into, I am keeping my eye on my goal.”

This is the beginning of something I’ve been working on about my (unusual) mother.

Grace McSpadden was a winsome girl from bluebonnet country, as smart as she was lovely. She knew it, too. High-spirited and strong-willed, she was determined to live a rich (and fully examined) life. In college, she worked for the Daily Texan, interviewed Carl Sandburg, dreamed of being a journalist. But this was the 1930’s. It didn’t happen.

She married — a preacher. They moved often, from one small southern town to another. They lived in genteel poverty. She cooked and washed and sewed. They had three children. She sang in the choir and did church work. He preached fine sermons but felt professionally stymied and sorely under-appreciated. She failed to be the helpmeet he pined for; she longed for things they could not afford. Their marriage grew more and more unhappy.

I imagine that the life Grace lived and the attitudes she held are representative of those of many of her contemporaries in comparable circumstances. But three things about her stand out: Her lifelong bent for self-reflection. How doggedly she held on to her hopes. And the fact that she wrote it all down, year after year, in letters to family and friends and, occasionally, in probing notes to herself.

Also: She kept carbon copies.

I have two manila folders full. In 2020, amid the crises we alI experienced plus a few extra of my own, I found the folders in a “Memorabilia” box. I put the papers in chronological order and, for the first time, read them through. I saw what a long path she had walked to become the person she was when she died at age 58. I was struck by how little I had known of that path. And I felt that what Grace had left behind, wittingly or not, was a rare record of the experiences of so many of our mothers, who lived, as she did, in the middle of the last century.

The Grace I knew in my young adulthood (I was 24 when she died) was full of fresh accomplishment. She’d earned a graduate degree, bought a house, become a dean in a small liberal arts college. She was teaching college English and African-American studies, and pursuing ground-breaking research on the work of Richard Wright.

My college friends marveled at the sort of mother I had — recently divorced, striking out on her own, a mother who urged us to read Simone de Beauvoir and James Baldwin, a woman who knew how to counsel a student seeking a safe abortion. A striking, vibrant, confident woman. While so many others’ mothers seemed forlorn, mine was flourishing.

On occasion, I could’ve used something less extraordinary. Here’s an example: When Grace dropped me off at Wellesley, she promptly went home and wrote an article called “How to Tell the Kids Goodbye without a Tear.” Proud to have it published, she enclosed it in a note to me. (Would a tear be so terrible?!) Here’s another: In a brief visit home before returning to college after a summer job at Glacier National Park, I told her I’d hopped a freight train from Glacier to Spokane. I thought she might say, “You could’ve lost a leg!” Or, “You could have been raped!” She said, “Oh, how I wish I could have done that.”

Now, though, I think I get it. Reading these letters, full of struggling to force herself to defer to her husband, of stretching dollars and mending clothes, of manses crying out for repair and cars with holes in the floorboard — now I see that this was a woman who had been yearning for years to live the life she was finally living. Yearning to get back to the hopes she’d outlined to herself as a brand new college graduate. To become, as she had put it early on, “A Grace McSpadden I can be proud of.” And damned if she hadn’t gone and done it. But what a journey — from the wish to the reality — it had been.