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.

By David Westphal and Geneva Overholser

One of the dominant themes of political life these days is the ever-growing division between urban and rural Americans. Thomas Edsall described it this way in The New York Times: “A toxic combination of racial resentment and the sharp regional disparity in economic growth between urban and rural America is driving the upheaval in American partisanship.”

This topic sometimes makes its way to our dinner table discussions, where we try to understand what is driving rural and urban citizens so strongly apart. It hits home for us partly because of our journalism careers at The Des Moines Register, which for many decades was arguably the pre-eminent American newspaper covering farming and rural life. Iowa ranks secondonly to California in the value of its farm production, and even with population declines over the years, more than one-third of its residents are still classified as rural.

Chronicling this rich agricultural footprint was a huge part of The Register’s mission. The farm sector was both a major source of the newspaper’s advertising revenue (mainly classified ads) and a primary focus of news coverage. And it resulted in one of the rare daily newspapers that was delivered to homes in all of the state’s counties. It was, The Register boasted on its front pages, “The Newspaper That Iowa Depends Upon.” (At one point, the Sunday Register claimed a statewide circulation of more than 500,000 — a majority of the state’s households.)

Although vestiges of that time remain — the Register’s Annual Great Bicycle Ride Across Iowa (RAGBRAI) still draws thousands of riders each year — the newspaper’s statewide reach is long gone, a result of demographic, cultural and economic changes that have hit newspapers nearly everywhere. According to a recent NiemanLab report, The Register’s combined print and digital subscriptions have fallen precipitously, to below 40,000.

What did it mean when, for half a century, most Iowans were reading The Register? What was the impact of a newspaper that covered both rural and urban Iowans? It’s impossible to know with any certainty, of course. Consider this a thought experiment — one with some relevance to the divisions our nation is facing today.

In his book, “Covering Iowa,” William B. Friedricks wrote:

“Beginning in the 1870s, but really from the 1920s on, when its circulation began to take off, The Register sought to appeal to all Iowans. In so doing, it became a unifying force within the state. In an age when tensions between farmers and merchants, politicians and professionals, rural and city people, and even men and women were increasing, the paper provided a common meeting ground for all Iowans. It held the attention of the state’s various constituents by providing special sections to appeal to certain groups: it offered detailed coverage of agriculture; campaigned for programs of statewide interest, such as the promotion of good roads; and identified the views of Iowans on important issues in the Iowa Poll. Through such efforts, the Register brought citizens of the state together, and in many ways helped define what it meant to be an Iowan.”

It’s not the case, of course, that rural residents were all big fans of The Register. The newspaper routinely spotlighted problem areas in the farming sector such as damaging environmental practices or safety issues. It regularly chronicled the amount of federal subsidies farmers were receiving. The decidedly liberal orientation of The Register’s editorial pages was not a big hit in many rural homes.

But one thing we think is true: A great many farmers, agribusiness people, and small-town political and business leaders believed that, through The Des Moines Register, they were being seen — by the state’s political and business leaders and by ordinary Iowans across the state. Even as they in turn could see the lives of urban Iowans.

Throughout much of the 20th century, Iowa was the antithesis of the sharp rural/urban divide that now defines our politics. From Harold Hughes to Dick Clark to John Culver to Tom Harkin, Iowa fielded some of the most liberal politicians in Washington, often with robust support from rural voters. In 1984, Harkin’s first Senate victory, a majority of rural counties voted for him. And in that same election, about 40 percent of Iowa’s urban counties backed Republican Ronald Reagan over Democrat Walter Mondale for president.

There was a striking open-mindedness in the electorate, with voters gravitating to candidates and issues without the bindings of tribalism. That fluidity was still in evidence in Barack Obama’s two presidential victories, with nearly two dozen rural counties supporting his 2012 successful re-election bid. Not so today, of course. In the last two presidential elections, all of Iowa’s rural counties have voted for Donald Trump.

In an editorial after the 2020 election, The Register lamented the state’s new pattern of “us vs. them” voting, which it said is permeating politics at all levels. “The risk for Iowa,” the editorial said, “is that it feels as if the state’s historical rural-urban divide is now on steroids, pushed to a new extreme…”

Perhaps unsurprisingly, we find ourselves believing that The Register’s decline, and its retreat from a statewide footprint, is a significant part of this story. Again, impossible to prove. But perhaps examining what has been lost, or nearly lost, from the paper’s report could shed some light.

At one time, The Register had full-time correspondents in eight Iowa cities beyond Des Moines. It had stringers in all 99 counties. It had a fleet of cars that reporters and photographers would use to drive across the state to cover athletic contests, cultural events and spot news developments. The Register was wonderfully innovative. In the 1920s it was one of the early newspapers to purchase airplanes for covering spot developments around the state. At one point, according to George Mills’ book, “Things Don’t Just Happen,” the editors employed carrier pigeons to fly film of an execution at the state prison in Fort Madison to Des Moines. (The pigeons never arrived.)

Three examples of The Register’s statewide orientation:

● Farm and agribusiness coverage. For much of The Register’s life, it had a daily page or more of farm news. The Sunday Farm/Agribusiness section, though, was the showcase, filled with rural-Iowa stories and, not coincidentally, pages of classified ads for farm equipment, livestock, auctions, and so on. The farm/business staff was stocked with some of the best journalists in the room. But that room was only part of the story. The Register’s Washington Bureau arguably had the strongest farm coverage of any DC staff — from reporters like Nick Kotz, Jim Risser, George Anthan. One of the byproducts of their coverage was to make Iowa more internationalist, showing how the state’s multibillion dollar farm exports tied the state to a global economy.

● Political coverage. For nearly 50 years, The Register’s political coverage has been recognized mainly for its chronicling of the Iowa Caucuses and the bellwether Iowa Poll. But day in and day out, reporters like Jim Flansburg and David Yepsen would reflect the local and regional politics of the state, traveling to county conventions, steak fries and other political events across Iowa. Former Gov. Robert Ray once remarked that he had a significant advantage over other governors. Because of The Register, he said, he knew what Iowans across the state knew.

● Sports coverage. For many years, and even today, The Register’s sports coverage has been anchored in its dispatches on the University of Iowa and Iowa State University. Almost as important, though, was its commitment to statewide high school sports. The Register sought to print the scores of every football and basketball game from the state’s 400-plus high schools, and would produce weekly columns and features on high school athletes. Every Friday night in football season, a reporter and photographer would travel to a “Spotlight Game,” often played in one of Iowa’s small towns. They would produce a short story and single photo that sent quite a message: What happens here on a Friday night, miles away from Des Moines, matters to us.

Coverage like this was possible, of course, only because the newspaper’s statewide orientation worked as a business model. It doesn’t anymore. The Register, once with a full-time news staff of 225, now has fewer than 50 reporters and editors. It still tries to cover farming and rural Iowa, but with a reach and strength reduced by orders of magnitude. This is true not just of The Register. Coverage of rural matters has vastly declined in recent decades, even in newspapers like the New York Times and Washington Post that could well afford it.

Nearly 25 years ago, Robert Putnam published “Bowling Alone,” in which he argued that “social capital” was in sharp decline in the United States, a result of dwindling participation in civic life — not just in bowling leagues but in community organizations, in churchgoing, in voting participation and yes, in newspaper readership. A Cornell University professor, Suzanne Mettler, said that because of these “cross cutting relationships … people had a sense that we’re all in this together; we’re all citizens of this country with a common project, even if we differ on policy issues.”

There may be many contributors to our current us-vs.-them climate. The internet. Social media. Extremist cable channels. Talk radio. Growing income disparities. A nation that becomes ever-less rural. But, as Putnam argued, a primary cause may also be the weakening of institutions like the newspaper that brought people of different backgrounds into contact with one another.

Last weekend on NPR, Atlantic writer McKay Coppins, who has studied the impact of newspaper closures and downsizing, said this: “There’s a pretty big body of research that shows that when a local newspaper vanishes or is dramatically gutted, it tends to correspond with lower voter turnout, increased polarization, a general erosion of civic engagement. It makes it easier for misinformation to spread, for conspiracy theories to spread.”

And that makes it a nationwide problem because newspapers are in fast decline virtually everywhere, with scant prospects for a turnaround.

So what is the case for optimism here, particularly in addressing the urban/rural divide?

1. Ultimately, the hope is that digital news can help provide solutions. One early attempt: the year-old Rural News Network, which includes about five dozen news sites and organizations that focus wholly or partly on rural issues. Organized by the Institute for Nonprofit News, the network is anchored by the Daily Yonder in Kentucky and Investigate Midwest in Illinois (including its Iowa Watch newsroom), and seeks reporting partnerships among its participants. This is an initiative that merits the support of charitable foundations and wealthy benefactors, and should grab the attention of national newspapers and TV networks for partnership possibilities. Then there is the growing list of local and regional digital sites, such as Julie Gammack’s Iowa Writers Collaborative, which offer increasingly rich reporting on their diverse populations.

2. The New York Times, the Washington Post and TV newsrooms — those still with working business models — should return to the time when they gave much broader coverage to farming and rural issues. They are certainly on the case covering the pitched, ideological political battles taking place in rural states, and rightly so. But there is so much more to farm and small-town life, and the big news organizations would do themselves, and the country, a favor by better reflecting it.

Rural and urban Americans seem increasingly to find themselves utterly foreign to one another. In looking back at The Register’s (and perhaps some of Iowa’s) best years, we are reminded that this is not an unsolvable problem.

Part 3

Mont Blanc is the grandest hike I’ve ever taken. But it’s the memories of our all being together on it that I most cherish. There is no companionship quite like the companionship of a long hike. Looking out for one another. Having a good talk first with one fellow hiker, then another. Sharing beauty that can’t be captured in words. Prevailing together over blisters and cold and fatigue. Celebrating together the successful finish of a hard day.

From our early family hikes through many sibling expeditions to my kids and now grandkids, our family have followed in my father’s footsteps. Decades ago, my brother brought his family out to join ours at a friend’s cabin in Marble, Colorado, for several fine days of hiking. As a baby, our Paris-born daughter rode in a backpack through Eastern Europe’s Tatra Mountains and Julian Alps, as passersby called out “die kleinste Alpinistin!” Years later, back in Hot Springs, my dad gave her a quartz crystal and led her on a hike on the mountain where he found it. Long after she and I survived that thirsty Grand Canyon descent, we climbed Mt. Washington together. She was married in the Tetons, and David and I hiked all through the mountains of the Northwest on our way from California to her wedding. Their home is in Utah now: Hiker heaven.

By a stroke of good fortune, all of our kids lived in California during our five years in L.A., opening up wondrous hiking opportunities. Our son lived nearby, in Long Beach. We’d drive up to Angeles Crest most weekends, scaling one San Gabriel peak or another. The three of us climbed 10,000-foot Mount Baldy together and hiked in the Eastern Sierra. With our younger daughter, we’ve delighted in Northern California hikes in Point Reyes, Mount Tamalpais, Muir Woods, the Berkeley hills, Mount Diablo.

Our littlest grandkids commandeered our hiking poles last summer on walks in Crested Butte. In a few months, we’ll be back on the trails with all of them in Maine.

Hiking is especially fine for the particular companionship of marriage. From the Sawtooths, the Bitterroots and the Uintas to the Adirondacks, the Green and the White mountains, from Grandfather Mountain to the slopes of Mount Rainier, David and I have hiked untold miles together. We seek out hikes when we travel abroad, even if they’re not the trip’s focus — up Arenal in Costa Rica, down Samaria Gorge in Crete, through hilly tea plantations in Kerala, India, and in the mountains towering above rice paddies in Sapa, Vietnam.

Last month, in New Zealand’s splendid Southern Alps, we hiked on the slopes of Mt. Cook, at Arthur’s Pass and in Mount Aspiring National Park, all in preparation for the big one: the Routeburn. What a hike.

Shortly after we returned home, we each turned 75. That was my father’s age when he took his last hike up North Mountain, across from his house on Ramble Street in Hot Springs National Park.

For his birthday, I got David a book about Patagonia.

On the Tour du Mont Blanc

Part 2

What is it that draws us to the long, hard hikes? Some of it is testing yourself against the difficulty. Some of it is knowing that, the deeper in you go, the more the wildness envelops you, the more dramatic the beauty, the greater the chance of encountering a fox, a bear, a marmot, an eagle. The farther from everything ordinary.

Powerful as Kilimanjaro was, Africa’s most remarkable hike for me was in the Ruwenzori mountains, along the border between Congo (where I was living) and Uganda. European explorers associated this range with Ptolemy’s Mountains of the Moon, because water runs from its slopes to the Nile. The Ruwenzoris are as mysterious as they sound, with mosses of every hue carpeting the ground and creeping up the trees, and towering plants that Dr. Seuss might have imagined. Our guides brought along a goat to roast for our Christmas dinner, later exchanging it for a piglet in a little village we walked through. (I appreciated the piglet’s slower pace for the rest of that long day.) In the third and highest hut was a guestbook in Flemish (from the days of Belgium’s colonialization), which Lowell Thomas had signed. The 10-mile massif, craggy, snowy, glaciated, towered above.

On our recent hike along New Zealand’s Routeburn Track, a most unlikely fact emerged: Of our group of 31, three of us had hiked in that fabled range, deep in equatorial Africa.

As the long days on the gorgeous Routeburn loosened the knots in my mind, I thought of other multi-day treks I’ve taken: The Jotunheimen of Norway, where a stream was so swollen that I have nightmares still of the terror I felt before throwing myself over it. The wild and rugged Pyrenees, and the two bird species we saw that are found only there. The Cotswolds, with their sheep pastures and their steeples beckoning from each storybook village. Machu Picchu, where our sure-footed guides carried everything from the portable toilets to our tents and woke us each morning with coca-leaf tea. The blazing-hot hike down into the Grand Canyon from the North Rim with my older daughter, when the water source we’d been told about didn’t show up. The Grand Traverse des Alpes across Switzerland, alpenglow out the window of each lovely inn.

But the granddaddy of them all was the Tour du Mont Blanc.

The idea of our trekking around Mont Blanc originated on a Blue Ridge hike with our younger daughter. (Another gift of hiking: You may find your teenager talking to you.) As we descended from the parkway past one lovely waterfall after another, I mentioned an article I’d seen in an in-flight magazine about a hike around the Mont Blanc summit. “I want us to do that,” our daughter said — but there had to be other kids along. Miraculously, given college schedules and two families’ busy lives, we gathered all three of our kids plus an uncle, an aunt and two cousins. It was a splendid trip, from the tough but beautiful first day ending at a little French inn with crème brûlée cooling on the window sill to our last celebratory night in Courmayeur, Italy.

David and I loved the hike so much that we returned a few years later to complete the 10-day loop, from Italy through Switzerland and back into Chamonix.