Full Circle

By Dorothy Langworthy

Full Circle is a memoir about growing up in the South during the Great Depression and World War II.

Dorothy Langworthy recounts rising from poverty, abuse, neglect, and foster careto success through education, determination, and an indomitable spirit. Eventually, she became a manager for Child Protective Services; advocating for foster children.

A story that provides a role model for women of all ages, Full Circle will be appreciated by nurses, teachers, counselors, hypnotherapists, social workers, business owners, American Red Cross workers, foster parents, parents, and grandparents. The author has experience in all of these areas.

• Language: English
• Publisher: WestBow Press
• Release date: Jul 31, 2015
• ISBN: 9781490880600

Dorothy Langworthy

Dorothy Langworthy holds a California RN license, University of Alaska BA in psychology and Master of Science in counseling psychology. She is a certified hypnotherapist, mediator, child birth educator and doula, and the former owner and manager of an employment agency and the California Learning Centers. She is a former instructor of the C.E. department, University of Alaska, Anchorage and Fairbanks, for nurses and teachers.

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Copyright © 2015 Dorothy B. Langworthy.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

WestBow Press

A Division of Thomas Nelson & Zondervan

1663 Liberty Drive

Bloomington, IN 47403

www.westbowpress.com

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Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

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ISBN: 978-1-4908-8059-4 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4908-8060-0 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2015907490

WestBow Press rev. date: 7/31/2015

Contents

Acknowledgements

Introduction

The Early Years......

Housekeeper

Tobie

Growing Up During The Depression

Influence Of Teachers And Sunday School Teachers

My Father

Lessons Beyond School

Bringing Myself Up

I Made My Own Rules

The Place, The Times

Tobie Goes To Town

My First Job

Leaving

What To Do With Me

How Tobie Had Fit Into The Family

Reflections

Things Dorothy Learned

*Life With The Burketts

High School Sweetheart

Johnnie (J.d.) Comes Home

Getting Into College And Nurses’ Training

Meeting The Man Of My Future

Getting To California

Getting Acquainted With La

Did I Know The Ten Key?

We Head Cross Country And Back

Jim Jr. Joins Us

Jim’s Work Expands

Jimmy Gets A Little Sister

Getting My Schooling In Various Ways And Various Places

Abbie’s Surgery

We Double Up With Family

Moving On Up

The Cat Saves Me

The Gap Begins

The Things We Do

The Accident

The Move To Ventura

How To Get Cheryl Through High School

Jim’s First Harley

Winter Trips

Church?

Vehicles

Back To School

World Campus Afloat

The Learning Centers

Another Circle

An Adventure That Changed My Life

Getting Through That Last Class

I Become A Grandmother

Schooling Continues

Opportunities Open

New Branches Of Hypnosis

We Embrace The Alaskan Way

The Prowler

We Prepare To Leave

Starting Over Again

Montana

A New Beginning

Colorado Adventures

Brandon’s Playmate

Angie

Moving Again

Starting Over Again

Lost In San Francisco

San Ysidro

Piecing Things Together With Miracles

Starting A Fifth Career When Most Persons Are Retiring

Mariposa County

The Fire

On The Level

Dress Up In Mariposa

The Fall

My Position Changes

Presentation To Foster Parents

Variety Of Experiences And Responsibilities

Middle Management

Designated Buddy

Jim Sr.’S Illness

A New Beginning For Cheryl

Cheryl’s Illness

Cheryl Comes Home

Back To The Hospital

Out On Leave

Brandon’s Schooling

College

Retirement

The Iron

Benefits

Relationship With A Son

Our Trip To Wasilla

Brandon Then And Now

Winding Down

Acknowledgements

Most of all I wish to acknowledge my husband, Bob, for his unswerving patience with my impatience, and his constant support and help with any effort I put forth. Without his technical support this could not have come together.

I wish to thank Chris Fredlund for her support and editing of very rough drafts as the words just seemed to fly off the computer at times; other times when there were months of waiting, as she hung in there with her expertise that was very much needed.

I wish to thank my encouragers who got me started and those who kept me going with a project that sometimes hung heavy in its making:

To Matt Flugharty who got me started, and to his wife, Kris, who kept me going

To Diana Adams who caught the theme and saw where it was headed

To Karen Briese who read it in the making and encouraged me along the way

To my daughter-in-law, Donna Langworthy, for her sense of being there with me

And to my faithful friend, Martha Doiran, who was ever present in the last twenty-five years.

Introduction

The story was started as an effort to record some family history for my children and grandchildren, focusing on growing up in poverty, abuse, neglect, and ignorance, and my determination to rise above that background. I was the only one left to record this part of their family history or heritage of what it was like growing up during the Great Depression and World War II in America. There was no one else who knew who the various photos and saved letters represented. There was a story to tell here, and as it unfolded and turned circles upon itself, a deeper message evolved. In retrospect and reflection, I caught the message for myself. It is my hope that as others read through this story they may catch a glimpse within their own lives and become aware of that all caring, all loving presence that directs our paths. May this be an encouragement for those who may have to work a little harder to climb a little higher.

*****The early years......

I was born at 1121 E. Market St. at 5:30 a.m. on April 24, 1930 in the small East Texas town of Palestine. I weighed two and a half pounds, or so I was told, but that was being weighed on a chicken scale, so I can’t be too sure of the weight. I really do suspect it was more than that for me to have survived the circumstances. The doctor did tell my parents that I was not likely to survive the first week. However, nestled at my Indian mother’s breast I received the nourishment necessary to continue. My father told me that I fit onto the palm of his hand. What hath God wrought? must have passed through their minds.

Being born at home, there was no accurate record of the birth. This was discovered when at age eighteen, I wrote to the county of birth requesting a birth certificate and discovered there was none.

Fortunately, I remembered the name of the doctor who had attended the birth and the small hospital where he practiced. He answered my letter telling me that he had no record as I described it, but there was a birth a week earlier, with the first name being different, but the last being what was ascribed to my family. His letter asked if this could be correct and if it would do? I wrote back telling him the name I had always used and the birth date that had always been counted, if not celebrated, and asked if he could accommodate this information. He did. Within a week or so I was holding a bona fide birth certificate.

I was the second child of my father’s third wife who was forty- two at the time of my birth, with my father being fifty-five. My brother had been born five years earlier. I had two half sisters, and a half brother born of my father’s first wife, and old enough to have been my parents. My father’s first wife had died in childbirth, and on those days set aside to go to the graveyard to clean off the family plot, I had viewed that grave with the tiny one at the foot. Another was close by of a girl child, age sixteen who had died. When I was old enough to put meaning to these facts and figures, it was easy enough to determine that I had not been in my parents’ planning that year in the midst of the Deep Depression.

The depression hit my father hard, and he lost all that he had in the banks, and though he lived to be seventy five, he never regained a trust of the banking system. What he had was hidden about the house, and this became popularly known. The home was visited more than once by someone hoping to find something worth risking the nose of the double barreled shot gun that hung over the door close to my father’s bed. I remember being awakened in the middle of the night hearing footsteps, doors slamming, and the shot gun sounding off. My father was faster than the intended robber, and I never knew of one succeeding during my years there, or actually getting shot either.

With a brother five years older than myself I was able to get all the childhood diseases of that day behind me before I entered school at the age of six. These included: measles of all varieties then known, mumps, chicken pox, scarlet fever, whooping cough, and many attacks of tonsillitis.

Scarlet fever was the worst of these and again, I was not expected to live through it or the whooping cough. Although tonsillitis was painful, at least it had a reward. After being taken to the doctor’s office to get my throat painted with some awful tasting mixture, there was the stop by the creamery for an ice cream cone on the way home. The tonsils stayed with me until I was well into adulthood when my doctor and I decided they were to go.

I was born in what was known to the family as the new house; the old house being the one that stood along side it that stood until long after I had left the premises thirteen years later. The old house had two bedrooms, a kitchen and a screened-in back porch. I used it as a play house for it was still fully furnished. It had just been vacated and its occupants moved into the new house. It seems the family of my father, mother, brother, and my father’s mother had all lived in the old house. Maybe my grandmother stayed in the old house for awhile for she lived until I was a year old. I know this because of the funeral notice from the local paper that had been sent to me, along with a package of family information by the genealogist I hired when I was seeking information of my Indian mother’s family.

I remember as a young child standing on a child’s chair and brushing my mother’s long black hair. I don’t actually remember how she looked, but there are pictures among those handed on to me years later. There was the story that was told to me over and over of my mother and her brother being taken in by a little old lady because they had gotten lost from their parents. In my search years later, I found a woman whose husband was the grandson of that little old lady, and she and I had the same family pictures. She was able to name the persons in some of the pictures for me. Although the family who raised my mother were authentically Native American, my search never validated my mother’s Native American heritage.

My mother had gone to school and learned to read and to write at the lower level of elementary school. My father had completed second grade, and I later learned that he had been in school with my fifth grade teacher. My father was born in Kentucky. I don’t know at what age he and the family migrated to Texas. He had a brother and a sister. I was named for his sister and my mother’s best friend. My mother was born in Alabama, and there are receipts and papers showing that she and her brother and adopted family arrived in the Palestine area around 1911.

I didn’t actually know what my name was until I entered school. I learned that the I.V. that I had been called stood for Ida Verlon. It was a custom at that time and in that town for children to be called by their initials, so my brother was J. D. and I was I. V. My initials continued to prevail among my classmates, and of course the I.V. became ivy which became poison ivy. This along with my small and very thin stature caused me to be known as poison ivy tooth pick legs

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I.V. and J.D.

My father had a short fuse as my brother described his quick and volatile anger. His punishment was one to be avoided. It consisted of a beating with a razor strap, which hung in the kitchen near the table where he shaved with a straight edged razor. It had hung there a long time, long enough to have dried out many times, and to have curled along the side edges. When struck by it, these curled edges left their stripes. I soon learned not to evoke my father’s anger and so evaded his punishment except for a few memorable times.

Once he had bought me a new pair of shoes, red sandals with a small heel, about one inch, that to me were high heels and I was, of course, anxious to wear them to school to show them off. I asked if I could wear them to school and was told that I could not. I should not have asked again. It was at the breakfast table, and he reached across the table to give a resounding slap that caused my nose to bleed. My brother said, Now look what you’ve done, Dad. You’ve made her nose bleed. To this his response was to say, Shut up or you’ll get it, too. This not being enough, I had to receive a few belts with the razor strap across my legs which, of course, showed when I went to school.

For the most part, I made myself scarce around my father. He was usually gone during the daytime. Once he did come home in the middle of the day, and he gave me a whipping, not saying what for, and I was too scared to ask. I learned not to be home during the daytime. There was no problem with this, as long as I was home by dark. No one ever asked where I’d been or what I was doing. I hung out with a few close friends, but learned to walk all over town, and learned where the library was when I had learned to read. I was there very often, sometimes reading a book and picking out another to read at home. It was quiet and cool.

My brother reminded me that our mother was pretty handy with the peach limb switches as these were her method of punishment. I remember once along about dusk walking around the yard and her saying that she thought I needed a switching. I was walking with her, and we were to find a tree, and I was to pick out the switch she would use. She was talking about this, and I was expecting the punishment to happen, but what I remember most of all is how glad I was, how good it was, to be walking along with her, and her being with me and talking with me. Eventually we came to the peach tree where she was headed, and I made some feeble attempts to select a switch, hoping she’d use what I selected. I remember her switching my legs, and I was jumping up and down trying to avoid the swinging stinging as she swung back and forth. As I jumped up and down I was saying, I won’t do it again. I won’t do it again. What did I do? What did I do? and later realized that I never knew if I had done anything I should not have done, or not; a lesson to be remembered as a parent.

One night I was very hungry about the time we were all going to bed. I was saying over and over that I was hungry. My father was getting more and more upset about it, and telling me to shut up and go to sleep. I must have been very hungry to have been brave enough to incite his ire. My mother got up, and lit the kerosene lamp, and took me to the little corner table in the dining room where left overs were kept. There were some black eyed peas, cold and congealed, but oh, so good. I must have really been hungry. I remember eating quite a lot of them, bite full after bite full and then going to bed and going to sleep. I remember feeling so good that my mother did that for me: gave me something to eat before going to bed and when my father was saying to shut up and go to sleep. I felt comforted. I still eat black eyed peas on New Year’s Day. It was a Texas tradition meant to bring good luck during the New Year.

My mother nursed me for a very long time. I don’t know if that was for her benefit or mine. I have heard that it is an American Indian culture, and also that it was popularly thought that a woman could not get pregnant as long as they were nursing. Once the doctor had to come in the middle of the night to attend to what was considered to be a spider bite on my mother’s hand. The doctor lanced and treated it, and bandaged it in clean white gauze. I do not know what age I was, but I remember selfishly complaining; Now I can’t suck. However she did oblige me. I do remember cuddling up close to her, and her comforting me when she must have been so uncomfortable herself.

I remember well when I could suck no more. My mother was visiting a neighbor about a block from the house, and she had me with her. My brother must have been at school. When I asked to nurse I was offered her breast, but she had put something very bitter on it. She and the neighbor were giggling at my response. The memory of that trauma lasted, but their remedy for weaning worked. If I can remember that, in spite of the impact of the trauma, I must have been well past the usual age for weaning.

I actually remember very little of my birth mother’s life with me but this was one bitter sweet moment. She left us when I was six years old and my brother was eleven. Mr. Sims, the cemetery caretaker, came to pick me up from school one November day. School was already out and I was walking along the road. He drove up beside me in his truck and leaned over to say that he had come to get me because my mother was in the hospital. In my childlike surprise, all I could say was, No, she’s not. She’s at home. She always was, so why not today? I got into the truck with him, and he drove to the Junior High School and went inside to get my brother who came out crying. When I saw him crying, I began to think that maybe our mother was in the hospital. Mr. Sims took us to the hospital, and we were allowed in to see my mother. We and the nurse were the only ones there. My mother was unconscious and the nurse was performing the task of pumping my mother’s stomach. She had taken a poison. It took her life.

Mr. Sims took my brother and me home. My father was home waiting for us. In a little while Mrs. Berry, our neighbor, who had a phone, came in to tell us the doctor had called. My father looked up at Mrs. Berry and asked, She’s gone, isn’t she? Mrs. Berry nodded Yes. This was the only time I ever remember seeing my father cry, and I was trying to comfort him. My brother was in another room struggling with his own feelings.

Mother was buried on Thanksgiving Day which was the request she had left in the note she had written. I remember sitting on the front row and a quartet of ladies singing some songs. Among them were: When the Roll Is Called Up Yonder, What a Friend We Have in Jesus, and In the Sweet By and By. We went from the funeral home out to a country cemetery where she was buried next to the little old lady who had taken her in and raised her. This too, was her request. At the cemetery Brother Nelson, the pastor who would later baptize me, held me up to look at her, but I was wrestling to get out of his arms and didn’t want to see. It was all so strange, and I was so afraid.

Back at home a cousin had brought some sandwiches and my father’s sister, Ida, had come from her home up in the panhandle region. One of my half sisters was there. It was Gladys who lived in Texas. The other half-relatives lived far away in California. The next morning my brother was lying in my father’s bed and crying. Others were scurrying around. I didn’t know what was happening. I asked my brother why he was crying and he said, Because Mama died, and now they’re taking you away. Away? I thought, away where? I soon found out that I was to go to stay with my Aunt Ida for awhile. It turned out to be for the rest of that first grade of school.

Aunt Ida and her husband and a very strange adult child lived in Childress, Texas on a wheat and turkey farm. Childress is just inside the boundary of Texas and Oklahoma and on the Red River. And it is really red. Red from the tons of red silt that lie on the bottom. I saw it a few times when we were driving into town and crossed over it on a high bridge.

School now would be in a two room school house that was about a mile and a half down a country road past a prairie dog town. I walked to school. The old truck was never started up to take me to school, but I remember one especially cold winter day when the neighbor was taking their child to the school, and I was offered a ride. I thankfully accepted. My class was the first, second, and third grades, and the other side of the building was the fourth, fifth, and sixth grades. I don’t remember if there was electricity or not, but the bathroom was an out house a little ways from the school, the boy’s bathroom being on one side of the school and the girl’s on the other side. The toilet tissue was in a metal box that let you obtain 2 sheets of small tissue paper at a time. A great improvement over what was at home.

I don’t remember much about the rest of that school year. I guess I learned something, because when the next school year came around I was back in Palestine and in the second grade.

There is much that I do remember about living with Aunt Ida. There was no room for me. I slept on a cot in the main room next to the kitchen. This main room had the only source of heat in the house except the wood cook stove in the kitchen. My cot was close to the stove so nights were warm for me. It was just the very cold winter days when I walked to school that I remember most. My hands and fingers and my toes hurt. My teacher lived down the road a piece on the way to school, but I never was offered a ride with her.

It was a very cold winter that winter of 1936 and lonely. I didn’t think much about my family except that I missed my brother most of all.

My Aunt Ida was not very pleased that I was now a part of the family. I did not fit into her plans in any way. The outhouse was through the turkey yard, and when you are a very petite six year old, the turkeys meet you eye to eye as you walk out to take care of things. Several times, my panties would be soiled, which always brought a spanking, but at least this was with Aunt Ida’s hand. It was very hard for a six year old not to have soiled panties after walking through the turkey yard to the outhouse and finding only an old Sears Roebuck catalog for cleaning oneself.

There was a tornado that visited our area that season. There was a storm cellar close to the house. It was a dug out with a ladder going down to the place where there were shelves of canned goods along the wall and a place for a couple of cots, and when we went down there that scary night, we had a kerosene lamp, and all four of us were closed down there for hours. I don’t know if that place was vented or not, but we survived it better than the animals that were about. The next morning our neighbor’s cow was on top of their barn, and there was quite a ruckus trying to get the poor thing down. It was more scared than I was. I did not know what a tornado was; only that the wind was really blowing and the turkeys were running about, and now they were scared instead of me.

At the end of the school year, my father and brother drove up and picked up my Aunt Ida and me, and we all went on up to Missouri where there were some family members and cousins. My brother and I enjoyed that visit because we were together again, and playing outside barefoot on the green grass with the cousins was fun. Then my father took Aunt Ida home, and took me and my brother back to Palestine.

*****housekeeper

While I had been away, my father had engaged a housekeeper to take care of my brother and himself. She cooked, and cleaned, and kept house, sort of. Her name was Mrs. J. B. Smith. She was a devout Christian, and by the time I was back on the scene she had my brother fully indoctrinated into her church where he remained all his life, and even became a deacon as well as a Mason, which was a conflict, but he managed it. One of the agreements that Mrs. J. B. Smith had with my father was that he would drive her to church on Sundays, and that he did. My brother and Mrs. J. B. Smith had become so tight that my brother and I never again enjoyed a close relationship. It was like three can’t be friends, and I was the one always on the outs.

My Dad must have noticed this too, because one night when Mrs. J. B. Smith and my brother were getting ready to go to one of their church activities, and rather gloatingly let me know that I could not go to what seemed was to be a special event, my father whispered to me that after they were gone we would have something. I was amazed and surprised so after they were gone, I looked at him expectantly, and with wonder in my eyes I saw him reach under his mattress and bring out an apple. Now we never had apples except at Christmastime and then it was either apples or oranges or the one year it was grapefruit, but right here with Christmas no where near, my Dad had an apple, and he was getting out his pocket knife and beginning to cut it into slices. We shared the apple, first one slice for me and one for him until it was gone. This was as close as I ever felt to my Dad. This was a very special treat that we were sharing, just my Dad and me.

I wasn’t too thrilled with Mrs. J. B. Smith’s and my brother’s church, and at the age of seven I announced that I wanted to go to the church where my mother had belonged. Now I never knew of her going to church, but there was a picture of a camp meeting with my mother and her best friend, Verlon Smith, right in the smack middle of the picture, and Brother Nelson was preaching and leading the meeting. Well now, Brother Nelson was the pastor of the First Baptist Church of Palestine, and it wasn’t too far from Alamo Elementary School where I had learned to walk during my first grade there.

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Odie and Verlon

My father said that it was all right if that was where I wanted to go to church, but that I would have to walk, and walk I did. Sunday after Sunday, rain or shine, cold or hot, spring or fall, I walked to church. And I would have studied my Sunday School lesson too, and I would have been on time, and usually stayed for church, especially if my Sunday School teacher stayed because she always let me sit next to her, and she helped me find the songs in the songbook. I memorized my memory verses, too, and always had a coin or two that my father gave me to put in the offering envelop where I marked if I was present, on time, Bible brought, lesson studied, and if I was staying for church. Year after year, I had a bar to hang on my award pin for the years of perfect attendance. Later this record was to pay off.

The first day I walked to Sunday School I walked into a small lobby in the Sunday School building. I didn’t know where to go or what to say to people. I was all of seven years old. A kind lady noticed me and asked me if I were looking for someone. I told her that I had come to go to Sunday School. She asked me if I’d been there before, and I told her that I had not. She asked how old I was, and I told her I was seven and in the second grade at school. She took me upstairs to a room that was in the Primary Department. There was a very nice teacher and some children there. They were from all over town, but none of them were in my class at school, so I made some new friends, and I liked the things we made, and the stories that were told, and I loved to color. There were papers to take home, and there were songs to sing. I loved it all, and so I just kept going Sunday after Sunday, year after year.

When