by Ed Bethune
Ned contacted Mother and quickly realized that she was a unique, interesting woman. He decided to do a weather report from her garden with the hope that it would add spice to his show. It did, so Ned and Mother worked out a plan for him to give his Wednesday weather reports from her garden. KATV called the segment, The Weather Garden, and a star was born. Mother loved every minute of the show, and she loved Ned Perme and the television crews who came to her house once a week. And they loved her. She made their work fun and surprised them each week with an eclectic array of newly baked treats such as her Jelly Bean Cake, or Broccoli Cornbread. The station managers were pleased, the viewers liked the chemistry of Ned and Mother, and the ratings for the Weather Garden were strong. All had a good time.
When I was in Congress people would ask Mother, “Are you Ed Bethune’s mother?” It made her proud to say yes, but after I left Congress my celebrity status began to fade, and she did not get the question as often as she had when I was making news on a regular basis. When Mother started the Weather Garden show, I had been back in the private sector for several years. One day I went to the grocery store for Mother, and when I was checking out a woman said, “You look familiar, what is your name?” I said, “Ed Bethune,” and she said, “Oh, are you Delta Bethune’s son?” I was proud to say yes. How quickly things can change in the world of celebrity.
All during this time, Mother was living in the house where I grew up, 2309 State Street in Little Rock. Two young white men shared the house next door, but the residents in the rest of the neighborhood, for blocks around, were all black. Mother, no shrinking violet, was well known and respected by all her neighbors because she stayed when other whites fled to the suburbs. She had a strong relationship with the black family that lived at 2305. When they barbequed meat they would give her some, and she gave them vegetables from her garden. When she spent a few days at St. Vincent’s Hospital in 1991 her good neighbor, an elderly gentleman from 2305, was the first to visit her, and she got cards and calls from several other friends in the neighborhood.
Mother, with a few of her best tomatoes, getting ready for the Weather Garden show on Channel 7 with Meteorologist Ned Perme in 1991.
Mother’s garden took up a large portion of the backyard where I used to play ping-pong-ball and work on my A-Model car, and to save on utilities she had closed off the upstairs. Otherwise, the place looked pretty much like it did when I was a little boy. Familiar paintings and photographs filled every wall and her masterpiece, an oil painting of two birddogs that she did in the 1920s, was still hanging next to her favorite sitting spot in the parlor. Every table and unused chair held at least one of her ongoing projects. Mother was always in the middle of knitting a sweater or an afghan, crocheting a doily, sewing something, or exploring some new way to paint. She always finished whatever she started, with one exception.
When she was seventy-five, she covered the north wall of the parlor with a huge piece of black velvet and began painting a landscape with fluorescent colors that would glow when illuminated by an invisible ultraviolet black light. Illuminated, the colors exploded. Un-illuminated the colors were drab. Either way it was hideous. Mother knew it was hideous, but she would never admit it. She just quit working on it, ignored it, and never took it down. She was no fan of failure.
Mother’s projects always had a purpose. Piddling around to kill time was not her way; purpose was her way, the Vermilye way. If she knitted a small knickknack and liked it, she would fill it with candy and give it to a friend. If the friend liked it, Mother would knit a hundred duplicates, fill them with candy, and give them to friends and neighbors. I watched her do this, or similar projects, year in and year out, especially at Christmastime. She would knit or crochet for hours on end until she finished the project. She never ran short of determination and perseverance. Waste not, want not; where there is a will, there is a way—the good Vermilye traits came to perfection in Delta Bethune. She was predictably practical, a little standoffish, and you could never tell what she might say. Once, our daughter Paige brought a young man to meet Mother. When she opened the door, Mother grabbed his hand, enthusiastically shook it, and said, “Hi, Chip. How’re you percolating?” The young man, stunned speechless, was not her first victim.
When I ran for Congress, Mother was working for the U. S. Department of Agriculture at the federal building on Capitol Avenue. The elevators were usually crowded, particularly in the morning. Mother saw it as a great opportunity to give each person on the elevator one of my colorful campaign brochures, featuring a photo of me and a list of my accomplishments. Her zealous method soon attracted the attention of a longtime Democrat who also worked at the federal building. He challenged Mother one day on the elevator, saying, “Mrs. Bethune, this is a federal building and you cannot hand out political cards; it is against the law.” There was a moment of silence and a gasp or two from others in the crowded elevator. They empathized with Mother and the confrontation made them uncomfortable. The slight hesitation was all the time Mother needed. She gave a defiant look to the Democrat and said, “I’m not handing out political cards, I am handing out pictures of my son.” With that, Mother continued to hand out my brochures. It was a perfect squelch, and such a good story that it spread throughout the federal building which, of course, is the best thing that can happen in a political campaign.
For me growing up, Mother was an enigma. She loved me, but she was a tough taskmaster, and the Vermilye credo all too often got the best of her. On those occasions, it was best to stand clear and wait for a better time but as she aged Mother changed, and it was a change for the better. She jettisoned the bad parts of the Vermilye worldview and adopted many of the softhearted Bethune family traits.
I had also changed. I was a difficult kid and took a torturous path to manhood, but in my fifties I began to mellow. The time had come for us to talk about our spiritual lives, our beliefs—better late than never.
Within days of our return from Europe in 1990, I drove to Little Rock to see Mother. I was eager to tell her about my sailing experience and my surrender to Jesus. I wanted to tell her how it happened and what it meant to me. I also wanted to go back in time and talk about her childhood, her life with Daddy, and my early years.
When I got to her house, I gave her a hug and we sat down in the parlor. The big black, hideous velvet landscape was still there, but the thing that got my attention was the television set. Mother was watching Pat Robertson’s 700 Club, something I had never known her to do. What a perfect entrée to start a conversation about faith. I asked her if it was a regular thing, and before I could use the occasion to tell of my commitment to Jesus, she told me of hers. I laughed and said, “Well, we are finally on the same wave length.” I told how it had taken thirty-six hours of jackhammering on the high seas, but I finally made the decision to surrender my will to God’s will. She said her decision was incremental. Her interest in the 700 Club led her to attend services at Quapaw Quarter United Methodist Church, the same church she sent my sister and me to when we were kids. Back then, it was Winfield Methodist Church, but Winfield had moved to West Little Rock. Mother told me she was happy at Quapaw, but she made it clear that Pat Robertson was the one who got through to her, and she took a friendly poke at me, saying, “He didn’t need a jackhammer to do it.” She said it was surprisingly easy for her, even after years of resistance. Once she got on the right road, she realized she was ready to surrender her powerful, Vermilye will to The Almighty. I expect health issues and the mellowing that comes with old age set the stage for her surrender, as it does with so many people. But in the end Mother, the strongest willed woman I ever met, surrendered her will to the will of God.
Our witness to each other that day was a magical moment. Many times after that we talked about her childhood, her life with Daddy, and my early years, the things I wanted to know more about. Our talks were happy moments, but there were some painful moments. We talked about the Vermilye way and how it differed from the Bethune way, and, yes, we
talked about the divorce, and we talked about Daddy. Mother loved Daddy and she knew that he loved her. We had a good laugh about the time when Daddy hired a maid to help Mother and she said it made her feel like the “Queen of Sheba.” Mother respected his intellect and his good heart but she could not handle Daddy’s tendency to dream and do the impractical. In the end, we realized these things no longer mattered. It was a new day for both of us, a time to understand and forgive.
Mother held back in one area. She still could not talk about the death of her younger brother, Little Gerle. When I asked her about it, she clammed up. She just repeated what she had always said, “Little Gerle died of diphtheria when I was nine.” His death was still too painful to discuss. Before she died, Mama Lewallen told me how Little Gerle’s death caused Mother—a warm, loving little girl—to surround herself with a shell as hard as steel. Mother’s unwillingness to talk about it convinced me that Mama was right; the gruesome death had hurt Mother deeply. It definitely changed her, but now she was back to where she started, warm and loving. Her hard shell dissolved completely when she surrendered her will to God. I never again asked her about Little Gerle; there was no need to.
I also held back a little. I told Mother that I had visited Daddy’s grave many times and that I had wonderful memories of him and our life as a family, but I never said how much it hurt me when they separated and later divorced. I did not need to, nor did I want to. I think she knew and it did not matter, now that we had forgiven all and moved on.
My lifelong attempt to reconcile the many conflicts between the Vermilye worldview and the Bethune worldview vanished. My struggle to choose between the two was over the instant I surrendered my will and adopted a God-centered worldview. I was making real progress, getting square with Mother, better understanding her and myself. I was beginning to think I had solved the great riddle of my life, but then I discovered that I had only just begun. There was more for me to do. The path to salvation is free and simple, but there is a cost to being a good disciple. New duties and challenges come with that territory. Once again, G. K. Chesterton challenged me from the grave: An inconvenience is an adventure wrongly considered, and an adventure is an inconvenience rightly considered. All my life I have been a dreamer and an adventurer. Why stop now, I asked myself. The Christian walk would be the greatest adventure of my life.
52
FAMILY HAPPY, FAMILY SAD
Man is fond of counting his troubles, but he does not count his
joys. If he counted them up as he ought to, he would see
that every lot has enough happiness provided for it.
Fyodor Dostoevsky
In May of 1990, just before we left on our ill-starred sailing trip, Chris Nassetta, a fine young man, came to me and asked for my daughter’s hand in marriage. It was not a surprise. He had had his eye on Paige from the moment we moved to Arlington, Virginia in 1978.
Paige made quite a splash when she transferred to Yorktown High School from Searcy High School. The boys at Yorktown were talking about her good looks, but before any of the students had a chance to get to know her, a huge snowstorm piled deep banks of snow and ice around our new house. We could not get out of our driveway, and we were so new to the area that we did not know who to call for help. As soon as the snow stopped, a seventeen-year-old kid turned into our driveway with a snowplow on the front of his Jeep. It was Chris Nassetta. He rang our doorbell and told Lana that he was “just in the neighborhood and saw that we needed someone to plow our driveway.” Lana, not knowing him, naturally asked how much he would charge, and he said, “Oh, nothing, I just wanted to help out.” He did not fool Lana. It took only a couple of questions for her to figure out that Chris wanted to meet Paige, and that is how it started. They dated off and on for several years, and on May 11, 1991, they were married and we could not have been happier. Chris was the fourth child in a family of three boys, and three girls. His mother and father are our dear friends, and have been since we first met them. At the wedding in St. Michaels, Maryland, I gave my daughter’s hand to Chris. Later at the reception Paige and I danced the first dance as the band played “Wind Beneath My Wings,” the song she chose.
After the wedding Lana and I hustled back to Arkansas. I was busy being a country lawyer and she was selling real estate in and around Searcy. Lana always made time to visit her mother who was retired and living alone in Little Rock, and I had many good visits with Mother, but she was not well, her heart was getting weaker by the day.
It was only a question of time. Mother—the Queen of Sheba, the predominant influence in my life, the Vermilye to Bethune convert, the television star, the fully surrendered Christian—died June 7, 1992.
She slipped away on a Sunday morning. Only God knows her last thoughts, but I know what was on her mind as my sister and I sat with her through the night at St. Vincent’s Hospital. Mother was in and out of consciousness, sometimes she would be out for as much as half an hour, but it was usually less. Her moments of consciousness never lasted long, but when they came, Delta Lew and I would listen and then tell her, “We’re right here, Mother. We love you.” She would squeeze our hands and say she loved us too. Then, without fail, she would say, “There’s a little white fence with a gate, and there is Little Gerle.” Throughout the long night, the three of us repeated the same script—over and over—and toward morning, we all got louder and louder as if Mother was moving away from us, which she was.
As Mother lay dying, I thought of what Mama Lewallen had told me about Mother and Little Gerle, how they were so close, and how his gruesome death was so painful for her.
My sister and I knew Mother’s vision of Little Gerle was a vital step for her to take. Since 1919, Mother would say Little Gerle’s name as part of her rote response that he died when she was nine, but she never ever brought his name up in any other way. It was as if he never existed. It was her way to defend against the painful memory of that day when the strangling angel of children filled his throat with the thick, gray membrane of diphtheria.
Never again will I question the extent to which a traumatic event can warp a child’s mind. In Mother’s case, the damage and pain stayed with her from 1919 to 1992, frozen in place.
Now, my dying Mother was making her final surrender, and as her life ebbed away, she was seeing her little brother. In her mind she and Little Gerle were together again. Soon, they would play again in Marr Creek, run helter-skelter through the carnival, and watch Baseball Man put up the World Series scores on the square in Pocahontas.
Mother rallied for a little while on Sunday morning before she died. It was a fine moment. Most of the family was there in her room and Ned Perme came by too. We all knew it was time to say our goodbyes and Mother knew it too. She sat up in bed, put on a cheerful face and “held court” for a few minutes, determined to see a smile on our faces, to see us happy. It was a brave and fitting finish. The nurse came in and asked if she was ready for a shot of pain medicine. Mother said yes and soon she was asleep, never to awake.
It was a comfort to Delta Lew and me to see Mother remembering and talking about Little Gerle. It told us that the long spell was broken; she was finally free of the demons that had haunted her from childhood. It was also significant that Mother told Delta Lew to be sure that her obituary explained that she was the widow of Edwin R. Bethune, Senior. She wanted to say, we preferred to believe, that she loved and respected Daddy and she wanted people to remember her as a softhearted Bethune, not a hardheaded Vermilye.
KATV ran a special on the evening news telling how Mother had built up a loyal following for her weekly visits with Ned Perme in her backyard garden. They told how her garden was crammed to capacity with just about every vegetable that will grow in the Central Arkansas climate. They had fun reporting how Mother and Ned Perme had made a running joke out of her determination to get Ned to eat exotic vegetables he had never tried before.
Ned Perme made a touching personal tribute to Mother that brought tears to the eyes of her loyal
fans. He ended up saying, “Delta is now helping the Good Lord tend the ultimate garden.”
Delta Lew and I talked often about Mother after she was gone, and we talked about Daddy just as much. Never has there been a sister as loyal, loving and dedicated as Delta Lew was to me. She put her life on hold to mother me. After she graduated from Little Rock Senior High School, she moved to Pocahontas, took an entry-level job, and devoted herself to helping me morph from an incorrigible child to a kid with promise. Little did we know, as we talked after Mother’s death in 1992, that Delta Lew did not have long to live. It was a blessing, however, that she was here long enough to enjoy a few more happy family events.
Lana and I worried after my election to Congress in 1978 that our children would have a hard time making the move from Searcy to Arlington, Virginia. They had gone through all the grades of school in Searcy. Paige was in the middle of the eleventh grade and Sam was in the middle of the tenth. It would not be an easy transition. Fortunately, they had new Arkansas friends who were in the same boat with them. Beryl Anthony had just won the Fourth District seat in Congress, and David Pryor had just won a seat in the United States Senate. Beryl, David, and I had been classmates in college and law school at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville. We were a lot alike except for the fact that I was a Republican and Beryl and David were Democrats. Beryl had two daughters, David had two sons who were school age, and we were all moving to the Washington, D.C. area at the same time.
The kids got together often for marathon-length games of Monopoly. They were inseparable for the first few months, and that gave them time to make new friendship and acclimate to their new surroundings.
It was quickly apparent that Beryl’s daughter Alison had a crush on Sam. He was ahead of her in school, but that did not slow her down. Soon she and Sam were dating and they developed an on and off relationship that continued for years.