by Brad Gooch
A sample of her writing style that would have stoked Dr. Wynn’s ire was “Going to the Dogs,” the first of a number of satires she published in the Corinthian. The parody appeared in the fall 1942 issue, with its black-and-white cover photograph of a thoughtful Jessie penning a “Dear Soldier” letter while lying on the campus lawn. “A few days later I was further startled by seeing another group of students chase a cat up a tree on the front campus,” complains her narrator, reminiscent of the myopic groom of Poe’s “The Spectacles,” as she mistakes roving dogs for college students. She signed this effort “M. F. O’Connor,” a half step to “Flannery O’Connor.” Tenderly echoed in the neutral signature, too, were the initials used by her father, “E. F. O’Connor.”
By the middle of the fall semester, Mary Flannery clicked into a congenial role for herself in the GSCW community: campus cartoonist. As she simply “moved over” from Peabody High to Georgia State, she likewise “moved over” as a cartoonist. The faculty adviser to the Colonnade was the same journalism instructor, George Haslam, who had invited her to contribute to the Palladium. Together they agreed that she would raise her rate of production to a cartoon every week and take over as art editor, beginning in November, in the newspaper offices in the basement of Parks Hall. She quickly adopted the campus as the setting for her cartoons, signified by a Greek column or a stone pediment. But instead of aligning herself with the idealistic view of Betty Boyd’s first-impressions piece, O’Connor fixed her gaze on its eyesores: packs of stray dogs; boards patching holes in the muddy lawn; glaring nighttime spotlights.
As with her first published college story, O’Connor marked her new artistic venue with a new signature, a monogram. Such monograms, formed by turning initials, or the letters of a name, into heraldic pictures, representing a person or a job, and used on stationery, handkerchiefs, and business cards, were a wartime fad; they were even highlighted in the popular Paramount Pictures “Unusual Occupations” series of ten-minute color newsreels, in a 1944 segment titled “‘What’s in a Name’ Monogram Art.” For her own identifying emblem, she mined her dearest obsession, scrambling her initials to make a design suggesting a bird: “M” for a beak; “F,” a tail; “O,” a face; “C,” the curve of a body. “It may look like a bird,” Betty Boyd Love wrote of the witty final result, “but I’m sure she would have said it was a chicken.”
O’Connor’s debut cartoon appeared on October 6, with her chicken logo fixed in the lower-left corner. Titled “The Immediate Results of Physical Fitness Day,” its subject was a spent girl in baggy sweater, skirt, and saddle oxfords, stiffly supporting herself with a cane, her tongue hanging out. The illustration accompanied a feature story: “Keeping Fit: Physical Fitness Program to Be Daily Feature at GSCW.” Over the next months, she concocted an unfolding frieze of such challenged types — some, like a harried, limp-haired girl, staggering under a load of books, an obvious self-portrait. “I thought of her then as a cartoonist who also tried her hand at writing,” says Gertrude Ehrlich, an Austrian “refugee student.” “She was a genius at depicting us ‘Jessies’ running around campus, with scarves hanging out of pockets, or messily draped on our heads.”
By the time O’Connor completed her eight cartoons of the first fall quarter, she had developed her favorite situation — a short, fat girl and her tall, thin sidekick, bouncing caustic remarks off each other. In an October 24 spoof of a faculty-student softball game, one of the pair of girls, loaded down with books, grouses to her friend, “Aw, nuts! I thought we’d at least have one day off after the faculty played softball!” The accompanying article: “Faculty Score 13 Over Seniors’ 12.” The steady outfitting of her odd couple with raincoats, galoshes, and umbrellas was a wink to a knowing audience. “It seemed to rain a lot in Milledgeville and we wore khaki-colored cotton gabardine raincoats most of the time,” explains Virginia Wood Alexander. “This is the way I remember Flannery. She would come ‘slouching’ along like the rest of us.”
A rare campus event that O’Connor truly enjoyed was the Golden Slipper, an annual drama contest between the freshmen and sophomore classes, with a small golden slipper as the award. “I remember her being behind some of the brilliant backdrops and scenery in this competition,” says her classmate Frances Lane Poole. The production that November was especially important to her, as the freshman entry, “Blossoms on Bataan,” was directed by Betty Boyd. It was set in a foxhole during the Battle of the Philippines, an American defeat in April 1942. The equally topical sophomore production “The Bell of Tarchova” took place in a village church during the 1939 Nazi annexation of Czechoslovakia. When the sophomore class won, O’Connor’s November 14 cartoon featured her trademark girls, defeated, in highly elongated saddle shoes, with the caption “Doggone the Golden Slipper Contest. Now we have to wear saddle oxfords.”
Enough excitement was generated by these cartoons that at the end of her first school year the Macon Telegraph and News ran a profile, written by Nelle Womack Hines, alongside a freshman photo of a grinning O’Connor wearing round glasses, her hair done in the typical pin-curled style of the 1940s. The piece was headlined “Mary O’Connor Shows Talent as Cartoonist.” Hines found herself with an easily quotable subject in the girl she characterized as “fast making a name for herself as an up-and-coming cartoonist”: “When asked how she went about her work, Miss O’Connor replied that first — she caught her ‘rabbit.’ In this case, she explained, the ‘rabbit’ was a good idea, which must tie up with some current event or a recent happening on the campus.” Hines rightly observed, with coaching from the cartoonist, “Usually Mary presents two students in her cartoons — a tall, lanky ‘dumb-bunny’ and a short and stocky ‘smart-aleck’ — female, of course.” The interviewer’s conclusion was politic: “A keen sense of humor enables her to see the funny side of situations which she portrays minus the sting.”
IN JANUARY 1943, World War II came marching onto the campus of Georgia State College for Women. By that winter, the global conflict had intensified. GSCW students and faculty heard daily news reports of battles from Guadalcanal to Tripoli and Stalingrad, as they worked in the Civilian Morale Service’s Key Center, operating out of Russell Library. But the war came home in a more startling way when Waves began drills on campus, and moved into their dorms and classrooms. Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Services were among eighty-six thousand female soldiers pressed into navy service on the home front. With lobbying from the powerful Milledgeville Congressman Carl Vinson, House chairman of the Naval Affairs Committee (who helped Ed O’Connor win his FHA appointment), GSCW was chosen as one of four campuses for on-site training (Smith was the only other women’s college).
The first of four hundred initial “Ripples” (a nickname that never caught on) “weighed anchor” on campus on January 15, taking over the prime dorms of Ennis, Sanford, Mayfair, Beeson, and the top floor of the Mansion, their numbers eventually adding up to a startling fifteen thousand between 1943 and 1945. As regulations required the women to speak navy language, Ennis became the “U.S.S. Ennis,” and its floors, “decks”; its stairs, “ladders”; its windows, “ports.” As part of their training to replace navy men at shore stations, the Waves woke to reveille, marched sixteen miles daily, attended six lectures in Arts Hall, typed two hours, exercised one hour, and went to bed to taps at ten p.m. Their uniforms were navy blue suits, blue hats, black gloves, and low-heeled black shoes. “They’d get out every morning at six marching between the dining hall and the library,” remembers Jane Sparks Willingham. “It wasn’t a happy mix, but it was necessary.”
Many of the Jessies, now crowded three or four to a room, had mixed feelings about this reverse invasion, as the Waves transformed their women’s college into a battleship in dry dock. But they usually cut their resentment with a grudging patriotism. “We had very little contact with them,” Dr. Elizabeth Knowles Adams has recalled. “Some of us were probably a little jealous because they seemed so glamorous in their uniforms.” For the proponents o
f the social equality of women, the presence of independent female soldiers on campus could be seen as a bonus. “Woman Power” became essential in the national emergency, and the radical-sounding slogan was adopted for regular use by the United States government, as well as by the Board of Regents of Georgia. Yet even the social feminist Helen Matthews Lewis found their unavoidable presence invasive: “They were always in the way, keeping us from getting to class.”
Mary Flannery skipped the patriotism and went straight for the comedy; in the Waves, she found her most reliable cartoon topic. Not since the nuns she liked to mimic at Sacred Heart had she seen so many single women together in uniform. The first of her series of Waves cuts appeared on January 23, a day after fifteen staff officers were introduced to the students during morning Chapel. The setting is a campus corner, where two girls espy a couple of Waves walking toward them. “Officer or no officer,” says one in a plaid skirt, “I’m going to ask her to let me try on that hat.” There followed two years of girls butting their umbrellas along the backs of marching Waves’ legs; girls clinging to tree trunks, like cats, to escape a drilling platoon; girls sneaking to check if Waves carried gunpowder in their handbags; or using Waves for archery practice.
Not only women, but male soldiers also bivouacked more and more in Milledgeville. Few showed up in O’Connor’s cartoon world, yet they were a force in the town and on campus. Although the only local “base” belonged to the navy women at GSCW, there were many military bases nearby: Camp Gordon, Augusta; Fort Benning, Columbus; Camp Wheeler, Cochran Field, and Warner Robins Field, Macon; as well as a naval hospital in Dublin. On weekends, throngs of servicemen with leave passes crowded into Milledgeville. As there were not enough hotels to house them, or families to take them in, they often slept on porch swings, or in sleeping bags, on campus. “When convoys passed, the soldiers threw down notes for the GSCW students to pick up,” recalls Charmet Garrett, who lived in Ennis Hall across Hancock Street. The military presence in town was dense enough for Bob Hope to broadcast his NBC radio show live from Russell Auditorium, for an audience of Waves and Jessies, on May 18, 1943.
Male soldiers became known to Mary Flannery mostly through Sacred Heart Church, and the USO, or United Service Organizations. A number of Roman Catholic soldiers would show up at her church on Sunday, and the Clines often invited them home for a family dinner. As early as 1941, Aunt Gertie reported to Agnes Florencourt that “two of the soldiers came over from Macon — Louis met one and asked him over, so Mary told Louis to ask him to dinner. . . . they were both at church.” The Clines were just as involved with the USO — Aunt Katie was appointed chairman after the opening of its social club, in December 1943, in a storefront at the corner of Hancock and Wilkinson streets. On Sunday mornings, soldiers who crashed on the campus of GSCW sauntered across the street to the USO to clean up and enjoy free coffee and doughnuts.
While short, solid, gray-haired Katie Cline was a regular presence at the post office, she had known other more engaging moments in her life. As a young woman, she was a member of the Georgia Military College Players Club, acting in light comedies with Bardy, brother of Oliver Hardy, later of the Laurel and Hardy comedy team, then a rotund, teenage, silent-movie projectionist at the Palace Theatre in town. The second most memorable chapter of her life, locally, was her generous hospitality to soldiers during the war. “Miss Katie used to sit out on the porch on a Sunday morning and talk to all the passers-by,” Betty Boyd Love has recalled. “If a lone service man happened by, he might be invited to dinner.” One wounded soldier later wrote to her from Camp Wheeler, “I can still remember vividly the first time I had dinner in your home. It was just grand, Miss Cline.” Another wrote her from Fort Benning, “About this time of day I’d be sitting on your veranda, begging for a Coca-Cola and cake — if I were in Milledgeville.”
One Sunday, Aunt Katie invited home from church John Sullivan, recently assigned as a sentry to the naval training station at the college. As Sally Fitzgerald, who met Sullivan once, in Cincinnati during the 1980s, told the story, he had been “a handsome Marine Sergeant, resplendent in his dress blues.” Following the service, he was handed a note, written by Miss Katie, inviting him to be the guest of “the Cline sisters” for a midday dinner at their home on Greene Street. He accepted, and met their cherished niece, in her freshman year at GSCW. The two quickly developed a rapport based partly on a similar family background: an Ohio boy, Sullivan came from a large Roman Catholic family. They were able to trade funny stories, and share suppressed giggles, as he became a regular visitor, a “fixture” welcomed by all the aunts and uncles.
Of course, he and Mary Flannery were quite different. He was blithe, outgoing, confident, and at ease with his good looks. She was painfully shy, given to awkward gestures, and, as Mary Boyd was fond of pointing out, not used to the company of boys. Yet because Sergeant Sullivan appreciated her offbeat wit, and wry inside tips about Southern mores, they went on what amounted to “dates” — long walks, an occasional movie. He even escorted her to one college dance, though he quickly discovered that she was truly a bad dancer — she later claimed to have a “tin leg.” The foiled attempt may have contributed to her April 1943 cartoon on the opening of the college gym for dances, portraying a “wallflower” of a girl in a long striped skirt, with glasses, sitting alone, watching other couples dance. The caption: “Oh, well, I can always be a Ph.D.”
When Fitzgerald interviewed Sullivan, forty years later, he claimed that theirs had been “a close comradeship,” not a romance. Yet the two played at romance enough to tease a hopeful mother. Once, as they sat together on the couch in the parlor, Regina called liltingly over the stairwell, “Mary Flannery, wouldn’t you and John like to polish the silver?” After an exchange of amused glances, her daughter wickedly answered with a flat “No.” Following Sullivan’s transfer to a training camp for the Pacific war zone, O’Connor did show signs of a modest “crush.” She wrote many drafts of her own “Dear Soldier” letters, stashing them between the pages of her college notebook. In a journal entry, she made fun of herself for “casually” dropping to her family that she had just heard from John. This exchange of letters lasted until he entered St. Gregory’s Seminary, just after the war, briefly studying for the priesthood.
Her “crush” was enough of a blip — or a carefully concealed secret — that no relatives or classmates in Milledgeville remember the marine sergeant. What remained for O’Connor, though, was the PhD thought balloon that she floated during their time together. For at eighteen, she was hatching a plan for a life away from Milledgeville — studying journalism, or working as a newspaper cartoonist. No one in her family took these plans seriously. John Sullivan did, and he offered “admiration and encouragement.” She must have felt in him some of her missing father: the handsome man, occasionally in uniform, who was both confidant and supporter. Like one of the suitors in her later stories — the less likeable Mr. Shiftlet, for instance, who comes walking up the road in “The Life You Save May Be Your Own” — his surprise visit had subtly enlivened things.
DURING THE TIME She was getting to know John Sullivan, coincidentally enough, Mary Flannery took a class with an English teacher who finally responded with understanding and enthusiasm to her writing. The professor who “got” her work was Miss Hallie Smith, a large and nurturing woman, one of those in the cadre of GSCW professors who belonged to the Audubon Society, and qualified in all respects as a “suffragette-spinster.” In the spring 1943 quarter, while O’Connor was in her class, Smith gave her own talk to the DAR on “Woman, a Strength in Freedom’s Cause,” trumpeting the importance of “womanpower in this war and other wars.”
The elective course O’Connor took with Miss Smith that spring quarter was English 324, Advanced Composition. As the capstone of the composition sequence, the class included only a dozen young women. “Miss Hallie required us to write something for each class — then, to my chagrin, she expected us to read it aloud,” recalls Marion Peterman Page
. “It wasn’t long before I realized that the only writer in the class was Mary Flannery. The efforts of the rest of us were so juvenile compared to her. She seemed to be very shy and very modest. She was a mousy looking young lady, but one forgot that when she read what she had written.” Another member of the class, Karen Owens Smith, who usually sat in the front row with Mary Flannery, a few feet from the teacher, remembers “a twang to her voice that I can still hear.”
On March 24, O’Connor handed in her first assignment, two descriptions of a street scene, one photographic, the second poetic. Naming her street Raphael Street, after Katie Semmes’s husband, she evoked Charlton Street in Savannah with a lineup of “six, tall grey buildings.” Yet she had obviously been reading James Joyce’s short story “Araby,” too, and precociously tried to copy the style of the Irish Catholic writer. On Dublin’s North Richmond Street, in Joyce’s story, “The other houses of the street . . . gazed at one another with brown imperturbable faces.” On O’Connor’s Raphael Street, “gaunt houses all of somber, grey stone, gaze austerely at each other.” Miss Hallie was thrilled with the effort. On the single typed page, signed “M. F. O’Connor,” she wrote in red pencil, “A+.”
Five days later, O’Connor handed in a typed, one-page character study. “Nine out of Every Ten” was signed with a pseudonym that could have popped out of a Merriweather Girls novel, “Jane Shorebanks.” The sketch details a vapid young lady walking along chewing gum to the beat of the “Missouri Waltz.” In red pencil, Miss Hallie wrote an exclamatory “A!” and added, “Won’t you submit something to the Corinthian?” Miss Hallie sensed in O’Connor’s depiction of a face “sagging and contracting” as a girl chews a “slippery mass” of chewing gum a different tenor of writing talent. O’Connor had previously published, in the winter 1943 Corinthian, a mock review of a children’s book about Ferdinand the bull, deeming the book “highly recommendable literature for the college student,” and a satire on replacing cars with horses, “Why Worry the Horse?”