| Biographical Non-Fiction posted March 31, 2020 | Chapters: |
...22 23 -24- 25... 
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Someone new on the scene
A chapter in the book Remembering Yesterday
And Baby Makes Three
by BethShelby
| Background I left my last job on a maternity leave, but I don't plan on returning because of problems I encountered while there. I am getting unwanted phone calls at home. |
After I ended my job at Knox glass and came home to await the arrival of my baby, the phone calls from Lee started coming every day. He seemed to be drinking all the time now. I hadn’t known he was an alcoholic, because I’d never seen him drink at work. I begged him not to call me, and I always ended hanging up on him but that didn’t seem to discourage him.
The phone calls came, not only during the day, but also at night when you were home. I started taking the receiver off the hook just enough to break the connection but so that it still looked as though it was in place. I was a bundle of nerves. What had I done to cause this? I was so afraid you might assume it was all my fault.
One day, he called slurring his words so badly I could barely understand him. He said he thought he was dying. He had told me before he had a heart problem. He said he had taken a lot of pain pills while he was drinking, and he thought his heart was about to stop.
I knew his doctor’s clinic was just down the street from his house, so I looked up the number and called. I told the doctor that Lee was in trouble and asked if he could send someone down to check on him. The doctor kept asking who was calling, but I wouldn’t tell him.
“I'm just a friend and my name is not important.”, I said as I hung up and then removed the receiver from the cradle. I had done all I dared to do. I couldn’t bear the thought that Lee might die if I did nothing. The next time he called, he said an ambulance had arrived and taken him to the emergency room.
Many times when I would answer the phone during the day, no one would say anything. One day his wife called. I begged her to please stop her husband from calling me. I told her I wasn’t interested in her husband. That I had only thought of him as a mentor and a friend. I told her I loved my husband and I wanted to be left alone.
I don’t know if I convinced her at all. The phone calls didn't stop. The last few weeks of my pregnancy was a nightmare. I was afraid that while I was in the hospital, Lee might get you on the phone and try to convince you there was something going on between us. I kept asking myself what I could have done differently that would have prevented this from happening.
Two weeks past my delivery date, I finally went into labor. Again we went to the hospital in the middle of the night. It was another long labor. This time I wasn’t given anything to help with the pain until I was taken into the delivery room.
On the 27th of February, a baby girl we named Carol was born at 12:48 on a Monday afternoon. She weighted an even nine pounds. The doctor said I should be careful handling her because her collarbone was broken during the delivery. This was upsetting news, but we would have never known if he hadn’t told us. She seemed fine. We were so thrilled to have a healthy baby. I stopped worrying about the phone calls. They did taper off after the baby was born. Mom came up and helped for a week. My mom and dad were once again proud grandparents.
I tried breast feeding again because I’d heard it was best for the baby and helped with bonding. When I took Carol for her first month check up she had gained two inches in length but only seven ounces. She looked fine because she’d been so fat at birth, but we decided my milk wasn’t rich enough and I started her on formula. This seemed to be a better solution. You could hold her while she ate sometimes so she could bond with you as well. We were both so afraid something might go wrong, we hovered over her like she might evaporate. If she slept longer than normal, we freaked out and shook her awake.
I told the doctor to forget about starting the DPT vaccinations until she was at least a year old. He agreed and said he didn’t blame me. Yet, he wouldn’t admit the shot caused Susan’s death. It was years later before we learned of the other deaths of babies during that time frame. In two of the cases, I knew the parents well.
In early May, you had vacation time coming. Mom kept the baby while we took a short vacation. This time we went up through Tennessee and into the Smoky Mountains. For me, this was the most amazing trip because I’d never been to the mountains before. We both decided we preferred the mountains to the beach. My first view of those misty peaks brought me to tears. The pictures I’d seen did them no justice. We drove into Gatlinburg expecting to see a dinky little one horse town. Instead we saw a beautiful new looking tourist town. It was like driving into Wonderland. It was the early sixties and they must have just started developing it. It was nothing like it is today. In Cherokee, North Carolina we bought some adorable white leather beaded moccasins for the baby. There were a lot of Cherokee Indians around in full headdress, hoping we would tip them for letting us take their picture. Cherokee is part of a big Indian reservation. They have casinos there now. We throughly enjoyed our trip, but we couldn’t wait to get back to our baby. Mom said she only cried once while we were gone.
None of the pictures we’d taken of Susan came out. I only got a couple of blurry images. I was determined to have good pictures of this baby. I found an ad for a older camera that had been used by a professional photographer. I got it for eight dollars and it took wonderfully sharp pictures. Carol became my little model. She couldn’t do much about it when she was still so young, but later as she got older, she would express her displeasure quite verbally if she didn't want her picture taken. She developed a opinionated personality at a very early in life.
When she was about six months old, I felt I needed to be working to help with expenses. I interviewed with a television station that was hoping to hire someone for their art department. The problem was they weren’t quite ready to put someone in that position yet. They needed someone on the switchboard in the evening to work from six to eleven. I agreed to work the switchboard until the art department job became available. I could be with our baby until you got home and then you could be with her until I got off work at eleven p.m..
Eleven was the time TV stations called it quits until the next day. It is hard to believe there was a time when the TV programming stopped for the day. The station played the Star Spangled Banner and then there was nothing but test patterns on the set until the next morning around six when the National Anthem was played again.
There weren’t a lot of calls in the evening and the work was easy. The switchboard was another job that has now gone the way of the dinosaurs. No one now plugs tubes into little holes to connect calls as we once did. Some of the calls were funny, but irritating. People would call to complain that the show playing on TV wasn’t the one advertised in the newspaper. Sometimes they would chew me out because something on TV offended them. Often they would demand to speak to one of the TV personalities that happened to be on the air. I got to meet the evening news and weather personalities. I also met Ross Barnett, who was the governor of Mississippi. Sometimes he had a live segment on the late news. He was always friendly and would stop to chat.
One TV personally had a popular talk show. He stopped by often to make conversation, when I wasn’t extremely busy. One day, he called me at home and said he wanted to come by my house to see me. I thought “Oh no, not again. I’ve just gotten rid of one guy who tried to ruin my life, and now another one wants to hit on me. What am I doing to deserve this.” I told him that he must have gotten the wrong impression of me, because I wasn’t someone looking to have an affair. He became angry and acted highly insulted. I later learned he thought any women would be thrilled to have his attention. After that, when he passed my my station he'd look in another direction.
The station manager, who originally told me about the upcoming art job, was giving me art work to do at home. I made a sign for the station to put on TV if there was a problem with the picture. It was a cartoon figure of a mouse shrugging his shoulders. The caption read, “It’s not you. It’s not me. It must be them.” I also did some storyboards for up-coming shows.
After a time, it seemed the job in the art department wasn’t going to happen. You were getting tired of not having me home in the evening and wanted me to find something else to do. There was a job advertised for a layout artist for one of the two local newspapers. I interviewed and was told they would like to hire me.
I told the Station manager, you didn’t want me working nights any more and I was going to take a job with the newspaper. He said I would be making a big mistake because the newspaper was about to go out of business. He assured me that if I would stay, he would put me to work right away in the art department. I called the newspaper and told them I wouldn’t be taking that job after all.
The station manager took me shopping and bought all the equipment I’d need for working in the art department and that afternoon he brought me in and introduced me to the lady I would be working with.
The work situation wasn’t what I’d expected. The lady was keeping her baby with severe birth defects in a playpen in the department. The baby was about two but it could only lie on it’s back and make weird gurgling noises. The mother was more of a problem for me than the baby. She never shut up for a second. By five O’clock, I thought I was going crazy. I called the station manager and told him, I didn’t want the job after all because I couldn’t think straight under those circumstances. I probably should have given it a few days but, I panicked and wanted out.
I called the paper and asked if that job was still open and was told that it was. They still wanted to hire me. The man who hired me said I was given the wrong information about the paper going bankrupt. He said they had been in business for seven years and they were doing just fine.
I interviewed several ladies that wanted to keep babies while their mothers worked. I found the perfect grandmother type who seemed to love Carol from the moment she met her. You and I could drop her there as we went to work and pick her up when we got off work.
The future months had more changes in store for us. At least on this day, we felt this situation would be something we could handle.
 Recognized |
This is done as a dialogue with me remembering my years with my late husband. I am speaking directly to him.
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