They had met a year before at a basketball game (Was it in Milstead or Porterdale?) and a little later at Uncle Lewis Shaw's house; Ruth and Lewis’s daughter Clara were school acquaintances. They were both at Clara’s for a “pound party” if I remember the story correctly. Charles was smitten immediately. They took walks around Porterdale down to the stone formations still called “The Rock House” along the Yellow River near the Bibb Manufacturing mill. It wasn’t long before, strolling along, Charles, 18, asked Ruth, 14, to marry him.
“You know I’m too young to be married!” she replied.
“I know,” he said, but couldn’t we be engaged?”
Ruth has impishly told me, again just in the last month, “Oh I was so wise; I thought, "We might as well go ahead and get married and have more years together.”
Today is the eighty-third anniversary of the day Ruth and Charles, two teenagers in love, stood in the living room at 45 Hazel Street in Porterdale, Georgia with the pastor of Milstead Methodist Church and several family members to promise their lives to each other for better or worse. There were definitely better and worse days, but they stuck together till that terrible day in 1986 when a heart attack took him away from her -- till last Sunday anyway.
Ruth had had her choice that day in 1938 of the beige dress her sister Louise (Sis) had bought for her or the blue dress her sister-in-law Julia had bought for her. My grandmother had watched teens forced apart and Charles Shaw, all of nineteen, somehow persuaded her to allow her fifteen year-old daughter to get married.
Charles had to catch a ride on his wedding day from Milstead to Porterdale with his pastor, and the couple rode back, chauffeured again by the pastor, to Milstead to begin their married life — Charles had wrecked his father’s automobile a few days earlier and carried a scar from that wreck on his chin throughout his days.
Mama Shaw and Daddy Shaw moved out of their own bedroom to give quarters to the newlyweds till they could find permanent lodging.
Mother reminded me, again less than a month ago, that when a few weeks had passed she had begun to worry that they might not be able to have children. She didn’t worry long; Baby Janice arrived ten months after the wedding. Then a few days before the Day of Infamy at Pearl Harbor Joan joined the little family. Two years in the South Pacific postponed the next baby, me, till 1947.
Tomorrow we will have a big reunion of loved ones and friends to celebrate the long life of Ruth Baird Shaw with a funeral at Trinity United Methodist Church. It will be a time of tears and laughs and wonderful remembering and also of worship and healing for a very large family. I hope lots of Mother’s friends will join us. We’ve laid down some time limits; even I will be brief, but we will mourn our loss, share our memories, and rejoice in our great good fortune of having this amazing, stubborn, gentle, unassuming, loving, beautiful woman in our lives. I will have had only six days of experience living without her out of my 27,166 days on Planet Earth. At some point each evening it crosses my mind: "I need to run over to Mother’s!" I quickly remember.
She did her best to prepare us and we’ll make it, but even now it ain’t easy.
Happy Anniversary, Mother and Daddy! As I have said, I am no theologian and I don’t have the inside dope on how things like this work, but while your family and friends have our earthly reunion tomorrow, I love the notion that y’all are having a grand anniversary reunion where you are.
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