46 - Grandmother Vivian, Doc and the others

THE HENRY GRADY HOTEL, Atlanta

Early Viv

      There’s no doubt about it, my Grandmother Vivian was a better grandmother than she was a mother.

     My grandfather, her first husband, was much older; he had met her while staying at her mother’s boarding house in southwest Georgia.   The family home, which sat smack in the middle of the little town of Cuthbert, bore no real similarity to any kind of mainstream hotel, other than the premise was the same.   Rooms were for rent, as attested a large, ugly sign stuck into the front yard, simply stating, "ROOMS." 

      I never knew my grandfather, as he died before I was born. Actually, I never heard much about him.   He was a medicine man.  

    
     Vivian traveled much of the time with her medicine-man husband, leaving most of the early rearing of my mother to my great-grandmother, Mama Woods.   I don’t think Vivian had any active participation in the “business,” but one of her brothers, who later became something of a small town tycoon in Lamar, South Carolina, travelled with them for awhile performing the "buck and wing", a specialized tap dance, from the back of their truck.

Doc, long before he met Vivian

     I suppose that people don’t really know what a medicine man is any longer.  It hasn’t much existed for the last 100 years or so. By the time my grandfather met Vivian it was already on the way out, as professions go.  He was an entertainer of sorts.  He organized a travelling show which would go through small, mainly southern towns to attract a crowd to which miraculous patent medicines, remedies for various ailments, would be proposed.   

     Everyone, including my mother, called him Doc, though needless to say, he was not a doctor, and the whole concept of hawking medicinal cure-alls, even in those more innocent times, was most often associated with charlatans and other unsavory characters.

     They usually made little money, but there were also flush times, and when the money did come in, they inevitably spent it quickly and extravagantly.  This was recounted to me by my mother and other members of the family as a warning of how not to handle your life and manage your money.  But I always looked at their lifestyle as a little bit glamorous, although it would have been fairly impossible to describe Vivian as ever having the remotest aura of glamour.

Mother, Sweet Sixteen

  My mother always felt left out of her own mother’s life, and although Vivian tried hard in later years to find her good graces, it was usually a losing battle. 

Mother tended to resent the fact that my brothers and I had such affection for her.   Whenever she’d come to visit, Vivian (or Bibby, as Mickie and Dickie called her) would always bring a big bag of corn candy, which was about the cheapest children’s confection you could pick up at any dime store.  We loved it, and whooped for joy when Vivien pulled it out of her bag.  Mother would sometimes remark what a shame that she had again forgotten to get a “real” gift for her grandchildren.  

Mickie (left) and Dickie with Vivian, Southern Pines 1961 

     In the last year of her life, when she was dying of cancer, Mother confided to me in an atypical moment of candor, that she still cringed when remembering how --growing up with her grandmother-- some of the girls at school taunted her with the epithet “Medicine Girl! Medicine Girl!”  Even though it would have been unfair to blame Vivian for these childhood memories, she never really forgave her.

     Vivian left her first husband in the Thirties for her childhood crush who happened to be her first cousin.   He was a practicing alcoholic and not always very well behaved to other members of the family, but Vivian loved him dearly for the rest of his life.

Vivian and Leon

 He, too, was much older, and by the time he died twenty years later, he had pretty well turned his life around, quit drinking, resettled in Florida, and made a respectable husband for my grandmother.   Though my mother refused to speak to him, let alone receive him, he was always a perfect step-grandfather to me when I would spend summers with them in Florida.

They lived for awhile in Atlanta, where Vivian worked as a receptionist at the Henry Grady Hotel.  It was then Atlanta’s premier hotel, and although my brothers and I adored her, she was not known for having a very sparkling personality, even less for her smile, and I have always found it difficult imagining her interacting effectively with hotel clients.

     When "Gone With The Wind" staged its world premiere at the old Loew’s Theatre in 1939, many of the MGM officials stayed at the Henry Grady, and the hotel received a number of invitations for its employees.  Vivian never could remember which of the stars had stayed there, but she enjoyed recounting how she and Leon had both enjoyed the movie, but had left at the intermission, thinking it was over. 

Mama Woods and daughters Vivian (left) and Aunt Ruth

     Widowed in the mid-1950’s, Vivian moved back to Cuthbert where she ran her mother’s boarding house for a few years.

* * * * * *

       She had red hair, and insisted on wearing pink whenever possible; she was always clearly on the fat side; and she was usually short of money.  Yet after two husbands and well past middle age, she always managed to find a new boyfriend, at least two of whom she outlived. Like her husbands, they were never exactly the crème de la crème, and reports of their existence always displeased my mother, who forbid her bringing any of them with her to Aberdeen.

     Whatever might have been said about some of my grandmother’s behavior throughout her life, she definitely did it her way.  Despite some of the collateral damage she may have engendered along the way, she had what most who knew her would describe as a good heart.  I wish I had told her before, but I'd like to say now, affectionately, belatedly and posthumously, “Well done!”

Grandmother Vivian, Cuthbert circa 1975

The Henry Grady Hotel, Atlanta's finest 

The Henry Grady, vintage postcard

I stayed briefly at the Henry Grady when I decided to make my life in Atlanta after finishing school in 1964.

With neither a clear future nor job, it seems odd that I would have checked into a top hotel, but times were certainly different, and jobs were plentiful; and I had soon found both an apartment and a job after a few days in the big city.

The personnel director at the now defunct Atlanta Times took pity on me, and in addition to placing me in a menial job as errand boy for some of the technical people in the press room, he proposed helping me move, as well, when he realized, not without surprise, that I was lodged at the Grady.

I have little memory of my stay there, other than of a vaguely tiny room.  The one vivid recollection I do have is of standing for long minutes on what I recall as an imposing mezzanine balcony with a lot of ornate grill work, surrounding and overlooking the entire ground floor with all of the comings and goings of its crowded lobby.  That was already the type of image that exemplified the other-world atmosphere I always felt in grand hotels.

Built in 1924, the 13-story luxury hotel barely survived a half century.  It had been constructed on the prize piece of real estate which previously boasted the Georgia governor’s mansion.     Located in what was then the fashionable downtown Atlanta, it was particularly favored by Georgia politicians. 

After the Grady was demolished in 1974, the Westin Plaza was built on the site.  

Your input is welcomed:  hotel-musings@hotmail.fr

CROSS REFERENCING … a look at other postings

"Mother" is also featured in blog No. 51, "A Christmas gift ... the little red lamp" and No. 49  "Thanksgiving: Ruth and Dickie ... and more about Mother"  (to access, click on highlighted titles).