Our

Story

by

Lawrence Abby Gauthier

ace reporter

The Westphalia Periodic News

Carol King

Often, my first thought in the morning is to hope that I’ll be inspired by at least one thing during the day. As a weekly columnist, it’s part of my job.

The inspiration doesn’t have to be a big one, like the continental shift of a bean vision when everything seen is for the very first time and all the answers are so obvious that even somebody with half a brain could not help but get it. The way to end the wars, for instance.

The inspiration can just as well be a little one, like suddenly remembering one that I had had in the past but hadn’t thought about for a while.

Last Friday, I woke hoping to be inspired at least once during the day.

After coffee and then after staring at the reflection of my uninspired mind in the blank screen of my computer for an hour or so, Culley Jane reminded me that it was time to go. She’s been thinking about getting involved in the Legendary Ladies group here in Colorado. They describe themselves as “a non-profit, educational, women’s performance organization.” Volunteers research the life of a woman who helped shape the American West; write a seriously researched, historically accurate performance script; sew and create authentic period dress; and then play the legendary lady on stage telling her own story in the first person in front of audiences all around the region — schools, churches, senior centers… wherever.

I have to admit that it sounded like a lot of work to me, but I knew that Culley Jane would be perfect for the group. She was used to performing. She’d spent years performing in front of college classrooms. And she knew the rules of research and had published in academic journals. She’s a writer, a novelist. Her spoken script would flow with grammatical impeccability. She even knows how to sew. Her mother had taught her how.

When she first told me about the group and that she was thinking about getting involved, I told her she should play herself, the legendary lady who married me.

She was amused. “I don’t think I’d qualify,” she said. “They focus on women who lived before I was born.”

Last Friday, the group was putting on a performance at a senior center in one of Denver’s older suburbs and it was time for us to go. Before making any commitments, the group wanted Culley Jane to get an idea of what went on behind the scenes and to meet some of the other ladies. I was tagging along to see the show.

We got there early, before the audience had started filtering in. The building had been a church before the City of Wheat Ridge bought it and remade it into the town’s senior center. The main seating area, where I imagined the pews had been, was maybe half the size of a basketball court with a raised stage up front where I imagined a religious leader had once preached that congregation’s particular take on the gospels.

Ironically, the converted church turned out to be where I would have my insight of the day, or, more exactly, remembered an insight I had had years before in the late 1970s when I was a newspaper reporter in Detroit. At the time, in addition to all my other assignments, I wrote a weekly column called “Faces in the Crowd.”

The column was a big hit in the city. A poll of readers taken by the newspaper’s marketing department revealed the column was the paper’s third most popular feature, just behind sports and the Sunday cartoons. I looked for the most regular, inconspicuous people I could find, the waitress, the autoworker, the gas station attendant, a perfect stranger sitting by herself in a bar in a warehouse district. When I told them who I was and that I wanted to write their story for my “Faces in the Crowd” column, they always said the same thing: “There’s nothing interesting about me.” But I had had an insight and knew that that could not be true.

After taking over the church, the city had removed the pews and turned the room into a dining area with a dozen or so large round tables and an adjoining kitchen. A pre-registered crowd of about sixty people were expected for a pre-performance sit-down brunch of roasted chicken, corn on the cob, a slice of watermelon and white cake with white frosting.

While Culley Jane was off doing her thing, I wandered around the facility, getting a lay of the land. A friendly young lady at the reception desk up front gave me a quick tour of the place, like where the bathrooms were and the side rooms for crafts and senior citizen yoga. Since I wasn’t pre-registered for the brunch, she showed me where to get a paper cup of coffee and a store-bought cookie.

Back in the dining room, a dozen or so mostly white-haired senior volunteers were scurrying about, finalizing preparations for the crowd to come. I settled into a chair in the back of the room. I noticed one of the volunteers casting a welcoming smile my way. I acknowledged. We got to talking.

During my years as an over-the-road trucker, I picked up a talent for recognizing regional dialects. I could tell she had a Midwest past.

I asked her: “Where’d you grow up?”

She was a chatterbox, all right. In no time at all I knew the outlines of her entire life, from growing up hardscrabble on a small farm in central Illinois to volunteering at a senior center in Colorado. She remembered getting water from the outdoor pump as a young girl. Sewing clothes. A wood stove. Her father had an airplane and built a landing strip in their fields where crop dusters with colorful stories landed to refuel.

Her family had been Lincoln Republicans for generations. Grandfathers had fought in the Civil War. But she idolized the Kennedy family, especially the President’s sister, Eunice, who championed people with disabilities and that’s why she decided to go to college to obtain a degree in special education, to help people with disabilities, which she did her entire working career.

She talked fast and I wasn’t taking notes, so if I fudge on some of the details she can correct me later. But I remember her name. Carol King, like the singer. I told her about Westphalia, and my weekly column. She agreed to let me take a picture of her in case I decided to include her in a story I might write about the Legendary Ladies. Of course, she said, there was nothing interesting about her.

I asked her how she’d wound up here, in Colorado? I remember her saying that she was in her late 20s when she left her Special Ed teaching position in Illinois to head “out West,” expecting to find something like she had seen in movies, mountains and new adventures just because that was the way she was, and she married a man who could fix any kind of automobile or machine and they raised their children while she continued helping people with disabilities until it was time to retire and volunteer at the senior center.

The Legendary Lady performance went off without a hitch and was well received by the large audience.

Driving back home I was kind of quiet until Culley Jane asked me what I was thinking about.

I looked at her, my partner on the road “A legendary lady,” I said. “My insight for the day. Just doin' my job.”