Betty Hamblin Wheaton
My mom loved baby people and baby animals.
When I was about 5 living in Tulsa, OK, we had two rabbits: Peter Rabbit and Welsh Rabbit (Rarebit!). We got them when they were very small and we all loved them. We all had chores related to them, as they had the run of the house. When they got to be full-sized rabbits, my mom ‘disappeared’ them one day. We never found out the details.
She had 3 chihuahuas at once a couple of times. She had a chair in the living room that was her center of activity. She would work the New York Times Sunday crossword puzzle, with her coffee on the table beside her and the three dogs in the chair with her. She would hold up one of the cute doggies, similar to the photo above, and ‘talk’ for them in a high baby-talk voice in conversation with you. There was no way out. You HAD to respond to what the ‘dog’ was saying. 😜
She loved ALL baby animals. My dad brought home a monkey in a cage from the pet store. My mom gushed about how ‘cute’ he was – until he figured out how to get out of the cage, ran into the kitchen, grabbed the head of lettuce soaking in the sink and proceeded to carry the dripping head all around the house, up the draperies, etc., with my dad running after it with a towel, trying to catch it. He finally did, and I can remember with great detail how it looked with the monkey’s teeth coming through the towel, trying to bite my dad. The monkey went back to the pet shop.🐒
When my mom saw a baby elephant on TV on ‘The Wild Kingdom,’ she gushed, “Oh! Isn’t that CUTE!!!!!” then looked at my dad and firmly said, “Jim, I DON’T WANT ONE!”
My mother was very intelligent. She wanted to go to college to become a lawyer. Her dad refused to pay for college, thinking it was a waste of money. She finally convinced him to pay for college at a 2-year community college, Cottey College, in Nevada, MO – but he was firm he would only pay for one year. She finished that year one credit short (a gym class) from fully graduating from the two-year college. I asked her why she didn’t go back to college later. She basically told me that she gave up that idea years ago and wouldn’t revisit it.
She was a very adaptable woman. She married and had my brother and me in Chicago, IL. They moved to Levittown NY and bought a house. When my dad got an opportunity to go into advertising, we moved to Tulsa, OK where my parents had a house built on 1-1/4 acres of land in a neighborhood unique to Tulsa. My mom was used to big cities, theatre, shopping in huge department stores, etc. (though it was during the depression, rationing, etc.) and felt she had been dropped onto a different planet in Tulsa, where you needed a car to do anything, there were no deliveries, no delicatessens, barely an outdoor drive-in movie theatre. When my dad started a one-man advertising agency in our home, she became his secretary, handling all of the business requirements, answering the phone, typing the commercials my dad wrote, and more – all while raising my brother and me.
She became active in the community. She was a good organizer and a great speaker. She could get up in front of a group and say what she thought with style, impressing all who heard her. Sometimes, if someone in the group challenged her ideas, she would respond, her words and phrases getting longer as her irritation grew. Sometimes she would tell the person off in such an elegant way that they had to go home and look up the words to figure out she had insulted them!
When I married, we moved to Arkansas. My husband suddenly needed a job and took one in Tulsa, living with his parents. When Brian needed a different school environment, he went to live with Harvey and his grandparents. Harvey was working in Tulsa. I was working in Arkansas. We were straining everything to pay for Brian’s tuition at the school there and stay afloat.
All of a sudden Harvey’s dad decided that he didn’t want Harvey and Brian to live there anymore. Harvey found an apartment, but I had to sell some stuff in order to help pay the rent. I talked to Harvey’s parents, telling them they had really thrown a wrench in our finances because we were counting on being able to live at their house, and in fact had made sure it was all right before we signed the contract for the tuition. My plea didn’t help.
My mom called to visit. I didn’t say anything, but she knew something was wrong. She insisted I tell her. When I did, she said, “Let me get back to you.” Ten minutes later we were on the phone again. She said, “I have just arranged to pay the year’s tuition at the school.” She had saved us financially. Words can’t express the relief I felt. I called Harvey and he called my mom in tears, thanking her for saving us.
My mother was a seamstress who made a lot of her clothes, seeing something she liked advertised, then buying material and a similar pattern, and making the dress so well that people thought she shopped in the really expensive stores in Tulsa. She made a lot of my clothes, as well.
The really amazing thing was that she altered every single shirt my dad wore their whole married life. (My dad fell off a horse when he was 3 and broke his arm and hand so badly that he left arm didn’t heal correctly. His left arm was much shorter than his right, and his left hand was essentially useless.) My mother would take out the left sleeve of every shirt they bought, cut it off at the top and insert it into the modified hole for the sleeve so well that people were unaware of what she had done or the need for it. She also knitted sweaters for my dad, carefully making the left arm shorter than the right so that it fit him perfectly. 🪡
I’m in awe of my mother’s abilities in so many things. She was a very exacting mother, and I fell short of her expectations many times, but she came through for my family when we desperately needed it and loved me in her way.
I have many memories of her, look up to her, loved her. I carry her in my head and my heart, so I am never alone. ❤️
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