Edit SEESAW, CHAPTER FOUR - BEST FRIENDS, PART ONE SeeSaw - Best Friends Chapter Four 04 11 12 Most of us can look back and identify one person throughout our lives whom we called our "best friend." I’ve been very lucky in that I’ve surrounded myself with a number of close friends ever since I was in college. My sorority sisters were my best friends in college, particularly my "big sister," Maybec Johnson, and my "little sisters," Ann Riall, Jane Durham Daniel and Gail Smith Ingrum. Of these, I am still very close to Maybec, Ann and Gail, but I haven’t heard from Jane in 44 years. I now divide my life into three parts: Before my brother Billy Tom died; After he died; and When I was disabled. In between, there were several major moves, resulting in different best friends in each city. Lifetime Martha Gissendanner McClure and I have been best friends since we were in diapers. She witnessed my mother’s rages, came down to be my companion when my brother died, came to help me move into my new house, and was the friend I called when I could not drive my father home, etc. She is also the one I turn to when I want the unvarnished truth. Although we’ve pursued different paths in life, we still have so much in common as only two girls from the same little town in rural northern Alabama can. We were separated in the sixth grade, then we went our separate ways in high school. I was a bookish kid who, thanks to contact lenses, turned into quite an attractive young woman. I only had one boyfriend in high school, and he was safely tucked away at Sewannee Military Academy, which remains one of the prettiest campuses I’ve ever visited. I chose to go to the University of Alabama to study journalism, while she went to Auburn University. Her father was superintendent of Auburn University’s Sand Mountain Experiment Station, and she laughs that she had no choice in the matter. Her mother was also my high school science teacher. Martha and I have remained close friends all of our lives, and I am the Godmother to Amy and Danny, her two children. We still email almost every day, and she brings me fresh flowers from her garden when her daffodils and roses are blooming. Today she brought me azaleas. First Three Years in Fort Lauderdale Elizabeth Rhodes and Ann Riall I had trouble finding a reliable roommate in Fort Lauderdale after spending the first summer renting the Kappa Delta housemother’s apartment at the Karen Club, which was supposed to be a swinging place to live. Well, I must have read an old brochure because it was mostly deserted in the summer, obviously the apartments bought as second homes by the snow birds. Not a creature stirred all summer except my stirrings as I was visited by numerous friends, including Miriam Hill, a journalism professor at University of Alabama, who accompanied me on the drive down and stayed the first two week with me. I literally launched my career with my journalism professor standing behind me. Not a bad way to go, I reasoned. Upon settling in on Memorial Day, 1968 my first call was to Elizabeth Rhodes, my former roommate on The Miami Herald when I was an intern the prior year. We had showed up to begin our internship on June 6, 1967, the very day that the Seven Day War broke out between Israel and the Palestinian factions living in the Middle East. So we waited. And waited, and waited. Finally the Managing Editor, Larry Jinks, came out and told us about the war and its impact on South Miami Beach, which was essentially a Jewish old folks home. That gave Elizabeth and I plenty of time to get to know each other, and I had already decided to give up the Hollywood motel on the beach that my father and I had worked so hard to find and move in with her in South Beach. For one thing, it was a whole lot cheaper and it easily made up for the extra mileage to my assigned Hollywood (FL) office. We only had one major problem - communicating. She could not understand a word I said in my Southern Hillbilly accent, even though I understood her Seattle accent perfectly. I particularly remember buying apricot nectar at the grocery store, and she thought I was saying chocolate. Go figure. We decided to come up with up with Jewish surnames to better fit in with the names on our mailboxes, and we both came up with the name "Irving." So it stuck and we still call each other "Irving" almost 45 years later. But she became a solid friend whom I came to depend on for companionship. When she followed me home to Alabama en route to the University of Kansas where she studied at the William S. White School of Journalism, we stopped in Conyers, Georgia, to stay overnight with my Aunt Ida. I wondered how she would react to real Southern food, but she was fine until the red eye gravy Aunt Ida served with homemade biscuits. Then she blanched, asked what was in it, and resorted to eating homemade pear preserves with her biscuits. I also worked in an interview with the bureau chief of Newsweek on the way through Atlanta. I really came back to south Florida because of her and my other friends at the Herald...unlike most of my sorority sisters, I was not getting married after four years of "husband hunting." I had come down for Spring Break, but I was not rehired by the Herald. So instead I signed on with The Fort Lauderdale News which was the second largest newspaper in south Florida (it’s now the successful Sun-Sentinel).. Once home, "Irving" saw my parents, who had come down to visit me over the summer, and she still remembers what a good cook my mother was. I was in a hurry to get back to the University for sorority "Rush Week" and there was a major incident with my mother, who resented my bringing all my dirty laundry home. Irving came to see me at the University en route to resume her job at the Herald, and she got a glimpse of sorority life at a university in the Deep South. Then I came down to Fort Lauderdale over Spring Break, wrecked her new VW Bug, and coincidentally was not rehired by the Herald. Still, I was determined to return to south Florida and the job with the local paper was the only vehicle available to me. After a series of roommates, I decided to talk my Zeta "little sister" and long-time friend Ann Riall into coming down and launching her career in Fort Lauderdale. It still had the "where the boys are" aura and the Spring Break crowds, so it was an easy sell to a young college graduate also wishing to put a little space between the racial tensions of the Deep South and herself. So she came down after an early graduation. I’ll never understand why I didn’t have her make a beeline for the local newspapers, but I guess my experience of being fired by the Fort Lauderdale News was too recent and too bitter to have her go in the same direction. She ended up doing public relations for the Easter Seal Society where she developed an interest in early childhood education. Ann had majored in political science and journalism and was so bright that she constantly amazed me...a true intellectual. We soon got out of our lease and rented the top floor of a lovely triplex in Victorial Park that Irving had found for us. We were all into tree hugging and environmental concerns, and I was working my way through The New York Times Cookbook by Craig Claiborne, which I had been given for college graduation. It was to become my kitchen bible and I was still using it 38 years later when I had to give up keeping house. Ann and Irving had adventurous appetites, but Ann ate like a waif. Therefore, I always had an invitation out for more people to sample my gourmet delicacies. Irving has remained a close friend and I wrote a letter of recommendation for her to the Seattle Times. I only visited her once in all these years, but she came to see me in northern Virginia and Chicago. We’ve kept in touch, though, and she did yeoman’s duty in fighting my court-appointed legal guardian when he scheduled an estate sale of all my possessions in 2009. Even though we didn’t succeed and every last one of my personal possessions was sold to the highest bidder without advising me of the date or time, she even enlisted the help of ADAP (Alabama Disabilities Association). Legal guardians can be bastards, and I certainly have experienced my share of dastardly conduct. Back to Ann, I brought home a dog that I’d adopted from Ray Biagiotti, a fellow PR person and a man with too many kids. Genghis Khan was an intelligent little pug who insisted that I take him for a long walk through old Victoria Park every afternoon. I was also very much into cooking with my downstairs neighbor. We cooked out of her favorite French cookbook by Countess de Mapie, hence my introduction to French haute cuisine, as well as French recipes from my New York Times cookbook (I mostly remember the pate’s and going out to look for truffles (having no idea of how expensive they were, I finally went to the back entrance of Le Café des Paris where my friend Louis doled out five dollars worth, still a smidgin’ in my opinion). I used fresh pate’ for everything from sandwiches made with brie cheese from The Cheese Shop and party rounds of pumpernickel bread to serving it in a mound for dinner with fried okra and green beans. Fried okra was considered a "gourmet item" in south Florida because nobody had tasted the Southern specialty–I even had to go to Bass Brothers market in Colored Town to find it, and I always made Craig Claiborne’s classic French salad made from romaine and dry mustard. Irving was a frequent dinner guest, and my neighbor and I even made our own fruitcakes and plum puddings from scratch–try to find suet in Fort Lauderdale! Ann only made Instant Breakfast because I didn’t want anyone fooling around in "my kitchen." But overall, we had a copacetic two years before Ann left for Europe and ultimately graduate school. She recently retired as a professor at the University of Wisconsin/Whitewater. I was correct in calling her a true intellectual as she got her PhD from Vanderbilt, and we had a Facebook reunion in 2011. Rosemary Jones I met Rosemary when we both washed up at a Florida business magazine, I, having been fired from my first job as a newspaper reporter, and she, having arrived from New York’s haute world of publishing with her best friend, whom she had met in Tehran on a year’s trip around the world. She was devoted to her extended family who grew up in Fort Lauderdale and Tehran. Patric was one of the most intriguing people I ever met, and Ashley (Bryn Mawr and Harvard) just wrote a book about her mother, Farangi Girl (published in the UK in 2011). So how does the penultimate New Englander (product of Andover and Barnard ) get to be best friends with a Southern belle? I invited her over for a drink in my new apartment on Las Olas. Next I ran into her at Holy Cross Hospital where I had been hired as assistant director of public relations. She was emptying bedpans as a nurse’s assistant, with the idea of entering the Peace Corps. I then invited her to a meeting of my journalism honorary, Theta Sigma Phi (now Women in Communications), where she met people who led her to the Broward Times, west Broward’s leading newspaper. She also bonded with the public library, organizing and teaching the first series of writer’s workshops in the area. Next she got pregnant and decided to have the baby and keep it. I counseled her that I would never in a million years do such a thing because of my strict Southern Baptist family (my Aunt Grace had said she would murder me in cold blood if I ever got pregnant, and I believed her). So I became the giver of the baby shower and I picked her and babe up at the hospital as only a best friend can. I also thought it my responsibility to keep food on her table, which translates into providing her with a job. I recommended her as my successor at Nova Southeastern University when I left to start a downtown arts council in Fort Lauderdale. Then I hired her at Eason Dobbs and Associates, Inc. And when I left the city, I made sure that she had a secure job as Fred Ruffner’s (a publishing magnate from Detroit) executive assistant, where she still works today at age 83. Chicago - Liza Antelo I met Liza Antelo when she was doing a cooking demonstration at my building, Lake Point Tower, which had been designed by my all-time favorite architect Mies van der Rohe. The in-house grocery store regularly scheduled cooking demos, and Liza’s credentials were in good order. A graduate of the prestigious Le Cordon Bleu cooking school, she was the new bride (at my age) of Joe Antelo, a high mucky-muck Tribune executive in Chicago. Liza had her own impressive background in advertising, having been an associate of Lois Wyse at Wyse Advertising in New York. But she and I were sort of lost souls in the great Midwest, and we bonded quickly over our love for creative cookery and decorating our apartments. I’d had my own cooking school in Fort Lauderdale and she joked that she had gone to Le Cordon Blah, and our first collaboration was Thanksgiving dinner for eight people in my Lake Point Tower dining room. My former secretary came up with her new husband who was from Chicago, and he was intent on giving me a tour of "his" Chicago on the Polish West Side. I didn’t know the West Side at all, and Liza was interested in tracking down a renowned butcher at a Polish meat shop there, and Chuck knew exactly where it was. He also showed us an Italian bread shop that turned out to be the source of LettuceEntertainYou’s (a prominent restaurant group in Chicago at that time) fabulous breads. Liza and I soon went everywhere together...the National Restaurant Association’s Annual Convention and Exhibit at McCormick Place, department store cooking classes, anything to do with cooking and shopping for the home. I even took her to Long Grove, a boutique shopping district about an hour’s drive from Chicago in extreme northwestern Cook County. I had commissioned a hand-painted portrait of my Rottweiler, Wilhelmina, on needlepoint, and was into collecting Russian lacquer boxes from a small boutique there. Plus my father and beloved stepmother Rhonwyn (after Mother died, my father remarried twice, and my second stepmother, Viola, was never beloved but instead reviled by me), who was to die of breast cancer after 10 years of a blissful marriage to my wonderful father. I never saw a woman more in love, and they adored the small town atmosphere of Long Grove. Liza and Joe became among my favorite house guests in Fort Lauderdale upon my return there in 1990. Liza and I took long morning walks through my neighborhoods with my dogs, and they loved her. Joe always went to Gulfstream Race Track when it was open. Always, I had several friends over for parties on the occasion of their visits. We haven’t kept in touch since I came to the nursing home, but I figure that Joe, who is much older than we are, is not in good health, and I can’t talk on the phone due to my dysarthria. I look forward to a reunion, if I ever get back to Florida.
Posted on: Sun, 14 Jul 2013 07:22:33 +0000
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