Helen Stapleford Rose

Our Grandfather’s family was always desperately poor.

When Floyd Stapleford and Clee Reel were first married, they lived far out in the country - 10 miles was a long way in those days. There was no phone. So, when his infant son Linwood got sick, Floyd had to drive out in a mule cart to try to find the doctor. By the time he got back, the child had died.

Floyd worked at a succession of odd jobs - riverboat hand, oil truck driver, night watchman. For a while, he worked as an oiler in a sawmill. Once, he got his clothes caught in the works, and the pulley dragged him down toward the saw blade like a character in a silent film. He locked his arms around a post. The rest of the crew upped the “juice” because the logs weren’t moving. Finally, in the nick of time, somebody looked up and saw him there. He lived, although he had a broken arm and lacerations.

After Linwood died, there were four other Children: Mary, our mother, Helen, Richard, and Jessie.

Clee’s health failed early, while her children were still small. Aunt Helen told us that she would tie the babies to the table so that they could not crawl off, since she was not strong or fast enough to catch them. During the early 1930‘s, she was diagnosed with breast cancer. The doctors in New Bern eventually told her that they had done everything they could do for her. Floyd got little work, and Clee’s treatments were expensive. Health insurance was unheard of. Aunt Helen remembers using newspaper to cover holes in shoes. One Christmas Aunt Helen asked for a basketball and got a football; the china doll had the initials of a best friend.

Because Clee was so ill, Mary, our Mom, took over the household. In all pictures of all four children, Mary has her arms around them all, as though to protect them. Aunt Helen said Mary arranged to have milk delivered for free because she (Aunt Helen) was scrawny. She did all the cooking and made all the clothes for both her younger sisters. Aunt Helen remembers the kindness of the neighbors; there were no strangers in New Bern. Mrs. Windley Simon across the street had a wood cook stove. Schools in the ‘30’s did not provide a lunch since everybody lived near the school and had a Mom at home to make lunch for them. Each day before going to school, Mary would fill the pot with collards, potatoes and dumplings, cornbread, and sometimes dried beans or peas, and place it on Mrs. Simon’s stove. The younger children were in Riverside Elementary School, just two blocks from home. They would run to Mrs. Simon’s home to pick up the warm meal.

Aunt Helen and our mother were always very close. Aunt Helen credited Mom for her success on the high school debating team - Helen was a champion debater. She said she came home the day before the first debate and told Mom she had no idea what to say. Mom asked what the question was. Helen told her. There apparently followed one of the dialectic sessions we all became familiar with: Mom laid out a closely reasoned argument for side A, which Aunt Helen picked up. Then, Mom laid out a similarly closely reasoned argument for side B. As we have reason to know, a couple of hours of this sort of preparation would leave anybody ready for anything. But all of the credit doesn't lie with Mom. Aunt Helen was a remarkably intelligent woman in her own right, and had in addition a wonderful gift for oral presentation sprinkled with self-depreciating humor. We loved to listen to her stories as we were growing up. She must have been dynamite on the dais.

As a young woman, Aunt Helen got herself a good job as a telephone operator, and rose to a position as supervisor in a relatively short time. It was at the credit union at work that she got the loan to help our Mom and Dad buy a house. The deal was, she would get the down payment, they would make the monthly payments, and she and Granddad would live there with them.

The credit union only had car loans at the time, and they certainly didn’t make loans to women. No one had asked for a house loan before. And Aunt Helen was not only a woman, but single. They decided to have some fun with her, and told her that if she could get twelve cosigners that day, she could have the loan. She got them all, that day.

Her bosses were aghast at her audacity, but they decided that such nontraditional boldness could be of use. They needed someone to travel from city to city to train new personnel, and they did not think that women could, or would, travel. Nobody but Helen Stapleford! And so she ended up as an early road warrior, based in Greenville.

By 1953, when she transferred back to New Bern, there were five children at the old manse where we all lived, and the house was getting pretty crowded. Aunt Helen decided that, tradition and banking ideas of the day aside, there was no reason she could not buy her own house in her own name instead of living with relatives, so she did. Apparently, that was a revolutionary concept in the South in 1953. Or anywhere in 1953.

The trouble was, between paying off the old loan and paying rent in Greenville, she didn’t have the $400 down payment. Granddaddy co-signed the loan for the $400, and moved to the second bedroom in the new house. She rented the third bedroom to a service couple from Cherry Point Marine Air Base to make ends meet.

Then she met Kenny Ray Rose. He asked her out, but was stiff and silent the whole evening. She was wearing her brand new red dress. He apparently told her that his mother had said that only “loose women” wore red. He must have decided that “loose women,” or at least Helen, weren’t so bad; he took her and her red dress out again, this time to a big dance. She was wearing, in addition to the dress, one of those stiff, strapless “brunhilde” bra contraptions that looked like the tips of howitzers. The dance of the day was “swing.” Well, Aunt Helen “swang” her heart out, then repaired to the ladies room. Once there, she discovered, to her horror, that the bra had slipped down and twisted around to the back of the dress. She had two pointed growths on the back of her waist.

Kenny Ray proposed, and they were married in 1954. They lived at her little house in New Bern for a while, then moved to Greensboro in 1961, to a house Aunt Helen designed. She says she just got out a sheet of paper, and drew up the house she wanted. The builder said “Fine,” and so it was. Aunt Helen had two boys, Kenneth Jr. and Richard Carson. Both were good, solid, handsome boys. But she still visited us, whipping down the highway in her giant "woody" station wagon at 80+ mph. If we were riding with her, she'd call out, "Now y'all tell me if I'm going too fast! We'd hang over the front seat and watch the speedometer rise. (No seatbelts then!) We'd let her know, but she didn't slow down. That must have been a terrifying sight to her fellow motorists, since she was so short, all you could see above the steering wheel was the bill of her cap.

In 1990 or so when Aunt Helen and little Helen were in New Bern on a genealogical foray, Aunt Helen got pulled over by a policeman right in front of where the old house used to be. She said, "Don't worry, I'll do the talking." She got the ticket.

Aunt Helen was always our most entertaining relative, and the fact that she used herself as the butt of all her stories made her even more endearing. One of her favorites was about the time she and Uncle Ken lived in Florida, and she decided to make a fresh coconut concoction called a "Japanese Fruit Cake." Aunt Helen had asked Uncle Ken's sister what his favorite dessert was, and she had responded, "Japanese Fruit Cake." Never having met anyone Japanese, Aunt Helen didn't know what to expect (please note that no self-respecting Japanese would eat this; it's basically fruit cake with coconut icing). First she needed to procure fresh coconut. She went from store to store looking for coconut. The proprietors either looked at her like she was crazy, or laughed and told her to go pick one up off the street. She said that there were smooth, football shaped objects all over the streets, but she didn’t see any coconuts. Finally, some kind soul told her that if you break off the outer shell of those objects, you find, inside, the hairy little balls she was familiar with. The recipe, alas, had a typographical error in it. Instead of 2 Tbls of cinnamon, it called for 2 lb. Aunt Helen apparently had to buy out two grocery stores, since all she could find were those little tiny tins. After baking this creation which had more cinnamon than flour, she and Uncle Ken each had one bite, and that was enough.

She told about how she had baked a birthday cake for Little Helen, and dropped the thing on its top as she was coming in the door. She just scraped the top layer off the icing, and marched on in as if nothing had happened. Apparently, Uncle Ken was aghast, and ever after looked suspiciously at the tops of things she had had to carry anywhere.

She carried on the tradition with my own children. Little David asked her for some “Granddaddy stories,” and boy, did he get an earful! She told him how to do a hog killing, or “pig picking,” which was a neighborhood-wide event that involved killing, stripping, and preserving the entire hog - and eating the parts you couldn’t preserve. The best part was her description of how chitlins are made. It seems that the men dig a deep trench, and put a long piece of metal fencing along one side of the trench to keep them from being splashed. The men would get the hog’s intestines, and, standing behind the metal fence, force all the contents into the trench. Then, they’d toss the cleaned intestines into a pot of lye.

Aunt Helen attacked motherhood with same intensity that she attacked everything. She noticed, for example, that Carson was having trouble reading and writing his letters and words. He mixed up b's and d's; "god" and "dog." Nowadays, everyone recognizes this as dyslexia. In North Carolina in the 60's and 70's, however, this was not the case. Schools did not recognize the problem, or have any means of dealing with it if they did. Aunt Helen became the classic irresistible force to the school system's immovable object. Using the new power of the law that states must provide for each child a "free and appropriate education," she compelled the school system to pay for a special school in New England for Carson. But that was not enough for her. Working tirelessly, she helped to change the way NC schools deal with dyslexic children. She received several awards for her work. Today, Carson is a college graduate and a successful engineer, like his dad. And the North Carolina school system became a model for the instruction of Special Ed. Children. It was that, or send every last special ed child in the state to that school in New England; Aunt Helen would have seen to it.

But she didn't forget us, especially when bad times came. It was Aunt Helen who was with Mom when she died. Thereafter, she was like a second mother to us, and Uncle Ken, like a second dad. It was Aunt Helen who went to court, with Father Hadden, to get Will off a drug charge. It was Aunt Helen who brought Will food and religious books when he lived in a commune in the woods. She remembers tiptoeing carefully over filled bedrolls, a bag of books in one hand, a bag of food in the other. He promised to read her books if she would read his, so she marched dutifully home to read Carlos Castenatas. And he read the religious books. A promise, in our family, is a promise. Neither converted.

It was Aunt Helen who provided the most wonderful, the most poignant, moment when I married. Her gift to me was the set of candlesticks that she had given Mom when she married Dad, and which Mom had given to her at her own wedding. She gave it, she said, as a token of the love between sisters. I will always treasure those candlesticks.

It was Aunt Helen who acted as sister Ann's Mom when she married and Uncle Ken who gave her away. Ann wore Aunt Helen's wedding gown. Mary Lou and Little Helen waited nervously as Aunt Helen buttoned the hundreds of tiny buttons. Uncle Ken had another engagement and was late; we worried that he wouldn't make the start time. But we looked up, and there he was, standing in the door, solid and reliable as always. Later, they "parented" Little Helen at her wedding in Chicago.

Aunt Helen and Uncle Ken always served as our "mater- and pater- familias," providing the rock at the center of our family.

Aunt Helen hosted our holiday gatherings after our mother’s death, and the family break up. She made sure New Bern High School knew how Little Helen was doing at St. Genevieve's (they sent a telegram when she got into National Honor Society). She'd scour used clothing places for us so that we'd have clothes to wear. She wrote endless letters to me, asking brother Jack's pants size. When Helen needed a dress for a dance at St. Genevieve's, Aunt Helen made her a shift of robin's egg blue with silver thread through it and died her wedding shoes silver to match. (Ok, so Little Helen wouldn't necessarily have chosen it, but it was a nice effort).

Helen Stapleford Rose died April 30, 2008. She was 92.