You won’t find the event on any holiday-marking calendar you pick up, but since my blogging day falls on May 1, I feel it’s necessary to mark an event from this day in 1937’s history. As the story was told to me, on that Saturday morning, Virginia Hannah and Berton McGee went to their pastor’s home and were married with his wife as a witness. They returned immediately to her family’s farm to reveal what they had done. Her youngest sister shared the news with their father, “Daddy, you’ve got a new son-in-law and a preacher, too!”
A realistic look at their prospects would have caused some foreboding. He grew up in a dysfunctional family who lived on the top floor above his father’s barber shop in a small town with four much-older half siblings. She grew up the oldest of six siblings in a farm family that never missed a service in the little Baptist church where her father served as deacon and Sunday school teacher. If Berton had a buffalo nickel in his pocket, it needed to be spent. If Virginia had the nickel, the buffalo might grunt and grumble from being held so tight. Depression years lingered ahead with each of them having had only their first year of college, despite the fact that he was 26 years old and she was 24. Perhaps the darkest shadow was cast by his visual challenges. He could not judge distance well enough to drive a vehicle and had been told that he would be blind by the time he was fifty, a real handicap as he entered his calling to pastor country churches.
That was then. I look back at this couple who became parents of four daughters with me as the oldest. From the vantage point of eighty-three years later on this May 1, 2020, my memories include many challenges, but most of all, their adapting with joy to the obstacles in their life’s journey together. Mama’s tight-fistedness with that nickel kept us afloat in hard financial times, and Daddy’s relatives told us she helped him smooth over the rough edges of his difficult growing up years. Daddy’s sense of humor eased their most difficult situations as he found the funny side. The eye problem became an asset as Mama chauffeured him wherever he needed to go and became a partner in his ministry. Thankfully, the prediction of becoming blind did not come true.
So, though you won’t find this event on any calendar you purchase, there are four McGee Girls and a host of country church members in North Mississippi who are very glad it happened.