The Great Throwing-Away continues. I opened a bin I thought contained photographs but found more paper than photos. Cards. Letters. Newspaper clippings. Little bits of life.
And my mother’s diploma from Martindale High School in Martindale, Texas, which she received May 31, 1935. It’s signed by Chas. E. Lumpkin, Superintendent; Ruby C. Slaughter, Principal; and J. E. Carnes, Secretary of the Board of Trustees. I can’t decipher the school board president’s name.
The diploma was folded inside a little booklet embossed on the outside with the letter M.
I held one corner down with the copy of Twelfth Night she read for an English class at Mary Hardin Baylor College, and the other with a copy of Liz Carpenter’s Ruffles and Flourishes, given to her many years later by Nell Waller, a dear friend.
On the last page of the booklet, there’s a note from the superintendent.
Kathy Waller 
I have been following your blog for a while now, but I haven’t read anyone’s blogs for about six months. I have been “throwing away stuff” accumulated over 50 years of adulthood, parenthood, etc. In fact, before reading your story here, I just read another friend’s article about “thinking about the past a lot” as he is now 72. His argues that older people are bound to reminisce, because they have more past than future. I completely agree with him. He mentioned how some people tend to discourage older people from recounting their past lives. Someone did this to me a few years ago, and I just ignored her. It stung me a bit, because I am a low-income senior compared to many of my peers, as dad died when my sister and I were teenagers and mom didn’t have much at all to leave us when she died. Some of our friends parents left them with houses worth 1 million dollars to be split between two siblings, so add $500,000 to their pensions and acquired wealth in their own working lives, and many of them plan futures full of cruises and travels around the world.
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Thanks for following, Marilyn. I agree with you about reminiscing. At sixty-seven, I have a lot to remember–and much of that is about people of my parents’ and grandparents’ generations I knew growing up, and the stories they told. Their lives were so much more interesting than mine has been. Regarding million-dollar houses–my imagination doesn’t stretch that far. Is your blog live? I wasn’t able to find it.
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So cool to have this!
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It really is. I’d forgotten I had it. Thanks for commenting.
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Loved reading this! Crystal was the “brainy” one of our family! Also the most dependable – always! I still miss each of them – Daddy, Mother, Mary Veazey and Gene, Crystal and Bill and my sweet little sister and playmate, Betty! Love you, Barbara BTW – the school board president was probably Arthur Smith – hard to tell from the signature, but I’ll bet that was the case! Love ya’, Barbara
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I’m glad you enjoyed it, Barbara. Thanks for ID-ing Arthur Smith. The name looked like Smith, but I couldn’t remember a specific one. I know what you mean about missing people. We have a lot of them to miss. And I’m not throwing that stuff away. (P.S. I was told that brainy Aunt Veazey wanted to be a nurse but Granddaddy Barrow wouldn’t let her go to nursing school because nurses have to see naked men.)
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