After Raymond’s time in the convalescent home, there followed a couple of TB hospitals—one in Connecticut and one in the Adirondacks. The current treatment for TB patients was quite literally fresh air—the colder the better. So my Virginia father found himself at a Saranac Lake “cure cottage,” where the patients were rolled out on the porch to breathe in the mountain winter air for most of the day. He had lived through gangrene, amputation, and gassing, but now he thought he would surely freeze to death. Among the patients was another veteran from Virginia—a graduate of the University of Virginia. This man realized that illiterate veterans were being taken indoors for an hour or so every day for reading lessons. He proposed that the two of them feign illiteracy and gain a welcome break from the cold.
The ruse worked, at least for a while. Then to Raymond’s disgust, his friend whispered something to him that made the instructor look more closely at the two of them. “Have you boys ever been to elementary school?” she asked. They nodded. “Have you had any high school?” They nodded again, this time a bit sheepishly, for the teacher was obviously annoyed. “How much education have you had?” she demanded furiously. And when they admitted that they were both university graduates, she immediately called for an attendant to wheel their beds out and force them to face the elements.
By summer, when it was finally determined that, though his lungs were indeed damaged, he was not suffering from TB, he was at last allowed to go home. He had applied and been accepted at Princeton Theological Seminary while he was still hospitalized, but when he told the pastor of the Lexington church this, Dr. Young persuaded him to cancel these plans. In those days the Presbyterian Church was divided as it had been since the Civil War. If, Dr. Young said, he expected to work in the Southern Presbyterian Church, it would be a mistake to go to a northern seminary. Dr. Young took charge, canceled the Princeton registration, and made sure Union Theological Seminary in Richmond, Virginia, would accept his late application. So we children must be thankful to the imperious Dr. Young for making it possible for our parents to meet and our subsequent births.
As I write this I remember a similar event in my own life. While in Japan I was notified of a scholarship for further study that I could use where I wished. I applied to Yale Divinity School, where two of my favorite professors had received their doctorates and was accepted. In the late spring I went to a meeting in Tokyo and an American missionary acquaintance asked me what my plans were for my year in the States. I told him I had been accepted at Yale. “You don’t want to go to Yale,” he said. “You want to go to Union Seminary in New York City. That’s where the exciting things in Christian Education are happening.” I protested that it was too late to apply, but he assured me it was not, and with his help I changed my plans. If I hadn’t, I would never have become Katherine Paterson.
My parents on their honeymoon.
The Courtship and Wedding
But, of course, I never would have been born at all if my mother had failed to show up as she had been told to at the General Assembly’s Training School for Lay Workers in Richmond, Virginia. The semester was already under way when Mary Goetchius arrived that late fall of 1920. The Training School, as it was usually called (causing the public to often confuse it with a juvenile correctional center), had been started just a few years before by professors from Union Theological Seminary. The seminary was strictly for men in those days, but the professors recognized that there was a growing need for a place to train young women who were eager to become overseas missionaries or church workers in the United States.
The Training School was in a large house across the street from the seminary campus, and it was from there, on her first Sunday at the new school, that Mother and her roommate Agnes Rowland set out for the streetcar stop on the way to church services in downtown Richmond. Before the car arrived, two young men from the seminary came to the stop, and Agnes introduced her to Pete Richardson and “Sarge” Womeldorf. No one could quite explain how my father, who was never more than a private, got this nickname at the seminary, but since he was one of the few veterans, and a wounded one at that, perhaps the promotion was a sign of respect from his fellow students.
Soon the streetcar arrived. Mother got on and went to a seat in the middle of the car, only to hear to her horror the tinkling of change in the box by the driver. In her limited experience with Georgia streetcars, there had always been a conductor who came around to collect the fare after the passenger was comfortably seated. One of the young men she had just met had obviously paid for her ride. Her face was red when he came down the aisle. “I guess,” he said, grinning, “if I pay your fare I can sit by you.”
And so it began. He asked her to take a walk later that afternoon and she agreed. They walked from the seminary to a park almost two miles away, talking and getting to know each other. He told her much later how important that walk had been. He had not known until that afternoon that he could walk such a distance on his artificial leg.
At what point they fell in love, I can’t say. I always believed, listening to the streetcar story, that it was the magical love at first sight. At any rate, by the following year they were engaged. As a child, I considered theirs a great love story, and it was evident to me that they did truly love each other all their lives. In Jacob Have I Loved, Louise observes her parents coming off the ferry after a trip they had taken together, and the expression on her parents’ faces were ones I often saw on my own parents’. I even gave Mrs. Bradshaw a hat that my mother owned that I thought made both women look particularly beautiful.
Among the letters retrieved from the farm attic is a very peculiar one that my father wrote his mother dated January 23, 1922. He had been home for the Christmas holidays, but apparently had never mustered up the courage to tell his family about two of the most important decisions of his life.
My dear Mother,
It is always good to get news from home and especially a letter from you. There is no place a person looks with more longing and desire to be. You were so good and kind and always have been, so it is no wonder that I think of you all often and long to be there.
Momma I want to tell you a secret that is just for the rest of you and you are the first to know it. Mary Goetchius has agreed to share life with me. She is the most earnest Christian girl and lovable companion and a girl who is loved and respected by everyone who knows her. I know you would like her. She is such an earnest worker; she is a college graduate and was in France in “Y” work.
Momma, I wish I had confided more in you before but I just didn’t. But I want to live closer now.
Yes, it has been my intention for a long time to go to the mission field in fact since my sophomore year in college. There is a plenty to do here, but just think of what is to be done on the mission field. I know you will be the same brave mother that sent your boy to France and help me with your advice and prayers to do what the Lord would have me do. That is one reason I told Dr. Young I would come back this summer because I wanted to be home one more summer.
No there will be no wedding until my work down here is completed. I have not said much about her before. But she is loved and honored by all the profs and the folks around, so you see I am not the only admirer, but the leading one I hope. Write me soon what you think, etc.
Your devoted son,
Raymond
P.S. Thank Katherine for the pictures, they came O.K. Tell Joshua I am sending him that suit soon and he can have the coat altered at Lyon’s to suit him. R.W.
It seems that my father hit his mother with two bombshells in one letter. The first that he was marrying a girl he might not have even mentioned knowing in previous letters or conversation, and the second that he was planning to be a foreign missionary when he finished the seminary. I don’t think his mother ever quite recovered. At any rate, it was obvious to my siblings and me that Grandmother Womeldorf did not really approve of our mother, and that although she and his broth
ers and sisters wrote to my parents and sent them gifts through the years, they never quite forgave our father for forsaking the family farm. I’ll never know what his father thought about all this. I have found no letters from Daddy either to or from my grandfather except that one my father wrote after he was wounded. Grandfather died in 1928, four years before I was born, so I never got to meet him. I once happened to meet a man who said he had known my grandfather and that he’d had a wonderful sense of humor. My father really didn’t talk about his parents—just that his father was determined that his children have a good education—so I was pleased to find out where Daddy’s own great sense of humor had come from.
Out of the nine children, only my father and his younger brother Herman married and left the farm permanently. Mamie and Maude became nurses and served in the army during World War II, but after the war both returned to live on the farm and work in the local hospital or as private duty nurses in the area. Katherine graduated from Mary Baldwin College, but her life’s work was divided between the farm and teaching classes and catechism in the church. Cora Belle (always known as Cora B.) went to Farmville Teachers’ College and taught school while living on the farm. William graduated from Washington and Lee University, but lived out his life as a farmer. Joshua spent two years at W and L, but his struggles with asthma caused him to drop out of college. They never prevented his working long, hard hours on the farm, though. Florence went off to Mary Baldwin but came home after a week, too homesick to continue.
True to my father’s word, my parents’ wedding did not take place until after seminary graduation. Mother’s course was a two-year one, so she spent the year between her graduation and his working in a large church in Atlanta. I’m sorry to say, I’ve never found the letters that went back and forth between them that year. I would love to know what they were saying to each other while they were separated. But, alas, no such love letters have survived. I do know that he went to visit her during his Christmas vacation and brought presents for her from his family.
The plan for the wedding was a simple one. Mary’s older sister had married a Baptist minister who had a church in Gainesville, Georgia. Her sister Helen would be Mother’s attendant, and Pete Richardson would be the best man. Incidentally, Pete married Agnes Rowland. The Richardsons and my parents went to China the same year and remained close friends all their lives. The wedding was to be in Mother’s sister Anne’s home on June 21, 1923. I have letters from both my aunt Anne and my mother urging my grandmother Womeldorf and any other family members who could be spared on the farm to come to the wedding. I have a vague memory that one of the sisters may have come, but I have no pictures other than a formal one of my mother in her wedding dress and one of Agnes Rowland and Pete Richardson with my smiling parents that might have been taken in Gainesville, so I don’t know if any of the Womeldorfs actually made the trip to Georgia.
I have one story from the time of the wedding. It was told to me by my cousin Elizabeth Anne Campbell. She adored her aunt Mary and, at four, was thrilled that her aunt was being married in her house. However, she was a child who wanted attention, and as the wedding day approached no one seemed concerned about her at all. Her baby sister was being cooed over by everyone who came into the house, but no one was cooing over her.
A day or so before the ceremony, the women of the household were bustling about preparing an elegant ladies’ luncheon. Again, no one was paying the slightest attention to little Elizabeth Anne, so she decided to go outside and water the lawn. Her mother would be so proud that she was being helpful. Before long the guests began to arrive. One of them, a large woman that she had never much liked, reprimanded her for playing with the hose. The temptation was too great. She aimed the hose directly at the woman’s very broad satin-covered bosom. It was most satisfying. She had nothing against any of the other guests, but once she started she saw no way to stop. There was nothing to do but turn the hose against every arriving guest. No one coming out of the house to reason with her was safe either. Even when the bride, her beloved aunt, came out to entreat her to turn off the hose, she could not. By now, it was a matter of self-defense. Regretfully, she soaked the bride’s lovely party dress as well.
But concentrating on the bride made her fail to see the dark figure creeping up behind her—a person completely covered by a black, very large man’s hat and raincoat, carrying an umbrella as a shield. It was her mother, who turned off the hose and dragged her weeping daughter indoors. It took time, I’m sure, but apparently all was forgiven in time for Elizabeth Anne to serve as flower girl in the wedding itself.
The surest photo I have of these events is one taken of my parents on their honeymoon. They are standing in a field beside a car and Mother’s arms are full of mountain laurel. They look very happy.
My parents had been married fifty-five years when my mother died. My father was devastated. “I was supposed to die first,” he said, remembering that many people had warned Mother against marrying him because veterans gassed in World War I usually were dead by their early forties. When my father was in his forties he was living a rugged life in China. He died the winter before he turned ninety years old, four years after my mother.
Me at two in Huai'an.
Early Days in China
When I was set to go to Japan in 1957, a friend of my mother’s, who was appalled that I was heading across the world for four years, asked me: “How could you do this to your mother?” “Well,” I answered, “she did it to her mother.” But when my parents went to China it was different. They were going for seven years without a home leave. It took six to eight weeks just to get a letter home, no one would think of trying to telephone from across the Pacific, and telegraphs were very expensive. Unlike Japan in 1957, China was a dangerous country. Bandits roamed the countryside, and there was widespread political unrest, which would soon break into actual civil war. I’m not sure how aware the young, idealistic missionaries were of all the physical and psychic dangers they would be facing. My father, as by now you’ve realized, was fearless, my mother less so, but they were both very much in love with each other and dedicated to telling the good news of God’s love to those who had never heard it.
Their honeymoon before heading to China was a long one. They spent the first part in the Blue Ridge Mountains. There followed a lengthy visit to the Lexington farm that might or might not have been delightful. It was never reported upon, so one wonders, but I do know that on August 9, 1923, they left by train for San Francisco.
They had not completed all the shots needed for Asian travel, so the doctor gave them needles and a little vial of serum, and, as Daddy said, “We had a time sticking each other as the train jogged along.” There was a memorable stop in Colorado Springs, with a trip up Pikes Peak and a visit to a rodeo, before arriving for a final week in San Francisco gathering the supplies they would need for the next seven years. My father loved peanuts and bought quantities of them to take along, only to find to his chagrin that peanuts were one of China’s leading exports. They also went to Chinatown, feeling that since they were headed for China, they should try Chinese food. The only thing on the menu that they recognized was chicken, but when it came the bones were black, so they were afraid to eat it. Again, it was only after living in China that they learned that a certain variety of chicken, one that was considered a great delicacy, had black bones.
They sailed aboard the Taiyo Maru, originally a German liner the Japanese had acquired after the war. There was a glorious stop in Hawaii, but six days out of Yokohama, news of the terrible 1923 earthquake reached the ship by cable. Every day the news was worse than the day before. The Japanese crew and the many Japanese passengers had no idea how family members and friends had fared. My mother recalled trying to express concern to one of them, only to have the person cover his mouth and seem to giggle behind it. She had no idea how to react to such a response.
When the ship finally sailed into the harbor the pas
sengers were appalled by what they saw. In my father’s words: “Gun emplacements along the way were turned upside down, dead bodies were floating in the water, lots of oil had spilled on the water from broken pipe lines, and the ship could not dock because the dock was no more.”
The Japanese passengers were let off the ship, replaced by four hundred and fifty refugees who were taken to an open port and set ashore. Looking up, they had a view of Mount Fuji, its peak lifted above the clouds—an incomparably beautiful sight amidst a scene of terrible devastation.
When at last they reached Shanghai, the city was in turmoil. Workers in the Japanese and English cotton mills were on strike. To blame were two young radicals, a country bumpkin named Mao Tse-tung and a disillusioned intellectual by the name of Zhou En Lai. These two had had the nerve to ask the owners of the mills to install safety devices so that the children and old people who worked long hours would no longer in their weariness lose fingers and even hands in the machinery. Both the Chinese and foreign owners refused to modify the machinery, and told the troublemakers to mind their own business—hence the protests.