In Love with Defeat. H. Brandt Ayers
face in the portrait and photographs concealed a playful nature. In letters he was sure chickens were calling Mother’s name “Edel, Edel Edel.” In another, he teased his wife, “Just got up and feel that I love you still. I don’t see how I can with all your faults—but it seems I can’t help it.” St. Olaf’s original mission was to acclimate Norwegian immigrants to the new American society without discarding all of their original culture. The young athletic professor, whose fund-raising had helped save the college, undertook even menial duties. One was fumigating the boy’s dorm with formaldehyde after an epidemic of scarlet fever. The fumes poisoned him and, cheerful and playful to the end, he died at forty-six. Mother, who worshipped him, was six years old.
Years later in New York at graduate school, she accepted a fateful invitation to venture South from a classmate in the Columbia University School of Education. Young Edel Ytterboe’s Southern friend was another pretty athlete, Palmer Daugette, whose father, Dr. Clarence W. Daugette, was president of the State Normal School in Jacksonville, ten miles north of Anniston. The two girls taught physical education that summer of 1921, when Edel met the Colonel . . . by accident of a coin flip.
Colonel Harry Mel Ayers, my father, was already a substantial man in Calhoun County and the state of Alabama, whose military title was awarded for service on the staff of his best friend, Governor Thomas E. Kilby, former president and CEO of Anniston’s Kilby Steel. Dad owned a daily newspaper, the Anniston Star, and had managed Kilby’s winning gubernatorial campaign. For his time and place, he was also a worldly man. He had lived and traveled in Asia with his father, Dr. Thomas Wilburn Ayers, one of the first Southern Baptist medical missionaries to China (1901–26). By Dad’s own estimate, he was far short of handsome: a slight man of medium height with sloping shoulders, receding hairline, and a substantial nose rudely sculpted on the football field of then Jacksonville Normal School, but bright and intellectually inquiring. His manly charm made him a popular and natural leader who would dazzle young Edel Ytterboe in their first lengthy and close encounter, which was by chance. Dad had lost a coin flip and had to drive the ten-mile, washboard dirt road to Jacksonville to pick up Edel and Palmer for a Rotary Club picnic. A dance number performed by Edel and the Daugette girls, Kathleen and Palmer, entertained the Rotarians and guests. The thirty-six-year-old publisher followed the moves of the blonde Nordic beauty and he fell, hard.
Their whirlwind romance was climaxed by an anti-climatic automobile journey to Minnesota by Dad and several of his friends, all expecting to bring home his bride. When the Alabamians entered a Minneapolis hotel in their seersucker suits and straw hats, it was as if there had been an aboriginal invasion of Scandinavia. The room clerk, curiosity mingling with alarm, asked, “What are you . . . Baptists?” No, the ecumenical delegation answered, worse . . . “We’re Democrats.” When the squad of exotic strangers reached thoroughly Lutheran and Republican Northfield, they and Dad were met with deep skepticism. The president of St. Olaf, Lars Boe, grilled Dad for hours and sent forth a blizzard of telegrams inquiring about the character of this alien being from the deepest, snake-infested jungles of Alabama. A crestfallen Colonel returned home sans bride. Shortly after, when President Boe’s telegrams yielded nothing but affirmative reviews of Dad’s character and history, the odd couple—or so it seemed to Minnesota Lutheran eyes—was wed on September 28, 1921 at Northfield’s St. John’s Lutheran Church.
The Star’s legendary society editor, Miss Iva Cook, whose story reached for, and almost went, over the top, reported the affair. She described the wedding as “a very notable event, which has been the occasion of much interest throughout Alabama, where the groom is well-known and prominent.” The bride was “very charming and accomplished, possessing many social graces, which will make her a lovely addition to Anniston society.” If Miss Iva said it, then it must be so, for she was the social tyrant of northeast Alabama. She chose and dictated the size and display of the bridal pictures each Sunday. If your daughter was not one of the three large pictures at the top of the page, then your family dined below the salt or at the second table. If your daughter’s picture was in the center, elevated slightly above the other two, then you were the pinnacle of Anniston society. Typical of Miss Iva’s imperious touch was her account of a garden party hosted by Mrs. Kilby, wife of the former governor. In almost sensual detail, Miss Iva described the day, the garden, the texture and make of the tablecloth, the silver, the food, and the medley of colorful frocks, and then listed some of the guests by name, concluding . . . “and several others.” Mother made the list, but imagine the distress of local matrons awakening to discover that Miss Iva had assigned them to an anonymous social purgatory of “several others.”
Those grown-up social nuances meant nothing to us local boys. We were no more aware of such distinctions than we were of the huge and omnipresent structure of segregation which, to us, was normality, the way things were, always had been, and always would be. The adult obsession with race was invisible to my buddies and me. I heard few telltale signs at the dinner table of the torturous grip the issue had on Dad or about his courageous and conflicted struggle to balance his belief in educational, economic, and political equality for blacks—within a segregated system.
We knew about the custom that reserved the back of city buses for Negroes, but we violated that taboo frequently, happily commandeering the prized long seat in the very back of the usually empty bus on Saturday afternoons. Saturday’s ritual was as permanent and predictable as the order of service at any of the town’s six jillion churches. The bus stopped at the main downtown intersection of 10th and Noble streets, where the elegant old Opera House had become the Noble Theater, venue for Roy Rogers cowboy movies and Batman serials. Riveted by the good-guy, shoot-em-up action of Roy and his horse Trigger, and by Batman’s weekly escapes from near death, we did not notice that the once-elegant Opera House, where Shakespeare had been performed, was now a derelict old lady, her velvet dirty, her ceiling murals caked with dust, her gilt cracked—genteel poverty at its most abject, vulnerable to the cocky, tasteless New South real estate economy soon to destroy her. She would be dismantled to make room for a furniture store—later closed. But in boyhood days, the Noble was the first of four downtown theaters with the Cameo, the Calhoun and the Ritz, one-to-a-block that lined the west side of Noble Street.
All are now erased, but then the Noble was the branch-head of the stream of ceremonial Saturdays in the happy, opaque, all-white world where we grew up. Every Saturday, as we exited the cooler darkness of the un-air-conditioned Noble Theater into the bright humidity of Noble Street, we speculated excitedly about Batman’s fate. Then we might get a cherry Coke at Wikles or Scarborough drug stores, but a necessary part of the ritual was to walk the two blocks up tenth Street to view the treasures of Carnegie Library. The library then housed the Regar Collection, beautifully mounted native birds in their natural habitat. A favorite was the steely-eyed eagle, its noble head capped in white, perched high on a limestone outcropping. In its claw was a lamb, a realistic drop of blood on the little animal’s white fur. Next, we mounted the stairs to the balcony to stare at the case with the Ptolemaic Period mummy, its colored wrapping faded by the centuries. But underneath, we knew, was the deadness—a dark, scary concept, beyond our imagination or experience. We regarded the dead Egyptian woman with silent respect.
There was one delicious year during construction of Memorial Hospital that the walk home took us by irresistible cliffs and valleys of red dirt. On dry days, conditions were just right for painless dirt-ball combat. Painless because the red clods crumbled when they struck. The year of the great mud-ball civil war, however, was real combat, with real casualties. The eastside was divided into two rival armies of boys, one defending in the woods above Governor Kilby’s house. When the invaders approached our roofless log fort, commanded by the governor’s grandson, George Kilby, I at first threw mud balls fearlessly—until one struck me in the chest. From that moment on, I was a cautious soldier. The battle was a formless affair, boys running through the woods tossing and ducking mud balls with high anxiety, as if there were real danger. Our side caught and briefly imprisoned a few invaders in the pool house but there were no real victors or losers; just boys excited by imagining we were real soldiers.
Casualties of similar skirmishes today might still face the unpleasantness of the Saturday bath, but their battle-soiled clothes would be dropped in the washing machine. Back then, dirty clothes were collected and taken to Jensie’s house in the Southside colored neighborhood. In her backyard was a giant black