Becoming a Counselor. Samuel T. Gladding
the aisle and then performed the wedding at Brown Memorial Baptist Church in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.
My mother and her father were close. He died in March 1945 and my grandmother, Inez Barnes Templeman (“Pal”), came to live with my parents soon thereafter. Thus, in October 1945, my mother was dealing with the birth of an unplanned child, grief surrounding the recent death of her father, and the arrival of her mother into the couple’s modest three bedroom, one bathroom house at 957 Church Street in Decatur, Georgia, a city outside Atlanta. After that came the discovery of the dislocated hips and the stress that her two youngest children needed operations and hospitalization if they were ever going to walk.
My father was a bit of a contrast but a complement to my mother. He was the third of four children—two older brothers and a younger sister—born to Henry Arcemus and Maggie Lena Northam Gladding. He stood about 5 feet 10 inches but was thin, weighing around 135 pounds. Like my mother, he wore glasses and had since the age of 4 because of what was described as a “lazy eye.” He had a high school and a business school education. He would likely have gone to college, probably Virginia Tech, had it not been for the Great Depression. His family had made a living as farmers on the Eastern Shore of Virginia in Accomack County since the mid-1600s, but 18 months into the Great Depression the farm was foreclosed on and the family became sharecroppers for a few years. Free from the constant labor of being a farmer, my father nurtured his love of the soil by having a large garden—about a third of an acre—behind our house in Decatur. There he grew many of the vegetables our family ate.
As mentioned previously, the ancestors of my father’s immediate family had settled on the Eastern Shore in the mid-1600s. In 1945, he found himself an office worker at the Virginia-Carolina (V-C) Chemical Corporation, a company that made fertilizer, in Atlanta. V-C, for whom he worked 27 years, had transferred him from Richmond to Atlanta in 1942. The transfer may well have saved his marriage, because my father’s mother and his younger sister, Mildred—both of whom my mother did not like—had moved into my parents’ apartment in Richmond in the 1930s, and the atmosphere in their flat was “uncomfortable.” Regrettably, in the mid-1940s, my father’s oldest brother, Hilton, who owned a general merchandise store on the Eastern Shore, was fighting lung cancer; he would die in 1946.
Thus, in addition to dealing with an unexpected birth, hospital bills, the arrival at the house of his wife’s mother, three children under the age of 5, and stress from his wife’s loss of her father, my father was dealing with the imminent death of his oldest brother. Overall, October 1945 was a bittersweet time for the Gladdings, with gains, losses, and uncertainty.
Section 1
Becoming During Childhood (Birth to Age 11)
When First Called
Templeman/Gladding travels in mea restless presence, a historyof time and people who walked the worldlong before my birth.Attuned to the sound of their storiesI wince at their failuresand bask in their glories.They are a part of my life.
© 1970, Samuel T. Gladding
No one begins life as a counselor. We develop into professionals over time. With or against the currents of our environment we steer, drift, or proceed toward becoming humans who embrace counseling instead of economics, history, or English. Part of the reason has to do with our early personal history and with circumstances in life as a child.
I am no less a product of time, environment, and interpersonal interactions than anyone else. The stories that follow will give you a glimpse into my childhood, but they are meant not so much to focus on me as to open your mind to thoughts of your early experiences. Some of the stories are funny, whereas a few show the frailty of human nature, interpersonal interactions, and just plain luck. In each of the vignettes there is knowledge you may have learned in a different way. Ask yourself as you read what forces in your developing years influenced you to be who you are now.
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Chapter 1
The Trike, the Porch, the Dare, the Air: Gravity Wins Again!
One of the situations that ended disastrously for me at about the age of 4 was my attempt to tricycle down the front steps of our house. This incident was not entirely my fault. An older boy, Bill G., who lived down the street, persuaded me it would be fun. He even put my trike on the landing at the top of the stairs. Our house was brick and had eight concrete steps leading up to the front door. At the bottom of the steps, on either side, were two concrete barrels about 2 feet high. I have no idea why they were there. In any case, on that summer morning with my trike on the porch landing, I climbed the steps, got on, and began to pedal. I may have pedaled twice, but it was probably only once, for after the front wheel went off the landing, gravity took over. I do not remember much about the ride other than being surprised as I went over the handlebars and landed on the concrete barrel to the left of the steps.
Screams broke the silence. My mother came—I am sure with a horrified look on her face—as blood flowed from my injuries. It was then off to the doctor’s office where I was patched up and returned home. I spent the rest of the day inside. Amazingly, my tricycle was not damaged, but I did not ride it for a week and then only on the sidewalk.
Chapter 2 Choices: Holding On or Letting Go
Whenever someone asks me if I have a good illustration of a situation involving choices, I smile and quickly respond. I am not sure why I smile (it probably has to do with reflexes). I do know why I respond. I have a rather graphic illustration. It happened during the exploratory preschool time of my life. My older brother, Russell, and his friend, Bill G. (from the previous chapter), were climbing up to the rafters of Bill’s garage. I wanted to be with them, but I could not climb the ladder on the inside of the structure.
Seeing my plight, my brother and Bill tried to be helpful. They threw down a rope from above and told me to tie it around my waist. I did so awkwardly but enthusiastically and with great anticipation. Then they started pulling me to the rafters. All went well for about 10 to 15 feet, whereupon the rope slipped. Such slippage would have been fine in most cases, but the place where the rope slipped with considerable force was around my neck. Unbeknownst to my brother and his friend, they were hanging me.
The good news is that within a few seconds my brother looked down and saw the noose and my beet-red face. He had to make a split-second decision as to what to do as he realized what was happening. With my head almost to the top of the platform where it and my body would have found a solid surface, he made a fateful decision. “Let him go,” he yelled, “or we will kill him!”
Being about 20 feet off the ground by then I wanted to reply, “But if you choose to drop me, you may also end my life.” Unfortunately, because my windpipe had been closed off, I could not say anything. Windless and limp, I followed the force of gravity to the ground, which was a concrete driveway. The trip down was quick (although it seemed like an eternity and could have made that word a part of my history). Before anyone could say “Farewell,” I made a thud, like a sack of potatoes being dropped from a roof, and the back of my head hit the cement!
At that point, my brother hurried down the ladder, looked me over, untied the noose, and quickly ran home swearing to my mother that he had nothing to do with what she was about to behold. My head was like a coconut cracked open with a stone. The only difference was that blood began pouring out, rather than coconut juice, and whereas coconuts are silent, I was anything but. Neighbors came running, dogs began barking, babies stopped crying, and my grandmother, from four houses away, made the innocent and objective remark to my mother that it sounded like someone was dying (which was more true than she knew). Bill’s mother carried me home to my visibly shaken mother, who got another neighbor to drive her to the doctor with me in her