Mary Alice Wellons Dixon

Mary Alice Wellons Dixon was my mom. She was born on Memorial Day, back when it was always on May 30th, and not a permanent Monday holiday. I found out later, when I started teaching in Florida, that it was a union holiday... as in Union vs. the Confederacy... and it was definitely not celebrated in southern states. Only federal government offices and the banks closed. That softened some over the years as it became in effect a 2nd Veterans Day.

She was born on May 30, 1929 at the beginning of the Great Depression. And she was 12 when Pearl Harbor was attacked and World War II began for America. Her brother, Bob, was on a destroyer in the Pacific for the last year of the war. She and dad graduated from Anderson High School in 1947 in a class of over 600 students.

They were married on June 4, 1948 at Noble Street Methodist Church in Anderson, Indiana. Dad had dropped out of Purdue, after funds ran out. He was working at Container Corporation, and had not started at Delco-Remy. He was hired later by Delco and began an apprenticeship as a Toolmaker. He later became one of the last of a breed... the non-degreed engineer. Mom worked for a man she thought was the most wonderful boss in the world, Mr. McCrary of McCrary Insurance and Real Estate. She worked until Jay was born. She always said that Mr. McCrary wanted to sell her the business, but she was on “mommy track” and that sort of thing really wasn’t done very often back then. Likewise, she never seriously considered, or had the money at first, to go to college.

Dave Given was the best man. Mary Jo Stanley was the bridesmaid. Barb Given sang at the wedding. Mr. McCrary attended, the only other non-family member in attendance. Mom says that she and dad both worked on the day of the wedding! They borrowed a car from her mom and dad and went to Cincinnati for a quick honeymoon.

They settled in at their new apartment in the 1200 block of West 6th Street. One room. Not one bedroom. Just one room. And a shared bath. They moved up to a better apartment, a walk-up on Madison Avenue that she used to point out to us when we drove through the area. This was better, but the roof leaked onto their bed. The landlord wouldn’t fix it, so mom moved the bed and the water leaked through to the owner’s rooms on the first floor. Roof fixed. They had no car and rode the bus for the first year of marriage. Mom got frostbite one time walking to work. Dad had told her to stay home, but she didn’t have the 15 cents for the bus and had to help with a Christmas party at work at noon.

They moved to Alex Pike into a new white frame house. Not the house at 2833 Alexandria Pike, but right next door. It was smaller. I lived there for my first year, but spent a lot of time there later as the Hudson boys and then the Barber girls lived there and we were playmates with each set of kids. That house was eventually demolished. Mom and dad had the new house built. It was a brick ranch and had 3 bedrooms and still just one bathroom. In fact, I don’t remember ever seeing a house with two bathrooms until I was a teenager. The second bathroom even then was usually a half-bath.

Mom was in many ways a single parent. My dad was always great to us, but not there much as he was very devoted to his career and employer. He felt that working for GM in those years was working for one of the two or three best companies in the world and he was probably right. I’m glad that the bankruptcy of GM happened after he passed. Mom didn’t really complain much about the hours he worked. She knew he was very important to the company and they were good to us. So she was the one who raised us and took us wherever we needed to go. It was a different time and we could roam the neighborhood and beyond before we became teens. It was a pretty safe neighborhood. The last suburbs before the rural area about 5 miles outside of Anderson. Of course, they didn’t know all of the sometimes stupid risks we took. I laughed when my dad’s friend wrote us a letter about his friendship with dad and Jim Drake and described the time they went swimming in a gravel pit. You see, we had a gravel pit across the street when we were kids...

Mom was fiercely loyal to us and was a little bit of a “tiger-mom”. She was very sociable and could dominate most situations. She took us golfing and loved to drive just for the fun, so ice cream trips were great. She even took us camping with our friends, without dad when he had to work. Mom also had the best friends of anyone I have ever known. She and her girls, especially Joy Skiles and Sally Lacey, were a hoot to watch as they played bridge seemingly every week. They even invited the husbands one night each month. And they were serious bridge players.

Alzheimer's is a terrible disease. It affected mom’s personality more than her memory, especially for the first 5 years of so. She turned against friends and family. I suspect she was becoming difficult for Dad to deal with, but he came down with a weird disease and died before we knew she had dementia. She was acting in a bizarre fashion right around the time of his death. Only later did we realize that her odd behavior was connected with her failing cognitive abilities. I was fortunate, probably because of the distance, to be the one she didn’t turn against in later years. That let me help her through the final stages, which included a couple of years of aphasia and failing memory and later the inability to walk or speak at all. It helped that I had previous experience working with dementia patients in a nursing home outside of Bloomington in my college years. She died on July 26, 2018 in a memory care unit here in Gainesville, Florida. Her ashes are buried next to dad’s in Anderson Memorial Park.