Louise Lowry Smith, nee Wescott with Dad about 1940, Mom was 19. My father, Walter William Smith, Sr. is about 29 in this photo.

Mom meets the in-laws; Grandmother Lillie Pearl Smith, nee Hailey; Uncle Leroy Smith, his wife Frances; she is in front of him, and far left is Aunt Opal Ganaden, nee Smith, and cousins in the front row.

Mom, a working Wife

My mother was of Missouri stock, but was born in New Haven, Connecticut. In her early years she was also raised in Alabama, before returning to Missouri and going to school were she graduated in 1939, from Huntsville High School, with honors.

My Grandmother holding Mom in 1921. Grandmother; Mary Louise Wescott, nee Lowry.

Mom holding her doll, somewhere in Alabama.

Mom with Grandma

My mother, I haven't written much about her on Wattpad, so here it goes. My mother worked, and I was raised by my dad, the stay at home husband. Dad was, what we call today, a sufferer of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. After he returned home from WII he had a hard time holding a job. He did work for ten years, and Mom stayed home to raise my two older brothers, but when it came to me, she took over and became the bread winner of the family, and did so as a politician. First she worked for a County Clerk as an assistant, and in 1960 she made the move to run for City Collector, like the collectors mention in the New Testament she took your money, kept track of it, and turned it over to the small town of Huntsville's treasury. She ran for office every two years and never lost an election in her twenty-five years of service, because she was popular, and I got to meet a lot of politicians growing up. Every two years we'd all sit and listen to the radio for the election results and wonder if she'd have a job the next day.

Me, hornswoggled into promoting Warren E. Hearnes for Governor of Missouri, 1963, by his political election team, during the Old Settlers County Fair. I would ride the downtown singing his election song, and I liked to never got those stickers off my brandnew bike.

Mom at work at the City Hall; the woman with her was the City Clerk.

Mom did this job up until 1986 when she retired at age 65; she would live until she was 69 when she passed away from accidental poisoning, because she breathed in the fumes of Carbon Tetrachloride, a chemical used in the dry cleaning industry. She bought old strips of wool clothing at yard sales, and then cut them up to weave into rugs to give out as gifts to the family for Christmas. The wool she used was often very dirty, so she cleaned the strips with carbon tetrachoride. She had been making rugs since I could first remember, and she cleaned the wool using the same chemical, but these last rugs she made were the tipping point for her liver, and as a result she died of liver poisoning. For her it was probably very fast. She was in the hospital, and on the first day she went into a coma, while I was holding her, she never regained consciousness--but for us it was an agonizing few weeks, and she died on December 16th 1990, nines days before Christmas.

We didn't find out Mom had lived with a heart condition until she was admitted to the hospital that day after Thanksgiving, and she'd taken the normal X-rays and scans for hospital admissions. The doctors discovered she had a massive heart attack at a young age that should have killed her. On her death bed I asked her about what the doctor had found during the X-ray of her heart. I asked her if she'd remembered having a heart attack when she was younger, and she said, "Oh, that is what that was." She said she was out in the garden and suddenly she said it felt like an elephant was sitting on her chest, but back then, 1945/46, they didn't think women had heart attacks, so she didn't think any more about it ― Curt and I should never have been born. The doctor found one-quarter of her heart was withered, everything below the tricuspid valve, how she lived no one knows, but at the hospital, near the end, her heart stopped twice, and came back after resuscitation; it was the strongest of all he organ-failures sydrome. She gave birth to Curt and me with only three-fourths of a working heart. I have no idea how to put that into the equation of who my mother was, anxiety wise or personality wise, but it did make her "one tough cookie." The doctors brought the family into a conference room to discuss her fate. At one point, they thought she might live, as her liver struggled to regenerate, but after the second code we were put on the line as a family to make the call; it was a hard request, but we all agreed. It was her shriveled heart that was the only thing keeping her alive; so we let her die, peacefully.

The Rug of Many Colors; this is a photo of my nephew, Shannon, nearby, and my niece Tammy, on my mother's rug she wove in 1957. The year the photo was taken was about 1972.

My mother's personality was very strong, a woman who could have been many things if not stuck in a marriage with a man who wanted to pull her back at every turn. She could have been what she wanted to be, a more powerful politician. She and Dad argued tooth-and-nail nearly every day, and she did something I feel is hard for me to forgive; she pitted us boys against their father; sort of like a shield, we ran defense. I recognized what was happening when I was away at college. I returned home and Mom started an argument and when she looked at me for protection, I just said, "That's your guys problem, work it out." She was shocked I didn't run to her defense, and the look on her face was total disbelief. She was wanting freedom to be the person she could have been, and most of the arguments boiled down to that. My father was a jealous man, but most of it was not really jealousy, but it was a deep fear she would leave him, which she did when she died. Eventually, Curt took him to St. Louis to live near him, and he finally got the medical help to treat his PTSD, and he lived alone for many years; after all, he was raised a city boy. We boys never thought for a moment that Dad would outlive Mom, after all; he was ten years her senior, but who can predict events in life?

Mom had a sixth sense about her, she knew when my brother Walt had an accident on the way to college, she knew before the Marshal came to tell us about it. She was a worrywart. Always fretting about one son or the other, and I said to her, "Mom, what can you do about it, worrying is not going to help."

She replied, "I just can't help it," and she worried until everybody got home safely" I wonder how much she worried about me the day of my accident that put me in a coma with a cracked skull injury. It was a thirty-minute drive to the first hospital, and when she arrived there she learned that I had been transferred to a larger hospital that could handle my level of trauma. When it came to her children she was an anxiety sufferer, but when it came to work she was a cool cookie, and robust.

Walt's wrecked car that happened the first day of school for my 4th grade, 1962, his injuries were minor, and Mom treated them at home.

A newspaper clipping of my accident, and the wrecked van. In 1971, they built vans like a sturdy tank, before plastic body parts. I was first listed in critical condition with a six-inch hairline fracture running from my left jawbone to the middle crown, and I had a two-inch fracture to the base of my brain. I was in a coma for a total of twelve days. When I came to I was paralyzed on my right side, blind, and could not speak. I had angels looking over me.