Nanny’s Hands

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Up next, a story from Dennis Peterson, an author from South Carolina. Today, Dennis shares with us the story of his maternal grandmother, or Nannie, as he and his family called her. Here’s Dennis with the story.

Hand can reveal a lot about a person. For example, a city slicker, a paper pusher, or someone who sits in front of a computer all day will generally have soft, smooth hands. Someone who does regular, hard manual labor outdoors in all kinds of weather, however, generally has hard, rough, calloused hands. The former will have clean, clear, neatly trimmed nails. The latter has thick, broken nails with some degree of dirt showing under them. Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes character certainly would notice such things. I too noticed them when I was growing up. I noticed especially my maternal grandmother’s hands, Nannie, we grandkids called her. Perhaps the most prominent feature of Nannie’s hands was that they showed unmistakable evidence of arthritis. The knuckles were swollen and enlarged, hard and painful-looking things. I especially recall the knuckle on her index finger where the finger joined the palm of her hand, and the arthritis had drawn her index fingers inward toward the middle fingers in a painful curve. Her hands must often have hurt her because she continually rubbed them, and she sometimes massaged into them various lotions, anointments, such as Kazwalker’s Supraderm Salve. I often wondered as I observed Nannie’s arthritic hands if there was a connection between arthritis and hard work, because Nannie’s hands were always hardworking hands. If they were not busy doing some kind of work, she was patting the arm of her chair with them, or tapping the side of her leg, or rubbing them. Her hands were seldom still.

Nannie’s hands had washed piles and piles of clothes long before she got an automatic ring or washer. I recall mothers recounting how Mondays were wash days. They built a fire back in the yard, heated water, and then carried it to the back porch, where they poured it into a large tub. In went the dirty clothes and the lye soap, and then Nannie scrubbed the clothes on an old washboard, the hot water and the lye burning her hands bright red. Then those strong hands rinsed the clothes and wrung the water from them before hanging them on the clothesline to dry in the bright sun and the clear country air. Nannie’s hands were also busy in the kitchen, preparing and then frying or baking various foods: peeling and mashing potatoes, shelling peas, breaking and stringing beans, peeling and slicing out pulls or peaches, or kneading and rolling out bread dough. She was always fixing or had just fixed something, so there was always something to eat at Nannie’s house. One could always count on her having some kind of dessert in the kitchen: coconut cake, stack cake, chocolate cake, apple pie. Her crusts were always what weak kids described as stout, meaning that one could hold a piece of pie in hand and eat it without its breaking apart. And my favorite fried apple pies. One of them was a meal in itself, almost as good as a Moon Pie. Like a Moon Pie, one of Nannie’s fried apple pies and an RC Cola would surely ruin a guy’s supper.

Nannie’s hands were also expressive. She used them a lot when she talked, gesturing, pointing, waving—all motions designed subconsciously, of course, to further communicate whatever she was saying. And they often covered her mouth, not only when she was suddenly surprised by something or alarmed by what she had just heard, but also when something had tickled her, and she was trying to suppress a laugh. But Nannie’s hands, arthritic, disfigured, tired, and warned, though they were, were most of all kind and gentle hands. They could as easily wipe away a tear, calm a fear, comfort homesickness, and clean a scrape as they could carry in a heavy bucket of cold to feed her hungry, warm-morning stove. They could as easily and gently caress and put the hand of a young grandson just going off to college, giving tactile proof of promised prayers, as they would grab and break off a switch with which to administer grandmotherly discipline. To some people, Nannie Summers’s hands might have seemed unsightly, perhaps even ugly. But to me those hands were among the most beautiful and most lovely hands on earth.

And what a beautiful piece. Special thanks to Monty Montgomery for the production, and to Dennis Peterson, an author from South Carolina, for sharing the story. Her finger joined the palm of her hand—the contortions of arthritis. When you look at it, you know it’s painful. He continually rubbed them, he said. And they were hardworking hands. He wondered if arthritis came from hard work. Some, he said, Nannie’s hands were ugly, but to me they were beautiful. And as I hear Dennis tell this story about his Nannie’s hands, I can’t help but think of Bill Withers, who tells, by the way, a remarkable story about his own grandma’s hands, in my favorite Bill Withers songs, and one of my favorite songs, “Grandma’s Hands.” Go to YouTube and look for a Bill Withers concert version because he tells the story of his Grandma’s Hands, Dennis Peterson’s story about his Nannie’s hands. Here on Our American Stories.

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And we continue with Our American Stories, and we’re about to tell you one of the quintessential American stories about one of the most esteemed of our American vets. Yet, chances are any of you have never heard this man’s name before. And now let’s go to the story of Audie Murphy. He had over 250 kills in World War II. He is America’s most decorated soldier, having received every award, citation, and decoration the Army could give, including the Medal of Honor, all before he turned 20, though he looked 14. He became a movie star and wrote 17 songs which were recorded by guys like Dean Martin, Eddie Fisher, Porter Wagoner, Jimmy Dean, and Charlie Pride. He wrote a best-selling autobiography and starred in its film adaptation, which became Universal Studios’ highest-grossing film for 20 years until Jaws broke its record in 1975. His grave is the second most visited at Arlington National Cemetery. JFK’s is the first. Yet, this five-foot-five, 110-pound, baby-faced hero is practically unknown in America today, which is astonishing considering just 50-plus years ago he received more fan mail than any other celebrity in Hollywood. To find out more about this American hero, let’s take a listen to the man who wrote the book.

Dr. David A. Smith is an American history professor at Baylor University in Waco, Texas. He wrote “The Price of Valor: The Life of Audie Murphy, America’s Most Decorated Hero of World War II.” I asked him, “Who is Audie Murphy?” “It’s interesting because nobody else in American history combines these two sort of archetypal roles as he does. I mean, he’s the most decorated soldier from the biggest war we’ve ever fought. And at the same time, or right after, he was a movie star at a time in Hollywood when movie star had a cultural cachet that they would never have again. And one of the things that I find so fascinating about him is that he brings these roles together. He brings together the role of genuine hero and celebrity, and they don’t match. They don’t match at all. I mean, a hero is a very particular thing. A hero is an important cultural element within any culture. A hero is how we learn what virtue is. I mean, a hero is someone who, for a small amount of time, embodies a particular virtue. I mean, a virtue is an idea and we have trouble relating to it until we see it in the flesh. And that’s what a hero is, and that’s what he was. First: selflessness, determination, duty, patriotism—that whole bit. And then, gosh, then he becomes a movie star, and he hated being a movie star. He didn’t like movie stars. His first wife, to whom he was married for just a year, wanted to be a movie star badly, and that’s what she was in Hollywood for. And that’s what drove them apart, because he hated Hollywood, he hated the phoniness of celebrity, and he disparaged his own talents. He refused to hang around other actors. Mostly when he was on the set, he would hang around with the horse wranglers and the stuntmen and the props guys. And it’s fascinating to me that here, in this one person, you have extreme heroism and extreme celebrity. It’s just trying to mix. And his story is a story of how we’ve confused them today. In mythology and legend, a hero is a man of divine ancestry who was endowed with great courage and strength, celebrated for his brave exploits, and favored by the gods. In reality, Audie was all these things, but as to the part of ancestry, it was far from divine.”

Here’s Joanne Matturn, author of “Audie Murphy: Fact or Fiction.” “Audie Murphy was born on June 20th, 1925, and he was born in a little town called Kingston, Texas. His parents were sharecroppers, and that means that they picked cotton in fields, but they didn’t own the fields. The fields were owned by someone else, and in return for working, all they got was a little shack to live in and a tiny little bit of the money that they earned. Everything else went to the owner of the field. The house they lived in was no more than a little shack. It had no running water, no bathrooms, no electricity. They had 12 children altogether, and as soon as the kids were old enough, maybe four or five years old, they went to work in the cotton fields with their parents. Audie later said that he just worked and that it was a full-time job, just existing. In fact, when Audie was born, his mother, Josie, couldn’t take time off to take care of the baby, so she put him in a baby swing and took him out in the cotton fields with her. Audie’s father, his name was Emmett, and Emmett, he was pretty lazy, more interested in gambling and having a good time. And the only time they got any meat to eat was if Audie and his brothers went out and hunted them. A neighbor once lent Audie his gun, and it had eight bullets in it, and Audie went hunting. It came back with four rabbits and four bullets still left in the gun. That’s how good a shot he was.”

Here’s Audie’s sister, Nadine Murphy. “He got a little .22. I don’t know her, but he was really good at it. He can kill squirrels on a run. Well, that’s how—that’s how we’ve lived, Dad. That’s how we ate. He would go out and kill squirrels, rabbits, and I guess we could say we’re alive day because of him. He was my hero, even lying four, he ever did anything great; he was great to me.”

Then here again is Dr. Smith. “One of the things that defines him throughout his entire life is his sense of duty to the people who are depending on him. He felt his duty towards his younger siblings in a profound way. Times were beginning to unfold that would shape his destiny forever. The country was in the throw, was it the Great Depression? Now, at one point things got so bad for the Murphys that they moved into a railroad boxcar. When he was 13 years old, father left the family, and he never came back. So now Audie had to step up and be the man of the house, and in order to do that, he had to quit school, so he never got further than the fifth grade. But the person that was hardest hit in the family was his mother, Josie, and in 1941 she died of pneumonia. And he said her early death was not unusual in the story of a sharecropper family, particularly when the sharecropper himself runs off, leaving his wife to take care of their children. Anyway, so Audie was only 16. He had younger sisters and a brother to take care of, and he couldn’t take care of them because he had to work, so they were sent to an orphanage. And then everything changed. Everything changed.”

Here’s Murphy historian Michael West. “Well, the time that the Japanese bombed, or December 7th, I believe Audie Murphy and Monroe Hackney were actually on a double date at a movie theater, and after they returned from the movie theater, they learned, of course, of the bombing. Well, immediately, all the young men, or a number of the young men, chose to join. Well, that included Audie Murphy as well. Well, at that time, Audie was only about 17 and a half years old, plus he was plagued with that baby face, and immediately the recruiters recognized that he was too young. He tries the Marines; they virtually laugh him out. He has visions of joining the paratroopers. Well, that never works out, so finally, he is just simply run off, in essence, and he doesn’t join. So Audie’s older sister Krinn got him a false birth certificate that showed he was a year older than he was. So after he turned 18, as it said on his birth certificate, he was actually only 17. He went back and joined the arm, and he was accepted into the infantry. And what a story so far. I’d been a fan of the movie, but just didn’t know. I just didn’t know the circumstances! My goodness, losing a father and a mother and then having kids orphaned, living out of a boxcar. And when we come back, more on the life of Audie Murphy. This is Our American Stories.

And we returned to Our American Stories. We’re telling the story of Audie Murphy. And if you’ve never seen the movie To Helen Back, it comes on TV all the time this time, don’t skip it. It’s terrific, and it should be a remake. His life story should be a remake too. So everybody today knows who Audie Murphy is. Let’s return to Greg Engler and Audie’s story.

“The Army infantry was the most accepting of recruits who appeared to possess the least amount of skills needed for combat. Audie Murphy attended two boot camps before seeing any action, and in both camps, the Army tried to protect the little recruit they nicknamed ‘Baby.’ They tried to put him in their post office and then their kitchen, but Audie would have none of it. Nobody pushed him around. I mean, he was restively tough from the very beginning, and he would literally push himself until he collapsed. The guys he met there at boot camp remembered that he was clearly in his element, even though he was small stature, even though he was baby-faced, and his superiors wanted to find someplace for him that he might be a better fit, because honestly, he wasn’t a good fit in the infantry until you got to know him. And he said, ‘Absolutely not. I want to be in the infantry. I want to march with this pack that’s as big as I am, and I’m gonna do it.’ And his superiors reluctantly let him stay, but they made a good decision. Audie was assigned to Company B, the 15th Infantry Regiment, 3rd Division. No one could know that this poor tenant farmer’s son would one day help to cause the demise of Hitler’s promised thousand-year Reich by performing such wondrous deeds in battle that the almost mythological. Here’s one of them.

The first time he goes into combat with a 3rd Division is in the invasion of Sicily, and Laddie Tipton is a soldier in his company, and they are extremely close. Laddie has an estranged wife and a daughter, and Audie Murphy—I don’t know if I want to say—envies him for this, but Audie Murphy realizes how special this is to have a wife and a daughter, because he, you know, he doesn’t have much in a way a family. And he talks to Laddie about his daughter all the time and says, ‘You know, you’re going to get back to see her. You’re gonna get back to her. You’re gonna be a great father.’ And then, you know, they come ashore in France together in August of ’44, and they’re fighting their way up this hill, he and Laddie. They’re working their way up this hill in the face of a whole repeated series of German machine gun in placements, and they get one German foxhole of surrender to them, and they wave a white flag, and Laddie says, ‘Okay, they’re surrendering. We can go get him.’ And Audie says, ‘No, no, no, no, stay down. There are other people up there.’ And a German sniper from someplace else up on the hill hits Laddie in the head with a bullet, and he collapses right down into Audie’s lap, and he’s sort of—I don’t want to say—goes nuts. But he grabs a gun and just charges up this hill, in and out of draws and in and out of foxhole, and then he gets a German gun and goes after other foxholes, and he clears out that entire still side, and everybody says, ‘Oh, that was the most courageous thing I had ever seen,’ and he says, ‘That would encourage. That was just me being mad.’ And, you know, he goes back to Laddie to where his body is, and he cries over him. It’s just a heartbreaking scene, but it wins him his Distinguished Service Cross. The Distinguished Service Cross is the second highest military award after the Medal of Honor. That was one of the only two moments in Audie’s life he openly admitted to crying, the other being the death of his mother. Here’s Dr. Smith with the heroic act that would earn