Once in a Lifetime: Reflections of a Mississippi First Lady

At Home in the Mansion

1. A Precarious Beginning

William was inaugurated as governor on Tuesday, January 22, 1980. The month leading up to that day was a frightening and harrowing time for him and for our family. I had not yet started keeping a journal, but I recalled that time two years later.

A Crisis of Vision

Friday, December 25, 1981

Christmas this year brings back memories of Christmas two years ago, which was the Christmas before William was inaugurated. Up until that point I had spent every Christmas of my life in Senatobia. The Christmas of 1979 found us in a hospital in Memphis.

William had devoted all summer and fall to winning the election on November 3, and during the several weeks between then and Christmas, he had been busily preparing for the inauguration and his administration. Then on the Friday morning before Christmas, he came into our house on Crane Boulevard, and I knew just from hearing his steps on the stairway that something was wrong.

He said Dr. Blount (Richard Blount, his ophthalmologist) has advised him to go to Memphis immediately for surgery. He had had a little bit of blurring in his left eye, which he had not thought much about. He had been aware of it for three days, and he had even jogged the day before this. When he called Dr. Blount, William said, I can’t come right now. I have a press conference this morning, but I have this problem. From his description Dick Blount knew at once what the problem was—a detached retina—and he called Dr. David Meyer at the Mid-South Hospital in Memphis and made all the preparations for William to get there immediately. I hurriedly packed whatever I could find. Our friend J. R. Scribner furnished his plane to fly us to Memphis, and we went directly to the hospital. Dr. Meyer checked him, and by midnight that Friday night, December 21, 1979, William was in surgery in a little hospital I had never heard of. I had never seen the doctor before, but I will be forever grateful to him and to Dr. Blount.

Dr. Meyer is a great big, tall imposing man who speaks with confidence and tells you frankly what the situation is. He is noted in retina research and surgery. I felt immediately that we were in the right place. He of course realized the seriousness of the problem when he saw it, and he understood the limitations under which we had to work. With the inauguration on January 22, we were hoping to move quickly to do whatever needed to be done. By nightfall, David Crews, William’s press secretary, had come to Memphis to be with us. (I am really not sure exactly why the girls were not there. I think they were tending to things here, closing the house and all of that. We had all prepared to spend Christmas in Senatobia.)

William went into surgery that night thinking that only one eye would be operated on. There were about fifteen to sixteen tears, or small rips, in the retina of that eye, though it was not completely detached. The other eye, the right one, had six to eight tears. Dr. Meyer had said that he would only work on one eye at a time, but when he got into surgery, he decided it was necessary to operate on both eyes. When they allowed me to go into the recovery room, I was surprised to find that both of his eyes were bandaged, and the nurses were saying repeatedly to him, You are not blind. You will be able to see. They explain this because some patients panic for fear they have lost their sight.

Dr. Meyer works under unusual circumstances. He does a tremendous amount of work, but he operates mostly at night, often starting in the late afternoon, 5:00 or 6:00, and working until 3:00 the next morning. He operated on William at midnight. In the early morning, when William was brought into his room, he lay there flat on his back with sandbags on either side of his head. He could not move his head at all for eleven days. He was the most marvelous patient you have ever seen. After coming from the hectic business of a campaign and then the frantic activity of planning for an administration, I thought he could not just lie there and be patient, but he was. He was sedated as he came out from under the anesthetic, but after that, he was not sedated at all.

As he got a little bit better, he began to work on his inaugural address, and he actually wrote it late one night while he was lying in bed. It was a masterpiece, I thought. During that time, David Crews stayed with me except for Christmas Day. The hospital had provided a room across the hall from William where we could answer the phone and deal with the press and visitors and handle whatever else came our way. When David first arrived, I thought that this was absolutely not necessary, that I could certainly manage, but I was truly grateful to him for being there and tending to the calls.

The girls—our children—came, and they simply were unprepared to find their father in that condition. They had never really seen him sick, and they couldn’t deal with it very well. In fact, all of us worried that after all of these long years, having finally attained his goal, he was impaired, with his future in question. But we never expressed that, not even to each other. Slowly he got better, and we were finally able to go home.

We had so anxiously awaited the time to leave. Eleven days is a long time, and through the Christmas season, it seemed even longer. But I have often looked back on that Christmas spent in a bleak, sterile hospital and found it one of the most treasured Christmases of all. It was free of tinsel and commercialism, and we were dealing with the loveliest gift—the gift of sight. This was being given gradually, so it was an unusual and marvelous Christmas.

We finally started home. William probably really got up too early, too soon. After lying there for so long, he became nauseated, but he was determined to go home. As I checked him out of the hospital, I heard reporters asking at the desk when he would be leaving. I turned my back, and we hurried on as fast as possible and managed to leave before the press caught up with us. The Scribner plane was again made available to us, and we came straight home.

When William got home, he was so glad to be here that he walked a little bit out on the porch with the children on either side of him. We later learned that this was going too fast, and he was put back to bed at home for another ten days. At this point, I was the nurse and the cook. I learned to bathe him in bed and to help him shave and to do everything for him as he lay flat on his back. It was difficult because during this same time, I was meeting with the inaugural committee and relaying William’s thoughts about the inauguration. I also had to fill in for him in a speech at the bank symposium. Warren Hood and several men had come to the hospital to see how William was doing, for fear that David and I were painting too rosy a picture. I think they were stunned when they saw him. That same day, Warren asked me to speak to the bank symposium if William were not able to make this speech. I agreed, and the time came with William still flat on his back.

I remember trying to prepare the speech. The day I went to make the speech, President Carter’s secretary of education, Mrs. Shirley Hufstedler, was visiting with him. One or two others helped at the house. Janice Ammann, William’s secretary, came and answered the telephones. Several of my friends answered the door. So I went off to make the speech while he lay there talking with Mrs. Hufstedler.

William conducted several interviews during that time, too. In fact, he hired General Sid Berry to be commissioner of public safety while lying flat on his back. While William was hiring people, I began to work with Ron Ford from the Governor’s Mansion on the particulars of moving and putting together the domestic staff. It was absolutely amazing that so much of it fell into place. All the time we were fighting the deadline of January 22, inauguration day.

Gradually, as William regained his strength, his eyesight became better. He had lost permanently a little peripheral vision in the left eye, but he could easily adjust to that bit of impairment. (After changing his glasses several times during the months that followed, he had good vision.)

When inauguration day came, it rained hard all day long, but William was sworn in as governor, and he delivered his speech. At one time, we were doubtful that he could even be sworn in. His doctor had instructed that for that day he was not, under any circumstances, to allow anyone to slap him on the back or embrace him with too much vigor. During the entire day, Highway Patrol chief Donald Butler and Don Edwards, his assistant chief, and I had our arms all over him, protecting him. That morning at the ecumenical service at Galloway Methodist Church, the minister announced William’s limitation and asked the congregation to please observe it. In spite of it all, people did embrace him and pat him on the back, but it seemed to cause no real harm.

At the tea that afternoon in the Governor’s Mansion, the girls and I stood in the receiving line from 1:00 until about 5:30. People stood in the rain and cold for hours, waiting to get inside. We were told that as many as six thousand people came through that afternoon. William stood in line for a while, and then he went to the bedroom and rested, as he had been advised. Our daughters from time to time left the receiving line, but I never left my post at any point during that afternoon. I stood so long that my legs became numb from my knees down. We made it, though, and we also made it through the inaugural gala that night with only twenty minutes to dress from one occasion to another. Everything was fine indeed.

2. Life in the Governor’s Mansion

The Mississippi Governor’s Mansion is a national historic landmark, and it is considered one of the finest remaining examples of Greek Revival architecture in the nation. Designed by William Nichols, the Mansion was completed in 1842. It has been the official residence of the governor of Mississippi since that time, making it the nation’s second-oldest continuously occupied executive house (after that of Virginia).

The original Nichols building has three handsome parlors and a state dining room downstairs and four bedrooms upstairs. Since its restoration in the 1970s, the Governor’s Mansion has been operated as a historic house museum by the Mississippi Department of Archives and History and is open for public tours on a regular basis. This historic building is also the area where the governor hosts official social events and houses special guests from out of town. Since 1910, the Mississippi governor’s family has had private quarters in a separate building located behind the original Nichols building. In the 1970s, a new family wing was constructed on that site: offices and a conference room occupy the first floor, and the family’s living area is on the second.

What is it like to live there? That is the question I was asked more often than any other when I was first lady. It was hardly surprising. Until we moved into the Governor’s Mansion, that was the overriding question on my mind, too. After all, most of us have never lived in a home that also serves as an office building, conference center, formal reception hall, community center, fine dining establishment, bed-and-breakfast, and museum!

It’s a strange feeling to move into a house that others have exited only hours before—Governor Cliff Finch and his family, in our case. But it’s your home now, even though it’s filled with furniture that doesn’t belong to you and personal odds and ends from the previous governor’s stay. We moved into the Mansion on Sunday night, two days before the inauguration on Tuesday. Because of his eye surgery, William was supposed to be resting as much as possible. As the bedtime hour rapidly approached, we discovered to our dismay that there were no sheets for our beds! Fortunately, my friend Amalie Robinson, who was helping us move in, rushed out and bought sheets before all the stores closed. So we did sleep on sheets that first night. But I hardly slept a wink.

A bright light on the telephone flashed on and off in our bedroom all night long! Although a security officer was on duty every night and answered the governor’s telephone from a basement office, the governor needed a phone in his bedroom in case of an emergency. So every time the phone rang downstairs, a bright blinking light illuminated the entire bedroom. After a few sleepless nights, I covered the telephone with pillows!

Having other people around all the time took a bit of getting used to as well. There was a security detail of four to six people at the Mansion all day, every day and at night as well. Buck Carroll was head of security, and he and the others were from the Mississippi Highway Patrol. Our friends Melba and Tommie Darras, who had recently retired from operating a marvelous restaurant in Grenada, agreed to become the managing housekeeper and the chef. They moved into an apartment in the basement. Other than two cooks who had worked there for many years and one housecleaning lady, the other Mansion workers were five inmates from the state penitentiary at Parchman. The inmates served as our waiters, dishwashers, butlers, gardeners, house cleaners, and handymen—plus whatever other helpers we