Wrestling With Gravy A Life, With Food

Cut to the Chase My parents battled through an acrimonious divorce right at the end of the war that supposedly made their generation the Greatest. They were almost central-castingly perfect opposites: Don Reynolds was short and fat, and at first meeting seemed like a hick from the dustbowls of Oklahoma and Texas; Edith Remick was a tall, dark-haired beauty, a refined and privately schooled graduate of Smith who had been brought up in Quincy, Massachusetts. She was given to upper-middle-class maladies like mild depression, frequently saw doctors for no apparent reason, and spent an inordinate amount of time resting at home. He was a whirlwind, she a lovely and fragile icicle. In the late thirties, he briefly owned part of a Quincy newspaper. One of his biggest advertisers was an upscale department store specializing in men's clothing, named Remick's. They met at a company picnic, and he swept her off her feet. She'd never seen anyone like him: such energy, such surprising smarts, such wild visions of the future. And such a sexual drive. I don't know whether he loosed her panties the very first night or was forced to wait till marriagebut I would bet the ranch, if I had one, that it was on his mind, raging, from the moment they met and every moment thereafter. He told herand her familythat he intended to live in Quincy for the rest of their lives together. Within a month of their marriage, he sold his interest in the Quincy newspaper and announced that they were moving to Texas. He didn't ask her and hadn't forewarned her or anyone in the family; he just announced it, and off they went. Men could get away with things like that then. He then proceeded to hit the road in search of additional businesses. My sister, Nancy, was born in San Antonio in 1938, and the three of them moved to Fort Smith, Arkansas, where he established the Southwestern Publishing Company, a solely-owned enterprise that operated half a dozen small newspapers. I was born in February 1942, barely two months after the attack on Pearl Harbor, and Dad was drafted shortly after that. He grumbled about the army but finagled his way to Europe, where all the glamour was. He returned home from adventures in London, France, and Australia, restless to continue his empire-building. Despite a wound received while being flown somewhere forStars and Stripes(the military newspaper), he'd had a great time during the war, traveling everywhere and hobnobbing with bigs. As he was fond of saying, "It was a hell of a war, but better than no war at all!" After about five minutes of peacetime America, he looked at the open landscape and concluded he'd outgrown Mother, and definitely had outgrown children. He hit the road for good in pursuit of new ventures, thinking Mother was living with my sister and me back in Texas because that's where he'd last left us and that's where her letters were postmarked. Once Mother decided on a divorcean iconoclastic choice in those days, unless you were a Hollywood starall Dad had to do to protect his rapidly increasing wealth was stay out of Texas so he wouldn't be served with divorce papers. Or so he thought. But Mother snuck us into Arkansas, where his headquarters was located. To establish residence, we hid out for six dusty months in Blytheville because she might have been recognized in Little Rock or Fort Smith. I remember surviving a tornado, watching Mother alone at an outdoor ironing board, and seeing a dog kill a rabbit. Nothing else. With the help of a very determined lawyer named Fred Schlater, Mother found out Dad was driving into Arkansas late one night and hired a midnight paper-server to surprise Dad with divorce documents right there on the highway. Angry? I was only three or four and didn't see the ambReynolds, Jonathan is the author of 'Wrestling With Gravy A Life, With Food', published 2006 under ISBN 9781400062744 and ISBN 1400062748.