Mightier Acorns

Originally Published on 2/26/2015

I found it difficult to compose a story about Grandma Nancy. She was probably the most present of my grandparents but I haven’t quite isolated a narrative thread for her, yet. This is the patchwork story I chose to tell a decade ago, in actual snapshots. (Lightly edited to update links and references.)

Today’s feature is all about one special person – my grandmother, Nancy Witter Callin.

Grandma was born and raised in Glendale, Arizona, and spent most of her life there and in the neighboring town of Peoria. She was an art teacher, traveler, souvenir collector, and notorious pack rat, so she left a lot of photographs and other visual artifacts behind to document her life. Most of the family photos I have are here because of her.

Here she is in a rare snapshot of her whole family – her daddy, Dick Witter, her momma, Hannah Merle Huff (who preferred to go by “Merle”), and her brother, Richard (usually referred to as Dick Jr.). I call this portrait rare because Merle did not seem to be as fond of getting her picture taken as she was of having pictures of her kids. Her family, the Huffs, was fond of keeping and sending photos to each other, so I imagine she was motivated to continue that tradition.

Most of my family are familiar with Harper Lee’s classic To Kill a Mockingbird, and when we look at pictures of Nancy as a little girl with her big brother Richard, we see a real-life Scout and Jem Finch. I don’t think Nancy was ever quite the tomboy that Scout was, but I’m willing to bet that growing up on a dairy farm in Depression-era Arizona gave her plenty of opportunity to get a little dirty from time to time.

(Check out tomorrow’s Famous Playmates for a look at what young Nancy was like, and how she got on with one of her most famous neighbors!)

Scout Finch wasn’t the only literary comparison we made to young Nancy. I remember the first time I saw this portrait of her as a young girl thinking that it looked like my cover of The Diary of Anne Frank:1

In high school, Nancy’s best friend was Bobbe Harris, and it seems they did just about everything together. Here we see them visiting Nancy’s grandmother, Rosa Murray Huff. (Rosa and I share a birthday – only separated by 111 years!)

I don’t recall any specific details, but I always thought that Nancy inherited her passion for traveling the country from her Huff grandparents. The Huffs were the adventurous early settlers from Kansas, as you might recall from an earlier post.

There isn’t much story behind many of these portraits. They are just the faces of people I knew – but they imply stories.

I have Grandpa Bob with his rakish Casablanca hat…and Grandma Nancy clutching her hands tightly.

…and the Witter family relaxing on the couch – possibly in the late-1940s.

Only Grandpa Dick seems close to smiling here – even the dog looks resigned. Perhaps a later decade with fancy haircuts will improve the mood? Here are Grandma Nancy and Grandpa Bob with my mom and dad (and Aunt Vicki peeking out in the middle).

There are numerous copies of annual school photos from Nancy’s long career as an art teacher with the Glendale Union School District. This one is the lady I remember most strongly – another school photo, probably from the early to mid-1980s.

This is the Grandma who babysat my sister and me on occasional Friday nights, letting us watch The Dukes of Hazzard and play with her art supplies. This is the Grandma who let us come swim in her pool all summer long, and who fed us iced oatmeal cookies (Grandma’s brand, naturally) before bed.

This is also the Grandma who collected owls, loved art by DeGrazia and kept two cages full of finches in her dining room. I can still smell the soaps in her bathroom and feel the transition from her 65-degree house to the 100+ degree patio on the way to her swimming pool.

As I edited this for re-publishing, I was struck by the fact that Grandma rarely smiled in her photos. I don’t think she liked her smile – and that last school portrait shows what I remember as her happy face. The downturned smile of someone resisting the urge to let go.

She may have resisted smiling, but she never held back on affection. She made sure we knew she loved us fiercely.