Chapter 8
Married With Children
When my father passed away he left his family with a $100,000.00 life insurance policy. Perhaps not “rich” by modern day standards but in 1963, one hundred thousand dollars was a great deal of money, or at least it was to us and most people of Shelby County Alabama would agree. My mother, Tee Baker, was truly a great business lady and made really good decisions regarding assets and money in her lifetime. In 1966, when I was eleven years of age, my mother built the grandest house with my father’s life insurance money. Harpersville residents could not have ever imagined the magnificent house that emerged on Baker’s Poultry Farm. Mother owned 160 acres adjacent to my grandfather’s two hundred acre farm and more importantly my mother’s new house would be out of eye sight, as well as ear shot, from my grandmother Baker and the “Big Farm House”.
The ground my mother chose for our new home had previously been a wooded farm but large earth moving equipment soon had the place beautifully landscaped with a rectangular one hundred by two hundred yard front lawn. The house became beautifully landscaped with lush green grass and magnificent trees. My mother’s house was approximately forty-eight hundred square feet and could best be described as a mid-century two level American contemporary with Californian “Malibu” contemporary influences and a Frank Lloyd Wright earthiness. Some property features of our house could be described as a five bed room, three bathroom, voluminous open living room and dining room with exposed cedar timber frame ceilings which were absolutely beautiful to look at, and this was just the first level. One of the coolest realizations of our house was that you could enter the front door and travel through every room of the entire house without ever even once going back through the same door you entered. I have never known any other house where this was possible but every bedroom, every bathroom, every “any” room had two doors. I really do not know if this was by design or mistake but it was an interesting talking point when showing people our home and made me feel somehow “special”; (the last feeling a budding alcoholic should ever feel).
Tee Baker was thirty six years of age in 1966 and mother knew she had two young boys to raise as well as her aging and ill mother to care for. When designing and building her house, mother took all these variables into consideration. The downstairs of our new magnificent house was a fully equipped and fully functioning apartment built for the sole purpose of being my grandmother’s home. My grandmother’s apartment consisted of a bathroom, bedroom, kitchen, living room and den. The house’s two car garage was part of this downstairs complex separated by a long hallway which ended at a stairway leading to the upstairs. My grandmother, with rumatoid arthritis, ascended and descended these steps every day to cook the household meals for the next twenty nine years until her death in 1995.
After the November 23rd 1972 wedding and short honeymoon, Brenda and I returned to my mother’s house to live out our “happily ever after’s”. My grandmother’s apartment had gone through a conversion in an effort to share the living space between two families. We halved the apartment by closing off the door to my grandmother’s bedroom. Grandmother had access to her bedroom and bathroom from the hallway which led to the rest of the house. Mine and Brenda’s side of the apartment consisted of the kitchen, living room and den which we turned into a bedroom. Brenda and I had access to the bathroom through another door adjoining the hallway and we shared the bathroom with my grandmother. A family member had given us a round yellow bed for our new bedroom and we had external access to our apartment through a sliding glass door off the living room.
The Saturday after our wedding and first day in our new home, Brenda was going to make some tea which turned into a lifetime memorable event for me. It was when Brenda was making this tea that the realization of a major mistake had occurred in my life. At the time I did not know this was possible but Brenda burned the tea. Not even my mother could burn tea. My new bride accomplished this unbelievable event by putting water on to boil and placing the tea bags into the pot and boiling all the water out. This left the poor little tea bags to sizzle and singe in the bottom of the empty tea pot. Incidentally, this particular Saturday…. Saturday November 25th 1972, was, at least for Auburn fans, the magical year Auburn blocked two punts for touchdowns from the same position on the field in the final seconds of the game against a number one rated Alabama to come from behind and win 17 – 16 after trailing the entire game 16 - 3. As things turned out, Auburn fans yelled “Punt Bama Punt “ for the next ten years as it would be that long before Auburn would be victorious over Alabama again but that minor detail is not my point here. This particular Saturday, November 25th 1972 has always stuck with me and has remained memorable all the days of my life. I have never known if this dominant memory was from sitting in my new family living room listening to a college football game on the radio or the sizzling of some tea bags that would mark the ending of a brand new marriage. Whatever the event, November 25th 1972 was imprinted deeply into my mind and I have always been able to recall each hour of that beautiful fall day all of my life. I suppose some days are just meant to be remembered.
Burning a pitcher of tea might not seem important to most people but I saw it for much more than what it really was at the moment; or perhaps even more than what it really actually was for that matter. The way I viewed this tea burning event at the age of seventeen, or perhaps after the responsible way I had been raised, I felt if any human being was so inept to not be able to boil a few bags of tea and pour up a pitcher of tea, well they probably were not going to be able to do much of anything productive in life. When I discovered the tea bag burning in the small apartment kitchen, the full knowledge that I had made a mistake by marrying this lady landed in my young mind and nauseated stomach. I was trapped! Now what would I do? I did not think I had any real options to this problem since my mother would certainly terminate my life if I did not remain happily married to Brenda for the rest of my life. In our world, once you were married, you remained married until death you do part. As far as my mother was concerned, divorce was the worse abomination on earth and all sinners engaging in divorce would spend all of eternity in hell right along side the sinners that drank alcohol. I did not know about any of that for sure but I did know I did not want to bear the wrath of divorce from my mother. I never said anything about the tea incident to anyone from that moment forward. I simply put on a new pot of water to boil, threw in the tea bags and soon poured up a pitcher of sweet ice tea and tried to forget everything that had just occurred.
I would like to say, from that point on, everything was right out of the fairy tale books and an enchanted life followed but that is not exactly how things turned out. I was going to school, as not finishing school was never an option in my mother’s house. I also continued to work on the farm as usual. As a matter of fact, not much at all had changed except for my driving around and having fun. That part was of course immediately terminated. I did however, continue with my beer drinking. I was quickly learning that alcohol seemed to dull the anxiety of adult life and that beer seemed to take the edge off, you might say.
Of course I had my image of how things would be in mine and Brenda’s life. However, I had overlooked one very important fact that I had never really thought much about. I had not realized that Brenda might have a different idea of the things that would happen in our life. For instance, my view of how our nights would be was certainly very similar to how our dates were except without the driving or finding a place to park. I had looked forward to our going to bed together at night but that image quickly evaporated just like the tea. I soon discovered that Brenda had no intention of having sexual relations with her husband at night. I think her exact words were something to the effect of “that’s what kids do”. This of course was quite a shock to me at the ripe old age of seventeen. Now what was I going to do? I had no idea of how to handle this situation, as I had never really learned the skill of conversation or compromising with another human being. I had entered what was going to be a fairly sexless marriage and there was to be no relief.
Things were happening fast in my life. A baby was on the way in May of 1973 and that was one event I was incredibly excited about and could not wait for the day to arrive. I was a senior in high school and lots of things were going on in the education arena of my life. A spring graduation was also coming. Talk of me going to college was a common conversation with my mother as I soon learned I had no other options other than attend college. My thinking was, I was now an adult married man with a child arriving soon and I would need to be seeking a real job to support my new family. My mother had an entirely different view of my life. The idea of not going to college was never even an option for her. I would simply do it all.
Explaining the “Baker” college connection requires a little history of the Baker family tree and Harpersville history. After all, God did not place the Baker family in Harpersville when he created Adam and Eve and the Garden of Eden as some have speculated. Besides, we now all know the Garden of Eden is in fact the Baker farm in Harpersville any way and not the hot sandy Middle East holy land where no one would want to be in the first place.
The Baker family originally came to Alabama from Mecklenburg County North Carolina and York County South Carolina through Sand Mountain Alabama and the family is connected to the American Revolution through Henry and Samuel Downs. The first Baker to come to Harpersville was my grandfathers grandfather; H. Baker (October 15, 1847 - April 10, 1916 ) and his wife M. E. Baker (October 10, 1846 - June 15, 1915). These two original Baker’s bought virtually all the land in Harpersville in the South West quadrant owning a large plantation. My great grandfather, John R. Baker (November 4, 1874 – April 2 1951) who was the son of H. Baker, and his wife Sallie A. Baker (January 3, 1866 – December 26, 1952) were contacted in Sand Mountain Alabama where they had remained and asked to move to the fertile valley of Shelby County Alabama by his father, H. Baker. At that time, my grandfathers adjoining two hundred acre farm was on the market and for sale. John Baker bought this property from the original land owners who happened to be a family by the name of Morgan. This is where the name Morgan Creek came from and hence, Morgan Creek Wineries much later in history. The Morgan farm, at that time, was a very important stage coach stop critical in Andrew Jackson’s battle with the Creek Coosa River Red Stick Indians. (Perhaps I’ve gone a little too far back in the history of the Harpersville Baker family farm). The Baker farms were now extended two hundred acres further south via John Baker’s purchase which adjoined his fathers plantation.
My grandfather, Earl V. Baker, was born January 19th, 1909 and is still alive at the age of 100 at the time of this writing. Granddaddy Baker was the next to the last child in a family of thirteen children. Granddaddy Earl V. Baker’s wife and my grandmother was Ophelia Baker (May 11, 1912 – November 26, 1996). Stories of my great grandfather John Baker was that he was so poor he would dress up in his Sunday suit, walk to Harpersville without a single penny in his pockets and go to the businesses in Harpersville to stand around and talk with merchants as if he was as big and important as anyone else in town; then he would walk back home to the farm. To finish this family tree to it’s current seventh generational branch, my fathers generation came along, then me, my son Bradley Edward Baker (June 27, 1977) and his son Andrew Bradley Baker (January 5th 2006), the 7th generation but all that is way ahead of where I am in this story and needs to be put off till much later.
My grandfather’s story would indeed be quite an interesting and lengthy book itself as he has seen two world wars, the great depression (which made the greatest imprint), electricity, cars, airplanes, the Korean, Vietnam and Middle East wars but most importantly my grandfather planted and picked cotton in the same field for ninety-seven years! Now I have gone through all this to try and explain the importance of Cotton to the Baker family. Cotton, for many years, is what quite literally fed the entire Baker family all the way back to H. Baker, the original Baker to Harpersville. When Earl Baker took over the farm as a young man in 1929, concern for growing the most efficient and productive cotton was of critical importance. Because of this and the local county Coop advice, my grandfather began to make many numerous trips to Auburn University simply to learn how to grow cotton crops with the greatest yield or bales of cotton per acre. Of course at that time, no Baker had owned any mode of transportation and Auburn University was over one hundred miles east on bloody highway 280. My grandfather Earl Baker unflinchingly walked to the intersection of Harpersville and hitch hiked to and from Auburn University to attend farmer meetings where he learned to grow cotton more efficiently than any other farmer in the county. Hence, my grandfather Earl Baker was in fact the first Auburn graduate of the Baker family although no graduation diploma, certificate of completion, graduation ceremony or any other authenticity of event can be found.
Every generation of Baker’s since my grandfather has been closely aligned with Auburn University and the ones with intelligence have in fact attending Auburn to further the families close ties with the university. As the many years and generations have passed by, the family used Auburn expertise in all forms of agriculture; chickens, hogs, cattle, and many other forms of livestock as well as all forms of crops; soybeans, corn, and cotton. My father’s middle brother, Larry Baker, graduated Magnum Cum Laude from Auburn University and later went through medical school. Naturally when it was my turn to attend college, I selected Auburn and I did in fact mail in an application and was in fact accepted to attend Auburn University beginning in the fall of 1973. However, I had embarked on a different path in life with my recent marriage that now saw me as a husband and soon to be father. I had a long growing list of responsibilities, and getting away from home and attending the typical fun college years that most adolescents do was just not in the cards for me. During spring days of 1973 I found myself being accepted to a small nearby community college known as the University of Montevallo. Montevallo is where I would soon spend four years of college commuting and driving back and forth from home to school but always returning to work on the farm and fill my other roles as husband and soon to be father.
With the above, commuting to college was setup and ready to go. Of course with my mother, not doing the other farm chores was not an option. There was my wife to think about and soon a baby so I was going to continue to live in the small apartment in my mother’s house and attend college as well. My mother had my life all mapped out in her mind and that is how it was going to be. I continued to drink my beer as often as possible with my friends and some Friday nights they would come to my apartment and we would drink in my house. Of course I had to keep my drinking secret from my mother and Brenda did not seem too happy about it either but she had ceased to be much fun any way. Through the spring of 1973 I worked the cotton fields and graduated from high school.
Saturday night May 5th 1973 was Coosa Valley Academy’s first graduation party. Brenda and I had attended this “bash” where I once again drank to excess as Dennis Holmes, a friend, class mate and football team mate, and I seemed to have an endless supply of 6oz Miller beers in small bottles we had affectionately termed “Ponies”. The next Sunday morning, May 6 1973, Brenda informed me our baby was coming about 5:00AM. We went to the hospital for the event and of course my mother went along as well. I will never forget, as my wife was wheeled off to a delivery room, my mother taking me to a nearby mall where we shopped for some new shoes for myself. The day my daughter was born, I became the owner of a shiny new pair of black and white paten leather dress shoes that could be describe as “Saddle Oxfords” although they were not. May 6th 1973 doctors, nurses and hospitals had no need of males when babies were delivered.
At 5:00PM May 6th 1973 the greatest moments of my life occurred. Of course I had been kept out of the way all day by the hospital staff but at 5:00 O’clock PM when I had become a father, someone came to get me and show me my new baby. She was the most amazing thing I had ever seen as my gaze fell upon her. My first view was through a glass window but there she was. About twenty inches long with red hair and she was naked and covered in blood from the delivery. She was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen and my life changed for all of eternity. I was in love for sure now and my life had taken on a whole new purpose and meaning. I felt like I could walk on water and could not wait to tell everyone I knew about my new daughter. I named her Brandy Kay Baker.
About dusk my mother and I headed home to Harpersville from the hospital and where my family would spend the night together, minus me. The baby hospital was actually on the other side of Birmingham and a full hour’s drive from Harpersville. I was floating on air, walking on water and any other metaphor one can express to exhibit euphoria. I had really not known what it meant to be a “dad” and I certainly would not know the full meaning in one night but I did know the most special moments of my life had occurred and I was literally tingling all over. I had never known the excitement I was feeling on the night of May 6th 1973.
The day had been a Sunday and frankly I really do not remember what exactly my mother’s agenda was when we returned home. Mother could have easily been anxious to get to the churches Sunday evening worship service or she may have felt the need to get out on the farm and check on the livestock but whatever her rush was fell on deaf ears if it landed on me. I truly had my own agenda the night of May 6th 1973. I was a dad! I had a tiny baby daughter that truly needed me. I had to be something although I didn’t fully know what that was or what it was to be. The love of my life arrived on earth and I was absolutely ecstatic!
April is crop planting time in the south east and in Shelby county Alabama that meant time to plant cotton had just passed by a few days. In typical Baker tradition and style the Baker family was running about seven to fourteen days behind normal which meant we were right on schedule for what we normally did. In other words, it was time to be planting cotton the very day my daughter decided to come live with me on earth. I was so excited back at my small apartment alone in my mother’s house that I just simply had to find something to do with all my nervous energy. I walked to my grandfathers farm which was about one half mile away walking and I got on a tractor that was hooked up to a turning plow. I decided I would plough my nervous energy away.
Right next to my mother’s house was a ten acre field that was usually planted in cotton. This track of land would later be the area my family and I would live for seven years in a mobile home or house trailer but those days still lay ahead several months. My mother and grandfather had been telling me that if I would plough, plant and tend to this ten acres of land I could have the proceeds of the cotton yield to support my family and myself. I was quite excited about this prospect and considered the entire ten acres mine as I had built a fence around the acreage a few years earlier when my mother purchased the new ground.
Of course it was dark and the long night was beginning but the tractor had headlights and I had seen my grandfather plow late into the night many times before. I figured if he could do it so could I. I set out to plough a ten acre cotton field on the night of May 6th 1973, the night that Brandy Kay Baker came to the world and into my life.
I pulled the tractor to the far outside edge of the ten acre field on the side my mother’s house was on and set the three bottom turning plough down onto the ground. I put the Ford 5000 diesel tractor into a low gear and began turn ploughing my old cotton field as a new father. The night of May 6th 1973 was the shortest work hours of my life as my head was in the air and I could sense no tragedies or threats in life. I was truly the happiest I would ever be.
Turn plowing fields is a slow process by any standards. The three bottom plough only processed about a three foot wide span or “swath” of earth with one pass around the cotton field. I first ploughed the outside edge all the way around the ten acres and finally made it back to my original starting point. I then began the second round unaware of how much time had elapsed. I drove the tractor and ploughed around and around in a diminishing ten acre circle until I finally found myself in the middle of the field with the sun coming up on a bright horizon.
With a broad smile across my face I drove the tractor slowly across the ploughed field smelling the freshly turned earth. Nothing on God’s earth smells as “clean” as freshly broken ground except perhaps an afternoon summer rain on a hot August day. The freshly broken dirt made for a slightly bumpy ride as I guided the Ford 5000 from the center of the cotton field in the direction of my mothers house. As I slowly drove the tractor across the field, my gaze absorbed the site of endless rows of fresh turned earth. It would be many years, way into the grey twilight wisdom years of my life (and many years of sobriety) that I would realize the deep meaning and value of the hours I had just lived; which were perhaps the truly “richest” days of my life.
I gazed at the beauty of morning sunlight caressing the shiny new dirt as my stomach began to realize it would soon be time for a fresh farm breakfast. My mother loved fried bacon, scrambled eggs, fresh coffee and my grandmother made wonderful homemade biscuits. These two ladies would be up making breakfast about the time I pulled the tractor into the back yard of my mother’s house. It wouldn’t be to much longer before it would be time for me to once again see the new love of my life.
A few days later it was time for Brenda and Brandy to come home. Being only eighteen at the time, I knew very little about doctors, hospitals, babies, births or any of the medical lingo one heard around such places. I was greatly shocked to soon learn that my new baby would not be going home with Brenda and I. Come to find out, Brandy had turned “yellow” and was afflicted with something called “jaundice”. I really had no idea what that was, what it meant or what it may do to my new daughter. I was very much at the mercy of the medical staff in charge of all these hospital events during this time. I only knew that I was told by a doctor that Brenda had to leave the hospital and Brandy had to stay. This news truly seemed like the most heartbreaking experience of my young life but I knew I was totally at the mercy of the establishment. The twenty four hours did pass quickly and soon enough all three of us were back home, in the downstairs apartment of my mother’s house, and living our new “family” life together. With high school graduation now only a few days away, I was perhaps the happiest eighteen year old to ever live.
The summer passed quickly and all too soon it was time for me to attend my first hours at the University of Montevallo where I would commute for the next four years pursuing an undergraduate college degree in something I knew nothing about let alone have any interest in. My first college day was a Sunday afternoon called “orientation” where the students were allowed to have their families with them for a few hours before the fall term began the following Monday. I was proud to be spending these hours with my mother, my wife and my daughter.
This collegiate orientation day was very memorable for me. Brandy was about three months old at this time and she laid cutely in a yellow pumpkin seat. My mother, wife, daughter and myself were all sitting on the front row in an auditorium as the “Dean of Men” was describing college life. The dean looked down at my family and commented about my daughter by saying “she was the youngest freshman he had ever seen on campus”. I already knew I was the proudest father to ever be there as well.
