Some History

My mother was born Marion Malone Hunter on May 19, 1926 in Charlotte, NC (LOL – now people will know how old you were, Mother! J).  My mother’s family was always big on family names, so she was named for her mother.  That unfortunate tradition was carried forward when I was born.  By then my mother was Marion Hunter Moore.  In discussing names with my father for their first child, she wanted to name the baby after my father had I been a boy.  William John Moore, Jr.  They had chosen Margaret for a girl.  Daddy wasn’t fond of juniors.  He knew Mother didn’t much care for her first name, so he thought he could avert that by saying he would agree to William John Moore, Jr. if she agreed to name a girl Marion Hunter Moore.  Shockingly, and disappointingly for me, she agreed.  She did change the spelling to Marian, hoping to spare me the curse of being thought of as male.  Unfortunately for me, the most common spelling of my name by those who either don’t think or don’t ask is Marion.  L

Anyway, Mother was born into an upper middle class family.  She was the oldest of three girls – her younger sisters were Amelia Ann, shortened to Mee Ann, and Sara.  They lived in the well-to-do neighborhood of Myers Park in Charlotte, a neighborhood full of large homes with big yards and quiet tree-lined streets.

She went off to college at WC – Women’s College.  Actually the Women’s College of the University of North Carolina.  I guess in those days women didn’t go to UNC.  She got her teaching degree and then moved back home and taught school.  She told me once that first graders were the best group to teach because they always loved the teacher.  I rolled my eyes at that because all that said to me was that she needed to be liked and put up on a pedestal.  Years later, I realized that it was not that at all, but it was the fact that younger children are happy to be in school and usually less problematic or prone to be troublemakers.

In pictures I saw of my mother in her high school and college yearbooks, she looked like a girl who wasn’t very fashion conscious and didn’t much care.  Her clothes looked kind of dreary and unimaginative and her hair was always kind of mussed looking, like she perpetually needed to brush it.  And my guess is no makeup either.  So kind of dweeby.  She seemed to hang out with a large mixed crowd of friends, from what little she shared about her life.  The only thing I really remember her telling us about that time in her life was a trip with her friends.  They went out deep sea fishing and she caught a sailfish which was later mounted and displayed at the Charlotte Nature Museum.  I remember seeing it there and always being amazed that my mother had caught that.

My mother lived at home with her parents after college.  One of her many pronouncements for life was that women should live at home and not buy furniture until they got married.  Seriously?  What if I never got married??  But she was happy with that life – living in the center of her universe, Charlotte, and teaching first grade.  But she somehow got the bug for adventure.  Which led her to the year she spent in Europe while teaching school.

How fortunate for us that she decided to write a diary about her adventure.  She was not one to share a lot of her personal life.  I really don’t know why that was.  She didn’t tell us a lot about the non-travel parts of her year in Europe either, except that she had met Daddy there, so the diary was a window into what made Marion Malone Hunter more of a real person to me.  It was entertaining, it was sometimes a little embarrassing, it was surprising, and it was endearing.  One of my brothers said that she had been a little embarrassed about the diary, that she thought it made her seem silly.  And it did sometimes, but maybe she would have been glad to know that, to me, it made her seem like someone I would have liked to know.