and Japanese. Because of that bitter irony, perhaps we can be forgiven sullen reflections about how rapidly the South would have recovered socially and economically—thus coaxing the national economy to a faster gallop—if the nineteenth century Radical Republicans had been men of vision such as twentieth-century Republican statesmen Henry Stimson, John J. McCloy, Robert Lovett, Arthur Vandenberg, and Dwight Eisenhower. The bipartisanship that remade the world by the enlightened self-interest of helping our fallen foes to their feet could have made America a much better place, much sooner. Perhaps it might even have accelerated civil rights reforms.
However, we’re not in a mood to dwell on that old mistake, because—irony of ironies, again—the economy of Anniston and a large slice of Alabama across the I-20 corridor is being occupied by the former Axis Powers. Germany’s Mercedes-Benz is on the western side of I-20 and Japan’s Honda has built a plant thirteen minutes from our major shopping mall on the eastern end of I-20. To make the ironic triangle complete, Italy’s Fiat has a plant just forty miles to the south. Of course, the boys and girls with whom I grew up so happily in our third-world cocoon had never heard such exotic names as Honda or Toyota, and if they had, they would have belonged to the enemy. It was beyond our powers of imagination to think that one day the Axis Powers would be our welcomed neighbors.
2
Growing Up—Cracks in the Cocoon
We were innocents, focused on the pleasures of the present. It was pleasant on Glenwood Terrace, a street divided by a grassy median, which supported a line of antique streetlights marching six blocks up to Tenth Street Mountain. Our house was the fourth on the south side of the median, number 818, the only one sitting on two corner lots. Glenwood Terrace was and is a premiere address in Anniston, but I didn’t know it at the time. Even if I had, we were taught that it is pretentious (a cardinal sin) to say so. My family was part of what passed for aristocracy in a small town, though we didn’t put on any airs. That “wasn’t done.” Besides, you couldn’t get away with such affectations in a small town.
Had there been a social register in Anniston, though, Mother and Dad would have been listed. Mother was an athletic, beautiful, and talented woman, star of the Little Theater and a state doubles tennis champion. From childhood, she had pulled a whole caravan of Norwegian maiden names—Edel Olga Leonora Ytterboe—that embarrassed her when she had to recite them before a first-grade class in the Minnesota college town of Northfield. Her father, Halvor Tykerssen Ytterboe, whom I knew only as a lithe, athletic-looking man in the portrait hanging in our dining room, played football for the University of Iowa and was a founder of St. Olaf College, as well as a popular professor and playing coach of the baseball team. His unsmiling face in the portrait and photographs concealed a playful nature. In letters he was sure chickens were calling Mother’s name “Edel, Edel Edel.” In another, he teased his wife, “Just got up and feel that I love you still. I don’t see how I can with all your faults—but it seems I can’t help it.” St. Olaf’s original mission was to acclimate Norwegian immigrants to the new American society without discarding all of their original culture. The young athletic professor, whose fund-raising had helped save the college, undertook even menial duties. One was fumigating the boy’s dorm with formaldehyde after an epidemic of scarlet fever. The fumes poisoned him and, cheerful and playful to the end, he died at forty-six. Mother, who worshipped him, was six years old.
Years later in New York at graduate school, she accepted a fateful invitation to venture South from a classmate in the Columbia University School of Education. Young Edel Ytterboe’s Southern friend was another pretty athlete, Palmer Daugette, whose father, Dr. Clarence W. Daugette, was president of the State Normal School in Jacksonville, ten miles north of Anniston. The two girls taught physical education that summer of 1921, when Edel met the Colonel . . . by accident of a coin flip.
Colonel Harry Mel Ayers, my father, was already a substantial man in Calhoun County and the state of Alabama, whose military title was awarded for service on the staff of his best friend, Governor Thomas E. Kilby, former president and CEO of Anniston’s Kilby Steel. Dad owned a daily newspaper, the Anniston Star, and had managed Kilby’s winning gubernatorial campaign. For his time and place, he was also a worldly man. He had lived and traveled in Asia with his father, Dr. Thomas Wilburn Ayers, one of the first Southern Baptist medical missionaries to China (1901–26). By Dad’s own estimate, he was far short of handsome: a slight man of medium height with sloping shoulders, receding hairline, and a substantial nose rudely sculpted on the football field of then Jacksonville Normal School, but bright and intellectually inquiring. His manly charm made him a popular and natural leader who would dazzle young Edel Ytterboe in their first lengthy and close encounter, which was by chance. Dad had lost a coin flip and had to drive the ten-mile, washboard dirt road to Jacksonville to pick up Edel and Palmer for a Rotary Club picnic. A dance number performed by Edel and the Daugette girls, Kathleen and Palmer, entertained the Rotarians and guests. The thirty-six-year-old publisher followed the moves of the blonde Nordic beauty and he fell, hard.
Their whirlwind romance was climaxed by an anti-climatic automobile journey to Minnesota by Dad and several of his friends, all expecting to bring home his bride. When the Alabamians entered a Minneapolis hotel in their seersucker suits and straw hats, it was as if there had been an aboriginal invasion of Scandinavia. The room clerk, curiosity mingling with alarm, asked, “What are you . . . Baptists?” No, the ecumenical delegation answered, worse . . . “We’re Democrats.” When the squad of exotic strangers reached thoroughly Lutheran and Republican Northfield, they and Dad were met with deep skepticism. The president of St. Olaf, Lars Boe, grilled Dad for hours and sent forth a blizzard of telegrams inquiring about the character of this alien being from the deepest, snake-infested jungles of Alabama. A crestfallen Colonel returned home sans bride. Shortly after, when President Boe’s telegrams yielded nothing but affirmative reviews of Dad’s character and history, the odd couple—or so it seemed to Minnesota Lutheran eyes—was wed on September 28, 1921 at Northfield’s St. John’s Lutheran Church.
The Star’s legendary society editor, Miss Iva Cook, whose story reached for, and almost went, over the top, reported the affair. She described the wedding as “a very notable event, which has been the occasion of much interest throughout Alabama, where the groom is well-known and prominent.” The bride was “very charming and accomplished, possessing many social graces, which will make her a lovely addition to Anniston society.” If Miss Iva said it, then it must be so, for she was the social tyrant of northeast Alabama. She chose and dictated the size and display of the bridal pictures each Sunday. If your daughter was not one of the three large pictures at the top of the page, then your family dined below the salt or at the second table. If your daughter’s picture was in the center, elevated slightly above the other two, then you were the pinnacle of Anniston society. Typical of Miss Iva’s imperious touch was her account of a garden party hosted by Mrs. Kilby, wife of the former governor. In almost sensual detail, Miss Iva described the day, the garden, the texture and make of the tablecloth, the silver, the food, and the medley of colorful frocks, and then listed some of the guests by name, concluding . . . “and several others.” Mother made the list, but imagine the distress of local matrons awakening to discover that Miss Iva had assigned them to an anonymous social purgatory of “several others.”
Those grown-up social nuances meant nothing to us local boys. We were no more aware of such distinctions than we were of the huge and omnipresent structure of segregation which, to us, was normality, the way things were, always had been, and always would be. The adult obsession with race was invisible to my buddies and me. I heard few telltale signs at the dinner table of the torturous grip the issue had on Dad or about his courageous and conflicted struggle to balance his belief in educational, economic, and political equality for blacks—within a segregated system.
We knew about the custom that reserved the back of city buses for Negroes, but we violated that taboo frequently, happily commandeering the prized long seat in the very back of the usually empty bus on Saturday afternoons.
