Aunt Carol

I mentioned my Aunt Carol in my last post and so I decided that this is a good time to tell you what I remember of her. She was my father's only sibling. She was born two years, one month and one day after he was (March 3, 1929). I don't know a lot about her, except that she was not very domestic and was more adventurous than most girls. For one thing, when she was old enough to drive, she could not afford to buy a car, so she got a motorcycle. It was just barely acceptable at that time for a girl to ride behind a man on a motorcycle. It was not acceptable for a girl to purchase and drive her own motorcycle. But that is what she did. She also worked her way through college and medical school. She qualified as a doctor--not a nurse, but a doctor--when I was about four years old. That was the early fifties and there were not many women doctors back then. Unfortunately, it was about then that she married Uncle Bill Battersby who was the son of maybe the richest people in Rochester, MN at the time and so she never did actually set up in the practice of medicine. I was in the Battersbys' home a couple of times that summer and it made a big impression on me. The estate--and I do mean estate--was located at the top of a cliff above the river that ran through the town. (It seems like every town had a river running through it.) There were wonderful views of the valley below. The house was huge with the double staircase curving up from the foyer like you see in the movies. A pair of fawn Great Danes patrolled the grounds outside the mansion and a pair of red Smooth Miniature Dachshunds had the run of the inside of the house. There was parking near the house, but the garages were beyond the tennis courts back near the stables and kennels. There were all kinds of bird dogs in the kennels and horses used for hunting as well as pleasure mounts in the stables. Soon after Aunt Carol married Uncle Bill, they became Jehovah's Witnesses and they worked full time for that organization and donated all they had to it when Bill inherited his parents' estate. They never had any children, but I think that was by choice since children would have interfered with their travel and missionary work. Poor Gramma! Her only son became a Mormon and her only daughter became a Jehovah's Witness so she did not dare to go to church anywhere! I was often told that I was very like my Aunt Carol and even talked like her and used the same gestures. I could not have learned those things from her because I saw very little of her while I was growing up. She was always very nice to us, but of course Jehovah's Witnesses do not believe in recognizing birthdays or celebrating Christmas or anything like that. And they were very busy with their missionary work and traveling all over the world for that. She was devoted to her mother and phoned and wrote to her often and sent her random gifts. That was how we got our news of her, usually. I wish I had made more of an effort to get to know Aunt Carol, even if it had to be through the mail. Uncle Bill was nice, too, but seemed an awful Caspar Milquetoast for someone like my Aunt Carol. Still, he had the handicap of being born with a silver spoon in his mouth. It's bound to slow a man down!