Chapter Two

Mom

Ann O. Douglas  —  June 20, 1939 – July 6, 2019

June 20, 1939. Huntsville, Alabama.

A small cotton town of 13,150 people. That’s the world Ann Oldfield opened her eyes into.

On the very day she arrived, a Nazi paramilitary unit — the SS Heimwehr Danzig — was being formed in Danzig, Germany. Nobody in the Merrimack Mill Village knew that. Nobody would have cared. But the fuse was burning.

Seventy-two days later, Germany invaded Poland and World War II began in Europe.

Ann didn’t know that. She was three months old.

In America, the Depression era was ending. The Wizard of Oz and Gone with the Wind were in theaters. Batman made his comic book debut. The average annual income was $1,368. A new car cost $750. A new house averaged $4,000. A gallon of milk was 23 cents. Gas was a dime. A loaf of bread cost nine cents.

In Huntsville, the cotton mills — Lincoln, Dallas, Merrimack — had built entire worlds around themselves. Company housing. Company stores that sometimes overcharged the very workers who had no choice but to shop there. Schools, churches, theaters, all within walking distance of the mill. The Depression had hit Huntsville’s farmers and textile workers hard in the years before Ann was born. The mills paid poor wages and kept their people dependent on a single industry.

It was her mama and daddy’s world. Charles Newton Oldfield — Corporal, U.S. Army, World War I. Born 1895. He had already seen what the world could do to a man. His wife was Ida. Their daughter Ann arrived June 20, 1939.

She had no way of knowing any of it.

She was just Ann.

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June 20, 1941

On June 20, 1941, Ann turned two years old. It was a Friday.

On that same Friday, in Washington, D.C., the United States Army Air Corps was reorganized into the United States Army Air Forces, under Major General Henry H. “Hap” Arnold. America was not yet in the war — Pearl Harbor was still six months away — but the country was quietly, urgently, rearranging itself for what was coming.

Two days later — on June 22nd — Adolf Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of the Soviet Union: more than 3.8 million Axis troops across a 1,800-mile front, the largest military offensive in human history. The Eastern Front had opened. The world would never be the same.

Ann did not know any of that. She was two.

In Huntsville, the Merrimack Mill Village — the neighborhood where the Oldfield family lived, on B Street, southwest of town — was humming. Merrimack’s spindles were running. The mill would soon be producing grey cloth for the United States military as wartime contracts poured into Alabama’s textile industry. Just weeks away, in July 1941, local newspapers would announce the coming of ordnance plants to Huntsville. Within three years, those plants would employ more than 17,000 workers, many of them former mill villagers — people from streets like B Street, people exactly like Charles Newton Oldfield and his family.

It would not become Bradley Street until 1946.

Huntsville, a cotton town of 13,000 people, was about to be transformed into something it had never been before. The war would do that.

None of it had arrived yet on June 20th. The mill was just running. The street was just a street. Ann Oldfield was just two years old, in her mama and daddy’s house, on her birthday.

And her brother died.

Harold Lloyd Oldfield — everybody called him Buddy — was four years old. Influenza. He is buried at Fowlkes Cemetery in Monrovia, Madison County, Alabama. His headstone says Buddy. Because that’s who he was to the people who loved him.

Ann’s mama and daddy had lost a son. Ann had lost a brother she was too young to remember. And every June 20th for the rest of her life — seventy-eight years — Ann’s birthday and Buddy’s death would share the same date on the calendar.

She celebrated every single year. Cake. Candles. People she loved. She chose joy anyway.

But she always knew.

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Toughy

Somewhere in those early years, Ann acquired a pet goose.

She named him Toughy.

The name required no explanation to anyone who knew the story. One night, Toughy was outside in a metal tub of water. The temperature dropped. By morning, the water had frozen solid — with Toughy in it.

Toughy lived.

Of course he did. He was Toughy.

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September 1945. The First Day of School.

The summer of 1945 was the summer the war ended.

On August 6th, the United States dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima. On August 9th, another on Nagasaki. On September 2nd, Japan surrendered. World War II was over.

Ann Oldfield was six years old.

She didn’t know about any of that yet. What she knew was that September had come, and it was time.

She walked out the front door of her mama and daddy’s house at 3312 Bradley Street that September morning, turned south, and headed toward Cedar Avenue. Past the identical two-story duplexes where everybody knew everybody. Past neighbors already out on their porches in the early Alabama heat. The mill was already running — it ran all day, every day — that low steady hum of 90,000 spindles that was simply the sound of Huntsville Park, the sound Ann had heard her entire life and never had to think about.

She turned left onto Cedar Avenue and walked toward Triana Boulevard.

And there it was. Joe Bradley School — right across the street from Merrimack Hall, where the company store sat on the first floor and the gymnasium waited upstairs.

She had walked past this building her whole life. Today she walked through the door.

Inside, teachers like Mabel Hughes, Miss Edna Keel, and Mrs. Earnest Wright commanded those classrooms. Under the leadership of Principal E.F. DuBose — firm hand, deep compassion — Joe Bradley School was not just a school. It was the social and recreational center for the entire community.

Ann found her seat.

Little did she know when she walked into that classroom for the first time the lessons life would teach her.

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1972

In September 1972, the world was doing what it does.

On the radio, Gilbert O’Sullivan’s “Alone Again (Naturally)” held the number one spot on the Billboard Hot 100 through most of the month, before Three Dog Night’s “Black and White” took over on September 16th.

On television, M*A*S*H had just premiered on CBS on September 17th — the same week Marcus Limbaugh was dying. It starred Alan Alda as a surgeon in a Mobile Army Surgical Hospital in Korea. Its first episode ranked 45th for the week. Nobody thought it would last.

In Washington, the Watergate break-in had happened three months earlier — June 17, 1972 — when operatives from President Richard Nixon’s reelection campaign were caught burglarizing the Democratic National Committee headquarters. The story had gone quiet. Nixon was headed for a landslide reelection in November. Nobody yet understood what was coming.

Gas was 36 cents a gallon. The oil crisis was thirteen months away. The economy felt stable. Inflation was 3.3 percent. The Vietnam War was winding down.

None of it touched Bradley Street.

Ann would go on to raise three children. She would lose the love of her life to cancer in 1972. After her husband died she worked three jobs, cared for her daddy with no legs, fed and clothed three children — and went to school at night to become an LPN.

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The Gifted School — and What Ann Did About It

After David’s sixth grade year, he was accepted into a special program for gifted students across town at Huntsville Junior High School on Randolph Street. In sixth grade David had answered every single question correctly on the California Achievement Test — a perfect score. Nine other students around the city had each missed fewer than ten questions. His Aunt Liz — who lived just a block up Bradley Street and ran Special Education for Huntsville City Schools — created a special accelerated program just for the ten of them.

Every morning Ann drove him from 3312 Bradley Street on one side of Huntsville to Randolph Street on the other. Every afternoon she drove him home. Ten gifted students from around the city, accelerated classes, a world away from the mill village — and Ann made it happen, twice a day, for two full years, without complaint.

She never once suggested it was inconvenient.

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Ann’s Day

Every morning Ann woke up, fed her daddy breakfast, then woke her children, made sure the girls were on their way to Ridgecrest Elementary, and drove David across Huntsville to his ‘special’ accelerated school. Then she drove to an AMC dealership on University Drive — Huntsville’s auto row — and answered phones until 2:30. Then back across town to pick David up at 3:00. Home. Fed Papa his late lunch. Took a nap. Woke up. Fed everyone supper. Then drove to J.F. Drake State Community & Technical College for two hours of LPN classes — 7:00 to 9:00. Home by 9:30 to check on the kids. Changed into her nurses aide uniform. Took a nap. Then off to Huntsville Hospital for third shift — 11:00 PM to 3:00 AM. Home by 3:30. Another nap. Up at 6:00.

Repeat. Monday through Friday.

Saturday morning was Winn Dixie day. Stevie came over to help carry the groceries in. Saturday afternoon was laundry day — our clothes and the neighbors’ clothes, washed, dried, folded and ironed for a little extra money. Papa Charlie had made sure of that. Before he lost his legs, he had bought Ann a washing machine, a dryer, and she always had her iron. He had seen to it that his daughter would have the tools she needed. She used every one of them.

Sunday was church. And rest.

She did this for her children. She never complained. She never quit.

That was Ann.

And somewhere in all of it, young David learned what not being tired meant.

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Ann’s Day — Every Trek She Made

Time	Stop	What She Did
6:00 AM	Home — 3312 Bradley Street	Fed Papa breakfast. Woke the kids. Girls walked to Ridgecrest Elementary.
8:00 AM	Huntsville Junior High School, Randolph Street	Dropped David off for the accelerated program.
8:30 AM – 2:30 PM	AMC Dealership — University Drive (approximate)	Answered phones. Huntsville’s auto row. Exact location lost to time.
3:00 PM	Huntsville Junior High School, Randolph Street	Picked David up.
3:30 PM	Home — 3312 Bradley Street	Fed Papa his late lunch. Took a nap. Woke up. Fed everyone supper.
7:00 – 9:00 PM	J.F. Drake State Community & Technical College	LPN classes.
9:30 PM	Home — 3312 Bradley Street	Checked on the kids. Changed into nurses aide uniform. Took a nap.
11:00 PM – 3:00 AM	Huntsville Hospital	Third shift. Bedpans. Patience. Exhaustion.
3:30 AM	Home — 3312 Bradley Street	Asleep by 4:00. Up at 6:00. Repeat.

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The License

Ann did not set out to become a nurse because of Lyndon B. Johnson. She set out to become a nurse because her children needed to eat.

But President Johnson helped anyway.

In 1964, as part of his Great Society initiative, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Nurse Training Act of 1964 — at the time, the most comprehensive nursing legislation in American history. It allocated $283 million over five years to build nursing schools, expand programs, and create student loans for working people who wanted to become nurses but could not afford the front door. The federal government had decided that the country needed nurses, and it was going to help pay to train them.

One of the schools that benefited was J.F. Drake State Technical College on Meridian Street North in Huntsville, Alabama — founded in 1961, renamed in honor of Joseph Fanning Drake, long-serving president of Alabama A&M University, and in 1967 the first desegregated postsecondary technical school in the United States. By the early 1970s, Drake State had a nursing program. It was exactly the kind of school the Nurse Training Act was designed to feed.

Marcus David Limbaugh died in 1972. He was thirty-five years old.

Ann was thirty-three. She had three children. She had a daddy with no legs who needed her. She had a washing machine, a dryer, and neighbors’ laundry to iron on Saturdays. She had a phone to answer at an AMC dealership on University Drive. She had a third-shift uniform for Huntsville Hospital. And she had, somewhere in the back of whatever drawer she kept her ambitions, the knowledge that nurses made more than receptionists.

She enrolled at Drake State. Nights. Two years. Family memory holds the graduation at approximately 1975 — the exact date is not documented, but the diploma was real.

To become a Licensed Practical Nurse in Alabama, a graduate had to pass the National Council Licensure Examination — the NCLEX-PN. It is not a formality. It is a test of pharmacology, patient assessment, medical-surgical nursing, maternal and child nursing, and clinical judgment. You study for it after your shift. You study for it after your children are asleep. You study for it in the car in the parking lot of Huntsville Hospital at 10:45 at night before you walk in for third shift.

And sometimes, you study at the kitchen table on Bradley Street, while your teenage son sits across from you with a stack of index cards he made himself — handwritten, every term, every drug, every procedure — and drills you until you have it right. David made the flashcards. David ran the drills. He did not know pharmacology. He did not need to. He knew the cards, and he knew his mother, and he asked the questions until she had the answers.

And then he sat across the table from her and helped her pass.

Ann passed.

She went to work as a Licensed Practical Nurse at Crestwood Hospital in Huntsville — a community hospital that had opened in 1965, founded by three local physicians, smaller and newer than Huntsville Hospital but a real hospital, with real patients who needed a real nurse. Ann was that nurse. She worked there until Steve Brown moved the family to Tennessee. What came after that is the next part of the story.

Lyndon Johnson signed the bill. J.F. Drake State built the program. Ann Oldfield Limbaugh showed up every night and did the work.

That is how it actually works.

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Steve Brown

The summer after David’s ninth grade year — the summer of 1975, the same summer Ann finished at Drake State — Ann remarried. His name was Steve Brown.

Steve Brown moved the family out of Huntsville. First to Manchester, Tennessee — which was not, for David, entirely unfamiliar ground. He had spent his summers there with Aunt Ophelia and Uncle Ernest and a houseful of cousins, hauling hay, picking blackberries, hauling logs from the nearby forest down to McMinnville, gardening and farming the land. He knew Manchester. He knew the cousins. When school started in Manchester, he was going to class with people he had spent every summer with. It was not Huntsville, but it was not new or strange.

Then Steve Brown moved them again. To Smyrna, Tennessee.

David knew nobody in Smyrna. He was a complete stranger. Away from Bradley Street. Away from the Merrimack Mill Village neighborhood where the Oldfields had lived for decades. Away from the cousins in Manchester. Away from the kinfolk on both sides — the Limbaughs out in the Chase area, the Oldfields right there in Huntsville Park. Away from everything he had ever known. In Smyrna, he started over from scratch.

The summer after David’s junior year, Steve Brown vanished in the middle of the night.

Not before cleaning out the bank account. Every dime.

Not before taking the money that Aunt Lot and Uncle John — Ann’s own people, Huntsville Park people — had paid her for her side of the duplex. Papa Charlie had bought Ann’s side. His mill co-worker Uncle John had bought the other side at the same time. Two halves of one building, two families, the way the mill village had always worked. Ann’s family bought her out of her half. Steve Brown took that money too.

Not before taking the car. Steve Brown took the 1976 blue and white El Camino. Uncle Punk and Uncle Bud drove up from Alabama in separate cars. They gave Ann some money — what kinfolks did back then. Then Uncle Bud drove Uncle Punk back to Alabama, and they left Ann Uncle Punk’s 1968 blue Rambler.

He left her with debts in both their names that she had not known were coming.

And then he was gone.

Ann was a single mother again. Three children. A stack of bills with her name on them. A car she didn’t own and payments she hadn’t agreed to. No house. No savings. In Tennessee, not Alabama, far from her people.

She had been here before. Not exactly here — but close enough. She knew what it looked like when the floor dropped out. She knew what to do next.

She went back to work.

She kept on working. Third shift nurse at the County Nursing Home on County Farm Road. In Tennessee now, not Alabama, but the work was the same — bedpans, patience, exhaustion, and the quiet dignity of caring for people who needed her.

And David went to work too.

His senior year at Smyrna High School, David walked into the office of his basketball coach, Stan Summerall, and told him he had to quit the team. He had to go to work. Coach Summerall heard him out.

David found three jobs. Gil’s IGA. Shoney’s. Brandon Hardware. His senior year in high school, while other kids were worried about Friday night games and who was taking whom to homecoming, David was working three jobs to help his mother and his sisters keep the lights on.

He had learned earlier in life what real work looked like. He had watched it every morning at six o’clock on Bradley Street. He had drilled his mother on pharmacology flashcards at the kitchen table. He knew exactly what was being asked of him.

Ann had taught him well.

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Billy

After her kids were grown and out of the house, Ann moved back to Huntsville. Back to her kinfolks. Back to her friends. Back to Crestwood Hospital. She had left, she had survived everything that happened after she left, and now she was home.

And there was Billy Douglas.

Billy was a Chase, Alabama man — from the same northeast Huntsville neighborhood where the Limbaugh kinfolk had always been, where Papa Joe had tended the Chase Nursery rows, where Marcus David Limbaugh had grown up. Billy had been a high school friend of Ann’s first husband. He had known her people for years. Some things take a long time to find their moment.

Billy Douglas became husband number three. Ann was happy. There were hummingbirds in the backyard. Songbirds. Squirrels. A hummingbird bush and a butterfly bush. The feeders were stocked and the yard was alive.

He was the kind of man you feel relieved about — relieved that she finally had one of those.

One day Billy fell on the front porch and hurt his ribs. He went to the doctor to get checked out. The doctor found advanced cancer. A couple of months later, Billy was gone.

A few years after that, one of David’s sisters was in Gatlinburg on vacation with her fiancé. She died of a heart attack.

Ann buried a husband she loved, and a child.

She kept going.

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What Ann Loved

In May of 1992, Ann’s daughter Brenda — not daughter-in-law, daughter — was diagnosed with A.L.S. Lou Gehrig’s disease. She was thirty-one years old.

Brenda was also David’s ex-wife. His high school sweetheart. She had divorced David a year after they returned from two and a half years in the Netherlands in 1986. She was not happy with David constantly flying around the country fixing problems at customer sites. The sixty-hour weeks when he was home. He offered to quit his job. She told him she loved the money. She was not happy raising three kids while he was constantly gone.

They went to one lawyer — a friend of David’s. David gave her forty percent of his net income — thirteen point three percent for each child — until the kids graduated college or turned twenty-one if they didn’t. He gave her the one-year-old Ford Escort he had bought when they returned from Europe, because he knew she was going to be a stay-at-home mom and needed a safe car. He continued making the payments on it. He continued to pay the car insurance. A car he would never drive again.

He had come home from Europe to find out that her stepfather Jim had forged Charles D. Limbaugh on the title of his 1975 Monte Carlo with captain seats — his baby — and sold it. Jim offered David a chest freezer as compensation. David asked Jim if it had four wheels, a steering wheel, and an Alpine sound system. He wanted them arrested for car theft. His high school sweetheart asked him not to. He didn’t.

For six months after the divorce, they still lived in one side of a duplex in Huntsville Park while David saved up enough to buy a car. He bought a hoopty from his coworker and friend Bobby Curtis — a rusty old Nissan with a six-speed transmission and a right headlight that pointed up into the trees as he drove down the road. He found two roommates from work. Forty percent of his income, plus a car payment and insurance on a car he would never drive again, took a toll.

Mom wanted her daughter and grandchildren to be happy. David did too.

In 1988, on the urging of one of David’s own cousins, Brenda took David to court to try to get a share of his Intergraph stock added to the divorce decree. The judge ruled with David.

In 1992, Davy was twelve. Patricia was nine — she had been born in the Netherlands. J.D. was six.

Ann called her son at work in Atlanta, crying her eyes out. Brenda was sick. She had A.L.S.

David went to see his boss, Bill Dunbar — a man he had worked for across two different companies for almost half of his then eleven and a half year career. He told Bill what was happening. Bill told David to go see the owner, Ken Byers.

David told Ken he needed to give two weeks’ notice. Ken told David to have a seat. Ken told David to just tell him what was going on. He already knew — Bill had called him.

Ken said: leave now. Go be with your family. You have plenty of vacation days built up. You are on vacation.

David got a U-Haul. His old red and white Chevy Cavalier had died the previous year, and his new car was MARTA — the Atlanta transit system. After all, he was living on sixty percent of his paycheck. You ride what you can afford.

David left. The job. The apartment. The coworkers. The friends. The season tickets. He moved back to Middle Tennessee and rented a house on Manson Pike in Murfreesboro. He moved Ann in. He moved Brenda in. He moved the three grandchildren in. Three generations under one roof — Ann, her daughter, her grandchildren, and David. That is what Huntsville Park folks did. You did not have to explain it. You just did it.

David rented Brenda a hospital bed. He got a job in Nashville with a customer from his Atlanta days. Ann worked. The house ran.

By 1995, Brenda was in a private room at the county nursing home where Ann worked third shift. Ann was her nurse. Some nights the children would ride to work with their grandmother and spend the night with their mother. Ann made sure of that too.

That year David bought a house on Warrior Drive, two blocks from Riverdale High School. He made sure the new house had a butterfly bush and a hummingbird bush in the backyard. A hummingbird feeder. Two anti-squirrel bird feeders. A squirrel feeder mounted on the privacy fence he built around the yard.

Mom was happy.

Ann loved her babies. And her grandbabies. And her great-grandbabies. Each one of them got the full version of her — the same woman who had worked three jobs and studied pharmacology at the kitchen table and never once suggested any of it was inconvenient.

She loved Kroger Wednesday Senior Nights. She went every week. When Kroger stopped doing them, she was mad about it. She had earned those Wednesday nights and did not appreciate anyone taking them away.

She loved her animals. The big birds were the problem. They would muscle in and crowd out the little birds, and Ann was not going to stand for that. She would run out into the backyard with a broom and chase the big birds off so the little ones could eat in peace. David once found a radio-controlled tank that shot BBs and told her he could buy it for her. She laughed. She didn’t need a tank. She had a broom and she knew how to use it.

One day she looked out and saw several large birds attacking a small bird in the yard. She went out. She picked the small bird up. She put it in the garage. She nursed it back to health.

Of course she did.

She was a nurse. It’s what she did.

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Wednesday, April 17, 2013 — “Go to Your Ballgame”

For years, Ann had been telling her son the same thing. Quit that job. Stop driving back and forth to Nashville. Go to school. Be a baseball coach. Do what you have dreamed about your entire life.

Ann had gone to a two-year school. No one in the family had ever gone to a four-year university. David had built his entire CAD/CAM/Reprographics career on self-taught skills — no degree, just ability and thirty years of hard work. Going back to school at his age, for a four-year degree, to become a coach, was not a small thing. Ann thought he should do it anyway.

David decided to do it. He left his thirty-year career and went to college. To make Mom proud.

April 17, 2013. Graduation was seventeen days away — May 4th. David is in the back seat of his great friend and fellow baseball coach Kerrick Cron’s car. Another awesome friend and fellow coach, Chris Biggs, is in the passenger seat. They are headed to Siegel High School — a regular season baseball game. They are stopped at the light on Thompson Lane, the Marathon Gas station on their right, a fast food restaurant on their left. They are talking baseball.

David’s cell phone rings.

It was Mom. She was crying.

She had been diagnosed with lung cancer. It had metastasized to her lymph nodes and kidneys. The exact same cancer that had taken Dad. Her third time having cancer. She was at the doctor’s office with his sister when she called.

David asked her if he needed to have the car turned around and come be with her.

Ann said: “No. You go to your ballgame. Have fun with your friends. We will get this fixed.”

Seventeen days later, she watched her son walk across the stage and get his diploma.

Demo’s Restaurant made sure Ann had a table where some folks could celebrate with her. Stevie drove up from Huntsville. Family and friends were there. Ann was going to have her son’s graduation dinner at Demo’s. She loved their chicken noodle soup — she always told them more carrots, and at some point Demo’s had started putting more carrots in her soup. She loved their bread. Demo’s folks loved Mom. They knew her. They knew her order. They knew about the carrots.

She was seventy-three years old. She had buried a brother on her second birthday. She had buried a husband she loved and a daughter. She had been left in the middle of the night with three children and a stack of bills she hadn’t made. She had worked third shift for decades. She had survived cancer twice before.

We will get this fixed.

That was Ann.

She was right. Eighteen weeks of daily chemotherapy and three-day-a-week radiation. It got fixed. She rang the bell.

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Ann had a rough life. She lost two great men to cancer and married one terrible man who took everything she had.

She would tell you she had a great life. Three kids. Five grandkids. Ten great-grandkids. She always had a smile on her face.

David is going to miss his Mom. She was HIS Mom.

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Please don’t smoke. If you do smoke, please quit. Smoking took Marcus Limbaugh far too young and made the later years of Ann’s life terrible. She passed away because her lungs — scarred from years of smoking, lung cancer, chemotherapy, and radiation treatments — finally gave up.

David went to see Ann at hospice the night she passed away. They played Go Fish without cards. They talked. He gave her a breathing treatment. Around nine o’clock he gave her a kiss and told her he would be back to see her in the morning.

That morning never came.

Within an hour of hearing that Mama Ann had died, David’s best friend Stevie — fifty-nine years of friendship, his entire life — sent him a YouTube link. A song David had never heard before. Charles Bradley performing a soulful cover of Black Sabbath’s “Changes.”

Stevie knew it was the perfect song. Stevie had lost a Mom too.

Daisy Ann Oldfield — June 20, 1939 — July 6, 2019.

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