Archive for September, 2009

Joan Herlong

Empty spaces

by Joan Herlong

No Comments    |   Email to Friend    |   Print    |   RSS 2.0
Sep
18

Published in the Sept 18, 2009 Journal

There is one bright spot in the whole Sanford affair (pardon the pun), and that is the empty space.

Did you notice the empty space?  A lot of women have.  It was just to the left of the podium.  Back in July, while our pathetic, flaccid Governor mouthed on and on and on like a trout gasping on the end of a hook, I was giving a standing ovation to the empty space beside him.

That’s the space that had been heretofore filled by Sanford’s wife, Jenny.  From that spot, for years, she had dutifully cast adoring looks as her husband uttered original political thoughts that she had probably scripted.

Mrs. Sanford has truly earned her stripes in the politic trenches, largely by ignoring the dictates of the political edition of Sun-tzu’s The Art of War. She didn’t just act wifey and bake cookies (although she really does bake them, a lot). She managed her husband’s campaign, then became his unofficial Chief of Staff, cutting costs and stretching budgets along the way, all the while maintaining a laser beam focus on their family.  Although their four young sons were necessarily trotted out for the cameras every now and then, Jenny never subbed out mothering them.  She was and is the real deal.

But when she had to suffer a public humiliation that the rest of us only glimpse in occasional nightmares, she tossed out the political play book altogether. You know that chapter that says the politician’s wife has to stand there beside the elected lout, looking stoic and vacuous in the glare of the spotlight of political scandal?  Jenny shredded it. 

But she’s had to write a new play book as she goes along. While she faltered a bit at first, confusing an AP reporter for a personal therapist, it’s a forgivable lapse. (I would probably do far worse if the tatters of my personal life were in e-mails published in print and on line, perused by the prurient). When a politician’s wronged wife makes the unprecedented decision to put her family ahead of political expediency, she is sadly on her own.  You cannot expect anyone in their inner political circle to support bizarre family priorities that are bound to cost them their jobs.  She was expected to talk the talk about the kids, to be sure, that’s in Chapter One of the old play book.  But nobody in the Governor’s Mansion was prepared for Jenny to walk the walk, right out the door, leaving quiet quarters and unfilled shoes behind.

Now the empty spaces have morphed into a vacuum. While Jenny was always the brains beside the throne, it becomes clearer every day that she was the only brain behind it, and certainly the only effective governor on the Governor’s mouth. 

Sanford is blinded by his own ambitions to the writing on the wall that he scribbled, or perhaps still monumentally distracted by memories of his Argentinean paramour’s “two magnificent parts.”  At this point, there is only one other person, besides Sanford, in the entire state of South Carolina who does not think he should resign, and that’s his lawyer (a spicy irony, since Sanford is no friend to lawyers).

Jenny made her position clear, early on, telling reporters that the future of her errant husband’s political career “was his problem.” 

But now Sanford has become our problem. He is loathe to become yet another footnote in the annals of political peccadilloes.  So instead he has become the guest who won’t leave.  He’s the girlfriend in that Seinfeld episode who won’t let George break up with her. He is the political lint in South Carolina’s navel.

The empty space Jenny created is an inspiration to other politicians’ spouses, and a warning to other narcissistic politicians who assume that the wife will be by their side, right or wronged.  I also applaud her for leaving the door open to personal reconciliation, and hope they work it out. 

Until Sanford takes the only unpaid hand still reaching out to him, and leaves political life behind him, nothing good will happen in South Carolina’s economy. Whether he takes refuge with his wife, or makes another poor choice elsewhere, until Sanford evacuates, we’re stuck with a chronic vacancy in the Governor’s mansion.

 

 

Bookmark and Share
Lyn Riddle

On finding a calling

by Lyn Riddle

No Comments    |   Email to Friend    |   Print    |   RSS 2.0
Sep
18

Published: Sept. 18, 2009, 1:48 p.m.

The passion nibbled and gurgled and grew little by little until it reached on-a-mission status.

A sideline to a full-time job, the passion filled 13 or more years, and like many such things it arrived unexpectedly.

Now Arlene Marcley is the nation’s public face – the spokeswoman – for Shoeless Joe Jackson, the Greenville native considered the greatest natural hitter in baseball history, but banned forever from the sport he loved because he was implicated in the fix on the 1919 World Series.

Documents found in the past few years and other investigations have all but cleared Jackson of the crime of taking money to ensure the White Sox would lose to the Cincinnati Reds. He tried several times to give back money left in his hotel room. He played flawlessly.

Marcley doesn’t need to know about research or game statistics. She believed his innocence from the first time she heard about him, sitting at her desk outside the mayor’s office in Greenville City Hall.

She hadn’t been administrative assistant to Mayor Knox White long, a few months perhaps, when two men came in, gave the mayor a large, pieced-together picture of Jackson and asked him to sign a petition asking the baseball commissioner to lift the ban and let Jackson take his rightful place in the Baseball Hall of Fame.

That was 1995. She wasn’t even a baseball fan. Knew nothing about baseball might say it more accurately.

Something about this man’s story resonated with her. The unfairness. The lifetime of shame. See, Jackson was 34 when Commissioner Kennesaw Mountain Landis banned him, despite a Chicago jury’s acquittal.

Jackson lived 30 years more. He had been a hero to Greenville, a textile mill worker who played on the Brandon Mill team and then made it big. The legend of him playing shoeless because his new cleats hurt began at that little mill field off U.S. 123, now a renovated county park.

After the 1919 series, Greenville residents shunned him and his wife Katie. The Jacksons moved to Savannah to operate a dry cleaning business and then came back home where Jackson ran a liquor store in West Greenville.

Jackson had been dead 44 years in 1995 when Marcley realized no memorial existed. Anyone looking for history went to the mill ballpark or Jackson’s grave at Woodlawn, where they left socks, bats, balls.

Marcley staged a Jackson exhibit in the City Hall lobby every July – his birth month – for five years and every year packed up the memorabilia and put it in unused rooms at City Hall and her home.

Then, when the city was getting into the statue-erecting business, she broached the idea of honoring Jackson. She collected $60,000, and Doug Smith, an art professor at Bob Jones University, crafted during his off hours a life-size statue of clay. Schoolchildren would come to the City Hall lobby to watch and if there weren’t a lot of them Smith would let them knead the clay and put it on themselves.

“That was to be my last hurrah,” Marcley said.

The bronzed statue was erected at Main and Augusta in 2002.

But in 2005, Richard Davis, who made flipping houses for a living famous, walked into her office and said he wanted to buy the house Jackson owned – the place he died. Eventually, Davis donated the house for the Shoeless Joe Jackson Museum, across the street from West End Field.

She had not a moment of design instruction other than the Martha Stewart shows she taped and watched at night. Yet the place she created with the help of her husband Bill has been praised by people who design museum exhibits for a living.

Marcley estimates 4,000 people have visited the museum, which is free because she believes Jackson would welcome anyone to his home.

She hasn’t given up hope that Jackson will get his due. She feels his spirit in the house. Sometimes she wonders – why me, Joe? – then she remembers.

“It’s just a story that takes hold of your heart.”

 

Bookmark and Share
Lyn Riddle

On never giving up hope

by Lyn Riddle

No Comments    |   Email to Friend    |   Print    |   RSS 2.0
Sep
10

Published: Sept. 10, 2009, 10:26 a.m.

He was No. 70, a right guard for the Greenville High Red Raiders.

Three years younger, she was a cheerleader.

Brother and sister from a well-to-do family that lived on Chanticleer Drive in Greenville. Their father was a textile executive, their mother a debutante. The perfect couple.  The perfect family. Everyone thought so.

Few knew the truth.

Life inside that house festered with a mother’s schizophrenia and attempts to control the voices and the hallucinations with vodka, and an embarrassed father concerned with social standing and how things looked.

Call Richmond and his sister Rebecca Schaper emerged, yet their lives in the ensuing 30 years could not have been more different.

Richmond spent decades moving from town to town across the country, homeless and hearing voices only in his mind, surviving on odd jobs, Budweiser and Jack Daniel and whatever discarded cigarette butts he could find.

Schaper went to the University of South Carolina to study criminal justice, but instead met a national champion track star who six months later would become her husband. They raised two daughters, one of whom works with Jim Schaper at the software development company he founded seven years ago in Atlanta.

And in all the time they were apart, Schaper never gave up on her brother, even though others did.

“We don’t remember each other as children,” Schaper said. Blocked out, perhaps, by the chaos that controlled their lives. Schaper remembers having to go spend the night at a friends house and learned later it was the first time her mother was committed to Marshall Pickens Hospital.

Schaper was 6 when her mother tried to kill herself. Schaper learned later it was her second attempt. She remembers seeing her mother pour vodka into a glass and drink it straight and begging her mother to stop. “For me,” the little girl would plead.

As a teen she became stand-in mother for her younger brother as Richmond went off to Presbyterian College. But between semesters of his senior year, Richmond left school and began what would be 20 years on the road, some of it beside the railroad tracks in the woods off Poinsett Highway.

Mary Richmond, their mother, swallowed pills with vodka one night and died. Eleven years later, Call Richmond Sr. shot himself in the heart in the shower of the Chanticleer home. Schaper said he, too, had suffered from depression and had been hospitalized for it. She learned later a Boy Scout leader abused him.  

Schaper said through it all she never forgot Call Jr. She did not know where he was or even if he was alive. There was a phone call once. One visit. Then, about 10 years ago, her mother-in-law who lives in Anderson called. Call had been to her house to pick up furniture for Haven of Rest rescue mission.

The next day, Schaper drove to Anderson and there was her brother standing in the parking lot of the mission. They hugged. They cried.

“I haven’t let him out of my sight since,” she said.

She moved him into an apartment, got him treatment and made sure he took his medication. It has not been easy. Even the simplest tasks such as cutting toenails can be a problem for him. There has been one regression, and Richmond was hospitalized, but the journey generally has been slow and steady.

Their story is the subject of a documentary by Emmy-award winning filmmaker Kyle Tekiela to be released in time for the festival circuit next spring. Schaper says the film is her life’s mission. She wants to lift the veil of secrecy, to reduce the stigma people place on mental illness and the homeless.

Bill Lindsey, the executive director of the South Carolina chapter of the National Alliance on Mental Illness, said the perception of mental illness has certainly improved in the past 10 years, but the stigma remains.

This, even though one in four people in this country suffer from some form of mental illness. It must be seen as an illness just the same as diabetes, he said. It’s not a choice. It’s not behavior. It’s a problem with chemical development in the brain.  

Along the way, Schaper said she’s learned some things about herself – to be more patient and quiet, that she had to take care of herself before she could even hope to care for others. That she was not Call’s mother. She had to let go.   

And so perhaps it is a good thing that she is at her family’s beach house this weekend at DeBourdeau near Georgetown and Call is doing something on his own, with three high school pals.

He is attending his 40th high school reunion at the Shrine Club. The first reunion he has been to.

Bookmark and Share