America was having mid-term elections during Jimmy Carter’s administration, and I had a problem. Turnips. During our first summer in East Tennessee, I finally had beat back drought, Japanese beetles, and creeping Bermuda grass (Mudey, to the natives) in the garden. But I didn’t know when to harvest the turnips. Someone had told me the first killing frost came on November 4, and at the same time the Daily Times was talking about a long growing season. So I called our neighbor, the fellow who lived by the sub-station. He was the line foreman when TVA installed electricity. He said to leave turnips in the ground as long as the tops were fresh. Pulling too soon robbed them of sweetness, but if tops were frozen they’d turn bitter. As a girl, I tangled with hard alkali soil and absolutely no summer rain in the near-desert conditions of Northeast Wyoming. The growing season was little more than three months. There, root crops would remain in good shape in the cellar. Here, a crawl space would fill the bill when the nights turned cold.
When we looked to buy, there were few low-cost houses available. Only one with a vacant lot for a garden in Maryville. I wanted to show my big city husband that we could eat well if we had a garden. I packed Mason jars from Illinois and bought more to reach 360 quarts. Beans, tomatoes, peaches, and whatever else was fresh and cheap would help the budget. Within one year, the price of a sheet of plywood had skyrocketed. There was plenty to do on our fixer-upper. Each time we went to the lumberyard, Jimmy Carter’s words ran through my mind: “Inflation is the cruelest tax of all.”
Retiring when we did raised a terrible risk. The weather had been extremely cold in the Chicago area for three successive years before we pulled up stakes. To make matters worse, natural gas was in short supply. A hint of a looming “rust belt” was circling my husband’s work. Mine would be changing also. What was to become a PC was still only an intelligent terminal. Teaching computer science would change shortly. IBM’s 360s had turned into 370s. A device, as long as a six-foot work bench, belched toner and was heralded as the newest thing in laser printers.
In Tennessee, we bought a used Datsun Honeybee to beat the high price of gasoline and vowed that we would not go into debt, nor use what capital we had. Then came the Gipper. Reagan’s inflation really tested our resolve. I remember local television showing the President at the World’s Fair in Knoxville in 1982. It was an Energy Exposition. During those years there were brownouts during the hottest part of the summer. A Mr. Friedman was in charge of TVA’s plan for more nuclear plants, the same man who later was in Los Angeles during the energy crisis in the early part of this century. By the spring of 1983, Knoxville was highlighted for having the first big bank failures. In 1984, when Howard Baker didn’t run for the Senate again, Al Gore beat out the GOP. Lamar Alexander, who grew up in Maryville, was the governor.
Meanwhile, in our pea patch, we continued to survive. What few savings we had in bonds produced double digit interest. We finally could afford a better Japanese small car. We added a laundry room to replace the clothes line. It was a comfortable, although certainly not a lavish, way of living. Our neighbors had become friends. I felt I was accepted. Many of those early couples, and by now their children, are still my friends. It’s hard to understand the provincialism of Appalachian culture, and to this day I sometimes wonder how I ever adjusted to what is referred to as the Bible Belt. Let it be said that folks are folks.