Touch of Gray - June / July 2005

Getting To Know You - At Carolina Meadows
Betty McMahan

Getting To Know You - At Carolina Meadows
   “Here we are, with hundreds of dear friends—and off we’re going to a place where we know, by name, not a soul! How long will it take us to feel at home among those strangers?”

   Nearly half of Carolina Meadows residents, especially those coming some distance from the Triangle area, must have asked that question of each other.  Others have been fortunate to have resident friends awaiting their arrival.

   A triumvirate of the Administration, Residents Association and neighbors have combined to make the transition rich in supportive friendliness.

   Take the Move-in Day, for example: The newcomers are greeted with a welcome packet including an immense amount of information about services available from all departments of the Administration, plus utilities, hairdressers, athletic facilities, etc. And, at noontime, a luncheon, adequate for half-a-dozen persons, is delivered to the scene, courtesy of Mark Maxwell and his Dining Services crew.

   “I couldn’t get over that wonderful meal,” said Helen Robins, “just in time for a break in the middle of our hard day’s work. Yummy sandwiches, fruit, drinks – enough to share with the movers and some left over for the next day.”

   Helen McLane found herself alone in her villa – the movers would be a day late. “I had nothing but my African violets,” she reported. “But Bob and Inge Newton, neighbors who had moved in only two weeks earlier, stepped in to provide me with bedding so that I could stay overnight in my otherwise empty place and be ready when the movers came early the next day.”

   “That was just the beginning,” she added.  “Shortly I received visits and gifts from neighbors.  I was invited to meet others at homes, with dinner following at the Club Center.” 

   Hastening recognition of the new residents, Carolyn Hatley, director of resident services, arranges for display of their photographs in the Club Center entrance, along with names and arrival dates.

    Carole and Dave Morrison couldn’t get over the host of drivers and walkers passing their villa who stopped on moving day to introduce themselves, offer a hearty welcome, and volunteer to help as needed.

   That was followed by gifts of homemade bread and cookies, an invitation from a stranger met at the bulletin board, another party before the special Christmas Dinner, and going to a Women’s Group luncheon where seating was by lot and everyone quickly got acquainted.

   The Carolina Meadows Administration helps new residents to thoroughly understand operations by holding informative meetings on three consecutive Tuesdays within three months after their arrival.  With refreshments served, there is ample time for the newcomers to get to know each other. And representatives of each department, e.g. finance, health, maintenance, activities, make clear the functions described in the handbook given out on arrival.

   Prior to or soon after their arrival, Carolina Meadows monthly newsletter, The Meadowlark, lists newcomers under the cartoon heading, Movers and Shakers.  Short bio’s include educational and vocational experience, writings, military and volunteer services, and special interests.

   Of major importance in making newcomers feel at home is the Residents Association which sponsors activities for the welfare of all residents, including semi-annual parties for those who came to Carolina Meadows the preceding six months.  

   The most recent event was held May 4 in the auditorium under the direction of Ginnie Jobe, Welcoming Committee chairperson.  Special music, floral decorations and refreshments were the background for the occasion.  Twenty-one people who had come to Carolina Meadows over the past six months were recognized and had opportunity to be greeted by 160 fellow-residents.

   Membership in the Carolina Meadows Residents Association is divided up into fourteen areas, which are called precincts.

   All residents are given durable nametags and are expected to wear them at the Residents Association and precinct meetings to speed up two-way recognition of and by newcomers.

   At monthly precinct and Association meetings, new arrivals are welcomed.  Each precinct has a designated greeter who calls promptly on newcomers, giving out the Association’s own informative packet including a directory, history of Carolina Meadows and descriptions of special activities.

   These are some other the ways in which precincts give special encouragement to newcomers:

   In apartment precinct 5 birthdays are posted for each successive month.  New residents are reminded to sign up for the monthly birthday dinners at the Club Center. And everyone sends a birthday card to the new neighbor.

   Apartment precinct 6 similarly observes birthdays. The residents gather to decorate their lobby for Christmas and again for the celebration of springtime.  Participants bring food for a potluck meal each time.  Newcomers are asked to tell of their families, employment, activities and hobbies when introduced at the precinct meeting.

    To draw out residents, new and established, at a tea in an apartment 6 parlor Jean Breckenridge offered a list of topics for each to choose to speak about (influences affecting one’s life; special memories; hero or heroine, etc.)

   Social activities for the apartment 3 precinct include an annual summer picnic, December holiday party, and a monthly “Happy Hour.”

   Precinct 12 has greeters for newcomers in each of its two circles of villas. Invitations to “happy hours” preceding dinners are assured within the first month.

   On May 18 residents of Precinct 8 enjoyed their annual picnic on the grounds behind the villas of Jean Waterbury and Charles and Natalie Tennant on Appletree Lane.  Participants contributed food from their kitchens or cash to pay for drinks and other items.  Special recognition was given to the eight residents who had moved into villas during the past year.

   Most precincts have a lively interest in the welfare of their residents. Rides beyond the usual Carolina Meadows free transportation may be provided. And visitors keep in touch with any who need Health Center care or assistance at home.

   Beyond the spontaneous neighborhood friendships residents find ample opportunity for developing ties with people of like interests in the 29 standing committees and 29 activity groups sponsored by the Residents Association.  Included are sports (golf, tennis, bocce, croquet), discussion groups, play reading, bird watching, and volunteer services related to the Health Center and the Fairways (assisted living). 

   Helen McLane spoke warmly of her continuing development of friendship within the Carolina Meadows “family”:

    "Soon after arriving at Carolina Meadows, I read about the Meadows Assistance Program, which held particular appeal for me as an activity.  I had been doing similar work--assisting clients in getting to medical appointments-- for many years.

    "As you would expect, I have met wonderful people in the organization, both volunteers and clients.

    "I would urge any newcomer to become active on campus immediately, with the caveat of not taking on too much.  There are so many choices, it is easy to get overloaded.  I think most CM people would agree that they've never been busier!" -- John Banks

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Betty McMahan
    Shortly before her eightieth birthday in April, 2004, Betty McMahan -- retired Professor of Biology Emeritus from the University of North Carolina and resident of Carolina Meadows -- began to write a sequel to an autobiographical book she completed about 14 years before entitled Heart and Nerve and Sinew.

    In a little over a year the sequel, Warming Both Hands before the Fire of Life, was completed. More than just a brief autobiography, it is a work in three volumes. These three books cover her year in the Peace Corps in Jamaica, her first six years at Carolina Meadows, diaries of her eight voyages to New Zealand and Australia on cargo ships, and two final chapters entitled “Legacy” and “Finis.” All-in-all over five hundred pages.

    But that is just part of the story The books not only preserve the memory of these later years of McMahan’s life in prose, but she gives the reader an additional treat in placing a number of her delightful drawings throughout that her relatives and friends have enjoyed through her illustrations in her children’s books and the Meadowlark, the Carolina Meadows newsletter.

    Throughout the past year, her apartment has become a small publishing house as she not only wrote and illustrated these books, but also printed them on her computer, learned to use the software for photos and color illustrations, and collated and bound them herself with a binding comb.

    What was the incentive for the author to undertake this task at this time in her life? She thought that her first memoir needed a sequel. More than that, it was a request of The Sallie Bingham Center for Women’s History and Culture at the Duke University Perkins Library that really made McMahan begin organizing her material and writing these three volumes.

Duke Connection
    Betty McMahan was born in Davie County, NC, and was raised in the state’s Piedmont area on a small family farm near Mocksville that had sorghum cane as the main cash crop. Early on, she knew she wanted to be a biologist, and began her college work at Appalachian. She later transferred to Duke in order to work in the Parapsychology Laboratory under the direction of Dr. J. B. Rhine, and later graduated from Duke with both a Bachelor’s and Master’s degree in psychology. (She received her Ph.D. from the University of Hawaii in entomology and was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Chicago.)

    Late in 2002 when she received the Duke Alumni Magazine, McMahan read an interesting article about the Perkins Library’s Special Collections section that mentioned the collection’s Nancy Drew books. Since Nancy Drew, the young detective, had been a heroine of her adolescent years, and since she had written children’s books -- ten in number -- UNC’s retired biologist wrote to Amy Leigh, archivist for the Bingham Center, to see if she would be interested in seeing her children’s books. Several of these books feature a young heroine also -- Cammie -- who has adventures reflecting the life McMahan knew in her childhood on the farm. The result was that she reveled in a morning of browsing through children’s books in the collection -- including Nancy Drew -- and she was asked to place the books she had written in the collection.

    The Special Collections Library also asked for her papers that she had saved from her years with the Rhine Institute and these items are now in the library in a Special Collection named for Elizabeth McMahan.

    Then Duke accepted ten volumes of the Life at Carolina Meadows booklets that contain the cartoons she created for her retirement community and also the children’s books that she wrote and illustrated in color for her young relatives: Mr. Piccadilly’s Fantastic Machine; ‘Possums and Persimmons; The Up-Side-Down Backward, Mixed-Up Spell; We’re Off in Our Carriage to Visit the King; and A Visit to Santa’s Workshop, as well as the Cammie books.

Aboard the Blue Star Line
    A good part of Warming Both Hands is devoted to eight voyages aboard cargo ships that took McMahan to Australia and New Zealand and back to the United States during this past decade. She traveled with a British company, the Blue Star Line, and eventually was a passenger on three of its ships --the Melbourne Star, the America Star, and the Sydney Star. Her book has many color photos and drawings of the container ships, both exterior and interior, and of the crew. An important incentive for each trip was the solitude of approximately two months to write and illustrate the children’s books for her large family of nieces and nephews. But since she had traveled to many parts of the world during her professional years, the adventure of the freighter trips was also appealing to her.

    Wherever she has worked or traveled, McMahan’s enthusiasm and curiosity has brought her a host of friends. And the same held for her voyages to Australia. She and Captain Cecil Jackson, known to his friends and family as “Cec.” eventually became fast friends. Little did she know when she boarded his ship for the first time that he was also an artist and she says he was an invaluable mentor as she worked on her illustrations.

    Jackson’s painting of one of his company’s ships is a treasured gift that is displayed in Betty McMahan’s living room. She acknowledged the captain’s contributions in the foreword of her book for his encouragement of her onboard drawing and his help in understanding mariner affairs. The other two people she credits with invaluable help in her project are Richard Craddock, of Carrboro, and his brother, George, of Cary, computer experts who frequently came to her rescue.

    In her book is a picture of the memorial to Arctic explorer, Robert Scott, taken at Port Chalmers, New Zealand. The last chapter of Volume II is dedicated to Captain James Cook, McMahan’s favorite explorer, and it was gratifying for her to stand on the deck of the replica of his ship, the Endeavor, when it was in Wilmington, NC, in the spring of 1998. She kept up with the travels of the replica Endeavor as it made its way around the waters and harbors of the world and she went on board again in Sydney in 2001. Later in Raleigh she was pleased to meet Tony Horwitz, author and Pulitzer Prize winner, whose book about Captain Cook’s voyages, Blue Latitudes, was a bestseller.

Betty McMahan’s Legacy
    Near the end of the third volume of Warming Both Hands, McMahan includes a chapter that she entitles “Legacy.” It is not surprising that she mentions her students first.

    As a university professor during her professional life, she taught and worked with many undergraduate and graduate students for 26 years in the classroom and the laboratory. A number of them accompanied her on her research trips around the world, which included the study of termite colonies in Puerto Rico, Australia, Venezuela, Costa Rica, India, Panama, and Egypt. Some of her students are in close touch with her and they have become like a second family as well as good friends.

    One of these former students, Christy Nalepa, is an adjunct professor at North Carolina State and a researcher with the North Carolina Department of Agriculture. Christy and her husband, Pat Rand, invited McMahan to dinner one evening in May 2004, to celebrate her eightieth birthday. After dinner Christy presented a large flat package wrapped as a birthday present for her professor. Inside was a certificate that read: “The Libraries of North Carolina State University are pleased to announce the creation of the Elizabeth A. McMahan Endowment, which is a fund created by Christine Nalepa in honor of her eightieth birthday and supported by your friends, students, colleagues, and fans.” McMahan says, “This high honor is rooted, of course, in my first proud legacy, my students.

    The second legacy she lists is that two insect species carry her name: a tiny beetle that lives closely with termites, Neophilotermes mcmahanae, which means McMahan’s new lover of termites, and an assassin bug, Salyavata mcmahanae. The beetle was discovered in 1967 while she was working at Rancho Grande, a field station founded by the famous naturalist, William Beebe, in Venezuela. The discovery of the assassin bug (which uses the carcasses of termites as bait for “fishing” additional termite workers from their nests) was in 1984 in Panama Some years later (2001) she was contacted by the curator of the National Natural History Museum in Leiden who asked to see the specimens she brought back from Panama and found that among them was a new species and asked if he might name this variety for her.

    Other legacies she lists are her professional publications, of which they’re are more than 50, her illustrations, and her teaching tools. Carolina Meadows residents cherish her whimsical drawings, which have appeared not only in the newsletter, but as a mural on the Club Center auditorium wall as the addition was built, in the 15-year history of Carolina Meadows published in 2000, as the design for the Carolina Meadows quilt that is displayed in the auditorium, and now on brown paper covering the gift shop window with “peep holes” to view the current renovation of the shop.

    One of her legacies that has continued as a “treat” through more than 40 years for the UNC-CH Biology Department is the annual Ice Cream Cone Party started by Betty McMahan in 1963. Faculty, graduate students, staff, and their families come every year during the week of final exams. In later years this amounted to ordering 400 cones and close to 20 gallons of ice cream. Butter pecan seemed to be the favorite, but strawberry, chocolate, chocolate revel, and rainbow sherbet are also included. In the 1970’s she remembers one afternoon when she was bringing all of the ice cream back from Durham and her car broke down on 15-501. She records that “on its final gasp, I was able to coax it into the driveway of a motel,” and she convinced the manager who was there alone to close the motel and drive her to the biology lab at UNC. The ice cream was not melted and the party went on as planned!

    In Elizabeth McMahan’s own words from her autobiography Warming Both Hands -- . . .”I am naming it from the brief poem, Finis, by Walter Savage Landor (1775-1864):

‘I strove with none, for none was worth my strife.
Nature I loved and next to Nature, Art.
I warm’d both hands before the fire of life;
It sinks, and I am ready to depart.’

    I don’t know, at this point, that I am quite ‘ready to depart,’ but I like the metaphor of warming both hands before the fire of life. It is what I think I have tried to do -- and succeeded beyond my hopes.” -- Pauly Dodd, Resident

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