Gail Piner – A Pitcher from a Good Mother

Claudia Henock 0:06
Welcome to another episode of Your Most Precious Thing, the podcast that delves deep into the captivating tales behind the objects we hold dear. I’m your host, Claudia Henock, and I’m thrilled to take you on a journey to uncover the mystery, the nostalgia, and the sheer wonder within the things that regular everyday people hold on to the most. So whether it’s a weathered trinket passed down through generations, or a modern day artifact with the surprising twist, Your Most Precious Thing is here to celebrate the sentimental, the quirky, and the downright unforgettable. And now, let’s meet our guest for this week.

Claudia Henock 0:36
Gail Piner is a retired academic who is finally pursuing the career she thought she’d have when she was twelve. She doesn’t recommend waiting as long as she did to pursue your dreams. Gail is interested in strong women, resilience, and the humor and hope that can help us get through difficult times. Her first novel, A High Courage, is about all those topics and is based on the best example she has known personally—her grandmother. Gail lives on the coast of North Carolina, where her main forms of exercise are dodging beach traffic, hurricanes, and alligators. Also, in regards to Gail’s audio, there’ll be a slight echo in the background that I want to let you all know about before we begin the episode.

Claudia Henock 1:19
Hi, Gail! Welcome to the podcast. How are you doing today?

Gail Piner 1:22
I’m great. Thank you for having me. I’m so pleased to be here.

Claudia Henock 1:27
I’m pleased that you’re able to join us today. So Gail, to start, what would you say is your most precious thing?

Gail Piner 1:35
Well, Claudia, I would have to say it is my grandmother’s pitcher, and I’ve had this for a long time. And I counted, I was trying to count up the other day, and I think it’s been through at least 18 different moves with me since about 1970. So it has travelled around the country, often where everything I owned was in my little car. And that would be one of the items that I always have with me, and it belonged to my grandmother.

Claudia Henock 2:11
Do you remember the story of how you first got the pitcher?

Gail Piner 2:14
Oh, I do. Actually I’m a little embarrassed by it. I believe I was either a senior in high school, or early in college, and was talking with my grandmother, my mother’s mother. And I grew up having sweet tea served out of that pitcher, you know, grandmother’s kitchen table. And I happened to look over at it and I said, “Grandmother, when you’re thinking about who to leave things to, the only thing I really, really want that pitcher.” And she said, and I can’t believe I had the nerve to say that, it was pretty rude. But anyway, she laughed, and she said, “Honey, you go get it right now and take it home with you. Because when I’m gone, I won’t be able to control who does what. And if you want it, I want you to have it.” And I was horrified. And I said “Oh no, no, no, no, no! I just meant, you know, way in the future.” And she was like, no, she was adamant. And so from the time I was about 18 or so, that has been in my possession. So basically, I’ve had that maybe well over 50 years. As though as awkward though it is, I am so glad, I’ve really, it is my most precious thing.

Claudia Henock 3:34
I’m really glad that she was able to give you that pitcher at that time, though, because she actually did make a good point about like, when people do pass away, the people who are in charge of the person’s things, they don’t have control about where like things are gonna go. So I’m really glad that she was able to give you the pitcher at that time, too.

Gail Piner 3:52
Yes, as I said, as embarrassed as I was. I thought my mother was going to be furious with me for even saying such a thing, because you just don’t ask for things in my family. But I have been so grateful that I made that thoughtless comment, and that she gave it to me. So yeah. And it’s always by my stove. Ever since my very first apartment, it holds all the utensils that I use, just fabulous, and so forth. Every now and then, I clean it up and serve tea out of it. But mostly it is a daily reminder for over 50 years of my grandmother.

Claudia Henock 4:31
That’s actually really sweet. And another thing that I want to ask about too was, this was something that you brought up before we did the recording. How old is the pitcher?

Gail Piner 4:41
Well, I just googled it again, I’ve been very frustrated by only having that mark on the bottom, and I wasn’t really sure what it was. I thought it was leaf. It turns out it’s a maple leaf. And this time when I was able to do a Google Image Search, and that worked the miracle, popped right up. There are some vintage ones on sale, you know, eBay, that kind of thing. This was made by an American company, and they stopped using that the maple leaf alone. After that, they started adding their company’s name, which I’ve now of course forgotten, something like Mortan, but when they only use the maple leaf, it was prior to 1930. Which is pretty interesting, because the book that I’ve written based on my grandmother’s life is 1928 and 1929. So the chances are, my grandmother had this at the time that my story takes place, which just gives me chills. So I’m delighted to have found that out. And I wouldn’t have known that except for this program, I thought, I’m gonna try one more time to find out something about the date, and the company. And there it was. Now I know, it’s more perfect than I could have ever predicted.

Claudia Henock 6:09
I’m so happy that you’re able to find out about how old the pitcher is. That’s really cool. And so, in speaking of your grandmother story, when we first met to discuss about you coming on to the show, you spoke about the book that you wrote about your grandmother’s life during that time period, what led you to start writing about it?

Gail Piner 6:29
This is a story that I’ve known my entire life. And as is the way when you grow up with a family story, it doesn’t seem remarkable to you, it’s just like the wallpaper, you know, this background. And as I got older, I realized how unusual it was. And what an amazing story it was. And I wanted to write it as a novel. And the problem is, not trained as a novelist. I’ve been an academic for over 25 years. So my field was psychology and management, and doing research and writing academic papers. That’s how I spent up my adult years.

Gail Piner 7:11
So after I retired a number of years ago, I started thinking as I got older, older, that if I kept procrastinating until I felt like “Yes, I could do it now,” it was going to be too late. So I started writing small pieces, memoir type pieces and reading books about writing fiction. And one day, I just sat down and thought, you know, you can’t keep putting this off. I was almost 70 at that point. So I started writing, and things that I had fussed with in my head for over 50 years, because I’m a perfectionist, about where to start the story, where to end the story, how to tell it, whose point of view, what person, I just made a decision and went with that. And the end result is I have the book, and it’s called “A High Courage”.

Gail Piner 8:09
I think what really drove me was realizing that if I were to be lying on my deathbed, what would I, what would I really regret? I would regret not writing this book. But this was it. So I have written it. And this house is about two miles from here. I’m in Wilmington, North Carolina, and that’s the intercostal waterway, and they see our island in the ocean in the background there. The artist who did the cover just I think did a smashing job. It’s actually, again, apparently my color scheme is a little dull, everything it’s much brighter in person anyway. So I have my book now, and I, so far is getting good reviews. And it’s the fulfillment for me of a lifelong dream to bring my grandmother’s story to life.

Claudia Henock 9:04
That’s really cool. So I read a little bit about what the story is about, and the experiences that your grandmother went through during that time period. What was extraordinary about the position that your grandmother was in during that time?

Gail Piner 9:17
Sure. As you can imagine things were not great for young women trying to find jobs in rural North Carolina back in the 20s. It wasn’t good in the 60s, so it’s certainly wasn’t good in the 20s. But my grandfather, who was 10 years older than my grandmother, died suddenly of a heart attack. So she was left at age 29 with six children. They had a 7th child who had died in infancy, but she had six living children ranging in age from 12 to four months. She had a newborn and she’s left a widow. She has only a six grade education because she married very young. And she finds out, after his funeral, that the house that she thought they owned, actually goes, went with his job. He was the manager of several farms in the area for landowner. And the land owner needed the house to be vacated pretty quickly, because he had to hire a new farm manager and get that person and his family in.

Gail Piner 10:25
And so she’s not only widowed at age 29, she is homeless. She has living parents, and she has three sisters in the area. But the problem is, the sisters, at least, have their own families. They have ever increasing size family, you know child is born every year or two, they can’t take in seven people, you know, an adult and six children. She does wind up staying with her parents for that 15 month period while she tries to figure out what to do, and how to save the lives of her children and herself and to figure out what needs to be done for them to continue on.

Gail Piner 10:25
And she has basically two paths are open to her, as we find out eventually. One is, her husband’s brothers, so her brother in law’s, they want to divvy the children out across their tobacco farms. And they act like they’re doing her a big favor. The problem is, she was very, very sure, and she and I had this conversation, that they wanted the children to be unpaid laborers in the field. And she didn’t think they would ever send the children to school. And therefore children would be locked into that life. They would never be inheriting any land from their uncles, because those uncle’s had 5,6,7 kids themselves. So they were going to be second class citizens. It was just going to be horrific.

Gail Piner 12:05
The other option open to her was my grandfather had belonged to a civic organization that had just finished building an orphanage. It’s kind of unusual, but it’s hard for us to understand now, perhaps. But this civic organization, which was a national wide thing, their members decided that their civic project would be to build an orphanage, but not a public one, one that was available only to their own children. So, which I could not understand the motivation that seemed very bizarre to me, but the orphanage, which is now not really an orphanage, it handles foster children, is still in operation.

Gail Piner 12:54
But they don’t have a good track of what the history was. So I had to play detective, what would motivate a group of men to raise enough money to build a very nice orphanage. The architecture was based on the University of Virginia, which if you have ever been there or seen photos has lovely colonial type, Georgian architecture, and what would possess them, and I can only think of two things: One was 10 years prior to WWI. So you had men being killed, leaving widows and their children, you know, with no means of support, and perhaps even more so. The Spanish flu, which happened right at the very end of World War One, and that decimated many, many families across the country, as well as around the world. It was the first pandemic of the 1900s. And I think that they saw what happened to women, who were left group children to take care of, no employment available. And so they decided they didn’t want that to happen to their children. And again, that’s speculation on my part, but really, it’s the only logical explanation I came up with. So that orphanage by sheer luck had just opened its doors the year before my grandfather died.

Gail Piner 14:26
And so my book is those 15 months where my grandmother is torn between basically doing what she was raised to being a sweet, obediant Southern woman, and doing what the men and her family wanted her to do, which was let them have those children. It was four girls and two young boys or defy her family, defy social customs, and the norms of that time and put her children in the orphanage instead, which by the way, was over 200 miles away. So she wouldn’t be seeing them very often, if she took that route, they wouldn’t be seeing her. So she had to think about what are, you know, what’s a good mother, a good mother keeps her children, a good mother raises her children and takes care of them. But she doesn’t really have an easy way to do that, or possible way that she can think up to do it herself and keep them. One way or the other, they’re going to be away from her. She, I have her in the book looking for jobs. And of course, she’s met with incredible skepticism, sixth grade education, and she’s not young, she’s 20. But by that time, she’s 30. She’s a 30 year old matron, she must be there to find a husband, that would be the thinking. So most of the office girls are going to be very young. And as soon as they get married, they stop working. Because that’s the way it went. So she’s not going to be lucky, finding that the kind of job that she wants to find. And she, it’s a time of her wrestling with this idea of what is it to be a good mother. And we see in the book that she has to recognize her own courage, she has to change her definition of what a good mother is. And she is just incredibly brave. And that’s why I’ve always thought that her story should be told.

Claudia Henock 16:36
That’s definitely really cool to hear as well. And definitely really important, because it sounds like based on her situation, she had just really two hard choices to decide with that will be essentially terrifying for any mother who’s in that

Gail Piner 16:51
Exactly!

Claudia Henock 16:53
It was basically, you’re damned if you do, damned if you don’t, type of situation. But she’s not thinking of herself. She’s thinking of safety of our children at that time, and what’s the best decision for them?

Gail Piner 17:02
And I have her and again, this is speculation on my part, I have her at the beginning of the book, very concerned with everything else. How will, what will people think of her? And what will her children think of her? Will they hate her, no matter what she does, you know all of this. And as she grows, she moves past all that. And it becomes: what is the best thing I can do for my children? And she is truly selfless in her decision. So, again, that led to the story that in my family, you know, we would go every Sunday afternoon to see grandmother, we’ve been Sunday afternoon at her house. And yet, my mother, as well as her siblings, would talk very openly about my grandmother’s decision. I’m trying not to give away, you know what that was, but it was a very natural thing. And apparently, to the extent that she worried that they might resent her, that simply didn’t happen. It was only as an adult, I could look back and realize how uncomplaining they all were, there was never any, “Oh, woe is me, you know, this happened”, not on her end, not on her children’s end, and it was, “Wow, this had to be done. And this was the best decision that was available.” And I, they all were courageous, not just my grandmother, but their focus is on grandmother, because the others are very young. They don’t have a part in that decision making. But she was under a lot of pressure.

Claudia Henock 18:45
So, when you are writing the story originally, I do understand at the time, based on our conversation, your mother and her siblings and the grandkids, like you and the other grandkids, had a really good relationship with your grandmother. What other insights do you have when it came to writing the story?

Gail Piner 19:03
I think that if you want to learn about yourself, just write a novel. It is amazing, the things that I remembered about my family, even though I am fictionalizing, to a great degree, I could still use events that actually happened. I had to transport them in time, of course. I wasn’t around in 1929. However much it might feel like it’s sometimes, but I had so many insights.

Gail Piner 19:30
For instance, one little minor thing when I was growing up, my mother would say, “Gail, I wish you had a better disposition.” She’d always sigh and shake her head. You know, when I had said something, you know, caustic or whatever. But in the book, in the first chapter, in fact, I decided to have a little fun and I have my grandmother saying that to her. And as I wrote that scene, I’m laughing, thinking, my mother’s no longer with us, but I thought, “Well, Mom, you know, and finally, you know, I’m zapping you back.” And then it occurred to me, I bet she heard that all the time from my grandmother, when she growing up, that thought had never crossed my mind. But knowing my mother, she would be just the kind of person who would be on the receiving end of that, “I wish you had a better disposition.” And I had to laugh, because I had thought about that. That was probably just a minor minor thing, but immersing myself in their lives, and trying to imagine what it was like, because I knew not only my grandmother, but all my aunts and uncles. And to imagine them being three years old, or six years old, or 12 years old. And the kinds of conversations they would have, I also got to imagine, my grandmother’s parents, whom I never met, they were long gone when I was born, but I got to endow them with the kind of personalities that I wish they had. So, I don’t, maybe they did, I don’t know. But it was just fun to imagine what her father might have said to her, what her mother, what kind of person her mother might have been, as she’s going through this. And clearly they were supportive of her. But, you know, what kind of advice would they give her, what, what, what kind of people were they?

Gail Piner 21:25
But over and over and over, as I went through ancestry.com, mapping out timelines, because everything is, all the main people in the family are based on real people who are all gone by now. But, you know, I would look at when people got married, and how old they were, and their remarriage of work. I have a chapter in there about a great aunt, actually a great, great aunt, I believe, who I remember as when I was a young girl, she would come and visit my grandmother, who lived out in the country, as we say. And she was a relative of my grandfather’s. But she was an old maid, as they said, back then, never married. And I started thinking as I wrote this book, what was her life like? And through Ancestry, looking at census data, I could see that when she was 15, her mother died. She was the eldest of five children. So obviously, she would have been in charge, but not for long. In less than a year, her father remarried, and he married a 14 year old girl. She was 15. So her stepmother was a year younger than she was. And by the next census, she’s living next door, taking care of a great aunt and a great uncle. I’m sure that step mother wanted her out of the house, you know, so that she could take over, but when the step mother, young step mother started having children, one of the elderly relatives passed away. So the great uncle and Mami came back to live with her birth family, and basically lived there the rest of her life. And I started thinking, it may have been that she was very much loved and catered to. Or she could have been resented by her stepmother. She could have been treated as, basically servant. I don’t know. I hope of course it was that she was greatly loved. And, I actually saw her grave marker, and it says “Aunt Mami”, so I’m hopeful that she was loved.

Gail Piner 21:45
But she was quite a character to me when I was 6,7,8 years old. So she always had little cans she’d be spitting into, she was very, very country. And she had all these stories, which I put into the book, stories that her grandmother told her about the Civil War, and Yankee soldiers coming to the house and all kinds of things. And I just remember her amazing character. And of course, I was oblivious to what her life might have been like. But through thinking about all these things, I got to imagine how women’s lives are so very different, and how restricted their choices were. And I wonder if maybe these outcomes, she was just about five years older than my grandmother. I wonder if her life didn’t influence my own grandmother to marry very young, to make sure she wouldn’t turn out to be an old maid.

Claudia Henock 23:50
That’s actually interesting to think about too. Like I know with historical context in mind, I do understand things were differently back then. But when you’re talking about the story of your great aunt and her step mother, it’s really weird to think about essentially, like a freshman in high school being a stepdaughter to essentially an eighth grader in middle school, if you want to think about that way.

Gail Piner 25:11
Yes!

Claudia Henock 25:11
I understand that I’m looking at it through like more of a modern lens versus someone within that time period. It’s still something that’s hard to think about. But I know, I do understand during that time period, that was just like normal life to them, essentially.

Gail Piner 25:24
Yes. Yes, and it was, I guess to them, it wasn’t all that odd. I will say that one thing that surprised me, I knew that she married young, I hadn’t realized how young. She got married a couple of months before she turned 15. And I started, you know, you could think, “Oh, well, everybody back then, you know, the girls got married young.” No, her mother was in her early 20s, when she got married. She had a sister who was 30, when she got married, several of her sisters were either in their very late teens or early 20s, when they got married. So marrying that young was a real anomaly in her family. And I’m thinking that that’s yet another example of my grandmother being strong willed. She wanted to marry Tom. And by golly, she wasn’t going to wait.

Gail Piner 26:21
So, but you know, I never put it in that context of how old were the other women in the family when they got married. But I also got to think about what it was like to go job hunting in the 20s. And so there she is, she has a sixth grade education. She has six children, one of whom is nursing. What are her chances of landing a job do you think? Not certainly, while she’s nursing, like zero, she would have to move off the farm into town. So she’s gonna have to find a more, more expensive living than if she were out in the country. And I’m sure the questions were incredibly intrusive, because in the early 70s, when I first job hunted, it was perfectly legal for employers to ask, “Are you pregnant? Are you planning on getting pregnant? Are you going to start a family soon?” These things were commonplace until the laws were put in place to prevent them. I used to amaze my business students by telling them that when I was in college, the only way you could find out about jobs in a general public kind of way was to look at the newspaper, the classified ads. They had jobs for women, and jobs for men. Most of them had never, have you ever heard of that?

Claudia Henock 27:43
I didn’t hear about essentially the separate classified ads for like men’s jobs and women’s jobs and stuff. That’s really weird to think about, like now essentially too.

Gail Piner 27:53
It would be illegal! Yes!

Claudia Henock 27:56
Yeah.

Gail Piner 27:57
But it wasn’t my point. It was not all that always that way. And I was an adult looking for jobs, so I can only imagine, if it was like that in 1972, what was it like in 1928, do you think?

Claudia Henock 28:13
Definitely very different, and in speaking of the position that your grandmother was in during that time, only unique was your, how unique was your grandmother’s story during that time period?

Gail Piner 28:24
I imagine it happened to quite a few women, as evidenced by my grandfather’s civic organization building the orphanage. Yeah, they knew that women who are widowed, would be doing well to provide for themselves. But the possibility of getting a job that would allow them to support five or six children, very tiny. You know, a seamstress is not going to be paid much. Unless you were more educated, you know, maybe of course, then you probably didn’t work when she married. So nursing and being a schoolteacher, usually they were unmarried or older, you know. So I imagine there were many women in that position. And of course, let’s not forget, the Great Depression was right around the corner.

Claudia Henock 29:16
Gotcha, because like the Great Depression affected like a lot of people’s lives during that time. So that was another stressor be like, “Oh, no, what is happening? What am I going to do? What am I going to do for my kids? What am I going to do for myself?” And in speaking of stressors, and anything like that, I do understand that during that time period, it’s gotten a lot better over the years, how we talk about mental health of the people, of ourselves to the people that we know and love. And during that time period, that was probably not even a thought for people’s heads at all. So what would you say is, were the type of demons that your grandmother was struggling with? Because during that time period, or she was probably under a lot of stress from making sure that she was safe, her kids were safe, making sure they had good lives after, after her husband and their father passed away. So what would you say were the type of like internal struggles that she was facing with?

Gail Piner 30:16
I think that, as I’ve mentioned, certainly the, “What will my family think of me if I make a choice they don’t approve of?” I think it upset her, I think she, probably knowing her, but had an independent streak anyway. But I think she really discovered what it means to be strong, and that is certainly the woman I knew. She was, boy, I have a scene at the end of the book, which takes place at the end of World War Two, and the children are all home. The two boys have been soldiers in the war as they were in real life. They’re there on Christmas Eve together. It’s the first time they’ve been together since Christmas of 1929. So I have everybody, you know, married if they were married at that time, and what was going on in their lives. And it’s just a short epilogue, to let the reader know how it all turned out. And one of the things they’re doing is my grandmother is telling a story that I heard her tell, so it actually happened a few decades later.

Gail Piner 31:27
But my grandmother took up pier fishing, as she got older. And she enjoyed standing out on the pier with my, she remarried in her late 40s. So she’s in the epilogue, she’s only been married three months. She has her second marriage, and that was the man I called Granddaddy. He was my step grandfather, but he was granddaddy to me, they’d go to the pier. And apparently, there were men on the pier who started using foul language. And they were saying things she didn’t approve of, and she, like, grandfather went off to get them a coke or something, and she’s left on her own. And finally, she snapped, she’d had enough of these men, they were drinking, you know, they had the brown paper bags with bottle in it and so forth. So they are getting rowdier. And she finally turned on them. And told them she was not going to have them talking like that anymore. They were taking the Lord’s name in vain. She was a lady. They weren’t, she wanted to enjoy herself, and she was not going to listen to them talk like that any more.

Gail Piner 32:37
I remember my mother and her sister Irene just being horrified because they’re thinking these man could have, who knows what they could of done to Grandmother? They could have been really rude to her, or really mean, they could have hurt her, you know, they’re just like, “Mother, why did you say that?” And my grandmother was like, “Well, of course, I said that, you know, I’m not going to put up with that.” Those men apologized, and they behaved themselves for the rest of the time. And she never, ever had to listen to swearing again when she was fishing, because they all knew her. That was my grandmother. So yeah, I think she was pretty feisty. I’m sorry, she was a very polite woman, don’t get me wrong, she didn’t go around, you know, telling people what to do. This was such an exception. But they had just gone too far.

Claudia Henock 33:32
I think what she was doing was just standing up for herself. And that was definitely something that she’s learned over the years as well, because she had to deal with those like societal expectations of like, what it means to be a good mom at the time. And she did it in her own way, and she basically had her happy ending.

Gail Piner 33:48
So, I’ve always been very proud to be her granddaughter. But I was held in thrall for a long time with this perfectionism of not wanting to write this story and do it badly. And as I got closer to 70, I realized, “Oh, you know, I think I just better write it, because I’m running out of time here.” But I thoroughly enjoyed the process. It was a great period of discovery for me, and I have a whole new appreciation for my grandmother.

Claudia Henock 34:21
And that’s definitely really important and really amazing to hear as well. And Gail, I’m gonna say thank you again for being on my podcast, and talking about the story of the pitcher, and talking about the story of her grandmother, and what she and the journey that she faced to keep her family together and to make sure everything was all right. If my audience wants to know more about your work, and wants to purchase a copy of the book, where can they find it?

Gail Piner 34:48
Sure. I would love that. Again, the book title is A High Courage and I’m Gail Piner, P-I-N-E-R, they couldn’t go to gailpiner.com, and I have a website there, of course, and Amazon and Barnes and Noble both carry my book. So I hope they read it and enjoy it. I’m happy to say I have really good reviews on both Amazon and Goodreads. So far, I haven’t run across anyone who hates it at all. Quite the contrary, most of the ratings are five star. So, please read it and enjoy my grandmother’s story.

Claudia Henock 35:31
And I’ll definitely put the links in the show notes below. And Gail, I want to say thank you again for being a guest on my show today. I hope you have an awesome, a wonderful rest of your Sunday, and I hope you have an awesome night.

Gail Piner 35:43
Thank you. This was great.

Claudia Henock 35:45
Awesome! Enjoy yourself and enjoy the rest of your day.

Claudia Henock 35:52
Thank you for listening to this episode of Your Most Precious Thing. If you want to support the show, you can leave a review on your favorite podcast platform and share your favorite episode with a friend. You can also contact me @claudiahenock on Instagram and Twitter, and Claudia Henock on LinkedIn. In addition, you can also contact me at claudiahenock1@gmail.com. You can also follow Your Most Precious Thing through my official website, www.claudiahenock.com, and anywhere where you listen to your podcasts. Intro and Outro music is Synapse by Shane Ivers and you can also listen to his music on silvermansound.com. Also, after this episode, Your Most Precious Thing will move from uploading episodes twice a month to every first Thursday of the month as well.