Kat's Rambling Mind

Things are getting entirely too heavy these days, so I’m going to post a distraction and write a little about my great-aunt Myrtie. Myrtie was my maternal grandfather’s half-sister, but he never made a distinction about the “half”; she was his sister, and that’s all there was to it from his point of view. My Papaw Jesse was quiet, but he was all heart. Myrtie was his older sister, and the oldest of the eight siblings that made up Papaw’s family.

According to my mother, Miss Janice, if you asked Papaw about Aunt Myrtie’s youth, all he’d say was, “Myrtie was a bad girl”. Of course, this instantly piqued my insatiable curiosity. I always thought to myself that she’d have to be interesting to live up to a name like Myrtle (Myrtie). Not a whole lot is known about Myrtie’s checkered past, save for a few stories passed down.

Gangsters, Ghosts, and a Pearl-Handled Pistol

When she was 17, Myrtie went to Tennessee to live with her father. While there, she contracted a serious case of pneumonia, was declared dead, and was laid out in the morgue. The family was notified that she had died, and if not for an attentive morgue assistant, she would have likely been buried alive. It turned out that he thought he saw her chest move and held a mirror under her nose. Sure enough, she was still breathing, although barely. Here’s the thing: Nobody (not even her father) told her family in Georgia that she was, in fact, very much alive. Imagine their shock when she showed up on the doorstep of her Aunt Minnie’s house six months later. According to the story, the woman who worked for Aunt Minnie opened the door, exclaimed loudly, “GOOD LORD, IT’S MISS MYRTIE’S GHOST!”, and then ran out the back door, never to return.

Myrtie ran off to Florida sometime in the 1920s, during the jazz and flapper era. Somewhere, there’s a picture of her in her flapper dress, but unfortunately, I was unable to find it for this post. She was thin with dark hair and striking features, and would become a gangster’s girlfriend. By all accounts, Aunt Myrtie definitely had a wild streak.

According to my Mamaw, Lila Mae (my maternal grandmother and Jesse’s wife), Myrtie’s boyfriend was no small-time hood; this was an honest-to-goodness, connected to New York gangster, with ties to people in Miami that most folks didn’t dare whisper about. Lila Mae also said that he was the best-looking man she’d ever laid eyes on, with black hair and dark eyes.

I’m pretty sure there was some good old-fashioned west Georgia bootlegging involved in Myrtie’s past as well, because I’ve always wondered why and how she took off to Florida. The timelines and details of the stories get a little hazy here and there, and the people who shared them have since passed away.

I’m told the gangster followed her to Georgia to try and convince Myrtie to marry him, but she refused. I guess after a brush with death she was ready to follow the (somewhat) straight and narrow. Well….if you can call putting a pearl-handled pistol between a man’s eyes and threatening to shoot him on her front porch “straight” or “narrow”!

After her return home in Hogansville, Georgia, it seems Aunt Myrtie hadn’t completely changed her ways. A local bully was tormenting one of her younger brothers, and made the mistake of following him home one day, Myrtie greeted him on the porch by pulling her pistol and threatening to shoot him if he didn’t leave her brother alone.

The bully never bothered them again.

Great-Aunt Myrtie and her “Medicine”

Myrtie later married a man named John, and according to all accounts, he treated her like a queen, and waited on her hand and foot. As she got older, it was found she had a heart condition; Myrtie promptly took to her bed in grand fashion, like the queen she was accustomed to being would have. Her bedroom was on the front of the house where she lived with her sister, my great-aunt Mary, in the mill village in Hogansville. Myrtie would dress every day in a fresh gown and bed jacket, with nails polished and hair done, and then raise the window and hold court with people on the sidewalk from her bedside. To complete the scene, she also had a little white fluffy dog that she would pull up into the bed beside her. I remember walking down the sidewalk from my Papaw and Mamaw’s house to the store just past Aunt Mary’s when I was a kid in the early 1970s, and talking to Aunt Myrtie through the screen as I went by. If only I’d known at the time that she had such an interesting past!

But to go back a little further, back to when my mom and dad first married in the late 1950s, there was a phone call late one night at their house, and Aunt Myrtie was on the other end, sounding dreadful. She desperately needed her medicine. Faithful newlywed nephew that my father was, he immediately called the small-town pharmacist and woke him up. “Myrtie needs her medicine, can you help?”, my dad inquired. “Meet me at the drugstore”, said the pharmacist.

And so, out into the night my dad went, coat on over his pajamas, to see exactly what it was Myrtie needed. She wrote it down on a piece of paper for him, and he grabbed it and went to the drugstore. As the pharmacist unlocked the door and switched on a light, he asked my dad which prescription Myrtie needed.

My Dad looked at the piece of paper and said, “Cepacol”.

The pharmacist boomed, “CEPACOL! THAT’S MOUTHWASH!”, much to my dad’s chagrin. He had dragged this poor man out of bed for a bottle of mouthwash. He went ahead and got a bottle while he was there, and he and the pharmacist had a good laugh. However, Dad did scold Aunt Myrtie a bit upon returning home with her “medicine”. (I should note here that Cepacol mouthwash contained a fairly high amount of alcohol back in the day, so I’ve always wondered if that’s why she wanted it.) Nevertheless, Aunt Myrtie pretty much continued to be incorrigible.

Great-Aunt Myrtie. What a character. I only wish I’d gotten a chance to talk with her after I was older; I would have loved to have known more about her. I’d say I could let my imagination fill in the blanks, but I’m betting I couldn’t top the real thing. I had a wild streak in my late teens and early 20s, and part of me wonders now if I might have come by it honestly, thanks to Myrtie.

Great-Aunt Myrtie. A bad girl, indeed.