(Born 1949)
Parents: Marjorie Lineback and James Towner
Siblings: Andrea, Todd, Bill, Barbara, and Christina
Husband: Terry (Married on December 1, 1967)
Children: Dane and Kristen
When were you born?
1949, September.
Where were you born?
I was born in Biloxi, Mississippi at Keesler Air Force Base. I have no knowledge of it or recollection; that’s not where we were from. My family was from Indiana.
Was there anything specifically they told you about the day you were born?
It was storming like crazy the night I was born, and I was born early because my mother was mopping the floor that day and slipped on the wax. That’s what I know.
Do you have siblings or are you an only child?
I am an only child with three sisters and two brothers. I know that sounds weird, but my parents were divorced in 1952, which was very rare in those days. My father remarried and had four kids. Wow. My mother remarried many, many years later. I was sixteen when she got married and had one [child]. That’s the one that matters most.
Did you get to grow up with [your siblings]?
I was grown up and married when my sister was born. (Wow…) There were 20 years and 9 days between us. Wow, that’s kind of cool. Yeah, she’s kind of my sister/daughter, and I’m her sister/mama.
What was your childhood like, growing up on an Air Force Base?
Well, I didn’t grow up on the Air Force Base. We moved back to Indiana when my father went to Korea. We moved back to Indiana and lived with my grandparents. I grew up living in a household with my grandparents and my mother because my mother did not remarry until after my grandfather had passed. So, I had two mamas and a daddy. That sounds like fun. It was nice because she was a working mother, and she didn’t have to worry. She always had somebody to love me and take care of me, and that was good.
What was it like going to school in Indiana?
I only lived in Indiana until I was seven, and the school system was different there. Depending on the time of the year you were born, you started school differently. I had a fall birthday, so I actually started school in January. They had Semester A and Semester B, and it just depended on where you were. In a way, it’s kind of nice because not only were you not behind, but those that did mess up in a semester could also catch up faster. Was it just a normal half of the year? Yes.
Then, we moved to North Miami, Florida in 1957. Their school system was altogether different, so they tested me and moved me ahead. Then, I was really young graduating, but that was okay. Most of my memories of growing up were in South Florida. In that day and age, South Florida was a wonderful place to grow up. There was a constant breeze; they hadn’t blocked the breeze with all the high-rises, yet. They hadn’t literally paved paradise and put up a parking lot. There was a lot of open space. We lived across the street from a grove of pine trees. We didn’t have air conditioning, so the breeze would blow in, and you could hear the pines rustling. I had a particular holly tree that I absolutely loved and that I would climb and sit on top of for hours.
Did you and your friends get to hang out by the beach?
We didn’t live very close to the beach, but we did go regularly during the summer; my mother would take me on Sundays. It was too far to walk. My husband grew up a little over a mile away from me, but we didn’t meet until I was almost out of high school. We must have passed each other a million times in the course of growing up.
I remember when winters got really cold; when it got cold, it got really cold, and the houses weren’t built for cold weather. We had a big coal-oil stove that ran on kerosene, and my grandmother would put a bowl of water on top to humidify the air and then put things like cloves in it to make it smell good. (If you smell just kerosene, it doesn’t smell so good burning.) We would close the bedrooms during the day and just heat the main part of the house. When it got closer to bedtime, we would open up the bedrooms, so they would warm up.
It still gets cold there on occasion, but when you’re used to warmer temperatures, even 70 degrees is sweater weather. It makes a difference. When I first moved here, I would get so cold that the only way I could warm up was to get in a hot shower. (Laughs…) When you move up from farther south, it can be quite a shock. I think that the winter I remember was a chilly winter, anyway. I don’t remember for sure because I don’t have anything to base it on, prior to that, but it doesn’t bother me so much anymore. We moved here in 1986, so we’ve been here for almost 27 years.
Do you remember your favorite subject in school? Was it science?
No, I hated science. I didn’t discover science until I went back to college when my daughter was three.
What were you interested in before that?
English. I went back to college to become an English teacher. You see how well that worked out for me! (Laughs because she was a science teacher for all those years.) Then, I took an Earth Science course, and it blew me away. It was the most fascinating stuff I had ever heard.
Then, I took an astronomy course. If the Earth Science course had made me feel like the flea on a dog, then the Astronomy course made me feel like the amoeba on the flea on the dog! It just opened up a whole new world to me. It dawned on me that in science, you do everything. You have to communicate; you have to use math; you have to know your place in history; and you have to know your place in geographical space. It really incorporated everything. When you’re looking at when things were done, you have to have a historical perspective of what came first, what came next, how they linked… When you look at the earth itself, it can’t get more fascinating than the earth itself.
That changed my perspective, so none of my certifications are in English, but my first course was a creative poetry course. Science is the key to unlocking our future. It helps us understand the physical world as it is, but it’s also the one thing that’s asking “why?” “Why can’t we do this?” “How does this work?” If we don’t ask these questions, we’ll never have any answers. I enjoyed it, but it certainly wasn’t the path I started on.
How did you get introduced to science and start to love science?
Just that course. The interesting thing about that course was that when I started back, I tried to take one poetry course when my daughter was three. But being so far away [from the college], I just couldn’t do that. They had a brand new distance learning program in community college where I had taken that course. The classes were telecast at about two o’clock in the morning on the public TV station, and you had to buy your books and materials. Sometimes you had things that you had to submit on different dates, and you had to come in to take the midterm and the final. That’s the only class time you had, so you were basically teaching yourself.
More than one year of credits I did that way. Was it hard? Well, I would record the shows (I wouldn’t get up in the middle of the night), and I could also go back to hear something again if it didn’t made sense. When the kids were in school, I would do my [work]. It took me eleven years to get my 4-year degree. Which I can understand! I was taking one course per semester. I didn’t finish my Associate’s degree until my daughter started middle school.
So, you were a parent, and your career started afterward?
I got my first teaching paycheck on my 40th birthday, so I was turning over a new leaf at forty. My kids were grown, and I feel like I had the best of both worlds because I had the opportunity to take care of my children and have a career. That’s great because I know it would be hard to give up all the time with your children if you had a career. I didn’t start teaching until my son was nineteen and my daughter was fifteen. At that point, I could take whatever I needed to do home with me and then be with my daughter when she got home.
What did [your children] think of it? Were they expecting it since you were in school?
I think so, and I did a lot of subbing when my classes at West Georgia allowed it. When I subbed at the high school where my son was going, he would love it. He would come and check on me to see and make sure everything was okay; he would come a couple times a day. I didn’t substitute much at the middle school, but when I did, my daughter would want to hide. The worst part was when they called me one day because a teacher had gotten ill, and they wanted to see if I could come in. It was her math teacher, and she hadn’t had math yet that day. When she walked in, I saw the look on her face, and I wished I had a camera. She was so surprised! Mortified would have been the word! (Laughs…)
Was being a substitute teacher really different from teaching? Did the kids treat you differently?
Very different; they did [treat me differently]. I did a lot of subbing at the high school in the math department because my two certifications were in science and math, so I had a pretty good handle on everything. Teachers could actually leave work with me, and I could guide the kids [I was teaching]. That’s one thing when you’re a teacher: you never know whether you’re going to get a substitute who has a good grasp of the content or someone who is coming in to just literally babysit. It’s very difficult to leave substitute plans if you don’t know who’s coming. If you know who is coming and they have a grasp, then you could actually leave work that would be meaningful. Otherwise, it’s practice work or preparation for CRCT (a standardized test).
Do you miss teaching?
I miss the kids, and I miss the people. I miss the content. I don’t miss the other stuff. (Laughs together…) There’s a lot of politics in any field; I don’t miss that.
When you were growing up, did you have any big role models?
I would say my grandmother, and she wasn’t a very big role model because she was shorter than I am. (Laughs…) But she was a very strong, determined lady. I’ll give you an example: my grandfather was a meat and potatoes man. You couldn’t make him eat vegetables or salad; he wouldn’t eat chicken or fish or anything. They were married just shy of 50 years when he passed away. She would cook two different meals, and she expected my mother and me to eat the vegetables, chicken, fish, and the good stuff. She would feed him what he wanted, but she was going to have the other stuff. That’s one incident showing how strong and determined she was.
She’s my role model. She lived to 89, and then, she fell and broke her pelvis as she was climbing a cabinet to reach for something in an upper cabinet, a standard short person trick. She probably would have lived a lot longer if she hadn’t had that fall. I will just be more careful when I’m 89.
Has your family lived in United States for a while or did they immigrate to the United States? What is your heritage?
On my father’s side, the first ancestor was Richard Towner, who was a seaman dumped on the South Carolina coast in 1656. On my mother side, the first ancestor was Johannes Von Leinbach who was a Hessian soldier… so I guess we’ve been here a while! Was he a soldier during the Revolutionary War? He was sent over here to fight the revolution. He’d been a farmer (so the story goes), but he was capable of losing the red uniform and going back to what he knew best. “I’m going to get killed for King who? …No, I’ll go farm.” (Chuckles…)
My family is pre-revolutionary times. My husband is second generation. There’s a little bit of everything in us—mainly Scottish, the British Isles area, and German.
When did you and your husband get married?
December 1st 1967.
What was your wedding like?
It was very small. I was very young; I had just turned 18, and nobody gave us 2 seconds to last. It’s going to be “a flash in a pan,” and here we are 46 years later. (Chuckles…) I guess we fooled them! I guess you knew what you were doing. Well, it was dumb luck, probably. It helps to be married to your best friend. That’s great. There are ups and downs like anybody else, but we always knew that the commitment was greater than anything else.
Our son was born on our third anniversary… and he used to make me so angry because you know in middle school when you had to write autobiographies? He would tell how his parents were married on December 1st at eight-thirty in the evening and how he was born on December 1st at two-thirty in the morning; he would forget the 3 years! It was so aggravating. Did he do it on purpose? (Laughs…).
Then, my daughter was born on December 13th of 1974, so December is a busy month. Definitely—with Christmas, too, I guess. Wow, lots of presents! I would start shopping much earlier in the year and put things away.
What did your wedding dress look like, too?
It was a street-length dress; it was high-collared, came back in a V-shape, white-laced with little blue centers, and sleeveless. Then, my matron of honor made my veil. It sounds gorgeous! We still have it in the cedar chest. (Laughs…) It’s probably falling apart, but that’s okay; somebody else can throw it away.
Oh, what are the names of your children?
Dane and Kristen.
Did your children get along?
They did. In fact, the year before Kristen was born, his grandma—Terry’s mom—asked him what he wanted for Christmas, and he said, “a baby sister.” And she was born the next December 13th. You could not convince that boy that she wasn’t his baby as much as ours. They have been exceptionally close. The only time they really argued was to get on my nerves. They could do a good job at that! (Laughs...) They are still exceptionally close. That’s wonderful. Like I said, he was convinced that she was his, so he’s always there to look after her… and still is.
What do you think the hardest part of raising children was, and what was the best part?
The hardest part was I didn’t want to be their friend; I wanted to be their parent… And “no” is not a word that is taken lightly by children, especially my daughter and I clashed a lot on the “no” word. She was a Florida child, and Florida is one of the states that is different for school starting. As long as you are five by December 31st, you started kindergarten that year.
Well, it was totally different here. She would be in a grade with people that were almost two years older than her. It was different here since you would have to be 5 by September 1st and if not, they didn’t start until the next year. She was young in the class to begin with, and telling her “no” a lot really made her upset. What is appropriate for a 16 year old isn’t appropriate for a 14 year old, though, and I stood my ground.
When she was about twenty-three, she came to me and said “Mom, I’m so sorry. I was so awful,” so she realized in retrospect how awful she was. I was determined that I was still the mom, so now we can be great friends because I raised her to be a decent child.
You can’t be their friend when they are little and be their friend when they are adults because you wouldn’t like them very much if you were too much of a friend when they were little and if you didn’t say no or couldn’t help them to see reason. You want your children to grow up to be somebody you’d like. Sometimes it makes teenager years difficult, but just like in teaching, when you see the light bulb go on, that’s a wonderful feeling.
(To Be Continued in Part II…)
Life Legacies 