John Shearer: Finding Treasures In Parents’ Attic And Home

Following the death of my father, Dr. C. Wayne Shearer, back in May as I have previously chronicled, we decided to go ahead and get his longtime Valleybrook home in Hixson ready to sell after my sister, Cathy Morris, and I each decided we did not want to move into it.

My wife, Laura, had worked hard and efficiently as the executor of the estate getting the residence ready to sell, and with her leadership, we got the house cleaned out and sold within four months of his passing and just three months after court documents were first filed.

It took not only physical labor, but also emotional discipline, as going through the valuable items, mementoes and even furniture belonging to your parents and deciding what to keep are not easy.

While old papers, photos, letters and other smaller items are now in our basement waiting to be sorted, kept, tossed in the garbage, or shared following another round of examination, the hard part of getting them from my father’s house is thankfully over.

While my mother, Velma, and my father had slightly differing personalities, they were similar in that they saved a lot of items, especially those that marked significant moments in their lives. Of course, most people are that way, but my parents had quite a collection of items since they were fortunate to live a combined 186-plus years.

Not only that, but when my mother’s identical twin sister, Thelma Jereb, had died back in 1989 in Memphis and had no children, and her spouse was already deceased, my mother meticulously went through her items as her estate’s executor. And then she brought home seemingly everything, and much of it ended up in her attic.

As a result, we got to dig into quite a bit of family history. In fact, with so much stuff up there, along with a few items in drawers in the house, it was almost like an archaeological excavation, even though we had to go up the attic ladder in the garage to find it.

And somewhat surprisingly, including as my sister and I decided what pieces of furniture and other house decorative items we did not want ourselves and gladly offered for the estate sale held in late August, my mother’s and even my aunt’s personas dominated the house.

And that came even though my father had lived there alone for the last 12 years and had also taken care of my mother there during the last eight or 10 years of her life as she battled dementia issues.

Although he kept a small collection of items from his optometry and Air Force Reserve careers amid the photos and mementoes, her household furniture she had years ago picked out, as well as her pottery and art collection, dominated the attention at the estate sale. Somewhat to my surprise, my sister and I had ended up taking less furniture and art pieces than we were given, probably because we also already had full houses.

My mother had enough pottery bought mostly from the Plum Nelly Shop to fill a museum, and she also had some paintings and art pieces from such noted local artists of yesteryear as Fannie Mennen and George Little. As a result, I gained a greater appreciation for her interest in the fine arts and realized more fully that my own appreciation for architecture and maybe well-done movies came from her!

I also got down my mother’s old blue Western Flyer bicycle from circa 1960, which I learned from my sister had been bought used, not new, at some shop in downtown Chattanooga.

And I realized my aunt was a photography enthusiast among other interests, sharing some of those artistically inclined genes in another way.

But the most interesting items found in the house were simply the personal treasures valuable only to me and probably my sister. I found some of my old art and shop items and social studies posters I made at Bright School, the latter ending up in the garbage can after I took some photographs due to 50 years of dust and grime collection in the attic.

And for my parents, there were the writings they had, some pictures of them in much younger years, and even other items that gave me an even fuller glimpse into who they were. And that included a few items that might have shown their vulnerabilities we all have and might have embarrassed them to know they were discovered.

I even learned from an old book belonging as a child to my maternal grandmother I never knew that she had once lived in Paris, Tn. And I found a photo of my handsome great-uncle on my father’s side probably not long before he died as a young man.

And there were the old teeth models my father had when he started in dental school at UT in Memphis before transferring to the Southern College of Optometry, as well as the large drawing showing the anatomy of the eye he did with the date of 1949. And I even found his civilian flight logbook, including flights he took from Athens, Ga., to his hometown of Cordele right after World War II, when he was enrolled at the University of Georgia.

Some of my mother’s old nursing records and earlier photographs were also discovered, along with some of her pottery and art that had not been displayed in the house in years.

I guess after my mother died in 2012, my father did not have the heart to throw much of her stuff away, other than periodically giving some of her clothes to a charitable place at Christmas, and then he became physically unable to go through any of it in recent years.

And I am thankful they saved some of sister Cathy’s and my items as well, including my old toy Ferris Wheel that was patterned after an actual ride shaped like a giant U.S. Royal tire and which I got at the New York World’s Fair in 1965 at the age of 5. Needless to say, I did not have the heart to put it in the estate sale.

All in all, the tangible treasures they left behind, several of which were pulled off the dusty floor in the attic in the final days before the home sold, have given me a fascinating final chapter of my parents’ and even aunt’s lives. And they are summarizing glimpses that go back decades.

Going through their items was all emotional-but-somewhat-fun work done before the also-sentimental exertion led by wife Laura to sell the 60-year-family home to a couple excited to make it their dream home. In the final days before the Sept. 13 closing with the home mostly empty, I took a few finals laps through the house and around the yard reminiscing.

And I took one final look in my middle bedroom behind the door, where my father had meticulously marked my measured height at the top of my head with a line and written my weight on my birthday every year until I was a freshman in college.

Don’t worry, Mama and Daddy, everything is OK down here. Your pretty ranch house you had built in 1965 is now in the hands of a happy new owner, and we still have many of your old papers, photos and a few pieces of furniture, including Daddy’s old office desk. In fact, I used the latter to write most of this story!

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Jcshearer2@comcast.net