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Miss Mattie

It rarely snows in my neck of the woods, in Knightdale, N.C., but when it does it reminds me of Miss Mattie, an old lady who worked where I worked, at The News & Observer in Raleigh.

When a big snow or ice storm was forecast, The N&O would rent hotel rooms near the paper for reporters and editors, so we could walk to work the next morning.  You could go home but if you did you darn well better be able to get back to work the next day. I always stayed in town.

Occasionally a snow or ice storm slipped up on us and when that happened you were still expected to get to work — we published 365 days a year.

Miss Mattie was way too old to make it to work on her own so The N&O would send two men in a four-wheel drive vehicle to pick her up , literally, and bring her to work.

I don’t know what her regular job was but on snow days she answered the phone and took messages from employees who called to say that they were not coming, that the roads around their houses were impassable.

One day I had to make that call.

The hill, on a warm, snow-free day.
The hill, on a warm, snow-free day.

There’s only one way out of my neighborhood, up a hill at the end of my street. And when there’s snow and ice you can’t drive up that hill.  That’s all there is to it.  Not even in a four-wheel drive.

Miss Mattie answered the phone. Her voice sounded like she looked, old. I told her there was no way my car was going up that hill.  And eight miles was too far to walk.  

She replied in her creaky, old voice, “That’s OK, Pat. I understand. I’ll tell them the weather too bad for you to come in today.”

I knew exactly why they had assigned an old lady to take messages from people who couldn’t get there.  I also knew how she got to work on snow days.  But she was pushing 80 and however she got there, she was at work.    

“No, wait.  Wait, Miss Mattie,” I said.  “Tell ’em I’m coming, just tell ’em I’ll be late.”

Postscript: I was walking down the shoulder of U.S. 64, toward Raleigh, when a kindhearted soul stopped and gave me a ride into town.

NOTE: The N&O published every day no matter what.  In March 1980, when our presses were heavily damaged in a fire, we published. Rival newspapers came to our aid. The Durham Herald printed our paper that first day and The Fayetteville Observer printed it the next two days, until we could get four of our presses back on line begin limping along on our own.

Coming Monday: The Source Of The Problem

What Can Go Wrong Will

When Brother Dave returned to Charlotte from a trip to Snowbird, in the mountains of North Carolina, he unloaded his generator and some other equipment right away, including a step ladder he needed to change a light bulb in the kitchen.

And then, he told me,  he sat down and watched some football on TV.

“There were still a couple of things on the truck so, at half time, I went out to put the rest of the stuff in the storage shed behind my house.”

While Dave was cleaning out his truck his wife, Kathy, who had Alzheimer’s, closed the back door.

Cap'n Dave Stith
Cap’n Dave Stith

Unfortunately, the lock was on. Fortunately Dave almost always carried his keys in his right front pocket.  But, unfortunately, not this time.

“This time I did not have my keys but I almost welcomed the opportunity to use the key that Edith, my sister-in-law, had convinced me to keep in my wallet.”

But Dave’s wallet was in the house, too.

“This was going to be embarrassing because I was going to have to call Edith and ask her to come over and unlock the door.  I’d had to do that about a month ago  — that’s when she suggested I get a spare key. But, turns out, I couldn’t call her.  My cell phone was in the house.”

There had to be a way in, and then Dave remembered.

“Kathy had tried to climb out one of the windows on the front of the house which meant I  could climb in that window.”

But that didn’t work either.  Kathy had gotten the window open but hadn’t figured out how to open the storm window, and Dave couldn’t raise it from the outside.

But there were lots of other windows and he figured one of them was bound to be unlocked. He was right.

“The very next window I checked was also unlocked and I was able to raise the storm window.”

The window was unlocked but it was stuck or something; he couldn’t raise it.  He got a crowbar from the storage shed but he couldn’t pry it open.  Someone had burglar-proofed it by drilling a hole through both windows, where they came together in the middle, and sticking a nail in the hole.

Of course, Brother Dave was not about to give up. 

The house
The computer room was on the far right.

“I  remembered a window in my computer room that had been broken for years. That storm window would not raise either so I got a screw driver from the shed and began removing the screws that held it in place.  Some of the screw were on top, a little too high for me to reach –I would need the small step ladder from my truck.”

When he went to his truck to get the ladder he remembered that he had already taken it in the house to change a light bulb. So he improvised.  He saw a cooler that he had taken to Snowbird — if he stood on the cooler he could reach the top screws.

Dave, who was 76, told me, “Fortunately I did not break anything in the little tumble I took the first time I tried to climb on top of the cooler.  The second time worked like a charm.”

He removed the storm window, wiggled the broken glass out of the window, stuck his hand through the hole,and unlocked the window.

“I was able to raise the window and start to crawl in about the same time some neighbors were walking up the street. I saw them give me a puzzled look and go for their phone. I was able to extract myself quickly enough to say howdy and explain a little of what was going on.”

And then he crawled into his house.

So what does this prove? It proves, once again, the validity of a rule I adopted years ago: “If you’re gonna be dumb, you got to be tough.”

Coming Friday: Miss Mattie