A Passing of Note

One of the things that provides a particular flavor to a small town are the colorful characters that live in it. As a city grows, you lose track of these people and they tend to blend in, like a glitch in a wallpaper pattern. They provide as much to the demeanor of the town as a quaint downtown or nearby lake.

Hickory lost one of it’s most colorful characters this week, and the city is a little less for it. I’m not going to put her name in here out of respect for her surviving siblings, who reached their exasperation point many, many times over the years, but anyone in Catawba County who’s dealt with the public has a story about her and will know who it is.

This lady wasn’t always plagued by her mental health issues. She had a Masters Degree and ran her own business for several years. Then, at some point, she began living an alternate reality.

She claimed to be the illegitimate love child of Ronald Reagan.

She maintained that she had a sister-in-law who had an identical name to hers and who assumed her identity at times.

Can’t really blame her for that one; we’ve all done things that in retrospect we’d like to blame on our evil twin.

She really began to come to the public’s attention about 1990, when she may have had a job working for the census. It seems the government had leased some empty offices in City Hall to the census workers. There were lots of people working there who were unfamiliar to the “regulars”, so nobody thought much of it when she went into an office, turned on the computer and went to work. It took several days until everyone went through the, “I thought she worked for you,” rounds and figured out that she probably didn’t belong there.

Her theory? It’s a public building. She needed to use an office and computer for, “…important secret government work” she was doing. When she declined to be evicted voluntarily, she was eventually banned from most public buildings without an appointment and an escort.

She liked to pick up stacks of files on people’s desks and take them with her, either to follow up on her conspiracy theories or to "help them out."

There are many times that taking a stack of files off of my desk would help out a lot, but in the long run we all know that’s going to come back to cause even bigger problems.

Her contact wasn’t just limited to government buildings. It seems that she got word that Belk’s Department Store had a new, good looking manager. Being a single woman, she decided that theirs would be a whirlwind romance followed by a story-book wedding. In order to accomplish this, she put on a prized possession that was somewhat unique here in the south – a full length rabbit fur coat.

The coat was famous -- she wore it for many, many years.  Toward the end, if you touched it or brushed against it, clouds of rabbit hair "poofed" off like stringy dandruff.

Under the coat she apparently wore some of Victoria’s Secret’s finest products.

Finding an opportune moment, the Temptress slipped into his office to drape herself across his desk.

She was banned from the mall after that.

As she got older, her illness progressed and led to a number of trips in and out of various mental institutions. Following the path of so many with her condition, she would be institutionalized, get her medication balanced and would improve only to be discharged and spiral downward again.

One thing that was both a curse and a gift was her ability to write. When she was on her meds, she could put together coherent, solid documents. When she wasn’t, they were merely pages and pages of incomprehensible words and phrases with little or no punctuation to give any respite to the reader.

The danger zone, though, was when she was at that tipping point on the way up or down. She could put together a seemingly coherent letter, but her grasp on this plane of existence wasn’t good. It was those letters that caused problems, especially when she actually mailed them.

Letters to federal officials and candidates for political office eventually drew the attention of the Secret Service. They didn’t know her. They made no allowance for her eccentricities, but appropriately kept the focus on their mission of protecting these people.

As a result, election years became something of a tribulation to her. A couple of days before elected officials or candidates for high offices were within driving distance of Hickory secret service agents would show up and give her two options – either put on an ankle bracelet that monitored her location or go into custody.

During the 2008 elections, between Charlotte, Asheville, Winston-Salem and Greensboro, all of which are within that undisclosed parameter, there were dozens of visits by candidates. Her life must have been extremely uncomfortable, especially as her health was declining.

So today’s obituary was kind of bitter-sweet. I hadn’t had any significant contact with her since I left public service, so she had kind of faded into the background of my world. Occasionally, I’d see her at the pharmacy or the grocery store and, whereas she used to try to engage in public confrontations she merely nodded and went on once I explained that I was no longer was in a position to either help or argue with her. I’d occasionally hear the stories, though, that told me she was still on the job.
The reality is, as aggravating as she was at times, when she appeared an otherwise monotonous day had the potential to become memorable and most of the time her antics were harmless.

The obituary in the newspaper belies the life she actually led, reducing 60 years of existence to a mere recitation of the mundane things deemed by those surviving relatives as relevant. In reality, though, her passing makes Hickory a bit less colorful and more like any other exit on the highway, a series of strip malls and fast food restaurants.

I hope that she finds the peace that she deserves, wherever she’s gone.