A Love Story

Most days I’d shy away from telling a personal love story. This is not one of those days. What little remains of my family lost a beloved matriarch this month and the sad occasion set in motion a parade of memories regarding my aunt Mary Lucille Oughton. She was 105 years old when she died so there’s a lot of life to ponder.

It came as a surprise to learn her first name was Mary. I had always known her as Aunt Lucille, Aunt Lucy, or most often as Aunt Sug. My mother told me her younger sister came by the name as shorthand for Sugar. Through family gossip over the years, I came to understand how she earned that nickname in a hard-scrabble family of six depression-era kids where Lucille often had to play babysitter and surrogate mom. Girls born into that situation, as Aunt Sug was in March 1919, displayed early maternal qualities as a matter of survival.

There were four girls in my mother’s family. Two boys came later and last. They all recognized that Lucille, like her oldest sister Della (my mother), was an independent spirit. By the time the family moved from St. Louis to a rural farming community in Illinois, the kids were already looking for a way off the farm. Aunt Sug followed my mother—who was working at a job with a trucking outfit in Little Rock, Arkansas—and went to high school there, followed by cosmetology school. Must have been hard for both of them. They were struggling for a profitable place in a male-dominated society dealing with a devastating depression. That likely explains why they rarely talked about those early days in Arkansas. It also explains to me why Aunt Sug was so fashion conscious and concerned about her appearance. She was always a good-looking woman, always as careful as budgets allowed about her clothing and cosmetics.

There seemed to be a special connection between my mother and my Aunt Lucille. They both married just before the start of World War II. Aunt Sug gave birth to my cousin Charleen just before Pearl Harbor, a sister Kathleen came along four years later in 1944, and my mom followed suit a couple of weeks after that, launching me into the game. Aunt Sug and her older sister always seemed to live near each other, usually in a series of cheap shotgun flats in and around St. Louis, where they traded babysitting chores and moral support.

Just as there was with our mothers, a special relationship developed between baby me and baby cousin Kathie that survives to this day. For a lot of those tough years when money was tight and husbands were either absent or in dissolution of one variety or another, I came to consider Aunt Sug a surrogate mom and cousin Kathie a sister. That was vitally important to the only child in a family that was about to detonate and dissolve. When that happened and I lost my estranged father to suicide, Aunt Sug was there for me unlike too many others. She was sympathetic but not weepy about it. That wasn’t her style. Aunt Sug expected me and her daughters to buck up, take it on the chin, and continue the march.

In most ways, I did that, marching to my own atypical drummer in military schools and later the Marine Corps. Most of my mother’s family considered me a black sheep, vaulting head-long down a bad path that could only lead to bad ends. I gave them little reassurance in the matter, reenlisting and then spending way too long in the Vietnam War. When my mother died while I was recovering from wounds in Japan, I rushed home only to be met by stern disapproval. Aunts and uncles seemed to think the loss might have been avoided had I just sobered up and stayed home where I belonged.

Except for Aunt Sug. She was single-minded about such things and understood an independent spirit. Somehow she saw through all the angst and irritation. Somehow she knew I was pursuing something worthy—at least to me—in my military service. Aunt Sug sometimes disapproved of my aberrations and wartime stress-induced behavior, but she tolerated it with the tough love I needed. When the rest of the family mostly ignored me, Aunt Sug quietly followed my military career and always returned the jangled and jaded notes I sent her from weird places in the world. As we were both avid St. Louis Cardinals baseball fans, Aunt Sug usually kept me up to date with what was happening with the club.

Later in life when Aunt Sug lost her sight, cousin Kathie—who cared for her Mom right up to the end—kept the comm link open. We shared baseball news and reports on Aunt Sug’s condition for years. When the family heat died down a bit and I had a new weird career in movies and TV, I went back to Missouri a time or two to see Kathie and Aunt Sug. When she heard accounts of my success in showbiz, Aunt Sug would just smile and nod. It was as if she knew something good would come of her wayward nephew. Aunt Sug may have been nearly blind at the time but she’d kept her eyes on the long game where I was concerned. She loved me when it seemed like no one else in the world did. For that I will be eternally grateful. See, that’s what love really is when you carve out all the romantic stuff. And that’s what my Aunt Sug was. Our world is a better place because it sometimes contains people like her. We should be cognizant of that and happy if we’re touched by it every once in a while.

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