Wynema Collins Sharman

J. Michael Sharman
Published: December 2, 2008

Her first memory, she said, was sitting on a cotton sack as her mom was pulling it up between the cottonfield rows.

She said she went to more than 20 schools one year as they traveled from town to town, and harvest to harvest. She remembered the time her dad bought a one-room tarpaper shack for $20 and, when that harvest was over, put it on skids and dragged it to the next one.

Finally, in the oil boom-town of Borger, Texas, her dad found steady work.

Mom’s scrapbook clippings from the “Borger Daily Herald” include a picture of she and two faculty advisers announcing the beginning of a new “young ladies club” called Las Bonitas. In her scrapbook, articles with captions like “Las Bonitas Spring Formal Slated Friday” have souvenir napkins from dated tea parties taped next to them.

On her graduation day, June 28, 1942, the newspaper had a special page for the graduating seniors’ photos, but it also had a map explaining troop movements and battles in Europe and Africa with the headlines: “Russians Repulse Attacks; U.S. to Bomb Germany from Secret Base” and “British Sink Jap Submarines.”

After high school she went to Southern California, paying for Compton Junior College from the tips she made working at a soda fountain counter with gleaming chrome stools in front and a “Drink Coke” clock behind.

At the same time, her future husband was shot down over Europe and held as a POW in Stalag 17-B.

Before she left Texas, she had seen my dad walking across the street and told a friend, “That’s who I’m going to marry.”

“David Sharman Weds Compton Girl,” the yellowed clipping announced. Mom told us there were so many weddings at the war’s end that she could only find one wedding dress her size in all of Southern California.

Mom followed Dad up to the Oregon mountains where he had bought land on the promise of a deal to fatten calves for a Northern California cattleman. Their mountain ranch had no electricity, no neighbors, no phone, and unfortunately, no cows from the California partner.

Back in California, Dad enrolled in UCLA, got two jobs, and coached a newsboys’ basketball team, while Mom took care of their brood which had now expanded to four little ones.

After college, while Dad was working up and down the West Coast as an AFL labor organizer, Mom started the “Sharman Studio for personal development and modeling” in Walnut Creek.

When Dad’s new job with the American Optometrist Association moved them to St. Louis, where I was born, Mom began a club of housewives to learn Braille and make books for the blind.

Upon Presdient John F. Kennedy’s election in 1963, Dad moved with the AOA headquarters to D.C.

Mom’s albums began filling up with mementos such as the program from the 1962 President’s Black Tie Ball where she heard Nat King Cole and danced to his music.

“Is it true,” the ladies who took care of her at Blue Ridge Christian Home have asked, “that she knew five presidents?” To say she knew them would be a stretch, but she had definitely met that many.

A decade or so ago — a few years after my dad’s death — she began noticing rows of men marching around her dinner plate: “Isn’t it incredible how precisely they stay in unison?”

“Yes, Mom, it is,” we’d respond.

At the auction of her household in the cul-de-sac of her Annandale home, folks inquired if “the garden lady” was moving. Mom had planted literally thousands of bulbs in her yard. Something was blooming all year round. Walkers and joggers told us they mapped out their routes with Mom’s house as the pivot point.

She died on Saturday and her funeral is on Wednesday.

When the hearse carries her between the white rows of tombstones at Arlington National Cemetery, it will deliver her to the little section below the Tomb of the Unknowns where she’ll be placed with my dad.

Her inscription will be etched below his and will read: Wynema Collins Sharman — Oct. 9, 1926 to Nov. 29, 2008.

J. Michael Sharman is a community columnist who practices law in Culpeper. His column appears Tuesdays in the Star-Exponent.