| Description |
: |
Happy was born and died in the Spartanburg General Hospital, but she spent almost all of her adult years living away from the Spartanburg area, she was the 2nd daughter of Tom & Hattie Weste Anderson's 7 children. She was a bubbly, happy child, hence her nickname, and a favorite of her mother; both shared an 'artistic' temperament. She was named for her grandmother Hattie Gentry Harris.
Happy was intelligent, energetic, healthy, impulsive and athletic, my mother said she would often do multiple cartwheels down the driveway starting at the house & going all the way...
Read More
|
Happy was born and died in the Spartanburg General Hospital, but she spent almost all of her adult years living away from the Spartanburg area, she was the 2nd daughter of Tom & Hattie Weste Anderson's 7 children. She was a bubbly, happy child, hence her nickname, and a favorite of her mother; both shared an 'artistic' temperament. She was named for her grandmother Hattie Gentry Harris.
Happy was intelligent, energetic, healthy, impulsive and athletic, my mother said she would often do multiple cartwheels down the driveway starting at the house & going all the way down the dirt country driveway to the road before she stopped. Mama said when the girls shared a bed, everyone always wanted to be next to Happy in the wintertime because her body was always hotter than theirs and kept everyone else warm. When the younger children were unruly and hard to get into bed, it was Happy who coaxed them into bed; she was a friend of everyone.
At the age of 2, my mother said her father Tom saw Happy drawing a face in the dirt in front of the house, he was astonished & called to his wife, "Hattie, come look at what this child has done!" Happy always loved drawing, but the family did not believe being an artist was a lucrative career, so after dutifully graduating from Converse College with a degree in English & after teaching English in the public schools for one year, Happy decided to stop being dutiful, she took a job at the WSPA TV & radio station on East Main Street, where she acted as secretary, weathergirl, newscaster and/or writer as the occasion warranted. Her older sister Margo was already working there as the secretary of the station manager. When I asked Margo what job did they did there, she laughed & said, "Everything and anything! Whatever was needed." (WSPA was the 1st radio & TV station in the state of SC.) I wish they had made tapes of their broadcasts then, I would love to see them giving the weather or the news, they were both beautiful women.
During this time, both Margo & Happy were still living with their schoolteacher aunt Mella Harris, who had taken in both older children to help out their parents after they lost their land in 1930-31. Happy's father Tom, who evidently did not understand finances, had been given land enough to live on for the rest of his life by his own father Maj Frank Anderson, but he had become dissatisfied with living in the old house his father had provided them & borrowed against his land with the Federal Land Bank in the 1920's when loans were cheap & easy to get. During the 1920's, Tom was not making enough money to pay even the interest on the loan every year, and when he foolishly gave his whole year's mortgage money to a shyster hawking a fake company in 1929, he could not even make the minimum payment that year, so they foreclosed on him.
Margo & Happy lived with the Harris's from the time they were 12 & 10 yrs old, respectively, and attended the Spartanburg city schools where Mella worked as a schoolteacher. Mella managed to send them both to Converse College on a teacher's salary, both graduated. Mella couldn't afford both their tuition's but a rich friend of Mella's paid for Happy's college tuition, according to their cousin Marjorie who went to school with them.
After leaving her school job & working at WSPA for a while, Happy decided to take a big risk & she took the train to New York City, waiting on tables & looking for a job in entertainment. She started dancing lessons, until her dance instructor took her aside after a week & told her she didn't need lessons, she needed to be teaching them, he hired her to teach dance on the spot. She took elocution lessons to get rid of her southern accent & auditioned for plays but she was rarely hired, so she kept dancing, and she started painting portraits. Happy loved music, and dance, and she met her future husband, Burton Elmore "Burt" Hayes there, he was also a dance instructor. They became a dance team, working the big hotels in the Hamptons in the summer, and working the Gulf coast hotels in Florida in the winter. (When I saw the movie "Dirty Dancing", I thought of Happy & Burt & wished she'd lived long enough to see it & to tell me how it compared to her real-life career, I'm sure she would've regaled me with anecdotes of her times dancing at the big resort hotels. She once showed me photos of them as professional dancers in their costumes with the other dancers & gave me a few pictures.) Burt was also a professional photographer & a puppeteer who rented out his skills to parties, and Happy painted portraits in her Hollywood, Florida studio and made unique lamps and jewelry to sell. They never had any children, Happy said Burt was sterile. (Happy said Burt was an only child of elderly parents, he had no living relatives. He had been married & divorced twice before she met him and had been working cruise ships. He died from a slow-growing brain tumor in 1976.)
After 10 yrs of marriage, Burt's (at that time unknown) tumor changed his personality, Happy said he became inexplicably angry & abusive toward her and she became very depressed & tried to kill herself. Her Florida psychiatrist suggested she go back to her family, so she filed for divorce in Florida & came back to Spartanburg for Christmas dinner at her aunt Mella's, an annual event. Her sister Margo took her back to New York with her, where she had since settled working as a secretary for Grant Tinker at ABC, she paid for a psychiatrist for Happy & rented an art studio for her to paint in. Margo said Happy used to get visits from people at a recording studio on another floor of the building, one of whom was Barbra Streisand just before she became famous, she said Barbra spelled her name Barbara then.
Happy met Hubert Bell at a New Jersey bar, he was a New Jersey "piano man" entertainer who used the stage name Sonny Shore and that's the name we always called him by. Sonny was multi-talented, an organist, pianist, guitarist and jack-of-all-trades, and they ran off together after only 2 weeks even though he was married with several teenage children. They went to Florida and worked in bars as a team, she sang & he played. He told me both were drinking heavily at the time (by the time I met him he was a self-professed recovering alcoholic). One day, Sonny said he decided he'd had enough of that lifestyle, he decided to get sober. And they did it together, they holed up in an apartment together until the delirium passed. Happy said they almost killed each other but they got through it, and it brought them closer.
Afterward, they started working and saving more money & they bought a Winnebago motor home to live in & started traveling. They started working cruise ships out of Florida ports together, going out for a week at a time and making a lot of money as a team. Sonny was an excellent keyboardist, he could play any song by ear or use cheat sheets. He told me he was a child music prodigy, he had been made his church organist & music director when he was only 16 yrs old. He also played guitar and the trumpet as well as piano & organ. He had a pilot's license & he built airplane simulators in Florida in the 60's and he repaired his own musical instruments. He was an all-around handyman, he did his own automotive repair work as well as the plumbing & electrical work & carpentry in his home. Sonny told me he had once been a policeman, but he didn't like the stress & violence, he kept a few guns for protection and I sometimes saw him cleaning them; he said he needed them out there in the country where they were living but he didn't especially like guns, they were just another tool to use if needed. He was a genial man, easygoing, he loved to play chess. He was tall & black-haired, very rugged-looking in a wild west sort of way, but he was gentle & kind. He once traded some work to a neighbor for a calf he said he was going to raise & slaughter for the meat, but he traded the calf away after a few months for a pregnant goat because he said he couldn't bear to kill it after looking into those gentle big brown eyes day after day. After the goat gave birth to 2 kids, he milked her & drank the milk raw in his morning coffee, filtering it through cheesecloth. They were living on a piece of country land and their neighbors were all farmers for whom he did odd jobs. Sonny smoked unfiltered Pall Mall cigarettes, at that time there was a concerted effort to eliminate smoking with information coming out regularly about the harm cigarettes did, and when I said I'd heard unfiltered cigarettes were more harmful than filtered cigarettes, he dismissed my worries saying filters were more harmful than the smoke itself because of what they were made from. (He had a massive stroke a few yrs after Happy died & lived for 7 long years in a nursing home in Florida before he died, a fate I would not wish on anyone and blame on those damn cigarettes.)
About 1975, Happy decided she wanted to move back to her childhood home, which was conveniently about halfway between New Jersey & Florida, so they bought an acre of land from her brother Carlos and set up housekeeping, living out of the Winnebago until they could get the only building left in liveable shape. It was an acre of the same land her mother had bought with her father's insurance death benefit, but there was no longer a house on it, just a small barn that had once been floored by neighbors to live in when the main house burned, and a shallow well from which the well pump had been stolen just before they moved in; the house/barn had become decrepit over the years and Sonny, who was a good carpenter & all-around handyman, started fixing it up. They lived rough and loved it, Happy painted portraits, Sonny worked on the house & did odd jobs for neighbors; they couldn't afford a phone (this was before cell phones) and a neighbor let them use his number as theirs, Sonny gave him a walkie-talkie to tell them when they had a phone call. City friends often visited them out in the country, marveling at their rustic lifestyle & sleeping in the unheated barn in all weathers. Sonny bought a used sink & made a wood stove from an old water heater. Happy bottled muscadine wine from the local wild grapes & gave it away to friends, she painted portraits for local people, trying to come up with new ways to make money, but they had to return to Florida for income every winter. Happy was starting to look aged, her skin was becoming very rough from baking for years in the Florida sun, there was only so much she could do with makeup and the cruise ship finally refused to hire her so Sonny started going on board alone while she stayed in the Winnebago.
In 1978, Happy's femur broke, and the Florida hospital found cancer in her thigh bone, she came back to Spartanburg for treatment, but the cancer was extremely aggressive and she died in the 1st week of August 1979. She was 59 yrs old. She had wanted to live long enough to attend her family's 5-yr reunion that August & offer her services as a portrait painter to relatives. Even near the end she was still making plans, she never lost hope.
Sonny wanted to put up a big memorial at her family church for Happy, but he didn't have enough money, he used what he had to put up the stone at Nazareth in her parents' plot with an abbreviated personal message. Happy's body is not buried there, she donated her body to a teaching hospital in Charleston. Happy & Sonny had never married legally, but he stayed by her side until the end, taking care of her every need. No one could have been more devoted. He said he owed her that because she had stayed by his side while he quit drinking.
Happy had lived what her family considered a wild life, a Bohemian life they had strongly counseled her against. She did what she wanted to do, she let the winds of opportunity happily blow her anywhere & everywhere, taking jobs where she could find them & never staying in one place for long. She was different from her family, and she knew it, but it suited her. I asked her once why she left her hometown, she told me when she was just out of college & had been working at the school as an English teacher & was even voted the most popular teacher in the school that year, someone reported her to the Principal for riding a student's bike down the sidewalk after school in a skirt. The Principal called her into his office & raked her out, told her it was very improper for a teacher to be seen with her skirt hiked up around her thighs on a boy's bike (this was in the 50's). Happy was floored, she said she realized she could never thrive in this kind of emotionally-abusive rigid environment, and I know she couldn't have been happy repressing her natural buoyancy & openness. She was a carefree kind of person, nothing embarrassed her; she loved life & lived it to her fullest, she was honest & kind & friendly to everyone. She never met a stranger. I think she was courageous for doing what she knew was right for her even though all her family was counseling her to do the opposite.
I think her bohemian lifestyle may have cut her life shorter than it could've been because she said the cancer was caused by a small defective microwave oven she had in the Winnebago that had fallen off the shelf & the door had become bent (this was a time before safety mechanisms were installed on microwave doors to prevent them from running if they weren't completely closed. The microwave sat on a shelf about thigh-high, and when the door wasn't quite shut, she would use that thigh that got the cancer to push it shut.) But Happy really enjoyed her time on this earth, and I believe doing what she wanted was the right choice for her. I wish I'd known her earlier in my life, her influence might have urged me to live a different life.
--Jennie Rhinehart
Revised 10/2017 |
