Having grown up in Jackson, I can remember having Eudora Welty sightings around town.  I mostly had mine at the Jitney 14 and along State Street, while Miss Welty was driving maybe back and forth from Lemuria.  I had grown up with Miss Welty’s great nieces and nephews and remain friends with them all today, and I was lucky that she came and spoke at my school (but I do wonder if that day I understood the enormity of what I was witnessing).  Now, I work at Lemuria, Miss Welty’s bookstore, and though she was not coming to the store anymore when I started, her presence and influence is still felt here everyday.

When the Welty House opened, Lemuria became a Jackson stop for many of the groups that came to tour the house.  I began to notice that some of the groups had begun to ask for me.  At first I was bewildered, how did these women know my name?  I then realized that my Dad, Coleman Lowery, was sending them to the bookstore.  As a part of his being ‘docent to the world’; he had begun giving tours at the Welty House.

If you know my Dad, you know he loves to talk and tell stories.  Growing up we would be driving down the street in Jackson and he would all of sudden start talking about a party he had gone to in a house we had just passed.  The party, however was in the 1960s and the hosts don’t even live there anymore.  He loves to point out a house and say, “I drank a lot of whiskey in there!”  If my Dad is telling a story that would normally take 5 minutes you can count on it lasting 15-20 minutes because he ‘editorializes’ as I affectionately call it.  I can guarantee you that if you were in his tour group at the Welty House the tour lasted at least 20 minutes longer than normal.  Most of the ladies who ended up at Lemuria would go on and on about how fun it was to have Daddy as their tour director because they felt like they got a lot of Jackson’s back story and history.

Unfortunately, my Dad is unable to do tours anymore but when we decided to do this Welty project in honor of A Daring Life by Carolyn Brown, I asked him to share with you some of his “editorializing” . . .

Here’s his Miss Welty Story:

From the summer of 1946, when I was in the 8th grade at Bailey Junior High School, until the spring of 1951, when I graduated from Central High School (called Jackson High School in Brown’s book), I was a package boy at the Jitney 14 on Fortification Street where Miss Eudora was a regular customer.  She tipped the package boys a dime.  We were making thirty cents an hour-so we fought over the ladies who tipped.  Mrs. Fred Sullins and Mrs. Robert Kennington both tipped a quarter!

In the fall of 1951, I entered Vanderbilt University, where I graduated in 1955, and that fall in my freshman English class we read “Why I Live at the P.O.” During the discussion that followed, I raised my hand  and said “I know Eudora Welty.  I carried her packages at the grocery store at home.”  That semester I received an A in freshman English which was one of the few A’s I received during my college career at Vanderbilt.

–F. Coleman Lowery, Jr.

Photo of the Jitney 14, ca. 1950, courtesy of The Mississippi Department of Archives and History

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If you have story about Miss Welty that you would like to share on our blog, please e-mail them to lisa@lemuriabooks.com.

Click here to learn more about Carolyn Brown’s A Daring Life: A Biography of Eudora Welty

Click here to see all blogs in our Knowing Miss Welty series

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