Drinkard Funeral Home in 1949Cullman, Alabama
By Bettina Pearson Higdon Burns
Cullman County Alabama High School was established in the early 1920s, but five new high schools were added in 1937, at Cold Springs, Fairview, Hanceville, Holly Pond and West Point. Mr. O. B. Hodges had moved from West Point to Cullman County High School in 1941. Lois King and others moved from West Point to town as openings occurred. Miss Bettina Pearson was ready for a change when offered a math job at THE high school! She and Miss King shared a room at Grants Boarding House about six or eight blocks from the school.
Walking was the mode of transportation during WWII, so Lois and Bettina walked to Stiefelmeyers, or Princess Art Shop, or Yosts, or All Steak, or B & B Cafe, after school or on to Grants before supper. Bettina had heard of eligible bachelor Raymond Earl Higdon (there werent’ many around during the war) while living at the boarding house in West Point that had an indoor bathroom. However, they never met. He did not have time for a country schoolteacher; he courted nurses.
One day as Lois and Bettina were walking by Moss Funeral Home on Highway 31 enroute to Grants, Raymond must have spotted Lois whom he had known from West Point. Suddenly an ambulance/hearse stopped by the teachers and they were invited to ride (the two blocks) back to their room. Lois made the directions. Raymond drove them to school nearly every morning from then on. He also started eating breakfast at Grants.
Time marched on. Bettina learned Raymond had taken his nurse girlfriend to dinner in Hanceville on a Saturday night in 1947. She resigned her job on Monday and when Raymond arrived Monday afternoon with red roses in a beautiful gold encrusted vase, it was too late to mend the fence. Bettina got a job teaching math at McAdory High School near Bessemer and went to live with her Aunt Bessie Williams and grandmother Nannie Belle (Myhand) Pearson, in the same house where she had been born.
Raymond and Bettina talked on the phone and he visited her in Bessemer from time to time, but a licensed embalmer who slept in the embalming room of the mortuary and who worked seven days and nights a week did not have much time to court. On Valentine’s Day 1948, he called long distance and asked, “When do you want to get married?” She answered, “Saturday will be soon enough.” He said, “I want a big church wedding.” “Well, it will have to be the second Sunday in June. I’ll need a week to finish my grades,” she replied without looking at a calendar.
June 13, 1948, at 4:00 p.m. at the First Methodist Church, Bessemer, the eligible bachelor of 32 years and spinster of 28 years exchanged vows in front of her family and friends, a few of his friends, but none of his immediate family. James and Margaret Bird Burns came from Cleveland, Tennessee. James made the pre-wedding pictures and one after the I do’s were completed. (pictures provided by James F Burns.)
Bettina returned to teaching at West Point as Mrs. Raymond E. Higdon. Since this was where she began teaching in 1941, she knew some of the other teachers but the new principal was Earl T. York whose philosophy was choose good teachers and let them do their jobs. Some of these students were siblings of those she had taught in 1941-44, so all went well for awhile.
Moss Funeral Home bought out Drinkard Funeral Home in 1949, and moved into the beautiful Southern Colonial home, built in 1905 by the Arnold’s on the corner of 3rd Street and 4th Avenue East. (See Sketch.) The Higdon’s had a beautiful seven-room apartment upstairs. Raymond could be at home and still be on call. Several teachers who lived in Cullman car-pooled to West Point five days a week. Bettina’s Cullman First Methodist Church was on the same block as the Funeral Home, so transportation was no problem for choir practice and other church services.
The class that graduated in 1955 had its 50th reunion in August of 2005. One of the graduates (Linda Reese Brock) and her husband, Bill, picked Bettina Pearson Higdon Burns up at Fair Haven Retirement Home in Birmingham, took her to the All Steak Restaurant in Cullman and brought her back to Fair Haven where she now lives in Birmingham. She was sure she would remember some of her former students and most of them remembered Little Alice, a reading she had learned from one of her Clarendon Avenue School teachers in the 1930s.
Frances Ward and Bettina attended Alabama College in Montevallo, AL, after graduation from Bessemer High School. Fran majored in Speech and Drama.
Bettina chose mathematics for her major and Latin for her minor. They graduated in the summer of 1941. There were only two available math jobs in Alabama that late in the summer: one at Pine Apple in Butler County in South Alabama and one at West Point in rural Cullman County about 60 miles from her parents in Bessemer. Bettina chose West Point. Fran went to Heflin near Anniston where she met and married an English aviator James Drysdale. Their military wedding occurred while Bettina was stuck in the Birmingham bus station trying to get to Anniston to sing at her friends wedding! Travel during WWII was difficult.
Published U.S. Legacies February 2006
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