{"id":1576,"date":"2018-04-06T06:00:11","date_gmt":"2018-04-06T13:00:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/?p=1576"},"modified":"2018-04-05T19:38:35","modified_gmt":"2018-04-06T02:38:35","slug":"tales-from-the-trail-take-three","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/2018\/04\/06\/tales-from-the-trail-take-three\/","title":{"rendered":"Tales From the Trail, Take Three"},"content":{"rendered":"

Whew!\u00a0 Thirty-five hundred miles in a little over three weeks.\u00a0 That many miles combined with countless events means that Bill and I have covered a lot of ground.\u00a0 He\u2019s been doing the driving; I\u2019ve been doing the talking and signing.\u00a0 Most nights we were ready to hit the hay by nine o\u2019clock or so.\u00a0 If anyone is under the misguided impression that being on a book tour is like being on vacation, please disabuse yourself of that notion.<\/p>\n

The dogs took a more direct trip home, so Jojo and Mary were already at home in Bellevue, Washington, by the time we got here.\u00a0 What we wanted more than anything was to spend some quality time with our puppies and our own television set and clicker.\u00a0 We also wanted to take a long hot showers.\u00a0 The dogs and the TV parts worked just fine.\u00a0 The shower?\u00a0 Not so much.<\/p>\n

One of the hazards of having two houses is that something goes wrong with one when you\u2019re visiting the other.\u00a0 In this case, it was the thermostats on the hot-water heaters.\u00a0 Why both decided to fail at once is one of the mysteries of the universe, but fail they did, and COLD showers are definitely not my thing!\u00a0 The kitchen garbage disposal had given up the ghost as well, so we spent two days with a plumber putting those issues to rights while our yappy dogs did what they do best\u2014they yapped.<\/p>\n

In addition, the trickle charger on the car in the garage had somehow come loose which meant that the car was dead as a doornail.\u00a0 It no longer recognizes either of our key fobs, and the only way to open the trunk is to have the ignition on and one foot on the brake.\u00a0 (Not exactly convenient for loading the trunk.)\u00a0 With the application of Bill\u2019s Amex, that problem is now resolved as well.<\/p>\n

But still, despite those little bumps, we\u2019re home and happy to be so.<\/p>\n

\"\"

Mrs. Riggins<\/p><\/div>\n

This week, as we traveled, there was another blast from the past.\u00a0 I heard from a complete stranger, Cindy Pearson Cole, who turns out to be the granddaughter of one of my favorite teachers from Bisbee High School.\u00a0 Cindy\u2019s mother, Rachel Eleanor Riggins was the daughter and namesake of her mother and my beloved teacher, Rachel T. Riggins.<\/p>\n

Mrs. Riggins was my home room teacher through all four of my years at Bisbee High.\u00a0 My junior year she was my Journalism teacher, and during my senior year when my best friend, Pat McAdams Hall, and I were co-editors of our student newspaper, the Copper Chronicle, she was our newspaper advisor.\u00a0 She was a kind, soft-spoken woman with a hairdo that came straight out of the forties.\u00a0 She was also the teacher who recommended me for Pima Hall, the co-op dorm at the University of Arizona that, in large measure, made it possible for me to attend four years of college.<\/p>\n

Cindy Cole was only eleven when her mother died of a heart ailment at age 35.\u00a0 One morning while making the bed in preparation for going off on vacation, she dropped dead, and Cindy was the one who found her.\u00a0 Cindy had previously received some CPR training at school.\u00a0 After summoning help and while awaiting the arrival of the medics, she tried administering CPR to no avail.\u00a0 It was too late.\u00a0 Her mother was gone.<\/p>\n

Mrs. Riggins\u2019s daughter’s death occurred years after I graduated from high school, but she was one of few teachers with whom I stayed in touch even after I left town, and I knew she was devastated at the loss of her only child.<\/p>\n

So why did Mrs. Riggins\u2019s granddaughter contact me? Cindy\u2019s two children\u2014 her daughter, Margeaux Adams Spain and her son, Henry Adams, were about to visit southern Arizona, and their mother was hoping to locate the house in Bisbee where their grandmother had once lived.\u00a0 While searching for information on the Web, she had Googled her grandmother\u2019s name and Bisbee, Arizona.\u00a0 What should show up in that search result was my Going Back To Bisbee blog entry from September of 2015.\u00a0 In it I had discussed how some of Rachel Riggins\u2019s timely advice, given to me long after high school, had favorably impacted the life of one of my own students when I was a teacher at Pueblo High in Tucson.<\/p>\n

Thus began Cindy\u2019s and my e-mailed conversation.\u00a0 Because Pat and I had worked closely with Mrs. Riggins on newspaper production, we had visited her home often. I was able to let Cindy know exactly where the house was located. Mrs. Riggins was a big believer in manicures, something Pat and I regarded with endless fascination since neither or our mothers ever indulged in manicures.\u00a0 When I mentioned that fact to Cindy, she wrote back telling me that on long family road trips, she and the woman she calls Grammie would sit in the back seat of the car and have pretend manicure sessions.\u00a0 It\u2019s interesting that that single telling detail\u2014Mrs. Riggins\u2019s love of manicures from back could still have so much impact on both Cindy and me all these years later.<\/p>\n

Cindy asked me what if anything I knew about Mrs. Riggins\u2019s second husband in what she referred to as a brief but disastrous second marriage.\u00a0 A second marriage.\u00a0 That was news to me.\u00a0 I knew nothing of the existence of a second husband.\u00a0 Mrs. Riggins was actually Julia Rachel Thompson Riggins, which by the time I knew her, she had shortened to Rachel T. Riggins.\u00a0 Her daughter was\u00a0 Rachel Eleanor Riggins.\u00a0 In an era when wives generally took their husband\u2019s last names, how would a second husband fit into that picture?<\/p>\n

Pat and I thought Mrs. Riggins came from somewhere back East and that she had graduated from Mt. Holyoke. It turns out she was a Bisbee native although she wasn\u2019t actually born there.\u00a0 Her mother trekked over to El Paso and gave birth in the Hotel Dieu Hospital there. The Mt. Holyoke part of her story was correct, but that raised more questions.\u00a0 How did a girl from Bisbee, Arizona, born in 1908, end up in an elite East Coast college?\u00a0 And, much to my surprise, I learned that she had two younger brothers, Bob and Sumner.<\/p>\n

Pat and I were under the impression that the woman we knew as Rachel T. Riggins had been widowed at a very early age.\u00a0 We knew that her husband, a physician in Bisbee, had died at some point.\u00a0 I\u2019ve now learned from Cindy that Dr. John Carton Riggins originally hailed rom North Carolina, and that the couple met while attending school in Tucson.\u00a0 But back in 1962 all or this information was shrouded in mystery.\u00a0 Inquiries into the private lives of teachers were strictly off limits.\u00a0 Together Pat and I theorized that Dr. Riggins must have gone away during World War II and not returned.\u00a0 Beyond that, Mrs. Riggins\u2019s personal life remained shrouded in mystery.<\/p>\n

I believe Pat and I were a bit of a trial for her.\u00a0 I remember her admonishing us on occasion that we shouldn\u2019t get pleasure from our evil thoughts.\u00a0 I can tell you that whenever she told us that, we dissolved into fits of giggles.<\/p>\n

In the course of our correspondence, Cindy told me that Dr. Riggins died of pneumonia in 1937, so our assumption of his perishing in World War II was way off base.\u00a0 She also mentioned that Mrs. Riggins discovered that she was pregnant with her daughter shortly after her husband\u2019s death.\u00a0 Was she already a teacher at that point?\u00a0 I have no way of knowing, but I doubt it.\u00a0 She evidently submitted a thesis for a Masters Degree in Social Work in 1946. I have a feeling teaching came later as she struggled to support her daughter.\u00a0 Being a single mother is always difficult, maybe even more so then than now.<\/p>\n

I asked Snoody Holland Boroweic, a longtime acquaintance and a Bisbee native, to do some research for on the matter.\u00a0 She came up with a marriage certificate dated March 9, 1946 between between one Keith Forrest Collins and Rachel Thompson Riggins.\u00a0 That was the same year the thesis was submitted.\u00a0 I have no idea how or why that marriage ended.\u00a0 Perhaps there was an annulment.\u00a0 Considering the times, she may have been forced to spend six weeks in Nevada in order to obtain a quickie divorce. According to Cindy, she refused to discuss that part of her life with anyone, so perhaps she never did get around around to obtaining a divorce.\u00a0 In any event, I suspect that finding a teaching job back in those days would have been problematic for a divorced woman.<\/p>\n

Sometime in the seventies, Mrs. Riggins left Bisbee and moved to Tucson, Arizona, where she was hired by the University of Arizona to supervise student teachers.\u00a0 She was probably the very best candidate they could have found to do that challenging job. I visited her only once at her second address in Tucson which, as it turns out, is less than a mile from our place in El Encanto.\u00a0 By then, though, I was going down the rabbit hole of my own difficult first marriage, and after that I simply lost track of her.\u00a0 Official records list her death as having occurred in Prescott.\u00a0 That was evidently in error.\u00a0 Cindy tells me she died at a nursing home in Tucson.\u00a0 She was cremated.\u00a0 I can only hope that her ashes were scattered in Bisbee.\u00a0 I like to think that she was finally able to go back home.<\/p>\n

Now, through the magic of the Internet, Cindy Pearson Cole knows more about her beloved Grammie than she knew before, and I know a few more bits and pieces about Mrs. Riggins, my much loved teacher from Bisbee High.\u00a0 More than five and a half decades later, she remains as much of a mystery to me as she ever was\u2014a much loved mystery and one well worth revisiting.<\/p>\n

Rest in peace, Rachel T. Riggins.\u00a0 And just in case you\u2019re interested, Pat McAdams and Judy Busk are still getting pleasure from their evil thoughts.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Whew!\u00a0 Thirty-five hundred miles in a little over three weeks.\u00a0 That many miles combined with countless events means that Bill and I have covered a lot of ground.\u00a0 He\u2019s been doing the driving; I\u2019ve been doing the talking and signing.\u00a0 Most nights we were ready to hit the hay by nine o\u2019clock or so.\u00a0 If […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[53],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1576","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bisbee"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3nsBA-pq","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1576","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1576"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1576\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1581,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1576\/revisions\/1581"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1576"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1576"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1576"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}