Meet Miss Virginia

Virginia Conway
13 Dec 1889- 16 Jun 1973

Aunt Ginnie was a well known poet.  She never married and never had children.  I have heard through family stories that she was in love with only one man in her entire life and he loved her.  The problem was religion.  She was devout, unswerving Church of Christ and he was Southern Baptist.  He asked her to marry him and she said yes but there were conditions which they both insisted on, almost like a contract today but, the only provisions in his part of the contract was that Aunt Ginnie become Baptist.

She flatly refused.  The only provisions in her part of the contract was that he become Church of Christ.  He refused. 

He did go on years later to marry someone else but Aunt Ginnie never did.

She was the finest and most religious lady I have ever known and I lived half of my life or more being raised by her in Lawrenceburg, TN.


The thing that has impressed me all of my life about her was the fact that her religion was not the 'Sunday only' kind.  She lived her religion and her love of her God and her Christ every day of her life.

There was no place in Lawrenceburg where Aunt Ginnie was not treated with the utmost respect and admiration and everyone knew her.

She exuded an inner beauty that almost literally radiated like a halo until she died.

Even when her mind started to go in the early '70s just before she died she exibited the kindness, and gentleness which was inherent to her nature.

Don't get me wrong, she was not above using the rod when I got out of hand but she would try every other approach she could think of first.

She was a teacher and it would appear that she taught everyone of my grade school and high school teachers and that's all I ever heard from my teachers while going to school in Lawrenceburg.

I have a great number of the original drafts of her poems and I fully intend to share them with everyone but, be patient, I am trying to put them in chronological order and find any which were published that I may not have and have them placed in a memorial poetry book to her.

Most of her poetry is religious and family oriented. Aunt Ginnie would sit up until all hours sometimes, writing poems.  She would stop whatever she was doing when a poem came into her head so she could write it down on virtually anything available to her at the moment.

About the only vice, that I know of, which Aunt Ginnie ever had was Saturday night Wrestling.  She and Miss Bergen and Miss McGee would visit back and forth at each other's homes on Saturday night and yell and scream at the TV.  For the next hour all you would hear would be one, or all of them in unison screaming, "Oh, Kill 'im!" "He can't do that! What's wrong with that referee?!?", and any other variety of encouragement and admonishment.

I tried to tell Aunt Ginnie and Miss McGee, one night, that I was of the understanding that wrestling was all a fake.  I commented on how the guys at school had told me that the wrestlers had to go to a special school to learn how to wrestle so no one gets hurt and that they already knew who the winner would be.

I guess I don't need to try to describe the looks I got from those two sweet old ladies.

Folks, it weren't no pretty sight!  I was sat down and informed that I was too young to know what was real or not.  I was further informed that they knew real blood when they saw it and some of those poor wrestlers were really bleeding. 

Friends, y'all lend me yore ears here.......TV was strictly B&W in those days!  How could anyone know exactly what they were seeing?  Blood and Ketchup look the same in B&W!

You know who won the argument, don't you? I was sent outside to play because the wrestling was coming on.

Other than Saturday night wrestling I don't believe I ever saw Aunt Ginnie turn the TV on. She listened to her news on the radio in the mornings during the 'Ralston-Purina' farm show.

Aunt Ginnie begun teaching with Uncle 'P' at the Pin Hook School in Appleton, TN when she was only 15 years old and actually became a teacher at the age of 19.  All of the children who went to the Pin Hook School knew that she wouldn't whip a young kid but would make them stand, on tip-toes, with their nose in a chalk ring drawn on the blackboard for infractions of the rules.  They also knew that, as they got older, she would tan their hides!

She taught at the Lawrence County High school for a number of years and then, as she got older, went to work for the 1st National Bank in Lawrenceburg as their head bookeeper.

She was also a firm believer in the adage, "idle hands cause idle minds..", which was brought home to me in the summer months, when I lived with her, as Uncle Andrew was tasked with getting me from Lawrenceburg to Appleton to board at Cousin Joe and Onabelle Wray's farm to plant, chop and pick the cotton crop.  She didn't intend for children to never have any idle time, just damned little of it.

Of course, she also knew that Joe Wray enjoyed a good day's fishing or squirrel hunting and that he liked kids, so it wasn't all work.  When I was small Aunt Ginnie provided everything I needed but as I got older she felt I needed to learn to earn what I got and learn responsibility.

I wanted a bicycle. She wanted me to have it, however, she had no intention of not being reimbursed for the cost of that bike.  She went to see Mr. Ezell who, at that time, ran the newspaper delivery for the Nashville Tennessean in Lawrenceburg and he put me on as a paper boy delivering newspapers on my new bike (Mr. Ezell became the Mayor of Lawrenceburg a few years ago).  I paid for my bicycle

Aunt Ginnie died in 1973.  Of all of my dead relatives whom I loved, I love and miss her most of all.