Celebrate Sweetest Day Today — it’s Sweet Wanda’s 98th Birthday!

If you’ve followed our Safe & Sound blog for a while, you know who Wanda Bridgeforth is: she has been attending the memoir-writing class I lead in downtown Chicago for over a decade. She’s witty and talented, and today, October 19, not only is Sweetest Day, it’s Wanda’s 98th birthday!

When our “Me, Myself and I” class celebrated the big event last Wednesday, Wanda remembered a prompt I’d given years ago: Write About Something You’re Really, Really Good At. “All I could come up with was…surviving!” she laughed, adding that she sometimes shares the weekly prompts with her daughter, Wanda, Jr. “When I shared the prompt with Junior that week, she came up with an answer I’ve never forgotten,” Wanda said, her voice sounding quite serious now. “She said I’ve always been good at mothering.”

And so, to celebrate this happy, happy birthday today, I am sharing a delightful essay Wanda wrote about how, way back in the 20th Century, she and her husband came up with a name for their daughter.

by Wanda Bridgeforth I

I was the oldest female of a dozen cousins. For almost seven years, I was the only girl. This age difference resulted in being the first to date, to marry, and to become a mother.

The family referred to my father and his brothers as “We Boys.” They had no sisters, so We Boys name their daughters after themselves. This resulted in Albertine, Claudette, Claudine, Earline, Fredricka, Haroldine, etc. That should give you some idea of our naming process.

We grew up in the age of fairy tales, True Romance magazine and and movies that ended with the hero winning the girl and riding off to live happily ever after. Curtis was in the army, and on New Year’s Eve he called me from a train station in downtown Chicago. He could not say which train station he was at, and he couldn’t leave the station because his outfit was on alert. They were being shipped out, destination unknown. He told me not to worry if I didn’t receive mail because all contact with family would cease until they reached their destination. I told him my pregnancy had been confirmed and we would be proud parents in early summer.

In the meantime, the girl cousins back home got busy compiling a list of names for the baby. My husband’s name was “Marvin Curtis,” mine, “Wanda Geneva,” so you can just imagine the suggestions. True to tradition, we had some doozies. For example: Wantis Curanda. Marvinia. Marvetta. The names go on from there. I guess because of their gender, boy’s names were limited to Marvin Curtis, Jr.

At last in mid-April I received a bag of V-mail from my soldier husband. Much of it was blotted out, but it did say the ship had been at sea for 56 days. In case all the mail didn’t reach me, he wrote his name suggestions in several letters. Only two names were on the letters, one mail, and one female. The boys name was his, and the girl’s name was mine.

I always signed my letters with Roman numeral I after my name, so when this baby girl arrived I gave her my name and added “Junior.” Although she changed her last name when she got married, and she’s been married over 40 years, our family and friends still call us “Senior” and “Junior.”

Happy birthday to Wanda, and Happy Sweetest Day to Junior, too — you’re one of the sweetest daughters around.