One of the waitresses was a college student and student YWCA leader from Athens College in Alabama. Mabel Orr had been born in Decatur, Alabama, on June 22, 1908, but at age six her family had moved to Birmingham. Mabel’s father John, a printer, hoped to find work in the city to support his wife Florence and their children Elsie, John (nicknamed Brother to keep the two Johns distinct), Mabel and Freeman. While the parents struggled to make ends meet, they also encouraged their children to share with others who had even fewer material advantages. A newspaper picture from 1918 shows a ten-year-old Mabel with eight other girls:
Children Give an Original Play and Raise $14.35 for The Birmingham News Milk and Ice Fund.
Education was important to the Birmingham family. Mabel’s sister Elsie and elder brother John had won scholarships to local colleges. But Mabel was adventuresome and wanted to live on a campus. She had graduated from high school at sixteen and worked for a year in the school office. She was supposed to be the secretary, but sometimes the principal needed a substitute and put Mabel in charge of a class. Some of the boys in the class were older than their teacher!
After saving her earnings for a whole year, Mabel still did not have enough money to attend an out-of-town college. Her mother, who had been a teacher before she married, remembered that one of her college classmates was now president of Athens College in a small town several hours north of Birmingham. Mabel wrote to her mother’s classmate, asking for a scholarship and a chance to work on campus. While she was working at a Methodist Church camp in Trussville, Alabama, Mabel received the following letter:
June 20, 1926
Office of the President, Athens College
“Governed by Women for Girls and Women”
Dear Mabel:
Your dear mother wrote me about you last summer and the registrar has again brought you to my attention with the recommendation that we give you some line of employment by which you could meet at least a part of your expenses at Athens College. Please let me know frankly what your financial condition is, and if you really desire to come to Athens. I knew your mother, and your grandmother (also a teacher) before you were born, and if I can help you I shall be glad to do so.
Sincerely your friend,
Mrs. J. M. McCoy, President
At Athens College, Mabel did any job the college offered her. By sophomore year she was the editor of the Crow’s Nest, the campus newspaper. The young woman from Birmingham had been inducted into the literary society and her classmates voted her Best All-Round Student. In her junior year Mabel continued with classes in the English department. Since she was so tall, enjoyed theater, and there were no men on campus, she often played male roles in college productions. “Once a classmate came to my room,” Mabel recalled years later, “and asked why I had a framed picture of myself dressed up as a man for one of the college plays. It was Brother’s (John’s) graduation picture. I guessed we did look like siblings!”
Mabel was elected president of the drama club, an officer of the athletic association and the junior class, and she was chosen to be the editor of the Maid of Athens, the college yearbook. Since arriving at Athens, she had been active in the student YWCA and, in her junior year, was the vice-president.
It was not surprising that a student leader with special interest in the YWCA had been accepted to spend the summer at the YMCA Blue Ridge Assembly in western North Carolina. At the end of that summer Martin went back to teaching and Mabel to her senior year of college. Their friendship, begun in the dining hall, continued through letters. Remembering Blue Ridge, Martin wrote, “Was ever so much of life—I should say life, packed into such a short time? I doubt it.”
At Christmas Martin took the train to Birmingham and was welcomed by Mabel’s family. In a January letter he thanked her: “I don’t know when I enjoyed a week more.” They continued to get acquainted by frequent letters, and Martin hoped to spend part of the next Christmas holiday in Alabama. But the year was 1929, and the bank failed again. Martin could not cash his salary check and had no money for a train ticket. “New Year’s,” he wrote, “was far too quiet after last year in Birmingham.”
On May 27, 1930, Mabel graduated with honors from Athens College. Finances had been a continuing struggle. At the beginning of her junior year she had owed $306 from the previous term. Room and board, after scholarships and work study, were $159 per semester. Each club had a $10 fee. Mabel must have wanted badly to participate in them to pay for each campus organization she had joined. But the experience of living away from home and taking part in so many activities had been worth the expense. While she was happy that her family could travel by bus to see her graduate, she missed Martin. He would have come, but once more his salary was tied up by bank failure. And Mabel had to cash in one of her academic prizes, a $20 gold piece, to pay for graduation expenses and her trip home.
The summer after graduation Mabel had an experience she would talk about the rest of her life:
I wanted to work professionally for the YWCA and needed training, but it was the Depression and I had no money. The national YW offered me a scholarship to study for the summer in New York City! For a young woman from Alabama, who had never been out of the South, this was an exciting time. We had excellent training and free time to explore the city. The Chrysler Building had just been completed and was famous as the tallest skyscraper in the world. (The Empire State Building would not be finished for another year.) To see that beautiful Art Deco Chrysler skyscraper lit up at night was a sight I never forgot.
While Mabel described the excitement of New York, Martin wondered if he should spend the rest of his life as a teacher in the peaceful North Carolina village or, once again, pursue his dream of becoming a minister. As he was struggling, Mars Hill College invited a professor to give a series of lectures. The guest taught at Crozer Seminary in Pennsylvania. Years later Martin could feel the impact of those talks: “If that is a sample of what Crozer has to offer, that is what I have been looking for.”
After the lectures Martin asked the visitor many questions about the graduate school. Would he have to repeat courses he had taken at Louisville? How long would it take him to get a degree and become a pastor? Could he work on campus? And, most frightening of all, how would a Southerner be accepted among young ministers-in-training from the North?
5
Crozer Theological Seminary did accept Martin as a student. The dean offered him a scholarship and a chance to work on campus. He would need both, as his small salary had not stretched to include much in the way of savings. The Depression was causing money troubles for most people, rich and poor. Martin wrote to Mabel that he was both excited about returning to graduate school and frightened at the same time:
The Burnsville bank closed today. One of the men who lent me money to go to Louisville is a stockholder. I had been hoping I could count on him for some pennies this fall. And I must see that Mama and Pop and the boys (his two younger brothers in college) are taken care of.
The train trip to Pennsylvania was Martin’s first venture out of the South. The seminary was in Chester, near Philadelphia. As much as he wanted to follow his dream, Martin was aware how far away he was from his friend Mabel. After college she had worked for a year as teenage program director (then called “Girl Reserve Secretary”) in the Mobile, Alabama, YWCA. Because the Depression had hit everywhere, as the youngest staff member she had been laid off. Mabel had gotten a new job in Miami, Florida, in a larger YWCA with even more teenage and young adult programs under her care. Martin congratulated her, knowing that she was even farther away from Pennsylvania and worrying about how long it would be until he could see her again.
Crozer, he wrote to her that fall of 1931,
is the most stimulating place I have been since the Blue Ridge