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Mary Barton Obituary
For some, the new year brought rain, and memory: the smell of pine floors and singed denim, knots of weary souls gathered 'round open-flame gas stoves, circles of hungry mouths devouring hot cornbread and cold Blue Bell ice cream.
The memory was of the living, in honor of the dead. A great patron of the arts has passed on to fresher canvas. Mary F. Barton died the second day of 1992. She was 83.
There was no shock in it. She had been sick long enough to expect and covet death. The services were simple, as befit her.
Atop her coffin in the Methodist church sat a photograph of an attractive young woman, hair cropped short in the fashion of the roaring '20s. In the picture, the skin is seamless, the lips ambiguous, the eyes deep, gray, wise, and old before their time, as if set far into the future.
No one who shared the passions of that long-ago moment was with her at the grave. She tarried too long for that kind of parting. Like some forgotten general from a long-ago war, a biplane in the age of jets, she had outlived her epoch, and few who read her obituary will realize what great and gentle armies she commanded, the quiet battles that she fought, or the slow but steady grace with which she flew.
Nonetheless, there was a good crowd for her departure, including old friends from Buda, loyal despite her successive exiles from society: the first, self-imposed, to care for a dying husband; the second dictated by the corrosive ravages of Altzheimer's disease. The bigger part of the gathering was of a generation or two behind her. These were people touched by her later life, or by the offspring and outshoots of her, testaments to the immortal consequences of a single, kind life upon the earth.
She was not a patron of the opera, nor of West Austin galleries, but of the art of the practical, of directness, of acceptance, of cornbread, potatoes, and living. Because of her family, she became also a patron of newspapers and whatever small art is in them.
She put meat on the ribs of the Free Press through two or three of the leanest years by cooking supper for half the staff or more every Thursday night, after the week's paper was put to bed. Editors, reporters, aspiring novelists and politicians would assemble there at whatever hour the work was finished, and whether the eaters were two or 20, there was always, somehow, food enough to go around. Exhausted souls were revived in her small parlor, resuscitated by the din of of merry voices, the familiar whistle of her hearing aide, and impossible doses of salt and sugar.
As the newspaper grew fatter, and Mary leaner, the tradition lingered. A wandering, oval-shaped young man by the name of John Chamberlin answered a classified ad in the Free Press, and so, with his oval-shaped cat, came to live with her, and care for her, and - in due time - to receive and expand upon the weekly miracle of loaves and fishes.
Young journalists continued to crowd into her home to strut and crow, and eat, and in winter to fight for position in front of the old stove, or in summer to maneuver for a place by the fan, until the odor of crispy denim or Texas sweat was palpable.
The ritual was capped, always, by settling in to watch Hill Street Blues. The show was new, a hit, and everyone was talking about its ensemble cast and its rich mixture of wit, action, unorthodox romance, ambition, and poignancy. When, at length, officer Renko had suffered his final torment for the evening, when Captain "Pizza Man" Furillo had beaten all the bureaucrats and all the criminals that it was in him to beat for this episode and had booked a hotel room for himself and councilor Joyce Davenport to discuss the ironies of civilization in skimpy bedclothes while the credits rolled, then, finally, gorged on ice cream and comradery, the parlor crew would stumble out in search of sleep.
Of course there came a time when Hill Street, for all its awards, lost its vigor and left the air. And there came a time when Mary Fly Barton, better known to her youthful admirers as "Mimi," confused the salt for the sugar, and the sugar for the Lemon Joy, and the traffic outside for the rail cars of 1917 carrying young men off to war.
Haltingly, the Thursdays came to an end. A new staff moved into the newspaper, and new people into Mary's house. Mary moved to an institution, while ever-so-slowly, reluctantly, her body gave up the show that her mind had long-since abandoned.
Now I see that after years of absence, Hill Street is back in late-night re-runs. Mary F. Barton, patron of cornbread, mistress of the Blue Bell, dispenser of sage if unspoken advice, was, also, to me, a grandmother, who bequeathed a home and many enriching memories. The most passionate, the most complex and the most adult of those are of her ancient photograph above that coffin, and of an old woman, in a sea of young faces, fiddling with her hearing aide and watching the season's hippest show.
The scion of Methodist circuit riders, she was, as far as I know, a teetotaler. But not a fanatical one. So I believe she will not object when a few of us tune to Hill Street and toast the human struggles of Renko, and Captain Furillo, councilor Joyce Davenport, and Mimi, the great provider.
- Jeff Barton, a freelance writer and former publisher of the Free Press, lives with his wife and son on the Mountain City farm that once belonged to Mary and Bob Barton Sr. -
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