Flannery arrived with her pet duckling, and a whole outfit of underwear and clothes, beautifully sewn to fit the duck! The class in great glee all gathered round and helped dress the duck. Flannery successfully passed the course.”
By now she had a full menagerie of birds to choose from for her models. On the eve of America’s entrance into World War II, Mary Flannery was particularly drawn to names for her pets lifted from the daily newspapers she was required to read for History class. With an instinct for shock value, the author who would later warn, “The topical is poison,” went straight for the headlines. She named her black crow, rescued when the bird was shot by a neighbor for stealing pecans, Winston, after Winston Churchill. Her pet rooster, another of her models in Art class, was Haile Selassie, for the emperor of Ethiopia, reinstated in 1941 after being routed by the armies of Benito Mussolini. Most controversial was her second rooster, Adolph, the pen mate of Haile, as Adolf Hitler, the führer of Germany, had just declared war on the United States in December 1941. She changed its name only after neighbors were disturbed by calls of “Here, Adolph!” issuing from the Cline backyard.
Cartoons turned out to be a happy medium for this quiet, yet extremely critical girl. Through her monthly cartoons, she could bare her teeth in the guise of a smile. As a more mature O’Connor wrote, in 1959, to Ted Spivey: “From 15 to 18 is an age at which one is very sensitive to the sins of others, as I know from recollections of myself. At that age you don’t look for what is hidden.” Among the sins that she exposed was the pretense of senior plays: in “Senior, Senior, Wherefore Art Thou, Senior,” she conjured two girls in a histrionic balcony scene to accompany the article “Seniors Present Annual Plays.” Like any good cartoonist, she was alert to the mood of her audience. A week following the bombing of Pearl Harbor, in a December 1941 cartoon, she modulated her tone with “In Hopes That a Jimmie Soon Will Be There”: a girl sits next to a fireplace, with a soldier’s jacket hung from the mantel as a Christmas stocking. (Jimmie was a nickname for a cadet at Georgia Military College, many of whom enlisted in the war effort.)
Most unsuitable for the physically awkward girl was gym class. “She just thought playing sports was the biggest bore,” says Elizabeth Shreve Ryan. “We had to put on our blue bloomers and go out to a grassy area behind the school on the main campus and play volleyball. I can just remember her standing in her gym uniform making no effort to give the ball a hoist. She’d kind of nudge her shoulder as if that was all she was willing to do. She did that very cheerfully, but it was just not her bag.” Likewise “not her bag” were dance invitations to battalion balls at Georgia Military College, and the chance to dress up in the retro gowns of Southern belles to match the gray uniforms of the boys. She was much happier adding to her collection of 150 replicas of birds, and other animals, in china and glass, or designing another of the original lapel pins she sold out of a local drugstore.
O’Connor was most in her element in English class, especially a six-week segment devoted to creative writing. Her Composition teacher, Frances Lott Ratliff, has remarked on how surprised she was that a fifteen-year-old could show such talent. “How she looked didn’t seem to matter,” she added. Elizabeth Shreve Ryan recalls the sensation caused by O’Connor’s writing: “Being in a creative writing class with Mary Flannery in high school was sheer torture. I remember she wrote a very strange story with weird characters. I don’t know whether it was a ghost story, but it was gripping. As World War II was just beginning, I wrote some drivel about a soldier and his girlfriend. Her stories were written with panache, and a wry sense of humor. But they were just weird.”
She did agree to
By now she had a full menagerie of birds to choose from for her models. On the eve of America’s entrance into World War II, Mary Flannery was particularly drawn to names for her pets lifted from the daily newspapers she was required to read for History class. With an instinct for shock value, the author who would later warn, “The topical is poison,” went straight for the headlines. She named her black crow, rescued when the bird was shot by a neighbor for stealing pecans, Winston, after Winston Churchill. Her pet rooster, another of her models in Art class, was Haile Selassie, for the emperor of Ethiopia, reinstated in 1941 after being routed by the armies of Benito Mussolini. Most controversial was her second rooster, Adolph, the pen mate of Haile, as Adolf Hitler, the führer of Germany, had just declared war on the United States in December 1941. She changed its name only after neighbors were disturbed by calls of “Here, Adolph!” issuing from the Cline backyard.
Cartoons turned out to be a happy medium for this quiet, yet extremely critical girl. Through her monthly cartoons, she could bare her teeth in the guise of a smile. As a more mature O’Connor wrote, in 1959, to Ted Spivey: “From 15 to 18 is an age at which one is very sensitive to the sins of others, as I know from recollections of myself. At that age you don’t look for what is hidden.” Among the sins that she exposed was the pretense of senior plays: in “Senior, Senior, Wherefore Art Thou, Senior,” she conjured two girls in a histrionic balcony scene to accompany the article “Seniors Present Annual Plays.” Like any good cartoonist, she was alert to the mood of her audience. A week following the bombing of Pearl Harbor, in a December 1941 cartoon, she modulated her tone with “In Hopes That a Jimmie Soon Will Be There”: a girl sits next to a fireplace, with a soldier’s jacket hung from the mantel as a Christmas stocking. (Jimmie was a nickname for a cadet at Georgia Military College, many of whom enlisted in the war effort.)
Most unsuitable for the physically awkward girl was gym class. “She just thought playing sports was the biggest bore,” says Elizabeth Shreve Ryan. “We had to put on our blue bloomers and go out to a grassy area behind the school on the main campus and play volleyball. I can just remember her standing in her gym uniform making no effort to give the ball a hoist. She’d kind of nudge her shoulder as if that was all she was willing to do. She did that very cheerfully, but it was just not her bag.” Likewise “not her bag” were dance invitations to battalion balls at Georgia Military College, and the chance to dress up in the retro gowns of Southern belles to match the gray uniforms of the boys. She was much happier adding to her collection of 150 replicas of birds, and other animals, in china and glass, or designing another of the original lapel pins she sold out of a local drugstore.
O’Connor was most in her element in English class, especially a six-week segment devoted to creative writing. Her Composition teacher, Frances Lott Ratliff, has remarked on how surprised she was that a fifteen-year-old could show such talent. “How she looked didn’t seem to matter,” she added. Elizabeth Shreve Ryan recalls the sensation caused by O’Connor’s writing: “Being in a creative writing class with Mary Flannery in high school was sheer torture. I remember she wrote a very strange story with weird characters. I don’t know whether it was a ghost story, but it was gripping. As World War II was just beginning, I wrote some drivel about a soldier and his girlfriend. Her stories were written with panache, and a wry sense of humor. But they were just weird.”
She did agree to
Similar Books
