Lenis by Holly Hart Shirley

Lenis by Holly Hart Shirley

…Fortis would have been a more appropriate name for my grandmother. Lenis was fortis all the way.

Everyone should have known that she would be a force of nature by the way Lenis came into the world. To get home to see his baby born, her Daddy had to swim across treacherous branches, rivers, and creeks to get back home to her mother, sans doctor or midwife. This flood was later known to locals as the Great Flood of 1929 and everyone in Escambia County had a mark on their walls where the water had stained. It was a badge of courage to show out of town folks how far the water had risen during the great flood.

Lenis brought the flood.

Bigmama always said she named Lenis after a name she’d seen in a book, and said it was French, I don’t know? My grandmother, Lenis with one “N”, is the only Lenis I’ve ever met, and I don’t think the world could've handled two of them.

Lenis: ADJECTIVE(of a consonant, especially a voiced consonant) weakly articulated, especially denoting the less or least strongly articulated of two or more similar consonants. The opposite of fortis.

Bigmama should’ve looked up the definition of Lenis before giving the girl who had the loudest sneeze in the history of insufferable screaming sneezes a name that meant the least articulated of two consonants. Fortis would have been a more appropriate name for my grandmother. Lenis was fortis all the way.

At nine years old, Lenis would wake up, milk the cow, get a fire going in the wood burning stove, help with breakfast, and sometimes make a batch of divinity or fudge that she’d sell on the bus for a nickel per chunk. From the time she was ten years old, she always had a pocket full of money.

Lenis graduated in record time from high school, going to summer school every summer and saving up the $3 per each county school bus she was paid to paint the letters on. Obsessed with Hollywood, glamour, and fashion her entire life, my grandmother always looked like she stepped out of a fashion magazine. The year she painted all those school buses, she bought a Catlina swimsuit with her money—just like the ones the movie stars wore.

By the time she was eighteen, she was a first-grade teacher and attended Troy State Teachers’ College in the summers to earn her teaching certificate. She never wanted to be a teacher, Lenis wanted to be a doctor or a nurse. Her Daddy told her that nurses were loose women and he “weren’t a gonna have it”, so she could be a teacher. Our branch of the tree wouldn’t be here today if Lenis had wanted to be a schoolteacher—a story for another day.

Following a failed marriage to a military man who slid into her front yard to sign his divorce papers on the two tires of a yellow convertible with a redhead named Mavis riding shotgun, Lenis found a job working for a local ENT, Dr. Perry. Albeit an indirect path to medicine, she found her way into a career and thrived working with patients.

A divorced, single mother in 1956 wasn’t an easy title to carry, and yet she was one of the first women in Escambia County to have her own checking account and a line of credit at the local bank. Mr. Murphy, the banker, asked her if she could bring her Daddy in to sign for her to open a checking account and she said “Why? He isn’t paying my bills.” She made history and died with the highest credit score most banks had ever seen.

Lenis had an entrepreneurial spirit that was cunning and relentless. She decided early on if she couldn’t be a doctor, she would become a hospital administrator. Word on the street was the doctor who owned the local hospital was recently divorced and struggling to manage his business. Lenis set her sights on becoming his administrator.

Upon returning from a beach trip, Lenis put on a linen sundress that crisscrossed in the back and made a pitcher of lemonade. Dr. Holley was coming out to visit Commissioner Julian Henley, Lenis’s Daddy, and she had decided she was going to ask for a job. It didn’t hurt that she was beautiful, twenty-eight years old with a twenty-four-inch waist and sun kissed, because before she could ask about a job, Dr. Holley asked her “What’s Perry paying you? I’ll give you $75 a week and I’ll buy you a car.”

She got a 1958 Packard.

Lenis went to work for Dr. Holley the next week and turned his hospital around in record time. According to Grandmother, she filed old insurance claims, had money pouring in the doors, started to pay off Doc’s debts, and had patients lined up to see him. Lenis kept him in line and sober when he needed to be. They were great partners, but there was a monkey wrench in the business—Lenis had a fiancé’.

Dr. Holley would come up with a list of ridiculous tasks that no person could accomplish if they worked a twenty-hour day every time Jim Yeager, Lenis’s Air Force pilot fiancé came into town. Very irritated, she came out and asked Doc why he was trying to sabotage her relationship and he simply said, “You don’t have any business marrying a man in the military.” The next weekend, Doc asked Lenis “What are you doing this weekend? Do you want to go to Mississippi and get married?”

September 10, 1957, they were married and remained married for forty-one years. Doc was twenty-three years her senior.

Lenis was the most determined person I’ve ever known. She did what she wanted, when she wanted, and how she wanted. She often said that she was the queen of that damned hill we lived on and if we didn’t like it, walk. She meant that. When she’d had enough of any conversation, she would loudly scream “Forget About it, I mean FORGET IT!”

When I had my first job interview in my twenties Lenis said “You’ll get the job. You’re beautiful and you know looking good is 90% of everything.” Inner beauty was for ugly people, not for Lenis and certainly not for her children. She once said that she would love me if I’d been born ugly, but she loved me more because I wasn’t.

Grandmother and her first cousin Jody didn’t have wrinkles until their nineties. They were having work done before plastic surgery was cool. When stopped for speeding after their first face lift, Jody told the policeman that they had been beaten by their husbands who were in the mob, and they were going to see the doctor. Instead of a ticket, the recovering bruised duo received a police escort to their plastic surgeon’s office with lights flashing.

Playing dress up in Lenis’s closet was a dream for a little girl. Capes and furs and boots and gloves like Alexis Carrington from Dynasty covered Lenis like royalty. Like Alexis, she had a presence about her; she took up all the oxygen in the room.

During the seventies, a square-dancing hair-dresser friend of Lenis’s named “Juanita” who was a cross between June Carter Cash and Elvira, met a shyster record producer who promised for five thousand dollars he would make her a country star. Lenis could smell Nashville and bit the scam hook, line, and sinker without ever hearing Juanita sing. Takeaway from this experience: Read the prospectus before you invest, and always get a sample of an artist’s work before becoming their benefactor.

Juanita returned from Nashville with a demo and five thousand dollars lighter. I will never forget walking into the kitchen while she was singing “I’m gonna haul off and love you one more time” while making a fist and stomping her foot—it looked like she was pumping water on the prairie. The sounds coming from her mouth were worse than yard cats in heat. It was that very day my mother, Deborah, decided if that lady could be a star, she was heading to Nashville too. For years, my mother had been singing in the mirror with a deodorant bottle, she was equally as qualified as Juanita.

Lenis was going through a mid-life crisis and had always craved the spotlight, so she went to Nashville with Juanita and my mom and bought herself a wardrobe that was nothing but leather, bling, fringe, and gigantic seventies sunglasses.

During the seventies, Nashville was experiencing a renaissance. Country music was crossing over to pop, sad drinking songs weren’t the only thing on country radio. Even Berry Gordy at Motown decided to branch out into country music. Gordy tapped John Fisher to the helm of Melodyland Records. John spotted Lenis the minute she walked into The King of the Road. She always said he approached her thinking she was important because of her fabulous white leather outfit with the fringe.

Fisher walked up to her and said, “Who are you with?” and she answered, “I’m Lenis Holley.” He spent a few days asking everyone in town who she was, which created a buzz, and she was soon invited to lots of fun parties.

Fisher and Lenis became fast friends and eventually the two of them started their own small record label—Current Records.

John could smoke three cigarettes at a time, put them inside of his mouth lit, down a drink of water, and then open his mouth and continue to smoke the cigarettes. To this day, it’s the best party trick I’ve ever seen.

While John did couch casting every day, Lenis would take T.G. Sheppard to lunch; that was her job. T.G. had a big hit with “Devil in the Bottle” and was John’s headline recording artist at Melodyland. Lenis and John later signed Stella Parton, Dolly’s sister, and a few lesser-known recording artists who were fantastic. John had also signed Terry Stafford who wrote one of the greatest country hits of all time, Amarillo by Morning.

You might imagine that Melodyland would have had a fancy office with lots of chrome and glass, but it didn’t. John had an upstairs office with paneled walls and some vinyl stacking chairs with a few gold records hanging on the wall. That was Nashville in the seventies- old houses on Sixteenth Avenue where you might run into a country music legend on any given day. I remember seeing a guy bending over tying his shoes and John screaming out “I’m not kissing your ass, stand up.” It was Ray Stevens and I yelled out the window “DON’T LOOK ETHEL!”

My mother became a great performer and had two singles on Lenis’s and John’s label. Her remake of Barbara Mason’s “Yes I’m ready” was #1 for 26 weeks in DeLand, Florida (#1 is a #1 no matter where it is) and she toured all over the country with a few guys who had toured with The Birds. Her last big gig was a headliner for a year in a Gilly’s type club in Daytona Beach, Florida, called Country Music USA in 1977. For a little girl singing in a deodorant bottle, these were dreams materialized.

Mom eventually moved us back home to raise me, Lenis had business to attend to with Granddaddy, and Nashville was in our rear-view mirror.

It was a long journey from Bradley, Alabama, firing up a wood burning stove and milking a cow at daylight to owning a small record label in Nashville, but Lenis did it. She was never inducted into the Opry, and she never won a grammy. What she did was so much better than that. Lenis turned her nickel fudge into star spangled dreams come true and I am a beneficiary of her tenacity.

Holly Hart Shirley is the fifth generation of women to live at Holley House and share their love of good food and hospitality. She is an interior designer and worked alongside her mother, Deborah George, for four and a half years on the renovation and reconstruction of the bed and breakfast—leaving no detail to chance. Holly lived at Holley House as a child and later as a young adult and now is the founder of the Murder Creek Writing Retreat that will take place in her childhood home every year. She is an NCIDQ certified interior designer and resides in Birmingham, Alabama with her husband of twenty years, Jimbo, and the ashes of their late Maltese, Willie Nelson. She is a professional member of Writers Bootcamp out of Los Angeles, California, and is an alumnus of the Yale Writers Workshop. Holly is currently working on a memoir entitled Blackwater Birthright.

Holly with her grandmother, Lenus, 1974