By KEN BECK
Special to The Wilson Post

She may be the mother of the new mayor of Memphis, but Mary Alice Wharton had four other children, and the one thing that she and her late husband, A C Wharton Sr., made sure of was that each child was going to college.

The couple’s high priority on education reached back to their own childhoods when their opportunities for schooling were minimal.

Mary Alice Wharton, 93, sits in the den of her Lebanon home. She and her late husband, A C Wharton Sr., raised five children and saw to it that each graduated from college. Notice the African violet plant to her right and the set of encyclopedias in the shelf to her left. Gardening and books helped nurture body and mind in the Wharton home.  KEN BECK / The Wilson Post

She may be the mother of the new mayor of Memphis, but Mary Alice Wharton had four other children, and the one thing that she and her late husband, A C Wharton Sr., made sure of was that each child was going to college.

The couple’s high priority on education reached back to their own childhoods when their opportunities for schooling were minimal.

“We didn’t know what it was go to school a solid week, and we had to walk so far, four or five miles each way. If we learned anything, we’d forget it before we got home,” said Wharton, 93, who made countless sacrifices for her children to earn degrees at Tennessee State University in Nashville.

“We had to. We never had a new car in our lives. We always bought used ones. I been told I was crazy trying to send them all to school,” she said. “I cleaned the waiting room at Martha Gaston Hospital (later Cedarcroft) for 10 years. There were three floors. I started in the basement, and I wound up working all over that place, even working in the X-ray room, mixing that barium.”

The Whartons owned and operated a country store for nearly a quarter of a century on Trousdale Ferry Pike in the heart of one of Lebanon’s African-American neighborhoods. A C and Mary Alice were sterling examples of a couple committed to God, their marriage, their family (children Mary, Ruth, A C Jr., Kenneth and Velma) and their neighbors.

Today, Wharton lives by herself in a brick house about 60 yards behind the convenience store and gas station that she still owns and leases. A passel of African violets fill a window seat and other nooks across the den, the descendants of blue ribbon-winners from Wilson County Fairs of years past. A colorful quilt remains a work in progress in the living room.

Dozens of family photos dot the walls in the den where Wharton sits in her rocking chair below a photograph of her husband reading from a book to a grandchild, while over her other shoulder a mat of a picturesque cottage offers a quotation from the book of Joshua: “As for me and my house we will serve the Lord.”

Wharton has been a member of the Market Street Church of Christ since 1945, and her husband served as an elder there. On Sunday mornings, their children knew it was a given: they were going to Sunday School and staying for the preaching.

“Our sons worked at restaurants, and during Castle Heights graduations when all the hotels would be filled, the restaurant manager would always call and ask could they work, but he knew we wouldn’t let them work until after church on Sunday.”

The couple were stern believers in the biblical principle of spare the rod, spoil the child. Most times, it was the mother who was the disciplinarian.

“A C, he never did whip any of them, hardly. I had to spank them, especially Brother (the family’s nickname for A C Jr.), but all of ’em got ’em,” said the matriarch, Wilson County’s first black female barber, who used her razor strap for more than just sharpening her straight razor.

“When I went to barber college in Nashville, I had to have a straight razor and strap. I cut hair for years. I cut out on the front porch and in the yard in the summer with clippers. I charged a dime at first and worked on weekends. On Friday evenings the people lined up.”

Born Mary Alice Seay on Sept. 6, 1916, in Smith County, her father, Frank, was a farmer, and her mother, Dessie, was a housewife, laundress and midwife. Dessie helped raise Stratton Bone, now a Tennessee State Representative, and his two brothers while nurturing her own eight children. Mary Alice graduated from the eighth grade at the Sugar Flat School in Wilson County, but it was an education that did not come easy.

“Some say they was good ole days, but you know I can’t say that and tell the truth. I was there and that’s all I can say.”

She met her husband to be when she was 11 or 12 as they grew up neighbors. They courted off and on with a two-year gap in the middle as A C went to seek his fortune in Kansas City.

On April, 22, 1939, they married on the Lebanon town square beside the statue of General Hatton. She was 22 and he was 25. “He started making me think I wouldn’t have to work when we got married, but I knew better,” recalls Wharton, who has nine grandchildren and one great-grandson.

Mary Alice was married to A C, her soul mate for 64 years, until his death in 2003 at the age of 90. She reveals no big secret to a long and healthy marriage and simply advises, “A lot of people today marry too young. You marry for better or worse. If it’s worse, just deal with it.”

Daughter Ruth remembers what her father did when moments were “worse.”

“Daddy had a barn, really it was a chicken house. It had glass windows and he had a chair in there, and I asked him, ‘Why you have a chair up here in this chicken house?’ He said, ‘Well, when I get tired of your mama telling me to do this, do that, I just come on up here.’”

A C Wharton Sr. knew hard work. From early childhood he farmed and also rode across the countryside on a mule and collected bleached out bones that he sold in town to a fertilizer company.

About 1949, in the midst of raising his family and working a variety of other jobs, A C and a partner opened a grocery store and restaurant on Market Street that they ran for four or five years, but the business never panned out.

“Yeah, it was a mess. It didn’t work,” Mary Alice said. “I told him, ‘If you just got to be in business, the next time it’s got to be all ours.’”

That next time was Feb. 4, 1960, when the couple bought a tiny country store from Jim Debow for $1,800, and that included $200 of stock, such as milk, ice cream, candy, soda, tobacco products, meats, cereal, vegetables, fruits and kerosene. The Wharton family lived across the street from the store on Trousdale Ferry Pike in a house still owned by Mrs. Wharton. There was another structure on the same lot, a small two-room house built for A C's 90-year-old aunt, Maggie Bailey, which the family referred to as "the little house." (In 1972, A C and Mary Alice moved into a brick house just a few feet west of the old house, where she lives now.)

The Whartons enlarged that store in 1968, and in 1970 began construction of a new store fronting Baddour Parkway and less than 100 yards away from the old one. They operated the new A C Wharton Store from 1971 to 1984 and then retired. In 2003 the family donated the original store to City of Lebanon, and it now sits snugly ensconced in a corner of Fiddler’s Grove, the old-timey village in the Wilson County Fairgrounds. Some of the store’s original equipment, like the cash register, are still inside.

The country store gave the Whartons’ three youngest children an education in dealing with people.

“A C Jr., Kenneth and Velma spent most of their time in there. That’s where they learned to deal with people so well,” Wharton said.

Of course, the mother was teaching them the things she believed were important all along the way. “I taught them to always respect other people, grownups, neighbors,” she said, and believes those remain to be timeless values that parents should teach their children.

The couple also gave their children the gift of the love for books and owned a set of Funk and Wagnall Encyclopedias that were used just like a library. The set came one book at a time, one a month, because that was only way the family could afford to buy them.

“We used them as well as all the children in the community,” recalled daughter Ruth.

Mother Wharton shares a few tales about the son that is called Mayor in Memphis but still known as “Brother” in her home.

“When he was little, he talked all the time. He worried all the children, worried me at night, saying, ‘Mother, would you read this? What does this say?’ I told him, ‘I will be so glad when you get to school so you can do your own reading.’

“One day he was in his room crying and he told me, ‘You said when I went to school I would learn to read, and I can’t read. I been three whole days and I can’t read nothing.’ He always liked to read. All of them just read and read and read.”

A C and Mary Alice also taught their children the value of hard work. “We had to teach them,” she said, “and they got to see it to do it.

“I know Brother had a way of not coming home in time to do his work. One day his brother Kenneth was getting mad, and he said, ‘I’m getting tired of having to do Brother’s work,’ and I told him, ‘Just don’t do it. Leave it. You do your part.’ Brother come in that night and just as happy, and I told him, ‘Your work’s out there,’ and he was mad. That broke that up.”

During his high school years, A C Jr. worked at McGee and Jennings Jewelry store on the square.

“After he finished working, he would rush over to the courthouse and sneak in there and sit in and listen and learn,” Ruth said. “He would watch and see Avon Williams (a famous African-American lawyer from Nashville) in action.”

Six-and-a-half years away from the century mark, Wharton keeps plenty busy in the house with sewing, quilting and canning. In the spring she plants her annual vegetable garden, although this year she plans to back off a little.

“I’m not going try to dig any this year,” she said, indicating she will have somebody else do the tilling. “The garden will have everything you’re supposed to have: carrots, tomatoes, beans, peas, corn.”

A C and Mary Alice Wharton have left many legacies. One is the A C Wharton Family Scholarship at Cumberland University which goes to a Wilson County student majoring in business who is in need of financial support.

Said Ruth, “We did that on one of their anniversaries in honor of them. They never had the opportunity to go to school and always encouraged us as well as others to go to school. This was just a way to give back with a perpetual scholarship begun on their 50th wedding anniversary.”

But their most enduring legacy remains an extended family, connected by blood or by spirit, whose minds have been enriched by a solid education.

Ken Beck may be contacted at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .