by Gwen McMath
Sometimes there are people who cross your path in life that make a lasting impression. One of the women in my life who mentored, and loved, and taught me much of what I have learned about being spiritual is my husband’s Grandmother May. When I think of her I think of the scripture from the beatitudes that says, “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.”
Grandmother May (full name Clara Mae Welch) was born to Marion Bee Welch and Alice Eugene Carter Welch on September 24, 1900 on a farm in De Leon, Texas. On her fifth birthday, after attending her mother’s funeral, May was sent to live with relatives at 1814 Pearsall in Corpus Christi, Texas. At thirteen May was sent back to Dallas to stay in a boarding house and make her own way in life. As providence would have it, she got involved with the Pentecostal outpouring of the Holy Spirit, and most of her time was spent at church or in church activities. She was engaged at sixteen to a man who was a Christian but who did not share her zeal for Pentecostalism. It was at this time in her life that she met her future husband, J.B. McMath at a Dallas County Jail ministry. He was a new convert to Pentecostalism, having been saved on a street corner in Marlin, Texas. When May first met J.B. it prompted her to put her engagement ring back in the pocket of her former sweetheart and she soon thereafter she married J.B. When J.B. proposed to her he said to her, “May, could you ever love me enough to marry me?” She replied, “I passed “could” a long time ago!” They married on January 19, 1919 and always told people that they met in jail.
I heard stories about Grandmother May long before I met her. While I was dating my husband Charley he told me the story of how his grandmother took him to a funeral home with her when he was about ten years old to see someone who had died. She let Charley roam free throughout the funeral home and soon he found an empty coffin and began to ask Grandmother what it was like being in one. She helped him crawl in and she shut the lid. He thought it was a great experience but I am sure his mother would not have approved!
When I finally met Grandmother May I was not disappointed. Though she was never what you would call a beautiful woman as she became older, she always wore an angelic smile and made you feel like you were the only person that mattered while you were with her. When anyone would visit her, she would run out to the back of her house before you left and pick you some of her lovely miniature pink sweetheart roses and wrap the stems in foil. This was an extra treat of her love that would linger with you after you left. One of her granddaughters, Heather, still has some of the petals from that rosebush in her mementoes. Grandmother always held your hand and patted you and would introduce me as “her darling Grandson’s wife.” I never saw her in anything but a dress. She had beautiful, thick hair and looked a lot like the Queen Mother of England. Sometimes her smile would be deceiving because she played the little old lady to the hilt. She would come over to visit and ask me to join her for a little outing somewhere. No one warned me not to get in the car with her. She would take off down the street and stop frequently whenever she saw some poor unsuspecting neighbor in their yard. She would tell me that they were my cousin and we were stopping to say hello, and I believed her. When we got out of the car she would talk long enough to find out her neighbor’s needs and then she would have us all pray. It was a long time before I realized that I was not related to any of these people. She was also a terrible driver. I would have to not look to the left or the right when I got in the car with her because she was a menace to all moving things around her. Actually, you didn’t have to even get in the car with her for her to take you on a surprise visit. Grandmother lived in the prominent neighborhood of Lakewood in Dallas and she took me down an alleyway on her street one day and into a strange little back apartment that was a hint to come of the lady inside. The lady was very old, wrinkled, with lots of makeup and black hair dye. She was dressed in a black negligee set out of the 1940’s. The room had a large bar and the walls were zebra-striped red and black. The lady had obviously been drinking from that bar most of the day. Grandmother May was oblivious to all around her and began to chat with the lady. Then she grabbed my hand and put it over the lady’s and said, “Now, my darling granddaughter is going to pray for you.” I didn’t know much about praying at that time but I did what she said and prayed. Grandmother May taught me that all people have spiritual needs and to pray for them when they express a need.
Grandmother May never wasted a day in her life. She had a box in her living room full of wigs and instead of worrying about her hair she would just pop on a wig when she was ready to go somewhere. One morning she wanted me to take her to the neighborhood grocery store. I said sure and as she proceeded to get ready I noticed her hair was in terrible disarray. She climbed in the car with me without her wig and I was too embarrassed to say anything about it. When we got to the store she saw herself in a mirror and just had a good laugh about it. To say that she could be eccentric was an understatement.
She would take trips at the drop of a hat. My husband Charley remembered a time when he was a child when she took him to Memphis, Tennessee in her new black Cadillac (she always got a new black Cadillac every year) and the new one had air-conditioning. The only trouble was that she would not turn it on. Charley said that she rolled the windows down for the whole trip to Memphis. The lesson she taught him was that when you went by a body of water the temperature would drop a little. He never forgot this science lesson from his Grandmother that he learned from experience.
When Charley and I were in college at East Texas State University in Commerce, Texas Grandmother would often drop in on our hippie pad and bring us her newest religious material (she never threw any religious material away, she felt she had to give it to someone) and she brought enough for all our friends. I remember a time she came and we weren’t home from classes yet, but there were some kids at our house and she began to chat with them, then they all held hands and prayed. Of course, these hippie friends said, “Wow, your Grandmother is the most religious lady we have ever met!” It was on that visit that she gave me her china and crystal that she was gifted with on her fiftieth wedding anniversary. Things didn’t mean much to her. I still have that Haviland china and it is one of the most precious things I own. Grandmother May gave another precious gift to her granddaughter Heather Davidson Danamraj. When Heather was in college she came to visit May one day and Grandmother slipped off her wedding band and gave it to her. She wears it now as her own wedding band. It is a simple gold band with an etched pattern almost rubbed off from wear. It has an inscription which reads, “B to May 1/19/1919. It is the most precious item she owns.
Another time Grandmother got on a Greyhound bus to go to California to visit a grandson in the military service just so she could go to church with him because he told her he had begun to go to church. It took her three days to get there. She spent the day with her grandson and went to church with him, then spent three more days getting home. She had left Granddaddy a note saying she had decided to go to California. I’m sure that her grandson John Allen never forgot that trip.
There were many examples of Grandmother May being liberated well before the women’s liberation era. Though she had a beautiful home with beautiful furnishings she was never a cook or a housekeeper. Charley and I would quite frequently bring friends from college to her house to visit and go to church and we would never know what we would find. I remember one time when she asked us to eat with them and then began to look around for something to serve us. She had made a crock of potato salad that would have fed the multitudes of China and then she began to look for the sausage to go along with it. She looked in all the cupboards and drawers and had out friends in stitches laughing. When she finally found the sausage way back in the refrigerator we didn’t know if we would live through eating it. Another time we were looking around in her refrigerator to find something edible when we spied a ham. It looked great but when touched it disintegrated it was so old! Her idea of cooking a meal was to go to Wyatt’s cafeteria, which we did almost every Sunday. We lived about sixty miles away from Grandmother and Granddaddy in Commerce, and being starving hippies, we would all pile into cars and go to Lakewood Assembly of God Church on Sundays. Grandmother and Granddaddy would take the whole bunch of us out to lunch. Before we ate the meal we would have to hold hands and pray and then sing Grandmother’s favorite song, “This is the day.” You haven’t lived until you have sung that song and danced the Pentecostal shuffle in a very public restaurant. Grandmother May taught me not to be ashamed of my faith. She taught me that it never hurts to include a free meal in the deal to get someone to go to church, a tactic I still use to get all of my family to church!
Mentioning Lakewood Assembly of God Church brings up another memory of Grandmother May. When she and Granddaddy first moved to the Lakewood area of Dallas, there were no churches in their neighborhood. Grandmother drove around the neighborhood and found a big, empty lot about two blocks from her house. She told Granddaddy about it and said she was going to pray for a PentecostalChurch to be built there. Granddaddy laughed and said, “Not in this neighborhood, it’s too wealthy for a PentecostalChurch.” Grandmother began to drive down to that lot every day and circle the lot and pray. That is the current site of Lakewood Assembly of God Church which has been there now for about seventy years!
Grandmother May’s favorite thing to do besides going to church was to go to every religious meeting within a sixty-mile radius of Dallas. In fact, when their friends Gordon and Freda Lindsey wanted to start a ministry to train missionaries in Oak Cliff, Granddaddy contributed a large sum of money to be the first to help start it. It is now called Christ for the Nations Institute and still is in the same location and trains hundreds of missionaries a year to send into the mission field. As Grandmother got older and didn’t drive anymore, she would take the city bus to her religious meetings. It was at one of these meetings that I learned another indirect lesson from Grandmother May. I had gone to a Women’s Aglow meeting in Denton, Texas (My family was living there at the time) and found myself sitting at a table alone for a few minutes. As I sat there my mind began to wander to an issue that was bothering me at the time. I had some good friends that had inherited a lot of money and material things from a death in their family. Since at this time my family did not have very much money, I was very covetous and jealous of this friend. At about this time a lady approached me and looked at my name tag and said, “Gwen McMath, are you any relation to May McMath?” I said, “Yes, she is my Grandmother.” The lady squealed with delight and promptly called all her friends over to meet me. The Lord spoke to my heart at that moment and asked me which was better to have a monetary inheritance or a spiritual one? I picked the spiritual and have never regretted it. I want to interject here that many years later when my mother-in-law died, I received many valuable things from her estate that had belonged to the grandparents. God double blessed me with both the spiritual and monetary inheritance at that time in my life. I learned that you can never out give God, a lesson to learn even after both grandparents had been gone for a long time. Many times I would go to a meeting and there Grandmother would be. I usually took her home, but if she could find someone going in the direction of another meeting, she would go with them. She knew every preacher and evangelist around, and the worst thing I ever heard her say about any of them was, “Well, they are controversial.” Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.
There was no one who loved her children, grandchildren, or great-grandchildren more than Grandmother May. I didn’t know for many years that Grandmother had lost a child in an accident. He climbed up on the back of an ice truck to get some ice when he fell and was run over by another car. This happened in front of Grandmothers house which they continued to live in for the rest of their lives. I only heard her speak of it once. She and I were outside sitting on a concrete bench when I told her it must have been hard for her to lose a child. She told me it was the hardest thing that ever happened to her. She didn’t say anything more, didn’t draw attention to her grief at all. Little did I know that I would lose a daughter and that one sentence she said then conveyed volumes to me about losing a child. I took my feelings of loss and bewilderment to the Lord and used my life to continue to serve the Lord. That advice of not becoming a victum made both of us strong women. When I had children of my own, we would go into Dallas from Denton and pick Grandmother up and she would stay with us for a few days at a time. I was always amazed that even though she was in her eighties she insisted on sleeping in the rooms with my children, and went to bed with them every night. I knew then that I wanted to be a grandmother just like her. My children are grown now and still remember with much fondness when their great grandmother would sleep with them. She was a grandmother who didn’t mind her grandchildren playing with her things. All of the girl grandchildren remember playing with her hats, costume jewelry, and old mink stoles and muffs. Grandmother May gave me all of her old costume jewelry and I’m sure she exchanged it for a beautiful crown in heaven. One of her grandchildren, David Allen, who suffered from mental problems, would go and sleep on the floor next to her bed when he was troubled and she would pray for him. When she came to visit us, she would always have cash in her purse. She would cash her social security checks and then give the money away until there was none left (she and granddaddy were independently wealthy). If she had a lot of money when she came or if she had just a little, she would give it to my children. She always talked to them about tithing and missions and many times after hearing her, they would give the money back for her to put in a collection plate somewhere. She used her purse to fill it up with food. This was her way of cooking, she would take the food back to granddaddy (he wouldn’t eat it) or she would survive on it herself until the next meeting with food. We would take her to church with us and if there were refreshments she would fill her purse with them for later. None of my church friends ever forgot her either. They still talk of her emptying her purse in the collection plate and then filling it up with food! She taught my family about tithing and supporting missionaries.
Grandmother May would witness to all she came in contact with about how Jesus loved them and wanted them to give their heart to him. Many times we would get embarrassed or tired of her always talking about Jesus in every situation with anyone who would listen. I learned a lesson about this too. One day while at her house the phone rang while we were eating lunch and it was a neighbor who had lived next to Grandmother about thirty five years before. The neighbor was in the hospital dying and remembered how Grandmother had witnessed to her so many years ago. She wanted Grandmother to visit her again and talk to her about Jesus. This time she responded and gave her life to Jesus. I learned from Grandmother to always take the time to tell others how Jesus loves them, no matter how embarrassing it might seem at the time.
When Grandmother got into her nineties she could no longer live alone, so Charley’s parents came back from the mission field in Mexico to take care of her. After several more years, when she was ninety-eight and could no longer see, she had to go to the nursing home. When I came into her room to visit at the nursing home, I was again blessed beyond measure by her example. In a clear voice she began to sing, “Count your blessings, name them one by one, Count your blessings see what God has done. Count your blessings, name them one by one, Count your many blessings, see what God has done.” That was to be the last time I visited Grandmother May before she left this world for her eternal reward. I remember thinking as I left the nursing home that day, “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for they shall see God.”