• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1389 0

a member of the Georgia Military College Players Club, acting in light comedies with Bardy, brother of Oliver Hardy, later of the Laurel and Hardy comedy team, then a rotund, teenage, silent-movie projectionist at the Palace Theatre in town. The second most memorable chapter of her life, locally, was her generous hospitality to soldiers during the war. “Miss Katie used to sit out on the porch on a Sunday morning and talk to all the passers-by,” Betty Boyd Love has recalled. “If a lone service man happened by, he might be invited to dinner.” One wounded soldier later wrote to her from Camp Wheeler, “I can still remember vividly the first time I had dinner in your home. It was just grand, Miss Cline.” Another wrote her from Fort Benning, “About this time of day I’d be sitting on your veranda, begging for a Coca-Cola and cake — if I were in Milledgeville.”

One Sunday, Aunt Katie invited home from church John Sullivan, recently assigned as a sentry to the naval training station at the college. As Sally Fitzgerald, who met Sullivan once, in Cincinnati during the 1980s, told the story, he had been “a handsome Marine Sergeant, resplendent in his dress blues.” Following the service, he was handed a note, written by Miss Katie, inviting him to be the guest of “the Cline sisters” for a midday dinner at their home on Greene Street. He accepted, and met their cherished niece, in her freshman year at GSCW. The two quickly developed a rapport based partly on a similar family background: an Ohio boy, Sullivan came from a large Roman Catholic family. They were able to trade funny stories, and share suppressed giggles, as he became a regular visitor, a “fixture” welcomed by all the aunts and uncles.

Of course, he and Mary Flannery were quite different. He was blithe, outgoing, confident, and at ease with his good looks. She was painfully shy, given to awkward gestures, and, as Mary Boyd was fond of pointing out, not used to the company of boys. Yet because Sergeant Sullivan appreciated her offbeat wit, and wry inside tips about Southern mores, they went on what amounted to “dates” — long walks, an occasional movie. He even escorted her to one college dance, though he quickly discovered that she was truly a bad dancer — she later claimed to have a “tin leg.” The foiled attempt may have contributed to her April 1943 cartoon on the opening of the college gym for dances, portraying a “wallflower” of a girl in a long striped skirt, with glasses, sitting alone, watching other couples dance. The caption: “Oh, well, I can always be a Ph.D.”

When Fitzgerald interviewed Sullivan, forty years later, he claimed that theirs had been “a close comradeship,” not a romance. Yet the two played at romance enough to tease a hopeful mother. Once, as they sat together on the couch in the parlor, Regina called liltingly over the stairwell, “Mary Flannery, wouldn’t you and John like to polish the silver?” After an exchange of amused glances, her daughter wickedly answered with a flat “No.” Following Sullivan’s transfer to a training camp for the Pacific war zone, O’Connor did show signs of a modest “crush.” She wrote many drafts of her own “Dear Soldier” letters, stashing them between the pages of her college notebook. In a journal entry, she made fun of herself for “casually” dropping to her family that she had just heard from John. This exchange of letters lasted until he entered St. Gregory’s Seminary, just after the war, briefly studying for the priesthood.

Her “crush” was enough of a blip — or a carefully concealed secret — that no relatives or classmates in Milledgeville remember the marine sergeant. What remained for O’Connor, though, was the PhD thought balloon that she floated during their time together. For at eighteen, she was hatching a plan for a life away from Milledgeville — studying journalism, or working as a newspaper cartoonist. No one in her family took these plans seriously. John Sullivan did, and he offered “admiration and encouragement.” She must have felt in him some of her missing father: the handsome man, occasionally in uniform, who