Trending
PUGHTOWN, W.Va. – Sally Stover was the only girl I ever got into a fight over. I was probably 10 years old. I said Sally was my girlfriend. The other boy said she was his. I got a bloody nose out of it, punched while I was held down in a two-on-one fight in front of my house. I got up mad as hell and chased my laughing antagonist and his stooge over the hill. Sally Ann Stover Graham died suddenly Oct. 19 at Pawleys Island, S.C., the community she had made her home since 1998. She was 72. Her sudden death caused a mighty ripple through the Mayhew galaxy of relations and friends.
Sally was a classmate and a childhood friend, and I could still call her a friend though I had seen her only three or four times in the past 50 years. She always seemed the same, looked the same, acted the same as the girl I knew throughout my youth.
As my mother used to say when she got to see her girlhood friends from Hamlin, Lincoln County, W.Va., "the years just fell away." You pick up the conversation like it was from yesterday.
It was two days after Sally died that the sad news percolated down to me through the Pughtown grapevine. When I called classmates and friends to pass it along, they already knew. That told me two things: one, that her passing was a hurtful shock to a lot of people, and two, that I'm hopelessly out of the loop, which I knew anyway.
Although Sally was adopted, she was a Mayhew by nurture: her mother Jane was a Mayhew. Sally had the sense of humor, the wit and strength of personality, the wry outlook on life, strong ties of friendship and storytelling gift of the Mayhew women. Most of the men had it too, cousins Skip Mayhew and John Mayhew of my generation among them. The women were funny storytellers whether they were Mayhews by blood or by marriage, Johnny's mother Mary Lou a prime example. Sally was cute as a button, smart, funny, sexy, a girl who would flirt with friends like me just to stay in practice, and then cross her eyes to show she wasn't serious; no, of course not, you knew that, right?
Sally's dad Harl Stover had the gas station up in Pughtown, two pumps and a tiny repair shop squeezed into the point of a triangle where the state route intersected with one of the unincorporated town's few streets. Every year Harl would sponsor a youth fishing derby at Tomlinson Run State Park, and he'd buy or get sporting goods stores to donate fishing poles, reels, lures and bait as prizes, the display of which festooned his gas station office and sent kids like me into spasms of desire, imaging the glory of landing that champion bass.
Sally's mother Jane was part of a network of Mayhew women that was a wonderous, productive and powerful social institution, linked in a small-town sisterhood with non-Mayhew women like my mother, Ol' Food, to hold Pughtown and the Fairview church together with covered-dish dinners, rummage sales and meals to shut-ins.
My memories of Sally are mainly of our childhood and adolescence in the loving cocoon of the Fairview Presbyterian congregation, overseen by the kindly Rev. Flurkey, as we in the youth choir droned through hymns and tested the patience of Mrs. Flurkey, and ran amok after youth fellowship on Sunday evenings, me with my pal Johnny Mayhew and
Sally with girlfriends like Saundra Swain and Carolyn Wright. Summer was spent in endless days at the Tomlinson Run swimming pool, anxiously anticipating the campfires and tribal competition of 4-H Camp, which in our memories ranks as the most fun we ever had. Sally was fun and active, a spitfire and a nonstop talker, and so cute every boy imagined her as his girlfriend at one time or another.
We all went our separate ways after high school. I didn't see her much but would hear now and then of how her life was going, the rough spots especially. She had more than her share of tragedy and trials but never lost her funny, sunny outlook and successfully raised her two girls.
My wife Honey said that dying suddenly like Sally would be her preferred way to go. I don't know. It's such a shock to family members and lifetime friends like Amy Cooper Mayhew. They were cheated of the chance to say goodbye, but Sally's close friends and especially daughters and grandchildren know that she loved and cherished them beyond words, and she knew they loved her. They were the center of her life.
John knew Sally had found a strong faith because she told him so. Her response to the hard bumps of life, he said, was, "God will take care of it." John said she faithfully called friends, cousins, aunts and uncles, sending cards and staying in touch, always with upbeat attitude and funny stories.
Her obituary called her a "fiercely strong and independent woman" and cited her "sassy sense of humor," calling it one of a kind. I would call it a Mayhew/Pughtown sense of humor. Sally was sassy and salty and sexy, funny and teasing and strong, a big spitfire personality in a pretty li'l package.
Her daughters picked the right photo of her to post online with the funeral home obituary. It showed Sally waist-up, half-turned and posing, hands on her hips and elbows flared, with that pixie hairstyle of hers and a big smile because she had just made a smart-ass comment to whoever was taking her picture.
That was the Sally Stover I knew, a girl well worth a bloody nose.