| Notes |
- General Notes: From Elmer Burns Lammon. The "B" in mother's name is not the initial letter of a name. The letter "B" is, itself, her middle name. Mother was tall and pretty in her youth. She was a wonderful cook and worked in restaurants much of her adult life, first as a waitress and later as cook and owner. She got along very well with the kitchen help, the waitresses, and people in general. She could cook without reference to recipes, judging amounts of different ingredients by taste or judgment. She authored several recipes that were recognized with honors, such as her recipe for peanut pie.
She had a wonderful sense of humor, too. One of her practical jokes, I recall, happened at Christmas in 1969. I had been attending the first semester of graduate business school at Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The school had a well-deserved reputation for putting its students through a regimen of very much hard work and study. The required reading and study for the next day's classes took so much time each day that I grew a beard in order to avoid wasting time shaving. Preparing to make the trip to Enterprise for Christmas, I called mother to tell her that I would be flying into Dothan and to ask her to meet me at the airport. Since she had never seen me with a beard, I told her that she might not recognize me at the airport because I had grown a beard.
The flight was uneventful. The plane landed at the Dothan airport. I got out of the plane, walked toward the terminal, anxious to see her. Finally, I made it to the door. I looked around - didn't see her anywhere. I went on deeper into the lobby - she was nowhere in sight. Surely, I thought, she could not have forgotten to meet me. There were people standing around in the lobby and Dothan terminal is not large. Finally, I noticed a tall woman with red hair. She was heavily made-up, with dark eyelashes, lots of eye shadow, too much rouge and lipstick. This woman looked like a whore in a B-movie As I kept looking, I realized that I was the butt of this joke. Indeed, it was mother, of course, at her best. She figured that if I were going to be hard to recognize, then so would she.
Donnie and Ed owned restaurants at two different times. The first was Lammon's Cafe on S. Main Street in Enterprise. I was too small to remember why this business didn't prosper. I think that, in losing it, Mother decided that if she ever had another one, she would make a go of it. She had great will and determination.
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1913 - 1995 (81 years)
