My Mother, Lucy Bynum Lambeth
Lucy Bynum Lambeth
One of my blogger friends recently posted a tribute to her mother. I started thinking about mine, of course. I found her college picture from her senior year. It was 1929. What a year to be graduating from college! She went straight to a teaching post in a very small town and then to another and then to another for 13 years before she married my father. She sent money home to her parents and helped some with the education of her younger sister who earned a BA and a teaching certificate too.
My mom’s degree was in music, however, and she taught public school music in North Carolina all those years. Imagine that! You thought we Southerners didn’t value culture back then (or now)?
Piano had been her instrument and she gave a senior recital that was quite excellent, or so I was told by people who went to school with her. When she became a mother, she started teaching private piano lessons and taught all the rest of her life……..well, almost. She taught hundreds of students to play the piano but not me. My son majored in music, however, and my daughter plays the piano. It skipped a generation.
This photo shows her in her innocence, launching her adulthood. She is wearing a blue silk bodice jacket from China which her aunt (a Methodist Missionary) brought home to her. She was not wealthy. In fact she was poor. Her farmer parents suffered to send her to college and this jacket was the nicest item of clothing she had at the time.
Sandra Lynn Gray Art 
“shows her in her innocence” you can really see this in her eyes can’t you? This is a beautiful shot – not only is your mother a lovely woman but also the camera really did a fabulous job. I appreciate the thoughts on your mother and especially sharing this photo. I cannot compliment this enough really and feel silly doing so. What a pretty gift her aunt sent her. This seems like a testimony to the days when a college graduate has such clean clear and innocent eyes. This is so amazing to me.
What a beautiful photograph! I love to look at photographs and imagine the story behind them, so I loved reading this. Your mother has such kind eyes. My father also plays the piano beautifully and never taught me, but he plays by ear and apparently I didn’t get that gene.
It’s a lovely photo, and lovely words, too. Seems like “college” meant so much more then than now, when so many take it as their due.