If Lois Haynes was your friend, you received a gift.
And when she died Monday — of a galloping sort of lung cancer that no one who loved her can believe — her pockets of friends everywhere were left stunned, wondering how it could be.
Pockets of friends, I thought.
Everywhere.
At her First Methodist Church, where she was treasurer; at W.A. Brown, where she was vice president; in the schools, where she was longtime testing evaluator and valued mentor of new teachers; in the offices of the Rowan Museum, the University of North Carolina at Greensboro alumni and the Salisbury Housing Authority; and all the other places she’d graced with her quiet efficiency, good humor, skill, integrity and intelligence.
Libby and Henry Buck and their daughters, Margaret and Susan, were backyard neighbors of Lois and Earl Haynes and their sons, Steve and Dodd, during that time when the children romped in and out of the back doors and life was still ahead, before the years passed and the Bucks moved to Virginia.
But the move didn’t break the ties.
And they were still tight a couple of years ago when the Bucks, retired now and eager to be closer to their girls and their grandchildren who’d migrated South, decided Salisbury was still their place. They were going to move back.
They bought a lot and began building a house and were back and forth, and, of course, Lois said, “C’mon now, this extra bedroom is yours until your house is finished.”
“Nobody,” Libby says, “could believe that we had a friend that let us come and spend the night and go home.
“I said, ‘At least, let me change the sheets,’ and she’d say,‘Nobody else is going to use the bed.’
“Sometimes they weren’t even home. Lois would say, ‘Answer the phone or the door or whatever.’
“One day I answered the phone, and this man was sort of concerned that they weren’t there and we were.” He kept asking questions and didn’t sound satisfied when they hung up. Libby’s sure he was wondering if a burglar had answered the Haynes phone.
“I’d water her plants and get the mail or whatever,” Libby says, and often go back to Virginia when Lois and Earl were out of town without ever seeing them.
But it felt right.
“Lois had dug up an old picture from somewhere of our daughters when they were little and put it in a frame by the bed so we would feel at home,” Libby says. “That was just ‘A Lois’ — all the little things along with the big things. She was somebody you could talk to and never worry about it going anywhere else.
“She did all kinds of neat things to make us feel they were happy to have us. She didn’t like to cook and I did. That was one of the few things we differed in and it worked really well. It took us a year and a half to build the house, but we moved back about a year ago, and they would come over real often and eat leftovers with us.
“Nobody ever had a better friend ... “
The mark Lois Haynes left on Salisbury could have been written in headlines about the boards she headed or in the stories being told today as tears spill, the stories that will be retold as long as friends are here to remember the sound of her voice saying, “Let’s have lunch.”
Or the story of the EEA, that secret society whose secret name (shhhhh!) is barely whispered among its secret members (the wind hints that the acronym stands for Eating Educators Anonymous), a dedicated group of classroom leaders who meet to indulge their secret gastric sins while they break the food of ideas that will help children with each other.
It can be told in Martha Agner’s memory of a friend who was “a loyal and loving daughter as she endeavored to provide care for her mother.”
Or museum Director Kaye Hirst’s memory of how excited members of Boyden High’s class of 1950 were at their reunion in mid-October (which Lois arranged) to visit their old high school youth center, which is now the Messinger Room of the new Rowan Museum.
“She had such a wide circle of friends,” Kaye says, “college, teaching, church, community — and she kept in touch.”
And school counselor Margaret Basinger’s memory that “she taught all of us about style and class and professionalism. She was a mentor, a true mentor to those of us who needed that.”
“For years she was my angel at East Rowan. When it got to scholarship time and I had a student who had received nothing but should have, she would always take care of that for me. She would write a check.” An anonymous check. “You just knew when she walked in the door, things were going to be OK.”
Or Betsy Detty’s memory of days when she was director of instruction for the Salisbury schools and worked with Lois, who could analyze tests and explain them so that parents and teachers could understand where their children really were and what they needed.
And she remembers that after Betsy’s husband died, Lois and Earl always quietly picked her up so she wouldn’t have to go to a book club party alone.
“Lois,” says Libby Buck, “knew how to make you feel so special. And she was so efficient. Whatever it was, she always got it done so quietly, never expecting glory from it and in such a nice unique way. She had a gift.”
A gift for friendship.
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