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The Story of John Rainey Parker, Jr.

Writer’s note: This book is being written online. Bookmark this page to follow its progress. Updates on June 25, 2019. Raw notes at the bottom

PROLOGUE

On November 12, 1931, a boy was born at Florence Crittenton Home, a facility for unwed mothers in Little Rock, Arkansas. He was named Harl Wayne Goza, but he would live another life, with other parents, and with another name.

About six weeks after the boy was born, he was adopted by John Rainey Parker, an Arkansas general surgeon and gynecologist, and his wife, Ollie, a nurse. The Parkers had two babies from which to choose and picked “The G boy,” “G” being the first initial of his birth family’s surname.

Arrangements were made between the boy’s parents and the adoptive parents. The baby’s future was assured, they told their daughter.

You could say Baby John fell up.

“My dad’s earliest and fondest memory was of his father playing violin. His father doted on him,” said Sarah Foster, John Jr.’s daughter. “His father just bought a big new car.”

They were in the middle of building a big new house in Hot Springs, Arkansas, when John Rainey Parker Sr. suffered a fatal heart attack.

The elder Parker died when John Jr. was just three. For Ollie Parker, his adoptive mother, career came first. She had different relatives and friends care for her adopted son throughout his childhood.

John Jr.’s childhood was spent moving from family to family, house to house, and state to state — Arkansas, New Mexico, Missouri, Illinois, and, finally, North Carolina.

Months after John Jr. was adopted, his real mother, Cora Mae Goza, and his real father, James Luther Townley, were married. They went on to have five daughters.

James was a farmer and a laborer who did sawmill work. He had a reputation for coarse language, heavy drinking, and unruly behavior in school.

Cora Mae’s family didn’t like him much at first, thinking he was beneath their daughter’s station. They discouraged her from dating him, but she persisted.

Cora Mae was a smart teenager and uncommonly athletic. She played for the Sparkman Sparklers, a high school basketball team from a very small town with a very big reputation. The Sparklers was a team that was freakishly good. One season, the Sparklers beat Malvern High, 164 to 9, setting a one-game scoring world record. That season, they outscored their opponents, 1,638 to 344.

When her family discovered that Cora Mae was pregnant, her father and several brothers chased James (he went by Luther) out of town at gunpoint and told him to never return.

But after the baby was adopted out and Cora Mae returned home, she reconnected with James a year later. They married.

Accepting things for what they were, Cora Mae’s father accepted James into the family, even offering him some of his land. There were conditions, however. To enjoy the Goza’s bounty, Luther would have to stop cussing and drinking. He refused.

Still, Cora Mae and Luther Townley stayed with her parents for a period before setting out on their own. They traveled to Arizona, and then to California, and on their way they had five daughters.

Luther served in World War II and, like many, came home a different man. His drinking grew worse and he was verbally abusive to his family, particularly his oldest daughter, Allah.

Not long after his fifth daughter’s birth, he left.

“We didn’t miss him,” said ElNora Bull, the Townley’s second youngest daughter.

His daughters have few memories of him and no pictures.

Living in Bakersfield, a hot, dusty oil town in California, Cora Mae raised her kids with unbounded love, Christian values, and strong principles — but did not share with them that they had an older brother.

Decades later, in 1995, Cora Mae’s heart began to fail. While hospitalized, she asked ElNora to fetch some money out of her nightstand at home. There, ElNora found some old papers, including a birth certificate, for a boy — her brother, her oldest sibling — a stranger.

ElNora stewed on that information for some time, but finally could hold it in no more. She asked her mom about it.

Imagine the setting. A household of six strong-willed, independent women. For one of them, the mother, there was a hole in her heart that could not be filled. For the five daughters, there came the sudden realization that there was another child, the oldest child — a boy.

ElNora asked Cora Mae for details. Cora Mae provided what she could, well washed with tears from decades of pent-up regret.

The information came gushing out, what there was of it. Cora Mae said she never got over losing her son. She would often cry herself to sleep, and her daughters now realized that she may well have been crying over her lost son.

ElNora shared her discovery with her sisters and began searching for her brother.

The internet was still new and not fully formed. It was not yet a thing you used to search. Instead, ElNora called every Parker in the Little Rock phone book.

It was an odd sort of coincidence that let her on the right track. She contacted a Parker unrelated to John Jr. but who knew someone who worked at the county courthouse who could pry the information loose from long-locked filing cabinets.

ElNora discovered that John Jr. might be in North Carolina, but there the trail went cold. She and her sisters pooled their money and hired a private investigator, who a few days later gave them the information they sought.

Their brother, John Rainey Parker Jr., was a lawyer in Clinton, North Carolina. The report included his address and phone number.

In early 1996, ElNora called the phone number but was told John was not there. She called later and a woman answered. His was a small office and the person who answered was probably his wife, Jean. She passed the phone to John.

“I just blurted it out,” ElNora recalled. “I said I’m one of your five sisters. We live here in California, near your mother.”

The response was disappointing.

John Jr., you see, had not known he was adopted. It came as a complete shock. He had long wondered why his mother was so cold to him and so willingly gave him up to others. But it was the hand he was dealt and he had come to terms with it.

He asked ElNora to leave him alone.

ElNora responded lovingly in two letters, saying that if he ever changed his mind, she and her sisters would greet him with open arms.

Yet neither John, living in North Carolina, nor his sisters, most of whom lived a continent away in California, stopped thinking about this turn of events, about what could have been. About what could be.

Despite his initial rejection, John wrote a letter in 1998 that described his life, career as a lawyer, his wife Jean, and their children Rainey and Sarah. He also described his heart problems (something he shared in common with his birth mother).

He had undergone successful bypass surgery in 1996, but six months later, he suffered a stroke. His letter to ElNora touched on it, saying he had trouble with his vision and reading. What he didn’t say was that it also severely affected his short-term memory.

The letter was never sent.

Later, history repeated itself. John’s son, Rainey (John Rainey Parker III) stumbled across a letter in which John’s mother and five sisters was discussed.

Rainey shared his discovery with his sister, Sarah, and when the two asked about the letter, Jean stepped in.

They would have nothing more to do with John Jr.’s “alleged” sisters, she demanded.

It may seem that’s where the story ends, but it’s where this story begins.

CHAPTER 1: HIDDEN IN THE BASEMENT

Rainey Parker walked down the only stairway in the house, the one leading from the kitchen hallway to the full basement below.

The basement was extravagant. It featured a full bathroom, wet bar, stove, sink, refrigerator, and a wide variety of wall decorations and comfortable furnishings.

John and Jean Parker designed the house themselves, and the basement was no mere afterthought. After the basement was built and before construction was started on the house above it, a pool table was gently lowered into it. The basement was to be the centerpiece of their entertainment.

John was a lawyer and leader in the Sampson County Republican Party (back in the days when being a Republican in Eastern North Carolina was a brave if lonely statement). Jean taught piano, putting her music degree from Wake Forest to good use.

They knew everyone in the modest town of Clinton, the government seat of a farming county whose most significant landmark was the water tower off Sunset Avenue. They hosted countless parties in that basement.

The special ones were feted to steak dinners accompanied by Cabernet Sauvignon and followed by Dewers Scotch in the dining room before the party moved downstairs.

Later, the kids, Rainey, the elder son, and Sarah, the baby daughter, used the basement to host parties of their own when they were teens.

One day the basement went from being party central, to a reservoir of things that had no other place to go — old furniture, bric-à-brac, file cabinets full of papers, a makeshift wine cellar, obsolete technology, dust, more dust, and drawers full of files.

When John retired, he moved his law office furnishings from an office around the corner from the county courthouse in Clinton, to the basement of their house on Airport Road.

Visiting one day, Rainey made his way down to the basement, looking for nothing particular but to satisfy his boundless curiosity.

John Jr. had a fascinating collection of stuff — a huge, hand-carved rendition of the North Carolina State Seal; a scull cap used in an electric chair execution; brass knuckles from an old case he represented; a truncheon from another old case; a vast law library with volumes dating to the 18th century. The list goes on. And on.

One could not blame Rainey for snooping.

As he leafed through his dad’s files, there, among court warrants, subpoenas, client files, index cards and other papers, Rainey found a letter hidden in plain sight that would change everything.

Rainey speculated that the letter was left to be found.

Dear John, the letter began, although this was not a Dear John letter of betrayal and abandonment. Quite the opposite.

ElNora Bull, fourth oldest daughter of Cora and Luther, fifth oldest child, summarized her earlier, out-of-the-blue phone call and apologized for upsetting him. She expressed hope that the door would be left open and that they would one day meet.

Rainey, who like his father was named after his grandfather, realized that his grandparents were not really his grandparents. There was a whole family tree out there, a complex one at that. Not just a grandmother and grandfather they knew nothing of, but five aunts and countless cousins, some in Oklahoma but most in California.

Rainey and Sarah approached their mother about this newfound information.

“My mother did not want to discuss it with my father,” Sarah said. “She said it was too upsetting to him. He did not want to talk about it, she said, so we abided by her wishes.”

But that didn’t jibe with the letter John wrote in 1998, the one that was never sent, the one telling his life’s story and expressing a wish to connect.

Sarah said it was probably her mother who didn’t want to pursue it.

Jean, although she didn’t know it at the time, had Huntington’s disease, which she inherited from her mother. A rogue gene causes gradual and relentless erosion of the brain, with a wide variety of symptoms in addition to loss of motor control.

In Jean’s case, the more the disease progressed, the more ornery she grew. She was a contrarian, saying no to any question or request no matter how absurd.

“Old friends told me she was not the same person she used to be before the disease took hold,” Sarah said.

Indeed, Jean was the belle of the ball in her youth. She would light up the room. Well into Jean’s twilight years, Sarah was chatting with a barber in Fayetteville, a large city a 30-minute drive west of Clinton.

The barber had grown up in Salemberg, Jean’s childhood home, a town so small that residents there considered Clinton a big city.

The barber asked Sarah who her people were, and when Sarah said Jean Gale was her mom, he looked starstruck. His gaze drifted a million miles away and he said, sighing as he went, “Jean Gale.”

Jean was a champion waterskier, spending summers on nearby White Lake. Coming from a small town with small town values, she nevertheless went to Wake Forest, where she earned a master’s degree in music.

The Jean who could do all that, became the Jean who could do nothing, and wanted to make sure no one else could, either.

Thinking back, Sarah, who inherited Huntington’s disease herself from her mother, is unsurprised her mother would oppose any attempt to connect the disconnected branches of the family.

CHAPTER 2: MISSED OPPORTUNITIES

The story of John Jr. and his birth parents is a story of “what could have been.”

John Jr. was born Nov. 12, 1931 and put up for adoption because his parents were unwed. But his parents did marry, on Aug. 2, 1932 — a mere nine months after John Jr. was born and put up for adoption.

Cora Mae was just 20 when she gave birth to John Jr. She turned 21 seven months later, and two months after that, she married James Luther Townley.

One does not know the future, and John Jr.’s parents and grandparents certainly could not have predicted how things would turn out, but in the panorama of life, John Jr. was born in a very narrow window during which his parents could not keep him.

It wasn’t long before Cora Mae and James Luther started having more children. Allah, John Jr.’s oldest sister, was born when he was two-and-a-half.

An infant John Jr. was brought home to his adoptive parents’ home in Hot Springs, Arkansas, about 200 miles south of Eureka Springs where the Goza family lived. John Jr. continued to live in his birth state of Arkansas until he was about four when his adoptive father died and his adoptive mother started bundling him off to stay with other relatives and friends, starting in New Mexico.

James Luther Townley, John Jr.’s birth father, registered for the draft in 1940 at the age of 31 and served during World War II. He was a cook and a baker during the war, and at one point got enough stripes to run a field kitchen. Of the few memories of their father, the Townley sisters remember this: he hated Gen. George Patton.

John Jr. served in the Army during the Korean War as a military policeman.

The decades continued to pass, with the brother living separately near the Atlantic Ocean and unaware of his birth family living their own lives near the Pacific.

In 1973, Luther died, closing one window. John Jr. would never be able to meet his birth father. He could never tell his father that he had lost one son, who was never named, or that he had another son, John Rainey Parker III, in 1963, and a daughter, Sarah Elizabeth Parker, in 1966.

When James Luther Townley died in 1973, John Jr. had been married to Jean for 13 years. was raising a 10-year-old son and a 7-year-old daughter, had a thriving law practice, owned a second house on the beach on Topsail Island, North Carolina, and was generally living the life.

Cora Mae’s daughter ElNora came across the adoption papers 23 years later, in 1996. John Jr. was 65 years old when he received ElNora’s call and was just months away from losing his short-term memory.

More than two years later, John Jr. had learned the truth using his own resources and had written a conciliatory letter in September 1998. By then he had undergone heart bypass surgery followed by a stroke six months later. He was not the same man he had been when he first heard from ElNora.

Seventeen months later, Cora Mae died. Another window closed.

Sometime after that, a door was cracked and was later to be thrown open. The next generation, of Rainey and Sarah, would go through that door.

This is a Your Story work in progress. The family has given permission for it to be shared. Bookmark this page to follow the story as it is written.

Notes

Tribute to Mother Cora Mae Bryant

June 17,1911 to Feb. 3, 2000

By ElNora Bull

The first thing my Mother would tell me at this moment would be, “stand up straight, and pull those shoulders back.”

Mother came from a strong Christian home with great moral values. She was from a large family of sisters and brothers. Mother was a twin; they were not identical, but their parents had them dress alike all the way through high school. Mom always said, “they never fussed over what to wear. Mom said, Aunt Nora would decide, and they would wear it. Of course, Aunt Nora says Mom did the deciding. I’m inclined to believe Aunt Nora. Mother and Aunt Nora were inseparable when they were growing up. They were always together. Aunt Nora lives in Arkansas now and she will miss Mother terribly. We were always amazed that they sent each other the same birthday cards and Christmas cards. Mother always said her brothers were just great to them. If they became too tired walking home or to school they would pick them up and carry them on their shoulders. We don’t see many brothers like that these days. She had a wonderful childhood growing up on a farm in Arkansas. I remember hearing her say they had more fun going out into the woods and climbing to the top on the pine saplings and riding them to the ground. And telling how her and Aunt Nora were the ones who drove into town on Saturdays and sold the strawberries. Her parents, Willie Lee Goza and La Visa Seale Goza, taught them how to love, laugh and be a strong, caring family. Her father was the witty one, and her mother balanced the family out with a more serious side. Her parents instilled great vitues in her that she tried to pass on to her family. 

After finishing high school, Mother married our father James Luther Townley on August 2, 1932. They had five daughters. We moved to California in 1948 and Mother was left to raise five girls alone. She was both Mother and Father to us. We don’t ever recall miss having a father figure in our lives. She somehow filled the gap. 

Mother worked day and night to provide food and shelter for her family. She always managed for our next meal. Mother had a great faith in God. She always said, she knew not what tomorrow would hold, but, she knew who held tomorrow.” God was her refuge and her strength. She loved her family with a great love and gentleness that bound us together as a loving family. 

She kept little journals, maybe on a calendar, or a page in a tablet with notation of who dropped by that day, the weather or something specific about her health. She also practiced the lost art of letter writing. She would write to her grandchildren, nieces and nephews, always trying to keep the family ties close. She also pieced her magnificent quilts. In the summer she would piece together the tops of her quilts and in the winter she would quilt them together. She won many ribbons on them at the fair through the years. 

We have wonderful memories of our childhood. We did not have many material things, but, we all knew mother loved us. I can remember her setting at the sewing machine late at night, making one of us a dress to wear the next day to school. Some of you will remember the sacks of flour with the printed fabrics, well we had many wonderful flour sack dresses she made for us. Until you have worn one of these dresses you don’t know what you have missed. She always made sure we had new dresses for special events — Easter, first day of school, or Christmas. 

We had lots of fun growing up. We didn’t have toys, she taught us to be creative and make up our own games. We cut out paper dolls from our catalogue, we drew lines in the dirt to make a hop scotch, we stacked up boards 3 feet high and placed one long board across the top and made wonderful jump boards, a sister on each end and one would jump, and the other would fly up in the air. We all loved to jump board. However, we did get into trouble sometimes for this one. We had jump ropes and played jacks. Our jacks and ball were rocks that we had collected from our yard. 

I don’t want to give you the impression we were little angels; we weren’t. We threatened to pull out each others’ hair quite often. We all had special things we did to drive mother nuts … 

Allah was our wonderful pastry baker. She would bake the most beautiful pies. The only problem was she would not let us have a piece until she was ready to cut it. Sometimes they would set there in full view for hours, and this would create quite a problem. Allah was mother’s straight-A student. Mother was so proud of her. I received a note from Allah this morning expressing her deep regrets that she could not be with us this morning. She wanted to send her love to each of you. She said, “She was so glad we fixed Mother up so pretty. She knew Mother would want to go to heaven looking her best.” Please pray for her comfort. 

James Luther Townley,
Born June 15, 1909
Died March of 1973
Married Cora Mae Goza, Aug. 2, 1932

Cora Mae Goza Townley
Born June 17,1911, died Feb. 3, 2000
Married James Luther Townley, Aug. 2, 1932

John Rainey Parker Jr.
Born Nov. 12, 1931, died Sept. 30, 2012
Wife Jean Elizabeth Gale, June 13, 1960

Allah Mae Townley
Born March 18, 1934, died Dec. 8, 2012
Husband Kenneth K. Lyons, marriage Dec. 16, 1950

Mittie R Townley 
Born June 30, 1936
Husband Harold D. Davenport Sr., married May 8, 1953

ElNora N. Townley
Born Oct. 16, 1938
Husband Norris G. Bull, married June 18, 1954

Dorothy S. “Dottie” Townley
Born March 2, 1943
Husband Floyd R. Felty, married Nov. 27, 1964
Husband Fred Shults
Husband (present) Kenneth Killian

Patty Kuster

Cora Mae Townley was a homemaker until they moved to California. Once in California she did domestic work, house cleaner and cleaned motels and hotels, later on worked for department store called Brocks and then retired working for Gottschalks