Copyright 1999 The Tribune Co. Publishes The Tampa Tribune Tampa Tribune (Florida)
December 12, 1999, Sunday, FINAL EDITION
SECTION: SPECIAL, Pg. 1

LENGTH: 3348 words

HEADLINE: The Human Touch;


BYLINE: LINDSAY PETERSON, of The Tampa Tribune;

BODY:
Sue Keezer walked through the front door and saw the wreckage of Sallee Moses' life.

Holes kicked in walls. Doors knocked off hinges. Darkness and disorder growling from every  corner.

Sue felt the sadness smothering Sallee's family.

More than a dozen years had passed since Sallee was paralyzed in 1976. The money from a  settlement was gone. So was the five-bedroom home, the pool, and the help of all but a few friends.  Only her youngest child, Bryan, not yet 20, remained with her in a beat-up ranch house.

Sallee had lived there for about five years, and Sue hadn't seen her childhood friend for at  least that long. They'd talked on the telephone, but Sue hadn't realized how much had been lost.

They spent half the day together, Sallee propped up in the bed where she spent every hour,  grateful for the break from her isolation. Sue sat beside the bed, disguising her revulsion at what  she'd seen.

She knew Bryan didn't bear sole responsibility for the house in the recent past, so she didn't  press him too hard for explanations.

And, once alone with Sue, Bryan had a question of his own.

"What was she like?" he asked quietly, a young man with a boy's voice. "What was she like before  the accident?"

Sue felt the ache with the heart of a mother.

"I wanted to cry," she remembered years later. "I had never realized he was so young when the  accident happened, he really didn't know his mother and who she had been....He only knew this  broken woman who had fallen into his care."

Sue wasn't sure how to help her friend. But the answer would come, in time.

"It was a long time ago in a very small town."

That's how Sallee came to think of her young life in Saline, Mich.

At Saline High School in 1957, if a boy wore his pants without a belt or slicked back his hair,  he was sent home. Couples caught holding hands in the hallways were hauled into the principal's  office. Gum chewing was allowed only during study hall.

Fifty-three graduates left school that year with a message that would resonate with many of them  for life. Their superintendent painted his ideal of a world in which caring for one another gives  people purpose.

"It is our function," he declared, "to help build a world in which men may live together in  justice, security and peace."

Sallee Jo Wood was at the top of this class - valedictorian, "Most Likely to Succeed." Her  counselors urged her to go to college, to use her brains and compassion to become a social worker  or a nurse.

Sallee had a different idea.

She and Lany Beckington already had spent many nights parked in the cornfields outside town.  They'd get married, raise a family and spend the rest of their lives in Saline, Sallee dreamed. But  not, her parents ordered, until she had a way to support herself. Lany was wild by Saline  standards, mostly because he drove a fast car, and they didn't trust him to take care of Sallee.

So she went to the University of Michigan to study dental hygiene, her quickest ticket to a good  job and permission, in 1959, to get married.

"Everyone told me I was making a mistake," she reflected some 40 years later. "But I always had to  do things my way."

The mismatch lasted two years. When the split was final, Sallee wanted to run to her parents.  But they were gone.

Four years earlier, her father's hardware store had burned down, and he went to work for a  company that would find its future in the new suburbs of Florida.

The company made nozzles for garden hoses, and when it shifted its business south, Sallee's  parents and younger sister went, too. Sallee, by then the mother of a toddler and pregnant with a  second girl, followed them in 1962 to a suburb called Brandon, once known as New Hope.

Like so many others who followed the asphalt path to the Sunshine State, Sallee traded one  American dream for another.

She left behind the small-town closeness of immigrant ancestors, who believed survival in a  strange place meant depending on one another. She came to a place of boundless opportunity, a land  of second chances, where people could be free from the rules of the old world.

What she didn't know was that this relentless migration would create communities without  centers. What she didn't know was how much she would need a sense of community some day.

Sallee hurried out the door as soon as the car pulled into the driveway.

Dorman Moses thought, "Lord, have mercy."

He saw a large woman, not fat but "big boned," in a loose-fitting, black-and-white checked dress  out of fashion by that day in 1966. Her head was a mass of curls, wavy, dark and still wet from a  shower. A 5-year-old girl gripped her hand as if she'd never let go.

"There's nothing phony about this woman," Dorman told himself.

It was their second time out. The first was a blind date lunch a week earlier, but now he was  treating Sallee and her daughter Lori to an Italian dinner.

Sallee was plain. Dorman liked that. She wore no powder on her face, no paint on her nails. She  loved to talk, but listened closely, too. Her nods and giggles and "oh, mys" could keep a  conversation going almost forever.

Dorman also liked to talk. He told stories in his sing-song twang about growing up in a family  of sharecroppers and about long nights working as a railroad engineer in Tampa.

He was a Korean War veteran with a quick smile and a temper he kept hidden. He'd grown up poor  and hard in rural Alabama. At 37, he knew how to survive and wasn't afraid to look anyone in the  eye.

Sallee didn't mind that he was 10 years older and 2 inches shorter. She liked him right off the  bat because he acted like a grown, responsible man.

"I needed that," she said.

Like Sallee, he had been married before. But it had recently ended after 14 years, when his wife  became involved with someone else. Like Sallee, he needed the security of a solid home and family.

Within three months, on Oct. 15, 1966, they exchanged wedding bands in a small, German Methodist  church Sallee attended with her parents.

Religion would become a big part of their lives, the fount of comfort, guilt and a thousand  desperate prayers in the years to come.



Sallee and Dorman built a new life in a developing Brandon still separated from Tampa by woods  and citrus groves. In their little subdivision, rows and circles of tidy houses stood so close  together that neighbors could talk through open windows.

Dorman taught Lori and Sallee's younger daughter, Heidi, to swim. He planted flowers and  vegetables around the two-bedroom block house. Sallee did her best to furnish it with their few  possessions.

Dorman came home one day with a dresser he picked up at a thrift shop. It had only three legs,  but Sallee found a brick that neatly filled the gap.

As Sallee built her nest, she sensed another space needed to be filled.

"Maybe it was selfish, since I already had two. I don't know, but I wanted more babies," she said.  "My life was so unsettled when the girls were younger, I never felt like I got a chance to cuddle  them the way I wanted."

Dorman agreed. Because he'd had a vasectomy years earlier, they would have to adopt. The day in  1968 when they brought Ginger home from the hospital in Tampa, Sallee cried the whole way, gazing  at the tawny baby in her lap.

"Look at her," she told Dorman. "She's so pretty."

The adoption officials told Sallee and Dorman they thought Ginger was part east Indian and part  Italian. Six months later, the couple learned Ginger's father was black. Dorman knew that could  mean rough times. He stood up to the disapproval of his family, who proclaimed white people should  not be allowed to take in mixed-race children.

He understood Sallee's absolute love for her baby.

Sallee was ready for another baby two years later. Dorman insisted on a boy. Sallee agreed  reluctantly - then fell instantly in love with her fourth child, Bryan.

"I had no idea that boys could be so lovable and affectionate," she said. Bryan was more cuddly  than her girls had been, and as he got older, she found it impossible to tell him no.

She rarely said no to any of the kids, for that matter. She let them sleep as late as possible,  then orchestrated a mad dash to get them fed, scrubbed, dressed and out the door in time for  school.

Sallee threw her arms around her life: cleaning the house, washing clothes, playing games,  cooking dinner, sewing, shopping and snuggling her little ones.

Everyone in the neighborhood knew her. They saw her behind the wheel of the family van,  putt-putt-putting up the street, rushing her kids to school or gymnastics lessons, taking cookies  to the church or old clothes to a rummage sale.

When a friend's co-worker - someone Sallee didn't know - had a serious accident, Sallee responded  the way she'd been taught in Saline. She baked a batch of cookies, whipped up some casseroles,  talked the grocery store up the street into donating a gift certificate, then delivered it all to  the woman's house.

"Why do you get yourself tied up with all these things?" Dorman asked.

"This is what mothers do," Sallee replied.

She was more than a mother.

"She was the mom of the neighborhood," Lori said.

Lori and Heidi became competitive swimmers who trained at Brandon Swim & Tennis Club. Sallee,  Dorman, Ginger and Bryan went to their meets. For out-of-  town races, Sallee filled the van with teammates.

"It seemed like we were always on the road," she said, and that was mostly because the other  parents were rarely available to drive. "But I loved it. I wanted to be there."

Lori counted on it.

"I knew I could look up any time and see her," Lori said.

Sallee recognized her oldest child's need for accolades and attention. Sallee had been the same  way growing up: shy but craving the A or the first-place ribbon.

"We're both emotional. We were always pushing ourselves," Sallee said.

Sallee pushed herself to be more than supermom. She had to be superwife to a teasing man who  relished catching her off balance.

"What did you do - rob a couch?" he cracked about one oversized floral print dress.

"I'm fat," she fretted. "I'm frumpy. I'm not attractive to you anymore."

She catered to him at every chance. One afternoon before his night shift, he settled down for a  nap with instructions to be awakened in time to pick up the car from a repair shop before it  closed.

He woke hours later, looked at the clock and jumped out of bed in a fury.

"What's wrong with you, woman?" he shouted. "I told you to wake me up!"

Outside, the car sat in the driveway. Seeing it, he blinked at Sallee, who tearfully explained  she had walked three miles to the shop to drive the car back herself.

"I was trying to help," she cried. "I wanted to let you sleep."

Sallee and Dorman fought over his long work hours, how to discipline the kids, and money, of  course. Sallee hated to argue. She'd burst into tears or storm from the house to walk off her  anger.

"I'd walk all over the neighborhood," she said. "You can't imagine how much I walked."

It was almost a family ritual.

"There she goes," one of her kids would say, never doubting she'd be back. She always came back.



Sallee and Dorman sat together one afternoon watching television. Coming across a Christian  show, they were riveted by a woman onstage preaching about miracles and God's power to heal all  wounds.

Neither can explain it, but Sallee and Dorman began to cry.

They shared a feeling of emptiness and doubt about the future. They'd been married about seven  years and until then, never worried about where they were headed. But their world in the early '70s  was changing in ways they couldn't explain or control.

Dorman's railroad check covered less every week as inflation edged up. Strip malls and cheap new  subdivisions slapped an unwelcome face on Brandon. Classrooms burst with students. Parents talked  anxiously about drugs and cults creeping into their children's lives.

Sometimes Sallee missed her hometown of Saline.

Her father had died soon after she married Dorman. She missed sitting on the counter at his  hardware store, secure in herself in a place where there were no strangers.

"I knew everybody, and they knew me," she said.



Saline, like any small town, wasn't a perfect place. But to Sallee it was home, the place where  she formed her first and deepest friendships.

Her ancestors were immigrants who built a community a century ago by helping each other through  punishing winters as well as blazing summers in the rolling hills of southeastern Michigan. Farmers  and merchants plowed steadily together through the Depression, bartering and trading the goods each  family needed.

"This was a community of people raised to accommodate one another," said Paul Tull, founder of the  local weekly newspaper. Civility was a staple. Tull's newspaper office had been a butcher shop  previously, and the worst an unhappy reader would say was, "Boy, I sure do miss that butcher shop."

Sallee's father came to Saline from Montana in the 1930s. George Wood opened his hardware store  at the central intersection and thrust himself into the center of town activities.

"If it was a project that was good for the community, he was right there," Tull said.

As a young father, however, the driven man was rough on his daughter born in 1939. Raised  himself by a stern and demanding woman, he spanked Sallee for the slightest misbehavior. Then when  she was 5 or 6, it stopped, and he later apologized for what he considered his abusiveness.

Sallee grew up both meek and strong. Even into high school, her timidity in the face of  authority kept her quiet around her teachers, while she strove to please them. She rose to the head  of her class but never turned her back to the outcasts.

In eighth and ninth grades, kids from one-room country schoolhouses were bused to the big  school, the two-story building in Saline.

Some of the townies stung the country kids by calling them hayseeds.

Sallee called them friends.

"Right away, she was so nice and open," said Jeanette Wiedmayer, one of the country kids.

"They seemed so scared," Sallee explained. She knew how it felt to be excluded; with her height  and thick glasses, a younger Sallee had felt awkward around more popular girls.

In her early teens, Sallee shared her bedroom with an exchange student from Germany. She cringed  at the girl's stories about running from the Russians at the end of World War II, suffering  frostbite that made her legs crack and bleed every winter that followed.

The Rotary Club later sent Sallee to Germany. Filled with stories, she came home to news of a  new girl in town - an exciting event in a community of 1,500.

The girl's aunt invited Sallee to lunch, so Sallee could meet her.

Sue.

Sallee chattered away about her trip to Germany. She and Sue clicked right away.

"I just remember this instant kindness," Sue said. Sallee welcomed Sue into her group of friends.  "She didn't bat an eye. She just took me under her wing and introduced me to everybody."

They began walking to school together and spending Friday nights at Sallee's after football or  basketball games.

They drank lemon Cokes at the Dairy Bar.

They gathered autumn leaves to preserve with wax.

They laughed about each going out with Donnie Skrzypczak, who slobbered when he kissed.

They spent hours together in their junior year stuffing colored tissue paper into chicken wire  to decorate the senior prom. That year's theme was "Over the Rainbow."

"I can't explain how we got so close. We just were," Sue said. "There was no jealousy or meanness.  That was impossible with Sallee. She was just a good old soul."

They consoled each other through teenage tribulations. "We sure have had our ups and downs in  more ways than one," Sallee wrote in Sue's yearbook. "I hope you will always be happy."

Years later, neither remembered what "downs" she meant.

"Our lives were so simple," Sue said.

Saline High's Class of 1957 had flowed like a river. It began the year the war ended with 23  children in Miss Nebbergall's kindergarten. Three joined a couple of years later, then one more  before the country kids streamed in. The journey ended as a group of 53.

It was all documented, each student by name, in the yearbook Sallee edited. And they all stepped  into adulthood with their superintendent's resounding message.

"We live today in a divided world," Leo Jensen wrote in the yearbook. "On one hand we have a world  with an insatiable lust for power and material goods....On the other hand we live in our world, our  America.

"It can come only through education that social responsibility will be established in all the  world."



As Sallee and Dorman cried that afternoon in front of the television preacher, unable to explain  their anxiety about the future, they decided they had to make a change.

They had faithfully attended Bell Shoals Baptist Church for years, but by the early 1970s, they  found themselves leaving the Sunday services hungry for more.

They heard about a fiery young minister leading Bible studies in local homes. They began taking  their children to the meetings, amazed at his spellbinding power.

He encouraged an aggressive, charismatic worship with praying so fevered and focused that people  cried out and spoke in tongues.

They called out their visions.

They laid hands on the sick.

They sang, "God's got an army that's marching through this land with deliverance in their souls  and healing in their hands."

Sallee had never experienced anything like this Pentecostalism, and she found it exhilarating.

She saw no visions of her own, she said, but did begin speaking in tongues, what she called her  private prayer language.

Then one night, her prayer group was reading from the Old Testament, Isaiah. It's a frightening  book that describes God's anger toward the unfaithful.

But it also presents a forgiving God. And as Sallee reached one passage, she began to feel God  speaking directly to her:

"For the sake of My name I delay My wrath.

"And for My praise I restrain it for you, ...

"Behold, I have refined you, but not as silver;

"I have tested you in the furnace of affliction."

She still can't explain it, but "something just clicked," she said. "It's not that I thought I was  anything special. I just knew right then my life belonged to the Lord, and I was in his hands."



Dorman awoke to the smell of freshly baked chocolate chip cookies June 23, 1976. Sallee had been  up for hours, and in the hazy light of the summer morning, he watched her dress at the foot of  their bed.

He didn't want her to leave for her part-time job in a dentist's office. He didn't want her to  work at all. But he was trying to learn to compromise.

She had tried his patience and roused his anger time and again. They'd worried about the four  children and fought over money. But then she'd slip a love note and a Hershey's kiss into his lunch  box or jump out of bed to fix him breakfast when he was called in to work at 2 a.m.

Her unwavering devotion brought out the best in him. With her, he wasn't just a man; he was a  good man.

As they approached their 10th wedding anniversary, their religious faith had helped their love  grow deeper. And he believed that whatever lay ahead, they'd come through it together.

"Don't go. Come back to bed," he said as she stood wiggling and twisting to get into her girdle.  He slipped a big toe under one elastic leg.

"Stop," she laughed, slapping at his foot. "If you don't stop, I'll be late for work."

She threw on her dress, kissed him, said goodbye to the kids watching television, and ran out  the door to her Volkswagen Beetle.

The smell of the cookies lingered as the phone rang 45 minutes later.

Dorman answered.

It was the Florida Highway Patrol.

GRAPHIC: PHOTO 12(7C),
Sallee Moses lives in the memory of Sue and other friends as a vibrant, delightful young woman, right.

NOTES: THE HUMAN TOUCH

LOAD-DATE: December 13, 1999