Welcome back to Ancient Wisdom, our Sunday series in which writers over 70 tell us how they are aging gracefully. Last week, after the death of basketball legend George Raveling, we published an excerpt from his inspiring memoir, What You’re Made For. This week, Lucky Gold, 75, takes us to the place that shaped him, Dalton, Georgia. It’s been a difficult week, and we hope that Lucky’s essay brightens your day.
Seventy-five years ago, I was born with a broken arm. My mother had been warned by her obstetrician that giving birth to a third child was highly risky—for the baby and for her. What he didn’t know is that during the Great Depression, my mother’s mother—attempting to cope with a failed family business and a tempestuous marriage—had traveled from Atlanta to New York in order to have an illegal abortion. My mother had grown up haunted by this knowledge and refused to consider terminating her pregnancy.
On the morning of September 6, 1950, the doctor’s prophecy came true. It seemed I had turned the wrong way in my mother’s womb. Unlike a more conventional breech birth, I didn’t come out feetfirst. No, in the first of what my mother viewed as my many acts of rebellion, I insisted on coming out shoulder first. In order to deliver me, my right arm had to be broken in utero. And so it was that I entered the world, led by my limp little arm, in what I came to call a Bob Fosse Delivery.
Mother and child survived the ordeal, but my right arm was useless. As fate would have it, a skilled surgeon was on call at Piedmont Hospital—one of the same surgeons who had pieced Eddie Rickenbacker back together when America’s greatest World War I ace nearly died from injuries in a commercial airplane crash outside of Atlanta. Dr. Thornton—his name forever sacred to my mother—couldn’t set my fracture in a cast but gently knitted the tiny bones back together with his bare hands and then applied a Band-Aid. If that weren’t miraculous enough, when the doctor’s bill arrived, to my cash-strapped parents still struggling on the GI Bill, it came to $25.
No surprise, then, that my mother quickly scrapped the idea of calling me Douglas Bruce and instead chose the name Lucky. For three quarters of a century, I have had a love-hate relationship with that moniker. It sometimes scored a primo table in a trendy Hollywood restaurant (they assumed I must be a bookie), but in an up-and-down career as a playwright and screenwriter, it has also been a source of bitter irony.
However, there is one place on God’s green earth where being Lucky was not ironic, and that was in the small north Georgia town I called home for my first 18 years. The memory of that place and time isn’t just an exercise in nostalgia, a collection of fading photographs in a drawer. I hope it offers a glimpse of a world too often dismissed as ignorant, intolerant, and cruel. Having lived my adult life in Manhattan, my hometown remains for me a portrait of America at its best, a true community of friends and strangers. As those of us in our 70s and beyond know all too well, our memories of the distant past are often sharper than what happened yesterday. In my case, that is a happy circumstance, for when I look homeward, I see unlikely angels.
