Sara on the left with two buddies in Jackson, around 1936

Another April 1st rolls around, and this one would be Sara’s 93rd birthday. Hard to believe it’s been almost a century since the third of Jessie and Howard’s stair-step girls came into the world on Strong Avenue. It was such an appropriate arrival date, that April Fool’s Day, and she always cherished the uniqueness of her birthday.

Sara definitely had a streak of prankster about her, evidenced above in a Belhaven photograph from the mid-1930s. Who knows if those teenagers bothered to replace the auction sign or if it’s in the bottom of one of these boxes of Sara’s ephemera that sit up in my spare bedroom? I wouldn’t be surprised at all to run across it. So many odd tidbits have come to light over the past year: As Allan Hammons, Donny Whitehead and I have worked well into a lot of nights with the Greenwood history volumes, one weird coincidence after another has us all convinced that we have at least stretched the time/space continuum if not ruptured it altogether (with apologies to Steven Spielberg and Marty McFly). Long-lost photographs have turned up, letters have appeared, trinkets and mementoes that were desperately needed to illustrate some Greenwood event have just mysteriously turned up, always just in time and with no viable explanation. Our suspicion is that Sara is to blame for all of this magic and mystery. We’re writing books about Greenwood and she has, as always, inserted herself smack in the middle of the action.

Happy Birthday, Sara…..and please keep those April Fool’s jokes coming our way.