Wanda’s Story
By Caroline Ackerman for Highgrove at Tates Creek
Wanda Brown was not born as Wanda Brown. Well, at least not if you ask her 1940 birth certificate, on which her mother’s lilting Arkansas accent (the same accent that Wanda carries today, turning “washing” to “warshing” and everyday furniture to “a Chester drawers”) caused a
delivery nurse to mark the baby’s name as “Wander.” It was a prescient sign of the slightly unpredictable, but beautifully vibrant life to come.
After her parents’ divorce at age four, Wanda moved in with her grandparents George and Laura at a cozy house five miles from the center of Little Rock, in an area fittingly named Sweet Home. The house, surrounded by bauxite quarries and sweeping views, served as home base throughout Wanda’s childhood adventures that she took on with her older brother Don by her side.
When Don was fourteen, he started a paper route, and Wanda found herself with a newfound independence. She began seeking a job of her own, working for local savings and loans and real estate companies, roles that fed her extroversion and allowed her to meet new, exciting people every day. Around sixteen, she began working for a dry cleaning company in town. Wanda didn’t have her own car, and so at the end of each shift she sat against a sparkling picture window, waiting for her aunt to pick her up. It was there that she first saw a blue 55’ Ford drive by, revving its engine.
A few months later, Wanda and a few friends were at a drive-in restaurant when that same Ford pulled in. “And I looked at my girlfriends, and I just said, ‘Ohhhh, it’s him! There’s that boy who drives that blue Ford!’” she squeals, remembering. Daniel Brown was that boy in that
Ford, a blue-eyed, dark haired Little Rock native who Wanda says she’d had her eye on for some time. That afternoon, Wanda found herself riding shotgun in his car, and four months later, she walked down the aisle at the tender age of seventeen to say, “I Do.”
Wanda and Daniel were passionate, sometimes to the point of volatility. They divorced shortly into the marriage, both young, but she knew all along, Wanda says, that she would find her way back to Daniel. They had the divorce annulled after less than a year, and moved to a Louisiana Air Force base. They stayed there for ten months, before returning to Little Rock. There were days in which they lived on pork and beans, but Wanda didn’t mind too much — “You can live on love if you have to, I suppose,” she muses.
In 1967, Wanda gave birth to her only child, a daughter she named Teresa after one of her favorite singers, Teresa Brewer. The young parents were enchanted, Wanda marveling over how sweet and calm her baby was. When Teresa was a year and a half old, Wanda started working again, taking up her old job with a local bank. She and Daniel continued to love each other deeply, and challenge each other just as tenaciously, as Teresa went to high school, then college, and eventually moved to Lexington, Kentucky, leaving Daniel and Wanda with an empty nest in
Little Rock.
In the mid-2000s, the Browns moved to join their daughter and the family she had built. Here, Wanda filled her days with family. She has four energetic grandchildren, aged nine to twenty-two, each with a bit of her sass and her outrageous sense of humor. She and Daniel lived
in a sweet ranch-style house five minutes from their family, exploring their new world of Kentucky together until his passing in November, 2017.
Nearly a year later, Wanda found a new home. It’s not Little Rock, but it has the community, the people, and conversation that Wanda thrives on. At Highgrove, Wanda need only step over her threshold to feel a sense of the social butterfly that she was as a teenager, her nature as an extrovert nourished and fed. Moving has not been without its challenges— she misses her home, and the independence it symbolized, the freedom to drive where she wanted when she wanted, and the adventures that freedom promised. She misses her own memories, of Daniel and the rest of her amazing life, memories she fears will slip away in time, memories she is so eager to preserve. In the midst of it all, Highgrove has given Wanda the community that she craves, and for that she is grateful.