Everything She Ever Wanted (21 page)

His survival became the focal point of his parents' existence.

Nona was always exhausted because she was up day and night turning

Walter so he wouldn't get bedsores.
 
Penicillin had yet to be

discovered, and strep infections of any kind were often fatal.

Paw and Nona didn't mean to neglect Jean, but her needs took second

place in their fight to save their son.

Walter and Jean had never had a solid brother-and-sister

relationship.

Walter was four years older than Jean, and their personalities were on

entirely different tracks.
 
Walter's illness distanced them even

more.

When Walter got out of bed after his ir parents were long siege with

rheumatic fever, the' so grateful he had survived that they gave him

everything he asked for.
 
To Jean's eye, her brother was always

greedy.

A greedy boy and a greedy man.

Many years later, when Walter persuaded Paw to sell him the back half

of the thirty-four acres he owned on Washington Road, Walter resold it

and made a handsome profit.
 
But Jean had asked her father first, and

she was both outraged and humiliated when she learned that Paw had sold

her brother the acreage she wanted.

Her efforts to please her parents had always failed.
 
Walter came first

because he was a son, and her father doted on her mother, but Jean was

left out.
 
The Allanson family relationships would always be distant

and strained.
 
Paw had become a gnarled, ornery old man, but he was

devoted and gentle with his wife, Nona, and he loved Tom.
 
As for his

own offspring, he might do business with his son, but he didn't really

care for either Walter or Big Carolyn.
 
He often ignored Jean.

Jean and her husband, George "Homer" Boggs, had two children, David and

Nona.
 
They were quite a bit younger than Walter's Tommy and as cousins

they would never be close.
 
The Allanson line had continued, but only

grudgingly.
 
Tommy was it for a long time.

The last Allanson to carry the name unless he had a son.

Years would go by when jean wouldn't see Walter.
 
And yet he was her

brother.
 
She may not have liked him very much, but she loved him.
 
She

had always assumed that, one day, they would settle their

differences.

And then, suddenly, it was too late.

Tom Allanson had often shivered in the emotional chill of his childhood

home.
 
"That's why I grew up being such a sucker for love," he

remembered years later.
 
"I never had any.
 
I can never remember-even

once-hearing my parents say 'I love you' or feeling them put their arms

around me.
 
. . . They showed they cared about me by giving me a good

education, they fed me, they took care of me, but that was their form

of love.
 
I understood that, although I found out later in life that I

wasn't exactly planned when I came along.
 
I wasn't exactly a

blessing.

But I was the kind of kid that thrived off of love.
 
I needed to be

told.
 
I needed to be shown.

Tom grew into a huge teenager who towered over his parents.

He looked like a big old country boy and that suited him fine.

All his life he would hide his intelligence and his education and speak

with a deep southern drawl.
 
He was happiest in the country, competing

in a rodeo or working in a horse barn.
 
Teenage girlsand not a few

grown women-watched Tom Allanson longingly from the rodeo stands.
 
His

jeans fit him like second skin, and he exuded masculinity.

One of the women was Liz Price, who would move in and out of his life

for years to come, and she laughed as she remembered knowing Tom.
 
"He

was my ideal man coming up.
 
A big rodeo star and-oh, how he fit those

jeans!
 
You hear about his jeans?
 
I thought he was God's gift to

women.
 
. . . One day I was walking across the horse show grounds with

a bucket of water in my hand, and somebody says, 'There goes Tom!"
 
and

I turned around, looking for him, and I ran right into a guy wire with

my neck and I poured all my water in my boots!"

Tom didn't know women looked at him that way.
 
He had had few

compliments in his life and his self-esteem was wrapped up only in his

skill with horses.
 
While he was still in high school, he learned to

shoe horses and worked as a farrier when he was only sixteen.
 
He had a

crush on Liz, who was a few years older than he.
 
But he never

mentioned it to her; he was much too shy.
 
"I won't say I was all that

good on my first horse or two," he remembered.
 
"Liz was my first

horseshoe customer and I like to ruined her horse."

After Tom graduated from the military academy, he enrolled in the

University of Georgia in Athens.
 
He played football; he was a line

coach's dream at six foot four and 250 pounds.
 
But he was forced to

drop out of football-and the university-in 1963 when a rodeo accident

ended his playing career.
 
He transferred to Truett McConnell Community

College and graduated with an associate degree in science.
 
Then he

returned to the University of Georgia.

Despite his father's vehement oppos't'on, Tom married for the first

time while he was in college.
 
He was mesmerized by a tall, slender,

raven-haired girl with clear blue eyes, Judy Van Meter.
 
"I fell in

love with this young girl up there in Athens," he said.
 
"She was

beautiful.
 
She looked absolutely beautifullike Lynda Carter, 'Wonder

Woman."You couldn't tell me anything as far as my parents goes.
 
I was

in love.
 
My dad said, 'You can't get married until you get through

with your college."
 
And I said, 'Well, you can't stop this love I've

got for this girl."
 
He said if I got married, they'd cut off all my

funds for college.
 
Well, I got married and he cut it off just like he

said he would.
 
There wasn't another penny.
 
So I had to make it on my

own."

Tom's marriage to Judy didn't work out.
 
"She had a champagne

appetite," Tom recalled ruefully.
 
"And I had a beer pocketbook.

I was trying to go to vet school and work, and she was working too.

She started playing games.
 
. . . If I didn't do what she wanted me to

do, there was no more sex."
 
He would later admit that it would be a

long time before he had good sense about women.

When his first wife shut the bedroom door on him, his eye soon wandered

to an even more unsuitable choice.
 
"YOU couldn't tell me anything

then-no more than you can tell any young man in love."

Tom's next love was, unfortunately, his wife's best friend, Carolyn

Brooks.
 
Carolyn was a delicate-appearing woman who swept her blond

hair back into a chignon.
 
"She looked like Grace Kelly," Tom said,

shaking his head.
 
"All my women were real pretty."
 
Carolyn was in her

twenties and also married-to a man almost fifteen years her senior.

"She gave me attention, and I wasn't getting that in my marriage," Tom

said.
 
"My wife was withholding sex and Carolyn was free with it.
 
We

started going to the Moose Club togetherand that was out of character

for me.
 
I didn't drink-never have."
 
Tom said Carolyn enjoyed dancing

and drinking, and it didn't concern him in the beginning.

Two divorce suits would be filed when Tom's wife and Carolyn's husband

discovered their romance.
 
Tom had yet to distinguish between love and

sex.
 
He believed that he had finally found what he was looking for and

that Carolyn would make a good wife as soon as their divorces were

final.

Despite his romantic misadventures, Tom managed to stay in college and

he graduated from the University of Georgia in 1966 with a bachelor of

science in agriculture, with emphasis on veterinary medicine.
 
He went

to work after graduation for the Beaver Dam Angus Farm in Colbert,

Georgia, near Athens, and stayed there for three years as cattle

manager over an eighteenhundred-head herd of Angus.
 
He then attended

Graham's School for Cattlemen and Horsemen in Garnett, Kansas, and was

certified to perform artificial insemination.

If Tom Allanson didn't understand women, he most definitely did know

orses.
 
He was now a farrier who specialized in "corrective shoeing"

and worked with quarter horses, thoroughbred Morgans, and Arabians.
 
By

this time, he had bred, trained, and shown quarter horses and Morgans

in halter, western, trail, reining, and fine harness classes.
 
He was

soon a judge in western horse shows.
 
He was a working fool.
 
Stripped

to his jeans and an undershirt to offset the heat of a Georgia summer

and the flames of his blacksmith rig on wheels, Tom was larger than

life.
 
His shoulders were ax-handle wide and his hugely bulging arms

matched those of any professional wrestler.
 
But, for all his physical

power, he was the gentlest of men, who truly believed the lyrics of

romantic country and western songs.

Given the right woman, he would have undoubtedly remained faithful for

fifty years.
 
But Tom had an uncanny talent for picking the wrong

woman.

Tom and his bride-to-be, who was soon called "Little Carolyn," were not

well matched.
 
He had a college degree and she had left school in tenth

grade.

He was noncombative and she had a fiery temper.
 
But Carolyn was

attractive and sexy, and Tom wanted so much to be married and create a

faihily of his own.
 
He married Carolyn with high hopes on October 25,