The Queen of Cool

 

Paula Bennett

Feb. 8, 1947 – Oct. 26, 2025

 

Her arrival in Kingsport was announced in the February 1961 issue of the junior high newspaper, the "Robinson Review":

New Personalities:

Paula Bennett

The first new personality to Robinson is Paula Bennett. She lives at 229 De Lee Drive in Colonial Heights. The school she used to attend is Disque Jr. High in Gadsden, Alabama. Paula is 5 feet 3 inches tall, has green eyes, black hair and loves to dance. Her favorite colors are lavender, green, and red. Shrimp and hamburger are her favorite foods, and her favorite record is “Surrender” by Elvis Presley. Paula has one sister, Rea Bennett, who attends Judson College in Marion, Alabama. Paula’s ambition is to become a teacher. Paula is fourteen and she is in Miss Riley’s homeroom.

But the boys of Ross N. Robinson Junior High School didn’t need an introduction from the school newspaper. We already knew she was at Robinson. She’d been the object of much conversation in the hallways:

“Who’s that new girl?”

“Golly, she’s cute.”

“She got a boyfriend yet?”

I could only admire Paula from afar. I wasn’t in Miss Riley’s homeroom.

But the next school year she was in my Latin class. And that began a lifelong friendship. 

We didn’t have many classes together over the years but it seemed she was always dating one of my friends.

Paula Bennett, 1965, Student Body, recording secretary

We did have one date in college. She came to Duke my junior year. We went to a dance on Friday night – boy, could she dance! That Robinson Review article was right! - and to a Dionne Warwick concert on Saturday night.

And through the years we always kept in touch: mail, phone, later email, then text. I just got a text from her a month ago. She had lost my phone number.

It seemed a little confusing: my phone number is my text number. But I knew Paula was now prone to moments of confusion. She had been diagnosed with a brain tumor a little over a year earlier and had undergone some brutal treatments. Still she was optimistic.

She had texted me in May with the shocking news that our mutual friend Jeannie Williams had died of a heart attack. The three of us had been fast friends over the years. We overlapped one summer quarter at UT and I had spent many afternoons at their apartment.

During college I would get letters from Paula who was at Columbia College (in S.C.), catching me up on her campus life and how Jeannie was doing at Salem College (N.C.). We always kept up.

When I was on David Letterman’s show in 1990, I think she was my only high school classmate who actually stayed up to watch.

I visited my grandkids in Texas a few years ago and Paula called on the cell with museum recommendations in Dallas that she got from her sister.

It was Jeannie who had kept me updated on Paula’s cancer treatments this past year. But then it was Paula who brought me the bad news about Jeannie. She told me she and Jeannie had just had an hour conversation about life’s challenges and life’s rewards. End of life kind of stuff.

On Wednesday I got the text I had dreaded: End of life had come for Paula. She had succumbed to her brain tumor.

I had known that news was coming but I wasn’t ready for it.

I had a note on my computer to send Paula my new book, just as I had sent her all the previous ones. And I had been trying to plan a trip to visit a friend in Charlotte and then swing by to see Paula in Brevard on the way home.

Paula did fulfill that junior high ambition: she became a teacher, 26 years in the classroom in Birmingham. But she became so much more: an author (“GRITS: Girls Raised in the South”), a world traveler (she loved Africa), a travel blogger (she, husband Garry, an RV and the road) and a caregiver during her husband Garry’s long battle with Parkinson’s.

When she and Garry left Alabama in 2009, she jumped into everything in her new hometown Brevard: church, AAUW, book club, college classes (taking and teaching), museums, theater, frequenting the local coffee houses, restaurants and book stores.

It was the same as always. Wherever Paula was, she made it a better place.

Now she’s in the proverbial better place. And I know she will make it an even better place.

Paula and Garry in 2023

The House The Newspaper Built

 

About 15 years ago, while cleaning out her parents’ house, Mary Porter found an old Kingsport Times-News envelope postmarked 1960 and addressed to her late father, Edward Gustafson. Inside was a brochure titled “House of the Week Study Plan: X-94.” Knowing that I was always looking for things to write about in my Times-News column, Mary passed it along, thinking I might find it interesting. She was right.

But alas my time as a columnist ran out before I ever got around to writing about Ed Gustafson’s House of the Week plans. But since my retirement, I’ve been revisiting ideas I never had time to explore, posting what I call Columns I Never Got Around To on my blog. And this week, I found myself staring at that house plan ordered 65 years ago - a relic of a bygone era when newspapers helped people build homes, literally.

I remembered those Sunday features well - weekly stories showcasing “dream homes” for the aspiring homeowner.

Apparently, House X-94 had caught Ed Gustafson’s eye enough that he sent away 50 cents for the study plan. He never got around to building the “Big Family House in a Small Package” as the newspaper described it, and the house Mary was cleaning out turned out to be the same address on the envelope, the house her parents moved into on Morningside Circle in 1943.

For decades, newspapers featured house plans every Sunday, catering to every dreamer with a hammer and a plot of land. Some weeks, the featured home was a cozy cottage, perfect for newlyweds or retirees. Other times, it was a stately two-story meant for a growing family, or a “rambling ranch,” as they often called them, full of sliding doors and picture windows looking out onto a generous backyard. Each rendering was accompanied by a glowing description of the home’s merits - how the kitchen was “perfect for modern living” or how the open floor plan allowed “for easy entertaining.”

At the bottom of the page was a small coupon.

For a low price – by 1960 it was 50 cents - you could send away for a “study plan” - a small-scale blueprint that included a materials list, giving you a rough idea of what your dream home might cost. And if you liked what you saw, another form allowed you to send off for full blueprints - detailed construction documents that could be had for the princely sum of eight or ten dollars.

It seems quaint now, in an era where house plans can be downloaded with the click of a button, but at the time, these newspaper house plans fueled a building boom across the country. The concept wasn’t new - the earliest versions of “House of the Week” articles appeared in the 1900s and 1910s - but the golden age of newspaper house plans was in the 1950s through the 1970s, when homeownership was an essential part of the American dream.

These plans were perfect for ambitious young couples, the kind who weren’t afraid of rolling up their sleeves, enlisting the help of handy relatives, and spending nights and weekends hammering their future into existence. They were for families stretching a dollar as far as it would go, for people who had land but needed guidance, for folks who dreamed of four walls and a roof that belonged to them.

No architect with a sophisticated portfolio. No draftsman hunched over a drawing board. No high-powered real estate firm guiding the process. Just a Sunday feature, a clipped coupon, and a few dollars sent through the mail.

And yet, somehow, it was perfect.

I don’t know when newspapers stopped running house plans. Maybe it was when home design became more complex, or when buyers preferred pre-built developments over custom construction. Maybe it was when the Sunday paper itself began to shrink, losing pages and sections to the digital age.

But every now and then, when I see an old newspaper tucked inside a flea market bin, I thumb through it to see if, somewhere in those yellowed pages, there’s a house waiting to be built.

All it needs is a dreamer, a hammer, and maybe a little pocket change.

The blueprint that came in Ed Gustafson's "study plan."

And the materials list.

House of the Week from April 23, 1947 Kingsport Times-News.

An early House of the Week from a 1924 edition of the Kingsport Times.