The Walking Lady of Augusta Road and Her Brother, Charlie: a NAMI story

Photo of Emelia Yurkus, courtesy of a Greenville, S.C., publication  

Emelia in Communion Dress, before schizophrenia interupted her life.  Emelia (detail from above photo) 

 

Charlie Younkers, Emelia's older brother, in 1967 when he was a 51-year-old designer for Bigelow-Sandford Carpet in New York City. (He somehow changed his last name.)  

Emelia Yurkus, a tall, thin woman who often walked the streets of Greenville, S.C., died recently.

Here is Emelia’s obituary, published in “The Greenville News,” August 6, 2011:

“Emelia Yurkus, 81, died August 4, 2011. Born in Brooklyn, N.Y., to the late Anthony Yurkus and Emelia Rasiluite Yurkus, she was a 50-year resident of Greenville. Emelia was known as ‘the walking lady of Augusta Road’ and was an independent person of great discipline and good manners in spite of the constraints of her schizophrenia.

“Emelia was predeceased by her brother and lifelong caregiver, Charles Younkers. She is survived by a nephew, John Wittenstrom, and a niece, Jeanne Cifaldi. The family thanks the many anonymous citizens of Greenville who supported and cared for Emelia during her long walks and thanks her late-life caregiving team: Beth Zweigoron, Hilda Jernigan, Connie Evans and Ann Campbell.

“A gathering of remembrance will be held at the Cremation Society of South Carolina on Monday, August 8 at 3:00 p.m. Memorials may be left to NAMI [National Alliance on Mental Illness] Greenville.”

When Bigelow-Sanford, a carpet manufacturer, moved its headquarters from New York City to Greenville, S.C., in the early 1970s, Emelia’s brother, Charlie Younkers, who worked as a designer with Bigelow, had to learn to drive. He, Emelia and their mother – Charlie and Emelia’s married sister, now evidently deceased, was not mentioned in Emilia’s obituary – had depended on buses or the New York City subway. He bought an old, silver-colored Mercedes-Benz, put a Saint Christopher medal on its dashboard – Charlie was Catholic – and headed south with his mother and Emelia.

In 1974, I hired on as a Bigelow designer and worked with Charlie. We were two of Bigelow’s nine designers. He, old enough to be my father, sat in front of my 5-ft. wide by almost 4-ft. tall drawing board. Lean and tall with a bit of a hook to his nose, he resembled his sister, Emelia. He often ate cabbage soup and onion sandwiches., and with a Brooklyn accent talked about “boids” (birds) he saw flying when he took lunchtime walks.

Charlie said he finished eighth grade in public school.

“The only book I ever read all the way through was ‘A Tree Grows in Brooklyn,’” said Charlie, who grew up in Brooklyn.

After his formal schooling, Charlie began working at the Bigelow design studio as a helper to some of the many designers hired to draw patterns for area rugs and broadloom carpets. He mixed tempera paints, using powdered pigments and “gum Arabic,” often wielding a mortar and a pestle. “A mortar and pestle is a tool used to crush, grind, and mix solid substances (trituration). The pestle is a heavy bat-shaped object, the end of which is used for crushing and grinding. The mortar is a bowl, typically made of hard wood, ceramic or stone. The substance to be ground is placed in the mortar and ground, crushed or mixed with the pestle” (from Wikipedia).

Designers used Charlie’s mixed paints to paint designs on “check paper.” A typical paper was pre-printed with small checks (often one-eighth inch or a tenth-inch in size). After a designer freehand-drew a sketch (some sketches were as large as three feet by four-plus feet) in charcoal and then secondarily in pastel chalks, he transferred that design to check paper. Some designs involved 28 colors (each color representing a colored yarn that would be used in a rug). Colors were mixed and matched by designers or assistants-to-designers such as Charlie. Designers used brushes to apply a paint color to each check, individually.

Charlie said his boss, a few years after he began work at Bigelow, let him try his hand at drawing. He was a good artist and could paint beautiful floral patterns.

He told me, “Don’t get stuck behind a drawing board. If you’re good, you’ll stay there.”

He said his bosses one day looked over his shoulder at a 3-ft. by 3-ft. nature-inspired abstract design he’d worked on for quite a while. They gave advice on things to change in his design.

“I sat there a week, staring out the window,” Charlie said, chuckling. “Then I turned that design upside down on my board. They came back and looked at it and liked it.”

He sometimes told me, “Don’t hurry. They’ll just give you another one (a design).”

Charlie’s last name, Younkers, was different from his parents because of a mix-up at Ellis Island when his parents emigrated from Lithuania, he said.

“My mother said her name was ‘Yurkus,’ and they wrote down “Younkers,’” Charlie said. Perhaps his parents and his sister later changed their names back to Yurkus and Charlie didn’t. I don’t know.

I once visited Charlie’s apartment in Lewis Village, located adjacent to Greenville’s Lewis Plaza Shopping Center on Augusta Road. I met Charlie’s thin, white-haired mother and Emelia, who didn’t acknowledge my visit. Neither Charlie nor Emelia ever married.

Months later, I saw Emelia sitting on a stool in an ice-cream shop. I entered that shop and said rather loudly, “Emelia.” She turned her head toward me and quickly jerked it back to its former position. She ignored me, and I said nothing else.

“I think something happened to her in a theater when she was a young woman,” Charlie later told me. “All she wants to do is walk and eat candy. She asked me for money for some, yesterday.”

I later attended the funeral for Charlie and Emelia’s mother, which was conducted at St. Mary’s Catholic Church in Greenville. I sometimes saw Emelia walking along Greenville’s Hwy. 291 Bypass and saw her traveling streets located far from her and Charlie’s Augusta Road apartment. She became a public figure of sorts and earned her title: “The Walking Lady of Augusta Road.”

Charlie retired from Bigelow, and then my family and I moved from Greenville to North Carolina in 1988. Charlie and I exchanged Christmas cards until he returned no messages and I figured he had died. Time’s passage has not dimmed my recollection of Charlie, his mother and his sister. In my mind, I can still see Charlie sitting at his drawing board on the third floor of the now-closed studio once located at the former Bigelow headquarters in Greenville, S.C., and I can still see Emelia, walking, walking, walking.

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OBITUARY

Emelia Yurkus, Greenville, SC

Emelia Yurkus, 81, died August 4, 2011. Born in Brooklyn, NY to the late Anthony Yurkus and Emelia Rasiluite Yurkus, she was a 50 year resident of Greenville. Emelia was known as 'the walking lady of Augusta Road' and was an independent person of great discipline and good manners in spite of the constraints of her schizophrenia.

Emelia was predeceased by her brother and lifelong caregiver, Charles Younkers. She is survived by a nephew, John Wittenstrom, and a niece, Jeanne Cifaldi. The family thanks the many anonymous citizens of Greenville who supported and cared for Emelia during her long walks and thanks her late life caregiving team: Beth Zweigoron, Hilda Jernigan, Connie Evans and Ann Campbell.

A gathering of remembrance will be held at the Cremation Society of South Carolina on Monday, August 8 at 3:00 pm. Memorials may be left to NAMI Greenville. -- Published by The Greenville News on Aug. 6, 2011.

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Below are some sketches rendered by Charlie Younkers:

Pictured below are some relatives of Charlie Younkers: 

Charlie Younkers, right, with his brother-in-law (left), are shown.

Pictured above are (from left) Charlie's brother-in-law with his son, John Wittenstrom (Charlie's nephew, living in Pinehurst, NC), and Charlie Younkers.

Charlie Younkers, left, with his brother-in-law, are shown.


Below are photos of people Charlie Younkers worked with at Bigelow-Sanford in Greenville, S.C.