NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP) - Daddy had tuberculosis, and not the kind romanticized by lonely poets like Lord Byron.
In the 1940s, the lung infection was an easily caught, easily transmitted, deadly disease - and people were terrified of it.
Quarantine signs were posted in front of his family's East Nashville home warning others to stay away.
And his little girl, an only child named Lois, was left to play at home alone.
The objects around her, delightful and distinct, became her companions. A bee she pulled on a string, a miniature red school house, a fossil collection, a nurse doll named Mary Jane. These items became part of Lois Riggins-Ezzell's story. And her future, serving as executive director of the Tennessee State Museum, became a study in them.
"Objects take on a very real life to people," she says. "And I really believe that's what a museum is. Your ability to reach your hand out and touch history. That is as real as it ever gets. That's what I fell in love with."
For the past 35 years, Riggins-Ezzell has curated the story of Tennessee's history, spirit and heritage through the objects that shaped it. A monolithic ax from the archaic woodland civilization of early Americans. The chains that bound together the hands of an unknown slave. The hat Andrew Jackson wore when he mourned his beloved Rachel on the day he was inaugurated the seventh president of the United States. More than 140,000 treasures and trinkets that transport visitors just inches from the past.
Under her leadership, the museum grew from a basement space with a staff of six to an operation of more than 50 curators, educators, entrepreneurs and financiers with a $3.8 million annual budget and residence on three floors of the James K. Polk State Office Building - just one block away from the state Capitol, where Riggins-Ezzell roamed as a teen and found her professional focus as a young adult.
At the end of this year, she will part ways with the museum and leave behind the collection of objects she has learned to love.
Her tenure closes in controversy with accusations of mismanagement, criminal charges filed against two former employees this year and, most recently, questions about a $23,000 pay raise given to Riggins-Ezzell earlier this year and a $40,000 part-time job approved for her after the planned Dec. 31 retirement.
At 77 years old, Riggins-Ezzell - a dynamic storyteller with a ponytail of waist-length silver hair and outfits vibrant enough to match her snappy personality - remains resolute. She is proud of Tennessee's history, the museum's history and her own.
"My roots," she says, "are here."
Her ancestors crossed the mountains in 1803 and built homesteads on the Red River. Riggins-Ezzell's father and mother grew up in historic Germantown. She was raised in East Nashville. To this day, she lives in the house next door to the one where she was born.
Her daddy attended Watkins Law School and worked at the Nashville Bridge Co. when he became ill. He spent years in and out of the Nashville tuberculosis hospital in Inglewood until scientists finally found a cure. When they did, many patients could not find work.
By happenstance, one of his hospital roommates was Robert Clement, the father of future Gov. Frank Clement. The elder Clement told his friend to go down and get a job in the administration of his newly elected son. Riggins-Ezzell's father became a security guard for the Capitol - a job that not only secured his future but also inspired his daughter's.
"That was when I got my first taste of falling in love with the architecture and the gold telephone that was in Clement's office," Riggins-Ezzell recalls.
She would climb out through the cupola atop the state Capitol and sit on the building's slanted roof, reading haikus while she watched the sun go down.
She would ascend the stairs past the graffiti in the building's towers, joining the young men who raised and lowered the flags every morning and every night. She would descend to the building's secret places with the porters, exploring the brick underpinnings where the stone had been cut out. She would, as she got older, learn to walk in high heels in the Motlow Tunnel.
And, as a young professional in 1973, she would begin her career as a state Capitol tour guide, a position that matured "into a glorious run in a job I have loved every day from dawn to dusk."
But first, she took a side journey.
If there is a pivotal moment in a person's life, Riggins-Ezzell says her came sifting dirt in a cave in Kentucky where Jesse James once lived.
She graduated from Belmont as a drama major with an elementary education teaching certificate and married a "crop duster soldier of fortune."
For 12 years, the couple lived on a big dirt farm in South Logan County, Kentucky. He would jet off to spray fire ants in Brazil or long staple cotton in Nicaragua or green bugs in Texas. She would stay home teaching history and English to schoolchildren in the little town. She taught the legend of the Bell Witch, and stories of Jackson's duel, and the history of James.
Along the way, she met a woman who owned property near a cave where James was said to have spent some winters. The lady believed it was a paleolithic or archaic settlement, and "somehow that country woman, a brilliant and creative antique collector and visionary that she was, convinced Carnegie to come down and do an excavation of that cave," Riggins-Ezzell remembers. And she helped.
Already Riggins-Ezzell was taking master's level anthropology and folk art classes at Western Kentucky University. She worked three summers in the cave, digging with a trowel.
As she worked, she got to meet people who were making discoveries about objects that no one had seen in 10,000 years. And she found a new appreciation for items buried and forgotten.
Eventually, Riggins-Ezzell and her crop-duster husband split up, and she returned to Nashville, where she got a job giving tours at the Capitol building she knew so well.
And then, with help from Tennessee Gov. Winfield Dunn, she got a job as curator of extension services at the Tennessee State Museum in 1977.
Four years later, she was its director.
Running a museum, Riggins-Ezzell says, means you never sleep. "You have to have a lot of hustle and a lot of swagger and brag," she says. When you find a piece for the collection, "You have to go in with the money ready and your fists clenched. And when they tell you no, you have to come back with another reason why this would be a perfect show for Tennesseans to have."
Over the years, she has driven across the state with a pair of Baxter Bean's pistols in her trunk, promoting the museum on a radio tour. She has called a gaming lobbyist she didn't know just after midnight to ask for money for "Chicken" George's hat from the movie "Roots" because "Chicken George was a gaming kind of man." She has fought to bring Old Glory, a Union flag that flew over the state Capitol and was hidden just down the street, to the halls of the museum.
Her proudest finds are early Native American artifacts, like the letter about how the Chickasaw were to be treated on the Trail of Tears, the collection of Confederate and Union flags, and, recently, the art of prolific painter Red Grooms, which will be the show that opens the new museum after she is gone.
Tennessee's story is America's story, she says. Where else do you find the homes of three presidents? Who else has Davy Crockett and Elvis, Tina Turner and a Tennessee State Tigerbelle, Garth Brooks and Cordell Hull? Only Tennessee had a man named Harry Burn, who cast the deciding vote on suffrage.
And, for more than three decades, she has created spaces where people can reach out a hand and know they are only two inches and one piece of glass away from that history. "And that," Riggins-Ezzell says, "is overwhelming."
That is her legacy.
In retirement, what she will remember most are the thousands and thousands of faces awe inspired by seeing Nathan Bedford Forrest's revolver, or Jackson's piano, or the powderhorn presented to Crockett.
"What you are selling are not just stories," Riggins-Ezzell says. "You are selling memories, you are selling ethics, you are a selling a belief that you can be whatever you want to be if you are a Tennessean. You can be a painter or a president. You can dream as big as you want to.
"The museum is a classroom without bells and whistles. It is a place to learn and live and dream and discover."
And now, it is Riggins-Ezzell's time to discover what's next. She doesn't plan to just go home and garden. She wants to spend time with her grandchildren and visit the museums she has always wanted to see. She wants to travel to Venice, Montana, Wyoming. She wants to revisit the South again, the places of her youth.
She wants to shake off any memory of ugliness she encountered during her tenure and remember the sparkling moments.
She wants to watch the new museum come out of the ground and be a monument to the Tennessee legacy.
"I want," she says, "to be happy."
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Information from: The Tennessean, http://www.tennessean.com