“Southern women are born with special genes to truly wrap your well-being in their heart.”
Those are words spoken to me by a special person whose life touched so many. Though she took no credit for all of the things she did and lives she touched, my friend Judge Joni Tidwell Haldeman was the absolute personification of the Heart of the Community.
I can’t remember the first time I met my friend. Memories are hazy. I believe it was a reenactment of the lives entombed at the Old DeKalb Cemetery, where she took students from the high school and had them portray the lives of some of the earliest residents of DeKalb.
What I do remember are the countless days sitting in her court office at DeKalb City Hall. Regardless of the temperature outside, you would be greeted by a blast of warm air as you entered her office because she always had a heater running, and usually still a sweater on. We spent hours and hours in that office, she behind her desk and I sitting on an old church pew. Her and Paula talking back and forth through the doorway between their offices was always interesting. But most interesting were the stories.
Judge Joni Haldeman was the keeper of tales. The guardian of history. The ever loving protector of the foundations of the town she lived in and devoted her life to serving. I could ask her about anyone and she would regale me with stories of their past, antics of younger days, and the lineage of their family. It was in those stories that a person learned a different side of my friend than the one people saw in her position of judge. It was a side that I believe only a select handful of friends were given a ticket to see and hear.
It was also in those stories that one could hear, as the quote above speaks, her desire to wrap the well being of her town and her people in her heart. She was fiercely protective of the history of her town, and gleeful when fresh historical facts would surface.
I remember vividly the day we climbed in her truck and drove over to a hill on the west side of town. She was absolutely ecstatic as she told me that hill was once the homesite of David Chisolm, one of the town’s founders, who chose the hill because it looked over the town. Joni also spent her life “looking over” her town.
My mind is flooded this morning of tales of backroad shenanigans, and tales of those she bonded with over the years to nourish an idea that came to be known as the Williams House Museum. I can loudly hear her recollections of pieces in the museum and how she, Linda, Carolyn and others took a thought and turned it into what you see today. She told of how she learned to fold a napkin properly, of how such and such brought in a piece, some lost treasure, and it was found again. She spoke in vivid color of Dan Blocker, Leadbelly, and the night a small plane crashed in DeKalb with Ricky Nelson on board.
But, even those stories, which made her eyes shine, were not told as fervently as the stories told of her son, Charlie, and her grandchildren. You could hear the pride and love in her voice when she spoke them and their achievements, and other members of her family as well. I remember very well this morning the unbridled joy and pride she felt when given the privilege of swearing her brother John in as a Bowie County district court judge. Here again you can see in her that Southern women are born with special genes to truly wrap your well-being in their heart.
My friend Joni Haldeman was a true Noble Heart. Likely the most sage advice she ever gave me was in telling me the truest gift of a Noble, and that is the fact that a true Noble Heart does not expect the recognition for doing what is right. A Noble does not want to be recognized for helping their town and its people. A Noble does what they do because of a love for the town, the people, and because it is simply the right thing to do.
That is why, to me, Judge Joni Tidwell Haldeman will always be the truest Noble to hold the moniker, because she did what she did, everything she did, because she loved her town and its people, and it was simply the right thing to do.
Our friend Joni went on to a better place on Sunday. It is hard to fathom a world without her but just like the history she worked so hard to preserve, her life will live on through the written word, the stories we remember, and in the echoes of her voice at the Williams House Museum. She truly was a treasure, and as she so fondly always said...
The treasure is here.
