Meet Janet May, Alabama’s 93-year-old B&B hostess

Alabama’s 93-year-old B&B hostess

By MICHELLE MATTHEWS

The Birmingham News

GREENSBORO, Ala.

As Melissa May Lemmon tromps through a nature trail maintained by her brother, Thad May, she expertly ducks to avoid spider webs and navigates narrow bridges she has crossed since she was a little girl. After circling the 14-acre pond – the other day, she took a kayak out in it for the first time – she emerges alongside a stand of longleaf pines her grandfather planted, into a field where her grandmother used to count cows as they came home every evening. Melissa picks up a smooth, flat “pancake rock,” the kind she collected here as a child. Now she saves these treasures for her grandchildren.

“This is home,” she says of the 320-acre property in Greensboro, Ala., where she lives part time with her mother, Janet May. “We all gather here.”

While the house is a repository of memories and a gathering spot for her four siblings and their families, who are spread out around the country, it’s also become known as a home away from home for guests who stay at Blue Shadows Bed and Breakfast, which Janet has operated since 1988.

Now 93 years old, Janet still reveals glimpses of the glamorous blue-eyed blonde who moved to New York City as a teenager and became a model. She uses a walker to get around now, and her transparent hearing aids, she says, don’t help much. But she’s dressed elegantly from head to toe in pale pink, her fingernails brightly painted. Even though she sometimes loses her train of thought or misunderstands a word here or there, her mind is sharp.

Originally from Chattanooga, Tenn., Janet Barker left home at age 15 to live with an aunt in Jacksonville, Fla. A few years later, she moved to New York City with a friend, a singer who had been hired by Tommy Dorsey. Janet ended up getting a job with Powers Modeling Agency.

While in New York, she met a handsome young pilot, Thaddeus May, who was from Greensboro, Ala. “I love New York, but Thaddeus hated it,” she says. “He was a real Southern country boy.’”

Janet was offered a contract with RKO Pictures, which at the time was owned by Howard Hughes, who also owned Thaddeus’s employer, Trans World Airlines. “Thaddeus had just proposed,” she says. “The ironic thing is, he ended up flying for Howard Hughes for 34 years and never saw him. He was never on any plane Thad flew.”

After they married, the couple moved to Kansas City, Kan., where he attended flight captain’s school. “I thought my life was over,” Janet says. But she was pleasantly surprised to fall in love with Kansas City, where the couple raised five children.

“I had a good deal because I traveled all over the world,” she says. “I would say to the children, ‘Don’t you want to go to Paris? Don’t you want to go to Spain?’”

After Thad’s parents, Ellery Brooks May and Emma Burdine Dew May, died, none of Thad’s six siblings wanted their home in Greensboro – but Thad did. “He thought, ‘We’ll go back to my roots,’” Janet says. They moved into his parents’ house in 1980.

They added a three-car garage with an apartment above it for Janet’s mother to live in. But once she arrived from Chattanooga, she told them she “couldn’t possibly” live there. “She was a city girl,” Janet explains. “It was too quiet here for her.”

So by the mid-1980s, Janet decided that she and Thad should make use of the guest house, which has a sitting area, kitchen, bedroom and large bathroom, by opening a bed-and-breakfast. “We had been to many in Europe but never one down here,” she says.

The spacious house, located just outside the Greensboro city limits, was built in 1941. Emma May named it “Blue Shadows” because of the bluish shadows cast on the white house late in the afternoon. Behind the house, a nature trail leads deep into the woods and winds down to a fully stocked fishing pond. There’s also a boathouse with a kayak and a boat that guests can use.

Bobby, a mutt who showed up and decided to stay, likes to help guests navigate the trails. “He won’t let you get lost,” Janet says of the dog who’s missing his tail. “He gets more mail than I do.”

After Thad died of Parkinson’s disease in 2007, Janet continued running the B&B with lots of help from her children, three of whom take turns staying with her throughout the year. “Everybody helps out,” Janet says.

Greensboro has always made her feel welcome. Shortly after the century-old oak tree in the front yard was struck by lightning, she says, she was surprised to see two tractors arrive driven by a couple who live nearby. “I said, ‘What are you doing?’ and they said, ‘We’re just helping you because you’re our neighbors.’”

Melissa, who lives in Kansas City, enjoys spending a few months out of the year in Greensboro. She enjoys running into someone she knows every time she shops at the Piggly Wiggly. “I never go to town and feel like a nobody, like I do at home,” she says. “It’s very warm and friendly like that.”

And her mother spreads that warmth and friendliness to everyone who visits her B&B. “I’ve met all these wonderful people,” she says. Thanks to Auburn’s Rural Studio in nearby Newbern, the B&B has hosted architects from all over the world, she says. She’s also grateful to Dr. John Dorsey for his nonprofit Project Horseshoe Farm, which brings “gap year” fellows from all over the country to Greensboro.

“My mom always loved entertaining and having parties,” says Janet’s daughter Emily May, who lives in Dallas. “She is energized when she is around people. This has made the bed-and-breakfast an essential part of her thriving into her old age, I believe.”

Janet and Thad always loved to travel when they were younger, says Emily. “They literally traveled all over the world. But the cool thing is that in her old age, now, when she can’t travel, the world comes to her.”

“It’s been a good life,” says Janet. “And it continues to be.”

Blue Shadows Bed and Breakfast is located at 11265 Ala. Hwy. 14 in Greensboro. The phone number is 334-624-3637.