ZULA SMITH CRUTCHER STORY

A few weeks ago, my distant Wilson cousin, Betty Putnam, who has helped me many times with this website, sent me this story to read.  I printed it out and found that I could not put it down.  It allowed me not only a peek into life in that era as it was for my Grandmother Flonnie Wilson Smith in Russell Springs, Kentucky, but also life in Cincinnati, where I was born and raised and where my Grandmother Henrietta Bernzott and her family resided.  I of course passed it onto all my girl cousins and it seemed to be a hit.  I was disappointed when the story ended, as were many others that read it.  I wanted to read more about her life.   It is a wonderfully written story of a mother's life that she put down on paper for her son.  It is with extreme pleasure that we have received permission from Zula's grandson, Eric Freeman to add this story to our collection of family information on this website.  I hope that everyone who reads it will enjoy it as much as the rest of us did.   

Zula passed away on June 30th 2006 and Irvin "Bud" Crutcher, her husband on September 11th of 2006.  Phillip, Zula's son, passed away in November of 2005 

LOOKING BACK

BY:

Antha Zula (Smith) Crutcher

1991

THE FAMILY MEMBERS MENTIONED IN THE STORY:

PHILLIP:  ZULA'S SON

EPPIE JANE WILSON:  ZULA'S MOTHER

LUTHER "OSCAR" SMITH: ZULA'S FATHER

EWELL AND PEARL SMITH: ZULA'S BROTHER AND SISTER IN LAW

DONNA JEAN AND SONNY: CHILDREN OF EWELL AND PEARL

BUD CRUTCHER:  ZULA'S HUSBAND

GRANDMA AND GRANDPA WILSON:  SILAS HUSTON AND NANCY PAUL WILSON

AUNT ORA WILSON PERKINS:  THE SISTER OF ZULA'S MOTHER ,EPPIE

AUNT OPAL WILSON WOOLDRIDGE: THE SISTER OF ZULA'S MOTHER, EPPIE

AUNT MAUD WILSON HART: THE SISTER OF ZULA'S MOTHER, EPPIE

UNCLE HANSFORD AND AUNT ETHEL WILSON: THE BROTHER AND SISTER IN LAW OF ZULA'S MOTHER, EPPIE

AUNT ETTA SMITH:  THE SISTER OF ZULA'S FATHER, LUTHER "OSCAR" SMITH

BIRTHPLACE

 ~1~

I was born in an area called Webb’s Cross Roads, Russell County, Kentucky, September 4, 1917.  My mother said I looked like a little animal because I had fine fuzz over my body when I came into this world.  I’ve always believed I was conceived to keep my father out of World War I.  One more draft call would have been “it” for him.  Gretta Choate, related to us through Grandma Wilson, was with my mother when I was born.  I suppose she would now be called a midwife.  Gretta gave me one of my names, Mom and Dad the other one.  One of my names came out of a novel I’ve been told.

When I was a small baby I had, Mom said, remittent (or intermittent??) Fever.  In those days a doctor could do very little for his patients at least in many cases.  Our doctor gave up on me, said I would not live.  But I surprised all, by one day screaming out as loud as I could in my weakened state indicating that I was hungry.  I think Mom said she gave me a bit of cornbread to eat.  From then on I began to get better.  No thanks to the cornbread I'm sure.       

At the time our family lived at Webb’s Cross Roads, there may have been, probably was, a post office and maybe a general store.  Marie (Wade) Owens, my cousin, with whom I stayed in September of 1987 drove me through the area.  It is a pretty area, rather hilly, with farm homes scattered here and there.  Kentucky is a beautiful state.  Conditions have changed drastically since I lived there as a small child.

 ~2~

MY FAMILY

My father, Luther Oscar Smith - always called Oscar - was born in Kentucky (I don’t know where) as were my mother and my brother.  Dad’s birth date was February 14, 1887 and he died in Cincinnati February 13, 1962.  My mother’s name was Eppie Jane (Wilson) Smith.  She was born May 27, 1890 and died April 13, 1939 of Addison’s Disease.  She was only 48.  Phillip was 3.  Mom adored him.  Mom and Dad are buried side by side in McBeath Cemetery, (Old) Eli, Kentucky.  My brother, Golford Ewell Smith - always called Ewell - was older than me by six years, having been born April 24, 1911.  He died October 21, 1952, of Chronic Myelogenous Leukemia which I now believe was caused from working with chemicals.  He had been a foreman - and before that a laborer - for several years at the Cincinnati Chemical Company.  He lived about a year after being diagnosed.  I flew to Cincinnati for that sad time and stayed three weeks with Pearl and the kids, Donna Jean and Harold Ray (always called Sonny).  I tried to be of some help in that brief time. 

I don’t know the exact cause of Dad’s death.  At the time, I was told that at some time he had suffered at collapsed lung.  During the early 30's my father began having asthma but only during the summer months.  By then we were all living in Cincinnati.  Some attacks were severe.  I’ve seen him walking the floor tearing at his shirt collar, gasping for air.  Often for days at a time he could not lie down to sleep or rest.  Many nights he slept with his head on his arms on a pillow which he placed on a window sill and with the window open trying to catch every small breeze.  Sitting in a straight-backed chair bent over in this awkward position, he might get a little sleep.  Dad was fearful that he might somehow crawl out the window and fall to the cement three stories below, so he would tie one ankle to the chair leg with a small rope hoping this would awaken him should he become too restless.  He was afraid of heights.  He would sometimes say that he would like to fly “if I could keep one foot on the ground.”  This was something of a joke in our family. 

But about Dad’s collapsed lung: I was told - after I came to Arizona - that one day Dad and a lady friend were sitting on the grass on one of the parkways chatting when suddenly Dad began gasping for breath and had excruciating chest pain.  I believe this is when his lung collapsed. 

Living on the third floor, they didn’t need window screens - flies & other insects don’t fly that high.  I’ve washed those same windows, sitting on the sill to wash the outside of the window - but always I held on to the sill with one hand while washing with the other.  And I didn’t make a habit of looking down.

~3~

ILLINOIS-The First Time

I can’t remember anything of the years at Webb’s Cross Roads.  Probably, we didn’t live there long until we moved to Illinois.  My father didn’t stay long anywhere.  

In Illinois we lived on a farm near Gifford.  My father was a tenant farmer.  He was a hard worker and always well liked.  The few things I have to relate where told me by my parents.  We lived in a house that had an upstairs.  Each afternoon my mother would put me down for my daily nap on one of the upstairs rooms.  I would get up in my sleep and fall down the stairs!  Finally, my father put a gate at the head of the stairs and when I got to the gate and touched it, I would awaken. 

Another time my folks missed me and began searching for me, finally found me asleep under a quilt that Mom had washed and hung over the clotheslines to dry.  The grass was quite high - remember folks didn’t manicure their lawns then (I’m not sure they had lawnmowers.  Probably my dad would occasionally cut it with a hand scythe) - the grass was high and the quilt came down and was laying on the grass.  I was completely hidden. 

My mother had a ring and it must have fascinated me for I’d been told not to put it on.  But I did put it on.  And couldn’t get it off!  And my folks couldn’t get it off.  Finally, someone held me while another person, probably Dad, used a hand file to file off the ring.  I seem to vaguely remember this event.  I guess vague memories plus the many times I heard about it from my folks sort of ‘cemented’ it in my mind.                                               

One morning Mom found me playing in the yard with snakes crawling all around me.  She was really frightened - just grabbed me and ran.  No harm done.  The snakes had nothing against me.  They probably had spent the night in their den and came out to warm up in the morning sunshine. 

Well, calamity struck!  Somehow our home caught fire one day (or night, I don’t know which) and burned to the ground.  It was a frame house and no way of putting out the fire.  We lost everything.  That’s why I don’t have very many old pictures and the ones I do possess have been given to me by friends and relatives.  Marie Owens, my cousin, recently gave me a copy of a picture of my mother and father and Ewell and me.  I’m just a baby sitting on my father’s knee.  The picture is sharp and clear.  How I appreciate it!  It is my belief that we returned to Kentucky immediately after the fire.

~4~

        BACK TO KENTUCKY

The next few years we spent in Kentucky on three different farms.  The first one was in what is still called the Clear Fork Area.  The house, I believe was made of logs, at least part of it was logs.  Things are so vague....  It had an upstairs, seldom used.  Once Uncle Hansford and Aunt Ethel Wilson’s kids came and stayed all night and we slept upstairs on pallets.  (Uncle Hansford was my mother’s oldest brother.)  There was a fair-sized front room but the rest of the downstairs is vague.  Probably my earliest memory is that of my mother walking back and forth in our front yard - weeping, praying, talking to herself but loud enough that I could hear - and with me close by her side petrified with fear.  I was afraid because Mom was so terribly wrought up and it was pitch dark.  But I don’t recall crying out.  These were terrifying experiences for me.  My father was off carousing - Mom knew not where.  I don’t know how he could have made a living when he was gone so much - probably he didn’t.  But Mom would have managed to plant a garden and do a lot of canning in preparation for the winter months,  I feel sure.  She was very thrifty and a good manager when she had anything to manage.  My mother really loved my father - at least in the early years of their marriage and was something of a doormat for him.  Years later, I told her that what he really needed was a right hook to the jaw.  And I really believe that had she stood up for herself, he would have quit any kind of physical and verbal abuse.  But my mother was not like that.  She really believed that he would eventually turn into a knight in shining armor.  She was afraid of him as she had every right to be.  But when not drinking, my father could be a charming, likeable man.  Had my mom left him, she could not have supported Ewell and me.  There would have been no way that she could have found any kind of work.  There just wasn’t any.  At least not in Russell County.  My parents had very little education - how much I don’t know.  Both could read and write - Mom probably better then Dad.  And they were interested in the day’s events.  In Cincinnati, they got a daily newspaper (the Cincinnati Post) and both read it all and enjoyed doing so.  It was not a chore. 

In this home there was a wall phone, the crank kind that you see in antique shops nowadays.  Each household was assigned one or more rings.  There was no privacy for every ring could be heard in every home where there was a phone and anyone could and often did listen in on the conversations.  News traveled fast!  Since there were no “coming attractions” such as movies, concerts, tailgate parties, etc., listening in to phone chats could be of some interest.  Deaths, births, murders, illnesses, marriages, revivals, and of course the weather, and about how gardens and crops were doing were of great interest to an isolated community such as Russell County. 

Ewell attended Clear Fork School, a one-room, one-teacher school.  The room had a big pot-bellied stove in the center.  I wonder how many cords of wood that fat stove used each winter.  I’ve always thought I attended this school - it was maybe a mile from our home - but now I think I was too young to have been a student.  But how account for the memory of playing a game called Roley-Holey on the school grounds?  A game I’ve forgotten how to play but remember that I really loved playing it.  A game played with marbles.  One of the Foxfire books explains the rules.  The only thing I recall is that four holes were made in the dirt, each hole was made about three inches deep and two-three inches across - three of the holes were set in a row and the fourth was dug off to one side like so:

               O                              O                                 O

            O

I seem to recall that I was good at Roley-Holey.  (Maybe I was allowed to attend school with Ewell, at least some of the time.  Rules were not so strict then - or perhaps I was allowed to be there at recess??.... Oh, well....)

~5~

Once Ewell wanted to go with some of his friends some place and asked Mom if he could take a mule and ride with them.  It was fine, Mom said, but he had to take me, his little snotty sister, with him.  He became very upset but it didn’t do him any good.  He took me - riding behind him on the mule.  I haven’t the slightest remembrance of where we went or what we did when we got there.  Probably I would never have remembered the episode if Ewell had not gotten so angry.

About two or three hundred yards in back of our house was a branch (Clear Fork?) of clear, sparkling running water and huge old shade trees all about.  I would like to know which river that little branch was running towards.  It was a cool shaded area.  The branch was not wide or deep so it wasn’t dangerous for me to play there.  But one did have to watch out for water moccasins and other snakes such as rattlesnakes.  (Speaking of rattlesnakes, I recall that years later when I was an adult, I went to visit Grandma and Aunt Ora.  We made a visit to McBeath Cemetery, where many Wilson/Paul ancestors are buried.  The cemetery was (is) on top of a hill and then one had to walk uphill on a dirt road with thick undergrowth on both sides to get to the cemetery.  Grandma and I were walking slowly up the hill - Grandma wasn’t young even then and it was hot - when suddenly we saw a long rattlesnake coming down the hill towards us.  Needless to say, we were very, very wary but the rattlesnake slithered away into the undergrowth.

“Mad” dogs were not uncommon in the community.  Our dog went “mad”.  As you know, that is the word sometimes used for dogs that have contracted hydrophobia or rabies.  These dogs act strangely and drool.  They are extremely dangerous not only to humans but livestock and other animals as well.  Rabies “shots” were unknown.  My father shot the dog and buried it some place away from the farm animals and buildings. 

Pie suppers were popular.  I remember one in particular that took place at Clear Fork School.  My mother, believe it or not, made a pie for me to take to be auctioned off.  I couldn’t have been more than five or six.  An adult - male of course - was the highest bidder for my pie.  And gallantly sat with me while we ate it.  How disappointed he must have been not to have bought some young woman’s creation.  Bidders were not supposed to know whose pie they were bidding on.  I wonder now what the money made from the pie supper was used for. 

My mother was a Christian so we attended church.  While we lived in the Clear Fork area we attended Clear Fork Baptist Church.  I remember two events while we attended.  I recall a big Easter egg hunt but no details.  The other happening was in the church building.  The church had an upstairs room.  It was the meeting room of the local group of Masons.  From the window in that room, we could look down on what I think was the roof of the porch or veranda of the church.  One Sunday after church services had ended and everybody was milling about in the yard below, laughing and chatting, kids running here and there, I climbed out that second story window and dropped down to the roof and walked about.  Showing off!  It’s a wonder I hadn’t fallen and broken my neck for the roof had a steep pitch.  I had trouble climbing back in the window.  Had my mother found out about that stunt she would have “skinned me alive.”

A preacher in those days might pastor two or three country churches.  To accommodate each church, sometimes services might be held on a day other than Sunday, usually Saturday Church was seldom dull.  I’ve seen preachers so caught up in excitement, ecstasy that they sometimes jumped over the pews but never stopped preaching the Word rapidly and loud.  Many in the congregation would join in shouting praises to Almighty God and later, after the invitation was given, the “mourners” bench at the front of the church would be filled with people on their knees or standing weeping, laughing, shouting, praying, some doing all at the same time.  (Years later, I committed my life to Jesus at a somewhat similar service in the Lockland Baptist Church.  Lockland, a suburb of Cincinnati.  I have fallen by the wayside many times since then but I’ve never forgotten that experience.  It was through the influence and invitation of my brother, Ewell, and his wife, Pearl, that I - with you, Phil - attended the Revival Services that evening.  They had been members of Lockland Baptist Church for several years.  If I had not had that experience, I don’t know where I would be today.  Phil and I attended church at Lockland regularly until 1943 when we came to Phoenix to live.  That church - it’s pastor and its people had a great influence on Ewell and his family.  I am grateful to God.  Pearl still attends that same church, except that it is in another location.)

During church services women set on one side and the men on the other side of the church.  I liked Sunday School.  I don’t know what materials besides the Bible were used in the adult classes but in my age group we were given beautifully colored picture post cards of Bible scenes and with a Bible verse on each.  We were supposed to memorize the verse.  Clear Fork Baptist Church, Salem Baptist Church and others that I know about still have regular services.  The buildings are kept in excellent condition.  It was a joy to see them.  (‘85, ‘86, ‘87). 

Church revivals were of great interest to the whole community and were well attended.  They lasted for a week or so and were held each evening after the farm chores were done.  When I became older, I recall Grandpa and Grandma Wilson, Aunt Ora and other family members walking through the Wilson fields and on through the Uncle Dutch Weathers’ farm to the dirt road that led to Salem Baptist Church.  Some of the area we walked through was heavily wooded.  It was summertime and so would be daylight on the way to church but returning it would be dark.  A few people would carry a lighted kerosene lantern which would give some light to the road or forest path.

Occasionally, an event called All Day Singing and Dinner on the Ground would take place.  Those I remember took place at the Salem church.  These events were also well attended and looked forward to with great anticipation.  It was just what it said it was.  Church groups - duets, trios, quartets, etc., would gather on the appointed day to sing their hearts out because they enjoyed it.  And the congregations enjoyed it.  There was no accompaniment, just great harmonizing of religious music.  We never had an organ or piano or any other kind of musical instrument in the churches that we attended in Kentucky.  I’m not sure why there wasn’t at least a guitar, for many people played that instrument, as well as the banjo, fiddle, and mandolin.  To get the right pitch, the leader used a tuning fork.  When he got the pitch he needed on the tuning fork, he would hum it softly so that the participants could hear it then the musical group would begin singing.  Groups came from many parts of Kentucky and Tennessee to sing.

At noon families brought out baskets of food, spread cloths on the grass, then passed around fried chicken, biscuits, cornbread, pies and cakes, and more, and ate their fill.  It was a wonderful time of fun, fellowship, good food.  After eating dinner the people filed back into church for more singing.  I wouldn’t want to live my life over but this generation could use a simpler life style such as I recall.

~6~ 

When we moved from the Clear Fork farm, we lived for a brief time on a farm in “spitting” distance of Eli (now called Old Eli for there is a new Eli.)  The house was at the top of a very steep hill.  It was breezy and cool on the hill top.  It was summer.  At the bottom of the hill was another branch and to cross it by foot one had to step on big rocks or remove footwear and wade it to get across. 

Except for a farm home or two nearby, the only thing at Eli was Jonah Kelsey’s store and the U.S. Post Office in the store.  He owned the store and was the postmaster.  One walked to Kelsey’s store for mail.  No home delivery in those days.  Jonah and his wife and kids lived in a house beside the store.  They had several children.  I remember only three.  Two were my friends and playmates.  Polly and Olvey - Olvey was the oldest and about my age.  I loved to visit them and sometimes stayed all night.  We had lots of fun.  We often played church.  One would preach, the other two would kneel as though at the mourner’s bench, crying and screaming, and praying - all pretend.  Sometimes, we smoked a weed called life-ever-lasting.  We crumbled up the weed, rolled it in brown paper, lit it and smoked it.  Or we thought we were smoking.  I can’t recall that there was much taste or smell to the stuff.  We learned this from seeing adults rolling their own cigarettes with real tobacco.

Those were the days when hard candy came in big wooden buckets.  Nails came in big barrels.  Cloth was sold by the yard.  No ready-made clothes so far as I can recall.  In every community there are always a few folks in comfortable circumstances, even rich by local standards.  Russell County was no exception.  But most families were dirt poor, including my family and our relatives.  If something was needed from Kelsey’s store, Mom gathered up a dozen or two eggs - or maybe only half a dozen - and walk to the store where she traded them for whatever she needed or wanted.  Most things were needs not wants.  Kelsey’s had buttons, thread, ribbon by the yard, a good assortment of dry goods and dozens of other items.  Lamps, kerosene, harness, flower and garden seeds, though most families saved seeds from the best of their previous year’s crops.

From the farm at Eli we moved to a farm that Dad bought - the only place we ever owned.  Mom would have been content to live here forever.  She and Dad planted an orchard which would bare fruit in a few short years.  Alas, we didn’t live there long enough to reap the fruits of their labor. 

Every farmer’s wife worth her salt had a big garden each summer.  And canned - canned - all summer long and into the fall.  Apples and peaches were dried in the sun.  At Grandma Wilson’s I recall seeing peeled and sliced apples spread out on old sheets which had been placed on the roof of her kitchen (the roof was rather low) and left there to dry.  They would have to be turned over occasionally while drying.  In summer the mid-day meal (we called it dinner) would consist of whatever Mom had planted in her garden: new peas, red ripe tomatoes fresh from the vines, new potatoes, green beans (Kentucky Wonder or others), and fresh onions.  Sweet peas right from the garden, so delicious.  I liked helping dig down under an Irish potato plant with my bare hands and pulling out those tiny potatoes. 

In winter it was canned green beans, or dried beans, mostly navy beans, canned tomatoes, fried potatoes, or baked sweet potatoes with the sugary juice running down the sides, and always cornbread.  No bakery bread.  Sometimes there was meat - usually pork which had been cured.  Fried chicken or chicken and dumplings was prepared on rare occasions, perhaps when the preacher was coming to eat.  I don’t recall Mom ever having a preacher for dinner.  (Mom never knew what kind of condition Dad would come home in so I’m sure that is why we never had a preacher for dinner.)  But Grandma Wilson did.  Families didn’t always have dessert, most people had molasses - that was their dessert.

Mom, when she made dessert would usually make a cobbler - peach or blackberry or maybe cherry.  Fried apple pies were a treat. 

Every family had chickens.  Some had geese or ducks or turkeys.  Wild game was plentiful: rabbits, squirrels, wild geese and turkeys, and birds.  Mom raised geese (goose and chicken feathers were needed to stuff bedding to sleep on and pillows).  At this last farm we lived on Mom raised chickens, geese, guineas, and I think ducks.  Speaking of geese reminds me that one day I was out in the garden when suddenly an old gander (ganders are mean and will bite) took out after me.  I began to run, screaming every breath, but that gander grabbed hold of the back of my dress and hung on.  I’m trying to run but not making much headway.  Well, my mother came to my rescue and not a bit to soon.   

We had a cow which provided milk and butter.  I vaguely remember hog-killing time - this at Grandpa Wilson’s.  It was a thankless hard job (nothing was easy in those days) and messy and time consuming.  Nothing was wasted.  Even the head was used for souse meat. 

Mom made hominy in an old black, cast iron wash tub, the one she boiled clothes in.  Lye was used in making hominy and she was very careful to follow exact steps otherwise the final product might kill us.  Housewives made their own soap.  It too was made with lye as well as old grease.  What else I don’t know.  The soap didn’t smell good and neither did it later well.  It was very harsh on the skin especially the hands that did so many dishes and washed so many tubs of clothes.

In summer, clothes were washed outdoors.  Mom would build a hot fire, then set the old black cast iron tub on the fire.  What made the tub set level on the fire, I’m not sure.  She filled the tub with water.  When it was boiling hot, she transferred some to her old metal wash tub and began scrubbing our clothes on the metal wash board.  White clothes were boiled until they came as white as possible, Mom stirring them occasionally with a smooth stick.  After they were rinsed and wrung out by hand they were hung out to dry on heavy wire clothes lines.  Bluing was added to the rinse water.  It was a matter of pride to hang out clothes that were snowy white.  Overalls and every day shirts (blue) and other colored things were washed in the same water that the white clothes had been washed in.  Water was plentiful but getting to the house from a spring or raising bucket after bucket of water from a well in the yard, was back-breaking labor.  One didn’t do any more than was necessary.  I think we had a well at the last place we lived.

For large families - and most of them were large - washing was an all day chore, as was ironing.  No electricity in Russell County then nor for years to come.  Irons were heated on the kitchen stove.  One had to use a “lifting” rag (pot holder) to handle the iron.  It didn’t stay hot long, so back to the stove and another iron, the cold one put back on the stove to reheat.  One usually had two to four irons on the stove so that a hot one was always ready.  The ironing board?  The square kitchen table padded with two or three old quilts and with a clean sheet over them.  Everything was ironed.  Shirts, dresses, “petticoats” (slips), “bloomers” or “drawers” (panties), overalls, sheets, pillow slips, towels, even stockings.  Dresses and petticoats were long, sometimes pleated or gathered.  It was a laborious, thankless task but a regular necessity.  Almost everything was starched!  Housewives took great pride in the clean, starched, well-ironed final product.  Believe it or not, most women could do a professional job on their laundry.  Even in the late ‘30's Mom and I were ironing sheets and towels and socks, etc.  Exciting, no?

~7~ 

My mother was happy living on this farm.  It was, relatively speaking, a calm, peaceful interlude in my parents’ marriage.  Dad continued to farm and also to haul supplies for anyone who asked.  I don’t know how he was paid for the hauling.  Mom made the garden, hoeing, chopping out weeds, and debugging plants.  There were no pesticides.  In summer, she canned fruits and vegetables as they became ripe.  Female members of families often went berry picking.  Blackberries and raspberries grew wild along the fences.  The fence rows were thick and tangled with all manner of weeds and vines.  Berry picking was fun and it wasn’t fun.  The weather was hot, so you wore a bonnet.  There were snakes so you had to wear shoes.  You needed gloves and long sleeves so that the sharp prongs of plants couldn’t get to you.  You also had to watch out for poison ivy.  The fun part of berry picking was finding lots of berries that you could get to without much effort or becoming entangled in a briar.  And you could eat all you could hold.  And they were delicious!  Back home, more work awaited the women - washing and cleaning and canning the berries.  I was too young to be of much help to Mom.  She, I feel sure got her satisfaction from seeing all those many jars of canned food lined up on shelves and knowing that her family would have enough food to get through the coming winter.

Part of our farm was “new” ground, meaning that very recently it had been virgin forest with huge trees and thick undergrowth.  The trees had been cut down and hauled away for lumber or firewood.  Dense thickets and underbrush had been cleared away.  The remaining stubble was set on fire.  But the tree stumps remained.  One had to plow around them.  The new ground was very fertile.  Back then farmers didn’t know about crop rotation and wore out their land by planting the same crop in the same field so that it had to be fertilized to grow even a meager crop.  The “new” ground was a real plus for Dad.

Our house set close to the road.  It had three rooms.  It may have had an upstairs room.  This house is still in existence.  I saw it a couple of years ago.  It no longer sets next to the road but has been moved back about a hundred yards or so.  I’m sorry to say that I think it is being used as a chicken house.  A comparatively new, small home now sets where ours once set.  I can only faintly recall the big room or as we would say now, the family room.  It had a fireplace with a mantel above it.  There were two beds in that room.  Dad and Mom slept in one and I in the other.  Ewell must have slept in another room.  The big room had two or three windows and a door leading outdoors.  There was not a front porch so we stepped right out that door to a step or two and then to the ground.  A very, very humble home - just like hundreds of others in Russell County.  We probably moved to this farm when I was 5 or 6. 

Housewives often covered their walls with what was called building paper.  It was a rather heavy paper but not very strong, monotone or maybe dull pink and without design.  Mom covered our walls with this building paper.  Small squares of the paper were cut out - about 1 1/4"  square, folded once and then once again.  A tack, like a thumb tack but with a bigger head and longer tack, was pushed into each little square of paper then the hole was pushed through the building paper onto the plank walls behind.  This was done at intervals all over the walls.  It wasn’t particularly pretty but neat and clean.  Some folks papered walls with newspapers.  But Mom never did that. 

One summer day my mother heard something rattling around in our kitchen ceiling.  She investigated.  Soon a long snake came slithering out from behind the building paper.  How she got it out of the house, I don’t recall.  She would not have tried to kill it in the house.  It was probably a “cow” snake and harmless.

I’ve had earaches only twice in my life, once while living here and once after I became an adult.  Earache is very painful - if you’ve ever had one you know what I mean.  My mother took a peeled onion, boiled it until it was soft, squeezed out the juice and put a few drops in my ear.  It must have helped as I can’t recall ever having an earache again during childhood.  Or, more likely it would have gone away all by itself.  Who is to say?

My first recollection of having croup was while we were living on this farm.  When I had a spell of croup, my parents would build a fire (usually happened in the winter) in the fireplace, smear my chest with Vick’s Salve, wrap me in a quilt and roast me by that roaring fire.  I’d get so hot that I’d think I was going to smother to death, although I didn’t know what smother meant.  My mother would hold me on her lap and rock me in the rocking chair.  And worried I’m sure.  Mom worried about everything.  Croup of course is not to be taken lightly.

Speaking of our fireplace reminds me that on another occasion, I took down from the mantel a plug of sweet chewing tobacco.  I’d been eyeing it for some time.  It smelled so good!  Well, I took myself a “chaw” of that sweet smelling stuff, sat down in front of the fireplace in an empty wood candy bucket and began to chew my wad of tobacco.  It didn’t take long.  Suddenly, I was so sick with nausea and vomiting and the room going round and round.  Not a word of reprimand did I hear from my parents.  They knew immediately what I’d done and probably had a big laugh out of my hearing.  Experience is the best of all teachers.  But hard on the sinner.  Needless to say, that was the end of my tobacco chewing, though I was stupid enough, years later, to start smoking cigarettes.  A nasty habit that I broke myself from after about ten years of puffing.  I broke myself by chewing a fresh stick of gum each time I craved a cigarette.  It worked but then I had to break my chewing gum habit.  That wasn’t too difficult, however.

~8~ 

Christmas was never a big celebration.  We never had a Christmas tree so far as I remember.  I recall only one Christmas in Kentucky.  Ewell played Santa Claus but I recognized him immediately and said so.  This leads me to believe that probably he, or Dad, had played Santa Claus in previous years.  This year I was a bit older and wiser.  Don’t recall getting any presents but feel certain we at least received a stocking filled with candy and maybe an orange or an apple and perhaps some nuts.  In those days, and maybe still, Kentucky celebrated Christmas with fireworks.  Anyone could buy them.

One summer night I was awakened by noise - thunder and lightning, and the wind howling and blowing gale force, and torrential rains coming in the front door.  Mom and Dad were using their bodies and with all the strength they had attempting to close the door, which the strong winds had blown open.  Each time they were able to close the door, another blast would open it again.  Finally, somehow they were able to make the door stay closed.  Early next morning Grandpa and Grandma Wilson sent Aunt Ora to see if we were safe.  Much damage was done throughout the county that night.  Our family suffered no damage.  (Our home was about a mile or two from the Wilson farm.)

Late one night or very early next morning, someone came to our house to tell us that Uncle Elmer Wade had died.  Dad at once hooked the mules to the wagon and drove our family to the Wade home, a distance of four to six miles.  Uncle Elmer was married to Etta, Dad’s sister.  They had five children, two girls, three boys.  Uncle Elmer died at home of tuberculosis, that dreaded disease for which there was no medication - no cure.  I had just turned seven.  I now know this because in 1987 I visited the graveyard where he and Aunt Etta are buried.  Date of death on his stone states September 26, 1924.  The graveyard is beside Fairview Baptist Church, where the family has worshiped all of their lives - even to this day. 

Both Ewell and I attended Salem School.  The school had two rooms with a small hallway between them.  Each room had the usual wood burning stove.  And two privies outdoors.  Mr. And Mrs. Grady Hamman were the teachers.  She taught the lower grades.  He taught the upper grades through eighth - or was it only seventh.  Back then almost anyone could teach in the rural schools though they may not have finished high school.  I believe Mr. & Mrs. Hammond were not in this category.  I believe they were well educated for that day.  They were certainly well thought of in the community. 

Aunt Opal also attended Salem School and at the same time as Ewell and I attended.  Aunt Opal was only ten years older than I.  I have a Salem School picture that shows Aunt Opal, as well as Ewell and me.  It was probably the year that Aunt Opal graduated from eighth grade.  Also in the picture are several cousins from the Smith side of the family.  They were Uncle Lester and Aunt Rosa Smith’s kids.  They lived within a half mile of the school. 

Aunt Opal was very good in math and often tutored Ewell.  Not long before her death, she told me that she felt sure Ewell knew his math but was timid and afraid of the teacher.  (Note: Salem School is gone - kids now attend a consolidated school elsewhere - but Salem Baptist Church is still where it has always been.  Several families lived in the general vicinity of the school. (And still do.)

When necessary, teachers disciplined boys - it was expected of them.  He used a big switch cut from a nearby tree.  Often the child might be told to go cut the switch himself.  In some cases, once the boy got home he might receive another switching from his father.  I don’t recall that Ewell was ever whipped by a teacher, but at home Dad was pretty heavy-handed with the discipline.  As for me, I can’t recall ever being whipped or even spanked.  I suppose I may have been.

~9~

Once I’m sure my mother would have enjoyed strangling me.  We had company, neighbors, and everyone was sitting around chatting, enjoying each other.  I had a piece of hard candy and remarked to all that “This candy is as hard as a buck’s horn.”  Well.....that kind of language was not used in polite company.  Not in our home nor in the community.  Mom gave me the kind of look that mothers are noted for.  I wasn’t spanked but I knew never to say that again. 

Many words and phrases that we used today were simply not used when I was growing up.  The word “bull” was never used where women were present.  A mother-to-be was in the family way.  Women didn’t use curse words.  Grandma Wilson might say “Oh, pshaw” or shucks.  That was as far as she went.  Women didn’t receive company, especially men, while barefoot.  I can still see Aunt Ora, sitting in a cane-back chair or maybe in the porch swing, resting before going back to the field or garden or to mend fences, or whatever, suddenly jump up and make a bee line for the inside of the house, saying as she went that she saw so and so coming up the hill.  She’d be back shortly with her shoes on.  How times have changed. 

At one time Dad carried the U.S. mail.  The motto of the U.S. Postal Service is: Neither snow, nor rain, nor heat, nor gloom of night shall stay these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds.  No matter the weather, or if he was sick, that mail had to go.  And on dirt roads in a wagon pulled by two mules.  It was a 60 mile round trip to Somerset and back.

~10~ 

The things one remembers!  Once I was running, along with other kids, with my mouth open and I swallowed a fly!  Within minutes I was ill and vomiting.  That was good of course.

Once, Ewell got head lice.  Believe me, having head lice was considered a disgrace in our family - in most families.  I’ve heard my mother tell about standing in our doorway watching Ewell walk down the dusty road to school and with his books in one hand and his lunch pail, a syrup bucket, in the other.  He set books and pail down in the middle of the road and began scratching his head with both hands.  Lice were not easy to get rid of because there were no medications to be had.  My mother sat down with him and went over his head small area by small area and kill each louse.  This would continue on a daily basis until his head was rid of them.  After each delousing his head was washed.

Caster oil was a popular remedy.  I hated the stuff but if Mom decided I should have it, I had it.  I said that no child of mine would ever have to take that evil-tasting oil and you, Phil, were never given it. 

Those were the days of button shoes,

            shaped notes

            camp meetings

            Foot washings (in some churches)

            Moonshining

            ‘coon hunting

            Flour sack dresses

and many other things/events that are gone - or almost - forever.  There are areas where life still goes on much as it did long ago.  But these places will give way to ‘civilization’ - so called progress.  Another generation or two from now and those times will be known and read about only in books - books such as the Foxfire books. 

Almost every family had a hound dog or two or even more.  They were used to hunt ‘coons at night.  Since I’ve never been on a ‘coon hunt I can’t comment.  It was a very popular sport with the male gender. 

Oh, I must not forget about button shoes.  One needed a shoe buttoner for this.  I think I have a shoe buttoner (buttonhook) some place around the house.  The head of the household - in our case, my father - had a shoe last and mended all of our shoes.  When we moved to Cincinnati, Dad took along the shoe last and continued to mend our shoes. 

There were few cars in Russell County so walking, riding horseback, or in a wagon pulled by two mules, or in a buggy pulled by a fine horse, were ways people got from one place to another.

Aunt Maud, one of my mother’s sisters, used to say when someone asked how she got some place, “why I put my hand in my foot and walked” - or some such silly saying.  Then would laugh uproariously.  She had a hard life, twelve children (eight lived to adulthood), but always had a smile, and often a hearty laugh to liven up things when she was around.  So far as I can recall, they never owned an auto.  Mostly they walked.  She was the third oldest of Grandma and Grandpa Wilson’s children and the first to die.  She was 64.  I think she had a heart attack.  Probably she was worn out from having kids, working in the fields, as well as her garden.  But I never heard her complain.

~11~

I heard the following story from, I think, Aunt Opal, my mother’s youngest sister.  The event took place in the early years of Aunt Maud and Uncle George Hart’s marriage.  One day the young couple walked from wherever they lived, to the Wilson farm.  When they arrived, Aunt Maud handed her baby (in arms) to Grandma Wilson, saying something like, “My baby is sick.  I want you to look at her and tell me what to do.”  Grandma took the little one and immediately realized the baby was dead.  She said so as gently as she knew how.  Can you not imagine the next few hours - days - as this young mother confronted the finality of her baby’s death. 

I was too young to remember the terrible influenza epidemic of 1918 but in later years I heard people talk about it.  It was a world-wide catastrophe.  Millions died.  In Russell County, many people died from the disease.  Many people were very ill with it but lived.  Often whole families were stricken and not able to care for one another.  Neighbors who were ill but still on their feet helped those who were bed fast.  Chickens and other farm animals had to be fed and watered.  Cows had to be milked.  A fire had to be kept going in the fireplace or stoves.  So far as I know, no one died in our immediate families but all had the ‘flu. 

Riding horseback - Women rode horseback but always side-saddle and never to church.  I shouldn’t say never but I can’t recall seeing a woman riding horseback to church.  I’ve been told that, before she was married, Grandma Wilson rode horseback to church.  She and her father attended Salem Baptist Church regularly and both rode horseback.  Grandma side saddle as was the custom for women.  I’ve heard Grandma say that when she was a young girl they lived at the “mouth of Greasy Creek, on the Cumberland River.”  I believe that was a long ride.  Grandma joined the Salem church at the age of fifteen and was a “faithful member all of her life.”  This from her obituary in the Russell Springs newspaper.  She lived to be 95.

Dad planted corn and I suppose other crops.  I recall the corn because of one incident.  In the fall when it was time to shuck (husk) corn, Dad put up “side boards” as they were called, on the wagon.  This allowed him to throw in more corn than if he’d used the wagon without them, hence fewer trips back to the barn to unload.  One day he took me with him to the corn field.  For some reason along in the morning, I became nauseated and dizzy.  To this day, when I think of that event, I can smell the corn.  A peculiar smell.  I recall that it was a chilly day, the sun shining weakly through a cloudy sky.  I was miserable, sitting on the wagon seat.

A number of men in Russell County traveled each fall to the corn-growing states - Iowa, the Dakotas, Missouri, and Illinois - to shuck corn.  This was a way of earning some cash.  Dad never went so far away as the Dakotas but I think he went to Illinois a time or two to shuck corn.  The men were given room and board, plus cash for their hard work. 

Dad also did hauling for people - fertilizer, flour, whatever anybody wanted hauled.  He often drove to Somerset, a sixty mile round trip.  These trips were made in a wagon pulled by two mules.  Once he took me with him to Somerset.  It was a long, slow trip.  I recall the trip because before we got to our destination, darkness arrived.  And the road went through a dense forest.  I was scared.  During that dark ride I recalled every scary tale I’d ever heard.  And conjured up some of my own.  There were folks who could tell some good ones.  Some folks were ignorant enough to scare their children with such tales.  My parents never did that.  When Dad and I finally arrived on the outskirts of Somerset, we stopped and spent the night - the rest of it - sleeping in the wagon.

~12~ 

Previously I think I’ve mentioned the roads, saying all roads in the county were dirt.  There was not one graveled road anywhere in our area.  The first road to be graveled was the one that passed by Aunt Etta Wade’s farm.  (She was Dad’s sister and a widow by then.)  That road was greeted with great enthusiasm.  In summer when it hadn’t rained for a time, the dust would be eight inches deep.  It was fun to walk barefoot in the fine dust.  But when it rained those same roads often became impassable, even with two or four mules hooked to a wagon.  When cold weather arrived those same ruts would freeze hard and make traveling over them very difficult.  Not an easy life.  But folks didn’t know any other way.  And we had nothing to compare with and to make us yearn for an easier way.  Most folks seemed happy or at least content.

I want to say a few words about Aunt Etta, one of my favorite aunts.  In her later years, we corresponded.  How I wish I’d saved her letters.  She was witty and wrote long interesting letters.  It was from her that I formed the habit of drawing happy faces to emphasize something.  She wrote wry comments about people and events then would add a happy face at the end of her sentences.  I always admired her spirit, her guts.  She was a tiny woman with black, wavy hair.  (From her and Aunt Ora, I got my easy to curl hair.)  She never remarried after Uncle Elmer’s death but stayed on their farm and, without help from anybody, raised her five children to adulthood.  Only she and Geoffrey, her oldest son, knew how tough it really was.  She was a happy person, always smiling.  And with a very soft voice.  She never lost her Christian faith.  She lived to be 92.

~13~

Hope I haven’t lost you.  We’re still living on “our” farm.  Mom always had a big garden.  In the spring, Dad would hook a mule to a plow and plow and disk the garden for her.  The rest, planting seed or setting out young plants, hoeing, weeding, etc., was up to her.  My father had an ungodly temper.  Once when he was plowing the garden, the mule became balky, wasn’t doing to suit him (mules are stubborn critters).  Dad began beating the mule.  I thought he was going to beat that poor animal to death.  Mom did too.  I remember her saying, “Oscar, don’t.”  She didn’t dare say more.  I was afraid.  Dad came very near tearing up the whole garden before he calmed down. 

It was absolute necessity to can - can - can - those vegetables and fruits, otherwise the family might go hungry during the long, cold winter months.  Although neighbors were caring and helpful toward one another, each family was expected to provide the necessities for their own members in the matter of raising food and taking care of it.  It was a hard life.  Summers were not very long and farmers were at the mercy of nature.  If, after planting crops, the rains came at the right time, probably the crops would be good, if the pests or one kind or another did not take over.  There were no pesticides.  Tobacco, for example, had to be “wormed” by hand.  I’m talking about the early 1920's.  If the rain didn’t come, then corn, wheat, and other crops, would dry up in the field.  There was not much money to be had - there were no “cash” crops until later when tobacco began to be cultivated.

Tobacco was a life saver for many families.  A lot of work but it was a cash crop.  In the fall, when the tobacco market opened, farmers hauled their yield to be auctioned off.  My Dad never grew tobacco because we moved to Cincinnati before Kentucky farmers began growing it to sell.  Aunt Ora, in later years, grew tobacco and would go with her load to market and stay to watch and listen to the auctioneer go through his spiel.  Of course she had to hire someone to do all this for her.  It was unusual for a woman to do this back then.  It was considered a man’s job - it was not ladylike - but she did it for years and let the gossip fall where it might.  And there was gossip, as she climbed in some neighbor man’s truck and took off for Louisville or maybe Lexington.  This was years after Grandpa Wilson’s death and Aunt Ora and Grandma Wilson lived alone on the farm.  Part of the time, Aunt Ora was able to hire a family usually a young couple just starting out in their married life, to live in a two-room shack on her property and share crop.  How anyone could survive Kentucky winters in such a place I don’t understand, but survive they did.

~14~

THE MOVE TO CINCINNATI 

Dad, I guess, became restless.  The grass in Cincinnati seemed greener to him and it wasn’t long until he decided to sell our farm and move to that “greener” place.  I don’t know if my mother was happy about this decision or not.  My guess is that she was not.  Whatever her feelings, my parents set a date and an auctioneer was called in to conduct the sale.  Everything was sold, including I’ve been told, two (or was it three?) trunks filled with my dolls.  Sounds like a lot of dolls for our poor family but that’s what I recall.  I hated dolls - I don’t know why.  I’d rather play Roley-Holey or some other game.  It’s my belief that we took nothing with us to Cincinnati but our clothes, bedding, dishes, some cooking utensils, and perhaps a few small tools, the hammer, etc.  And the shoe last. 

I think the car we rode in to Cincinnati belonged to my father.  Probably he bought it with some of the proceeds from the sale of our farm.  This was in either 1924 or 1925.  Cars were in their infancy.

I remember nothing of the actual drive to Cincinnati.  However, it could not have been a smooth ride.  The road from Russell Springs, Kentucky to Cincinnati was one lane, rough and winding.  This of course because Kentucky is (was) mostly mountains and hills.  Even today in some of the most beautiful areas you will ever see, the roads are paved but narrow and winding.  I’m uncertain whether or not there was one gas pump between Russell Springs and Cincinnati at that time. There were not public toilets facilities anywhere along the way.  When necessary, Dad stopped the car, one, or all of us, got out and walked out into the woods and placed ourselves behind a tree.

Our family arrived in Cincinnati late one night or very early next morning.  I think it was Fall for the weather wasn’t cold.  The family whose door Dad knocked on (their name is long gone from memory) were Kentuckians trying for a better life just as Mom and Dad were.  They got up out of bed, welcomed us, then fixed places for us to sleep.  For Ewell and me that was pallets on the floor.  Dad and Mom, I feel sure, would have made prior arrangements with this family for our short stay though it would not have been unusual if they had not.  We would have been warmly welcomed anyway.

I knew I was in a different world because of the night-time traffic sounds.  These, though muted at that hour, were disquieting to this little country girl of seven.  I drifted off to sleep.  I awakened to the sounds of clip-clopping of a horse’s hooves on the pavement.  It was the milkman making his early morning deliveries. 

Almost certainly Mom and Dad were up and out very early that morning in search of a place for us to live.  It wasn’t difficult to find a flat to rent as there were hundreds of brick tenements - old even then - to choose from.  I don’t know what flats rented for then but during the Great Depression a two-room flat could be had for between $6 and $10 a month.  (Tenement house: apartment house especially one meeting minimum standards of sanitation, safety, and comfort and occupied by poorer families usually in a city.  Webster’s Ninth - How true!).

Over the years we lived on several streets: Walnut, Clay, Spring, Twelfth, Thirteenth, Pendleton, Mansfield, Sycamore, as well as three or four others but those names escape me.  We never had much furniture so moving about was relatively easy.  Most flats were wallpapered by the landlord or landlady before one moved in.  When it was time for fresh wallpaper and if the landlord refused to paper, you could and often did pack up and move to another tenement.  The flat wasn’t any nicer but at least the walls were fresh and clean.  There was, perhaps still is, wallpaper cleaner.  It came in a can and could be kneaded - something like Play Dough.  With wallpaper cleaner one could fairly quickly clean the walls and ceilings.  You made one swipe down the paper, then kneaded the dirty cleaner into the clean, made another swipe repeating the process.  Voila! Almost like new!  Wallpaper could be cleaned in this manner maybe two or three times.  After that new wallpaper was required.  The difference before and after was like the difference between day and night.  That’s how dirty the walls and ceilings became during winter.

In those years, Cincinnati - like many other industrialized cities - was a very dirty place to live.  The culprit?  The burning of coal in almost every home, flat and business in the Queen City and outlying areas.

~15~

It was fashionable to wear cloth coats in winter.  (Who could afford fur coats?  Not our family.)  Cloth coats often came with real fur collars that were detachable.  And sometimes the sleeves also had detachable fur pieces.  The air was so filled with soot that when one went shopping - though one left home clean - when one arrived back home one’s face, neck and the fur collar would be streaked with old black soot.  I must say though that when I was in Cincinnati in 1985 the air was cleaner than the air in Phoenix.

Soot seeped into the flat from around the windows and it was easily smeared when dusting.  You must know how I hated those conditions since I’ve dwelled this long on them.  Often the sky was so hazy from the dirty air that the sun was barely visible or perhaps not visible at all.  I once worked as a waitress for a couple who owned a restaurant about a dozen blocks from where we lived.  This couple lived in a flat near their restaurant.  They could afford a maid.  The maid had instructions to put up clean curtains in their flat every week during the winter months.

Most tenements had a dingy, poorly-lit basement which was partitioned off into sections.  Each tenant kept coal in one of those bins and kept the door padlocked.  How did coal get into a bin?  One walked to a pay (5 cents) phone (few people had a private phone) called a coal company and ordered whatever amount of coal one needed or could afford to pay for: a ton, half ton, or quarter ton.  Most couldn’t afford a ton.  The coal company delivered the coal, dumping it on the sidewalk in front of the tenement.  The building had two or three small windows, each about the size of a transom that were level (or almost level) with the sidewalk.  These windows could be opened so that the tenant could push/shovel his coal into the basement.  Once there it had to be shoveled or carried in a coal bucket to the bin.  It was carried in that same bucket up to the flat as needed.  (Note: I’ve had to consult my friend, my dictionary for the exact meaning of some words.  My family always called the container in which we carried coal, the coal bucket, but I couldn’t find that in my Webster’s Ninth.  But I checked the word scuttle and found the precise definition: Scuttle: a metal pail that usually has a bail and a sloped lip and is used especially for carrying coal.  That exactly describes our coal bucket.

From the coalman, who came by during winter and whose conveyance was a wagon usually pulled by a mule, one could buy small amounts of coal - a bushel or half a bushel or less.  This was during the years of the Great Depression.  People were in terrible circumstances.  Somehow, Dad - I don’t know how - managed so that our flat was warm.  Though it was customary to allow the fire die down in the stove during the night.  The stove heated only the room it was in.  The kitchen stove was often used to heat the kitchen.  Most of the flats had rather large rooms, usually 12 x 15 feet or maybe 15 x 15 feet.  We always bought congoleum rugs for the rooms but they were only 9 x 12 feet so there was 2-3 feet of bare floor around the edges of the rugs.

Besides the coalman, there were other vendors who came through our neighborhood selling their wares.  Each, as in the case of the coalman, had a wagon and pulled usually by a mule.  The milk wagon was most often pulled by a horse. 

The iceman (summer only).  In winter we had a window box that was placed on the outside window sill of the kitchen window in which we placed some things.  But we had to be careful.  Items could freeze in that window box.  As Dad didn’t try to heat the flat all through the night, it got darn cold.  I once had a canary.  Each night I covered the cage with a cloth.  One cold winter morning when I removed its cover, my canary was dead - frozen to death.  I flushed the bird down the toilet.  I once told Agnes Goldman this story and she was aghast that I had done such a thing.  You’ll remember Aunt Agnes’ love for animals.  What is the difference in flushing the canary down the toilet and tossing it in the garbage can??

Well - let me get on with the vendors.  The iceman, like the milkman, would deliver to any floor.  The iceman would throw a gunny sack over one shoulder, grab a 25 or 50 lb. block of ice with the tongs, heave it up onto his shoulder and head for the stairs.  He knocked on his customer’s door and when it opened he entered and placed the block in the icebox.  Often there was a chunk of ice already in the box and to make the new block fit, he would chip away at the block of ice with an ice pick until the lid would go down properly.

How did the iceman know how much ice and where to deliver it?  The customer had a card board sign (given by the ice company) about 20 inches square.  On one side was printed 25 in large print and on the other side was printed the number 50, also in large print.   When needing ice, the customer placed this card board sign, and with the appropriate number facing the street, in a front window.  The iceman could easily see the sign from his ice wagon.  How the tenants in the back of tenements ordered ice, I don’t recall.  Maybe they had standing orders or themselves went in person to the street and ordered directly from the iceman.  When cold weather came on, the iceman disappeared and the coalman appeared.  Often they worked for the same company.  The coalman did not deliver upstairs.  One had to lug his/her own coal upstairs.  These would be small amounts.  People who bought in small quantities simply could not afford to do any better.

The milkman ran up the stairs taking two or three steps at a time announcing his presence in a voice, not loud but above a conversational tone, saying, “Milkman, Milkman.”  I can’t recall one surly milkman - all seemed happy and cheerful.  His heavy metal container held, I think six or was it eight - thick glass bottles of milk.  Cream came in pints.  Bottle caps were made of cardboard and with the name and address of the dairy imprinted on them.  Milk was delivered daily.  The milk was  placed on the hall floor beside the customer’s door.  The milkman collected the empty (clean) bottles each time he came and his money once a week.  There may have been occasional stealing of milk but I can’t recall one instance of that happening.  Milk being contaminated by some “nut” was unheard of, though it would have been easy to do as bottle caps were simple to remove.

I pause here to say that a beggar - we called them tramps - would sometimes climb the three flights of stairs to our flat to beg for food.  Mom always fed them, giving them whatever she had on hand.  They were never invited in but sat on the stair steps to eat and when finished knocked on our door once again to give back the empty utensils and to thank my mother.  After feeding that first tramp, others occasionally followed.  This told my folks that the word had gotten around that Mom was a soft touch.  Mom continued feeding tramps, however.  We were not really afraid of them - just careful.  There were many hungry people roaming the cities and country sides of America during those depressing Depression years.  There were no social programs back then.  Social Security, unemployment compensation, etc., were yet to come.  There were no soup/food kitchens even or a place where one could pick up food items to take home - at least not at first.  These came later as did such programs as the WPA (Works Project Administration) and the CCC (Civilian Conservation Corps) both Federal programs.  These did not come into being until after Franklin Delano Roosevelt was elected president in 1932.  America was at a standstill and no one seemed to know what to do.  Roosevelt had ideas and began to implement them with practically no opposition.  He was the first president I ever voted for.  One had to be 21 to vote.  When he died years later people wept in the streets.  One of my mother’s friends wept uncontrollably on learning of his death.

Kids, if you make a little or a lot of money, save accordingly, on a regular basis.  History often repeats itself.

~16~

I’m getting ahead of my story.  The Wall Street stock market crashed in 1929. We moved to Cincinnati from Kentucky in 1924.  I was seven.  Many of the incidents above took place in the early thirties.

One of the first places we lived after arriving in Cincinnati was on Clay Street.  It was a complex of three frame buildings and close to Liberty Street.  A small cottage sat in one corner of the brick courtyard.  Across from the cottage and in the opposite corner of the yard was a two-story building with a two-room flat on each floor.  We lived on the second floor.  A porch ran the length of the two rooms.  Another building which sat at the back of the lot facing Clay Street was three stories high and also had porches running the entire length of the building - second and third floor only.  The porches and stairs were not enclosed.  I believe each floor had three flats.

In the center of the brick courtyard were two toilets (for the entire complex) the likes of which I had never seen - nor have I since.  Each toilet was separately enclosed.  The seat - there was no lid - had a spring of some kind.  When one sat down the seat went down flush with the toilet bowl.  When one got up, the lid also raised up and at the same time the toilet automatically flushed.  Isn’t this exciting?  This complex was old even then and the whole thing, toilets included, may have been built in the late 1800's.

 Our flat had two rooms.  In one room were two beds, one for Ewell and one for me.  The only other piece of furniture that I can recall was our victrola.  But we must have had some chairs at least.  Mom and Dad slept in the kitchen.  (One time Aunt Ora came to visit and she had to sleep with me.)  In this flat we had gas lights.  One in the ceiling of each room.  Each had a mantle - a big nuisance - for if you just barely touched it the mantle would disintegrate.  An old friend of our family, Walker Wisdom, also from Kentucky was more than six feet tall.  Not only that he had curly hair that made him 3-4 inches taller.  Guess what?  He often forgot and brushed his head close to the mantle (in this flat the ceilings were low) and another mantle had to be replaced. 

In the cottage lived a couple who got roaring drunk ever Saturday night and would yell, curse, scream and fight.  They had a parrot that cursed like a drunken sailor and could be heard in the whole complex.  After the couple had quieted down, you could still hear that parrot continuing its tirade.

~17~

I’ve already mentioned Walker Wisdom.  He and Aunt Ora (Wilson) Perkins - she was my mother’s next to youngest sister - were sweethearts before she ever married Mr. Perkins.  His first name was Tom.  That marriage was not to last very long.  Tom came home from World War I with tuberculosis and died in about a year.  The family (Grandpa and Grandma Wilson and other family members) feared for Aunt Ora’s sanity.  She not only lost her husband but the Perkins family tried to take away the G.I. insurance as well as her pension.  They finally did get the G.I. insurance but did not get the pension.  They battled in court over these issues.  It was during those very trying times that knives, hatchets, axes, etc. were very quietly kept hidden from Aunt Ora.  She was depressed and lost a lot of weight.  It was thought she might commit suicide.

Aunt Ora eventually snapped out of her depression/grieving and became her smiling self again.  Over the many years after these events, Walker Wisdom always visited her and Grandma Wilson each time he returned to Kentucky from some other area or state.  It has always been a mystery to me why they never married.  There was some chemistry between them.  In some ways Walker was a reprobate and perhaps Aunt Ora had good reason to think that he would not make good husband material. I don’t know.

My first memory of Walker was a time after Aunt Ora became a widow.  I was very young - I barely remember but I recall Aunt Ora and Walker walking down the pathway to the Wilson home.  (They had been to some kind of gathering.)  Walker picked me up and sat me on his shoulders and carried me the rest of the way to the house.  I feel sure, that had happened many times.  I was a great favorite of his.  And of course I loved the attention.

Walker was already living in Cincinnati when we moved there.  By that time he had married but was separated from his wife.  He was at our house often when we lived at the Clay Street flat.  He took me places.  He took me out on country roads and taught me how to drive his car.  He taught me how to drive on icy roads.  Of course he was always beside me to grab the wheel when necessary.  I don’t remember that he ever had to do that.  Always he talked to me gently and directed me in a manner that did not frighten me.  I have a snapshot of that car and me standing on the running board (yes, cars had running boards in those days).  The snapshot was taken in Eden Park.

As I look back on these situations, I believe he had a don’t -give-a-damn attitude.  He cared deeply for his wife I believe.  As young as I was I sensed that he was really hurting inside.  I did not know his wife but I knew she had wild drinking parties and other men.  This was during prohibition when liquor was illegal.  But of course you can always get liquor if you know the right sources.  And many people made home brew in their homes.  This also was illegal. 

One day Walker came by our flat, picked me up and we drove to their flat.  It was a Saturday morning.  A party was going on, a number of people (men and women) milling about each with a drink in hand and in different stages of intoxication.  We didn’t stay long.  He picked up some items and we left.  Later they divorced.

~18~

While living on Clay Street I

            enrolled in school,

            had whooping cough (pertussis),

            learned to dance the Charleston,

            became aware of popular songs and one

            in particular Me and My Shadow, and

             played hopscotch, jacks, jumped rope.    

School - I vividly remember my first weeks in the first school I attended in Cincinnati.  I have never been a morning person.  During my early years I was never hungry at breakfast.  My folks didn’t force me to eat.  (When I was a little older I recall that my Mom actually allowed me to have a CocaCola and a candy bar for my breakfast!  I suppose she thought that was better than nothing.)  Our class had gym soon after we got to school - I think each morning.  The exercises the gym teacher gave us to do were strenuous and for me very tiring.  Doing them made me so weary that I’d think I was going to fall on my face.  I was too timid - and new to everything - to say anything to anyone but tried as best I could to continue them.  Those exercises were probably one of the best things that could have happened to me.  Little by little, week by week, I became stronger and finally got so that I loved gym and all the activities that went with that class.  Mom and Dad never knew about my struggle with gym.

The kids in school made fun of me because of my hillbilly speech.  That hurt.  But didn’t hurt my brain power any.  I liked school, learned fast, and always got good grades. (It was our home life that was devastating.) 

Another embarrassment for the new kid on the block was having to wear long underwear during the winter.  I’d always worn long underwear in Kentucky.  Everyone did.  In Cincinnati, though, the girls didn’t wear long underwear.

I didn’t want to either.  But Mom insisted.  I’ve a small studio picture of Aunt Ora and me in which my long underwear, the legs tucked in my long stockings, is obvious.  Of course the weather was just as cold in Cincinnati as it was in Kentucky but styles/habits were different.  Eventually, Mom relented on the underwear issue, much against her better judgment I’m sure. 

Whooping cough - I had a severe case of whooping cough.  And nothing to do for it.  (And to think there are parents today who refuse to have their kids vaccinated against the childhood diseases.)  I tried hard not to cough but in the end I had no control and would begin coughing, then whooping and would lose my breath...and think I’d never get another one.  It was frightening.  Finally, I would begin breathing again only to have the same thing happen again and again. 

The Charleston - I loved dancing the Charleston.  Most of my dancing and the games I played after school were danced/played on the rough concrete sidewalk in front of the Clay Street complex.  Often I was given money for dancing the Charleston.  One time, with the money I’d earned, I bought a quart of ice cream.  I sat down on the curb and ate the whole quart with the flat wooden spoon (so called) that was given to the customer in those days.  My conscience bothered me some over not sharing my ice cream with someone else.

Songs of the day - ME AND MY SHADOW has always stayed with me.  I suppose I identified with the words because I was lonely and often afraid.  Here are the words:

            Me and my Shadow,

            Strolling down the avenue. -

            Me and my Shadow,

            Not a soul to tell our troubles to.

            And when it’s twelve o’clock

            We climb the stair, we never knock

            for nobody’s there.

            Just Me and My Shadow,

            All alone and feeling blue.

            Copyright 1927    Words:         Billy Rose

                 Music:         Al Jolson and   

            Dave Breyer

Al Jolson was a great actor/singer/comedian.  He gained fame for, among other, singing the song Mammy.  I loved to watch him.

Playing jacks - What fun!  I kept the nails of my right hand worn to the quick from scraping them along the rough concrete sidewalk as I picked up jacks.  Mom would say, “Stop playing for awhile” but I didn’t want to do that.  Playing was too much enjoyment. 

O’Leary - I also liked to play O’Leary and one could play it without a partner.  It was played with a ball.  One - two - three O’Leary and as you said O’Leary you threw your right leg over the ball as it bounced - then one - two - three O’Leary and you threw your left leg over the ball.  When you got to ten you would say ten O’Leary postman.  Why we said postman I don’t know.  Remember this was a long time ago....66 or 67 years ago.  Sometimes I can’t believe I’ve lived this long.

~19~

Summers are hot and humid in Cincinnati.  There was a fire station nearby.  When the weather became unbearable, firemen from the station would turn on one of the big fire hydrants and let it run in the street.  The kids loved it and would splash and play to their hearts content.  The other stations throughout the city would do the same.  There were public swimming pools also but I never went very often.  Can’t remember why.  Perhaps too much sun??  I was badly sunburned once.  Miserable!

One thing Mom would never buy for me was skates.  I really wanted to skate but she was afraid I would get killed because the best place to skate was in the streets. 

At some point, after we moved to Cincinnati, my mother had her long hair cut.  Bobbed it was called.  Aunt Opal, after she and Uncle Sam (Wooldridge) were married and moved to the farm in Illinois, also had her hair bobbed.  When Aunt Opal and my mother went back to Kentucky to visit their parents (my Grandpa and Grandma Wilson) they were very, very careful to wear dust caps on their heads to hide from Grandpa Wilson their short hair.  As old as they were, as well as being married and with kids, still they feared his wrath should he find out.  (Many people thought it was a sin against God for women to have their hair bobbed.)  Some time later there was a small book published by a fundamentalist preacher called Bobbed Hair, Bossy Wives, and Women Preachers.  It was read by a lot of people. 

(Note: Dust caps were just that - a covering for the head to keep dust out of the hair.  Many women wore them, especially in the mornings while they cleaned and dusted their flats or homes.  Women made their own from scraps of material.)

While living on Clay Street, Mom worked for the Crosley Radio Corporation, a well known company, on the assembly line.  Her task was to solder tiny wires in the radios.  She liked her job.  It was easy and she could sit down to do it.  I don’t know how much she was paid.  Dad also worked but I can’t remember where.  This was before the Great Depression when jobs were not too difficult to find.  As I’ve said before, my folks were not lazy.  Hard work was not a deterrent to accepting a job.  Dad’s drinking was for the most part done on weekends.  Come Monday morning, he got the old bod out of bed (I never ever heard him complain of a hangover), ate the breakfast Mom prepared for him, fixed his lunch and off he went to the job whatever it was. 

After such a weekend my parents wouldn’t be speaking to each other.  How I hated that!  I would be so happy if, during this time, we’d have company drop in - in the evening.  We didn’t let on to the company that anything was wrong.  Mom and Dad would be all smiles and friendly as they welcomed the visitors, usually relatives.  After our company left, Mom and Dad would then continue talking until another one of those weekends - and the cycle continued.

Mom got the idea that if she could keep Dad from drinking weekends it would be his (our) salvation.  She persuaded him to drive out into the country Sunday mornings where he’d find a shady spot under a huge overhanging tree.  They’d bring the Sunday newspaper and the lunch Mom had packed and there we’d sit on the green grass in the cool shade and read or talk.  Later, we’d eat fried chicken and whatever else Mom had prepared.  By the time we got back home it would be dusk. These Sunday outings didn’t last long for Dad, as soon as we arrived back at the flat, would be off to the neighborhood saloon.  And when he finally decided to come home, he would be “three sheets in the wind.”  When he was like this, I would always try to be the buffer between him and my mother.  Always I tried to keep him in a good humor.  That wasn’t easy.  Almost anything could set him off.  Almost always I could cajole him into a better mood, but not always, until he became sleepy and we’d put him to bed/or he would fall into bed himself.  I was only 8 or 9 years old.  I feel as though I’ve been - or tried to be - all things to all people throughout my entire life.

At a later date - in the early 30's - and at another address, Dad threatened my mother.  I wasn’t home so I can’t remember what the fight was about.  He had a butcher knife in his hand and came at her.  Mom managed to grab the handle and pulled the knife through his hand, cutting a big gash across his palm.  That took all the fight out of Dad.  He was bleeding profusely.  Mom bandaged his hand with clean white rag strips.  Eventually the wound healed without any problems.

~20~

Since early childhood I had been a bed wetter.  I suppose Mom had told Walker Wisdom or more probably he’d known about it all along.  One day, during our early days in Cincinnati, Walker came by our flat.  He said he had been to a doctor he knew and had talked with him about my bedwetting problem.  The doctor gave Walker some big pills for me to take.  I was to take one pill daily until all were gone.  Walker explained the doctor had said that the bedwetting might become even worse - how could it get any worse? - but under no circumstances was I to stop taking the pills.  I began immediately and, yes, the bedwetting got worse.  But I never stopped taking those big pills.  How I wanted to stop bedwetting!  When all the pills had been taken, I stopped wetting the bed and have never done so since!  I’ve often thought about this event in my life.  I do not believe there was any kind of medication that would cure bedwetting.  I think there was a lot of psychology involved in Walker’s and the doctor’s strategy.  I’ve always been grateful for Walker’s interest and the doctor’s “cure.”  Mom was probably even more thankful.  (She never scolded me for that nocturnal habit.)

After we moved to Cincinnati, Ewell never again attended school.*  He refused saying that if Mom and Dad made him attend he would return to Kentucky and live with some of our relatives.  He got himself a job.  Some time later, after he’d saved some money, he bought a motorcycle with a sidecar (that is what he called it which may have been the wrong terminology) attached.  The sidecar held one adult.  The day Ewell brought his motorcycle home, he invited Dad to go for a ride.  Dad accepted, climbed into the sidecar, and off they went.  It must have been a hair-raising experience for when they returned Dad said he’d never ride with Ewell again.  Dad said that when Ewell turned street corners, the sidecar would fly up and over the sidewalk before setting down on the street.  Probably Ewell had not yet learned the trick of driving a motorcycle.  That ride was the end of Dad’s motorcycle outings. 

I hadn’t thought about nor seen a motorcycle with a sidecar until 1964 when I was in Athens, Greece.  Our small tour group of seven was being driven to old Corinth (the biblical Corinth) when a motorcycle with a sidecar whizzed past.  A man was riding the motorcycle and his wife and baby were in the sidecar.  That scene brought back memories of Dad’s precarious ride with Ewell. *(Note: Child labor laws were either non-existent or very lax.  I think it was compulsory to attend school but since Ewell had never enrolled in Cincinnati, who would know of his existence?)

~21~

We moved to a rooming house on Mansfield Street.  Mansfield was about a block long and cobblestone, as were some of the surrounding streets.  Why we moved to a rooming house I don’t know.  On Clay Street we had our own furniture such as it was.  Rooming houses consisted of one room, or sometimes two rooms, flats and always furnished.  One room might rent for $2.50 or $3.00 a week.  A bed, some kind of an old dresser/chiffonier, a tiny stove, and a chair or two was about all the small room could hold.  There were hundreds if not thousands of such rooms in Cincinnati.

We lived in two furnished rooms on the first floor of this Mansfield Street rooming house.  The building was three stories high.  The windows of both rooms looked out upon the street.  The rooming house was managed by a couple from our part of Russell County, Kentucky.  I think their last name was Cooper.  One afternoon Dad came home.  He was drinking.  He and my mother got into a fight - why I don’t remember - but Dad had Mom down on the bed and was choking her.  I jumped on his back to try to pull him off her.  It worked but then he began choking me.  (This is the only time he was ever abusive to me.)  Well, Dad finally left the flat.  My mother immediately packed our things in a suitcase (or two?) And we walked to the depot where we caught a train for Illinois.

~22~

ILLINOIS - THE SECOND TIME

We ended up at Aunt Opal and Uncle Sam Wooldridge’s farm.  (Aunt Opal you’ll remember was Mom’s youngest sister.)  Any details of the train ride to Illinois, where Aunt Opal lived, are long gone from my memory.  Aunt Opal and Uncle Sam’s home was a tenant farmer’s home and was big but they didn’t have much furniture as I recall.  I slept in a baby bed.  It was much too short for me and could never get comfortable.  The Wooldridge's had at least one baby, Pauline, several months old and I helped with her.  They may have had another baby at the time.  (Eventually they had five kids including one set of twins, a boy and a girl.)  This time I speak about was probably mid-fall.  My mother got a job as cook/housekeeper in a town some distance from where the Wooldridge's lived.  But I continued to stay with Aunt Opal.  I did not enroll in school.  I am quite sure this was a traumatic time for my mother.  And me too since I seem to have wiped out any recollection of many events.  I do recall this: I was maybe eight years old.  I was either living with or I may have been visiting the Wooldridge's.  One day they decided to attend a Chautauqua some distance from their home.  I remember nothing of the Chautauqua.  But driving home afterwards, a storm with high winds and torrential rain came upon us.  This kind of weather and even tornadoes is not unusual in Illinois.  Aunt Opal and Uncle Sam discussed our situation, the ferocious weather with darkness near, and decided to stop and ask for shelter for the night from a nearby farm family they barely knew.  Our safety was their primary concern.

The farm family was gracious and invited us to stay the night.  Their home was spacious and comfortable furnished, with bedrooms on the second floor.  (Illinois farms are large in acreage, the owners thrifty, hardworking, and successful.  The majority of farmers were from the “old country” - Germany.  All built large homes.)  The home where we had been invited to stay the night was spic and span clean.  The point I’m working towards is this: Next morning when we came down the stairway to breakfast, we could see the big round dining table already set with pretty china on a snow-white damask cloth.  It was beautiful.  The food looked delicious and I was hungry.  We sat down, grace was said and the food then passed.  Imagine my disappointment when I discovered the food had not one bit of seasoning in it.  It was tasteless.  No one commented.  My folks had taught Ewell and me to eat what was put on the table without comment.  Even if a hair or a fly was spied - no comment.  You did not have to swallow them - one could work around these extraneous items.  Later I learned this family, for religious reasons, did not use condiments.  That included sugar.  Soon after breakfast, the Wooldridges gathered their babies and me and headed for home.  We were thankful that we’d been taken in and sheltered from the awful weather of the previous night.

At Christmas, the couple Mom was working for, invited me to spend a few days in their home.  I went though I can’t recall how I got there.  This couple lived in a small town in a large comfortable home.  The wife was pregnant - her first - and she was having problems.  Her doctor had ordered her to bed for the rest of her pregnancy.  This was why my mother was needed.  I recall the weather was cold, the ground covered with snow.  Days, the sun shone brilliantly on the white ground.  Glare was intense.  Mom and I slept in an upstairs bedroom.  It was cold going to bed, even though there was a good-sized vent in the ceiling over the big heating stove in the family room downstairs.  This allowed some warm air to escape through the ceiling vent into the upstairs bedroom where we slept.  Even so, we shivered and shook as we changed into our flannel nightgowns and crawled between the cold bedclothes.  (Note: The husband was not a total stranger to my mother.  He was also from Kentucky and he and my mother had gone together for a brief time before Mom and Dad met and married.)

Almost from the beginning of our “flight” to Illinois, Dad knew where we were and began writing to Mom, begging her to come back to him.  I was young and don’t know all that was said back and forth between them.  Nevertheless, the upshot of all this was that Dad came to Illinois and got himself a job as the hired hand of the large Al Engelman farm, near Rantoul.  Dad was paid a monthly salary and was given the use of the tenant house rent free.  Both the big Engelman farm home and our little tenant house faced the country (dirt) road.  We probably moved here shortly after the Christmas I’ve mentioned above.

The tenant house was made like a box.  Two rooms downstairs, two upstairs.  The kitchen was quite small.  In it was a wood burning cook stove, a makeshift dish cabinet, a small work table, plus a small table to eat on, and some chairs.  Some lovely smells came from that tiny kitchen during the months we lived there.  My mother was a good cook.  She sometimes made yeast bread and big fat rolls.  Ooh!  Delicious!  The other downstairs room - I’ve not been able to recall what we called such a room but today we would call it the living or family room - was where we visited friends and other company.  In that room was a bed, where Dad and Mom slept (I slept upstairs), some chairs, including a rocker or two.  What else?  Can’t remember.  Oh, yes, I do remember a small square oak table (the top about the size of a small card table top) on which Dad, Mom and I sometimes played cards during the frigid Illinois winter evenings.  (In Kentucky we had never played cards.  I think it was considered a sin, as was dancing.)  Oh, I must not forget the inevitable potbellied heating stove which kept the room cozily warm, as long as one kept it filled with either wood or coal.  The wood box also often needed refilling.  I know this must sound like ancient history to those of you who read these words.  It was a long time ago.  Life today is so different that I doubt if you can grasp the fact that it took such an enormous amount of one’s energy and time just to put food on the table three times a day, keep the fires going, water in the water bucket, as well as our clothes and linens scrubbed and ironed to name a few chores.

Mr. and Mrs. Engelman had two children, Milton and Beth.  Milton and I were in the same grade and class.  Beth was, I think, in the second grade.  She was a bit spoiled.  Milton was a typical boy.  Mrs. Engelman had to pass our house each time she drove her kids to school.  (Their big home was four or five hundred yards from our house.)  Mrs. Engelman offered to stop by for me and my parents accepted.  We lived on a dirt road about a quarter of a mile from the paved county road that led into Rantoul and the grade school.

I recall the first day Mrs. Engelman stopped in the middle of the road to pick me up.  Mom and I stood inside our front door watching for her.  I was eager to go.  I ran out to the car.  I had on a warm coat (red) and hat (more like a cap) to match, a scarf about my neck, my hands in woolen mittens and the inevitable galoshes over my shoes.  (Such a chore putting galoshes on and off.)  Under my coat I had on a dark blue wool dress.  In my dress pocket was a clean white handkerchief.  None of these items were new.  All had been brought with my mother and me when we hurriedly left Cincinnati.  Mom took good care of our clothes and I was taught to do the same.  In my arms I carried my new school books, tablet, pencils and my lunch pail.  As I said, I was ready, eager for school.

I climbed into the back seat with Milton and Beth.  I had never met the Engelman family.  Mrs. Engelman drove slipping and sliding in the muddy road.  At times the car slid almost completely around.  But she was used to bad weather conditions.  They did not deter her from driving into Rantoul twice a day five days a week during the school year.  Once we reached the paved county road it was smooth riding the mile into Rantoul and the grade school.  (Note: Rantoul was and is a typical prosperous farm town with one exception.  Chanute Field, a big U.S. Air Force base was and still is located there.  The base adds millions of dollars yearly to the local economy.) 

One day shortly after I enrolled in school I heard Dad and Mom talking.  Evidently we were not the usual tenant family the Engelman’s were used to.  Mr. Engleman told Dad that his “Missus” had commented favorably on my appearance as well as my preparedness (supplies) for school.  I was not prepared, however, for fractions.  That subject became my Waterloo - almost.

~23~

My class in Cincinnati had not been introduced to fractions.  In Rantoul my class was in the midst of fractions.  Our teacher explained and I listened and thought I understood.  But in the evenings at home when I dug into my homework I could not come up with the answers.  Often I cried in frustration.  Next day in school the teacher would explain and again I understood.  I eagerly raised my hand when she asked for an answer.  It was never correct.  At recess Milton Engleman made smart remarks about my intelligence.

This situation continued for some time.  The nights when I struggled with homework were as bad as the days in school.  At least at home I could cry.  In school I would not cry.  I’ve never been much to cry anyway.  The day - the moment - arrived when all changed.  It was as though a light bulb clicked on in my brain.  Suddenly I understood fractions and how to work them.  Hallelujah! 

From then on I gave smart-mouth, Milton Engelman, a run for his money.  He stopped his belittling remarks.  To this day I’ve never much cared for the name Milton. 

I loved school.  Have I said that before?  The Rantoul school had a small library.  I checked out books often.  I read everything I could get my hands on.  Still do.  (Each time I visit my ophthalmologist he will stop in the midst of his examination and say, “Do you read a lot?”  And I always answer “Yes, everything I can get my hands on.”  So far, he has not asked me to curtail the reading I so enjoy.)  So far I’ve not said which grade I was in.  I think it was fourth.  Our teacher read to our class immediately after our lunch/recess break from interesting books and for about twenty or so minutes.  So relaxing - so enjoyable. 

Our class was visited once a week by a young music teacher.  I remember her because of her long graceful hands.  I had never seen such long lovely fingers.  She used her hands as a dancer might as she played the organ to get the right pitch for our singing.  Our regular teacher sat in the back of the room while we had our music lesson.  Can’t remember a note or a song we learned but I’ve never forgotten that music teacher’s hands.

~24~ 

Another traumatic thing for me during our stay in the Rantoul area was my utter loneliness when school was out and the library closed.  I had no books, my folks didn’t subscribe to a newspaper at that time, and we didn’t have a radio.  There was no one to play with.  The Engelman kids never once invited me to play with them.  Tenant farmer kids beneath them?  I don’t know.  There were no other kids within walking distance. 

 Once I had a cute loveable puppy, Trixie, but one day she ran out onto the road and a passing car ran over her.  She died almost instantly.  I was devastated.  Her insides were strewn about the yard.  For days after, mealtime was difficult because a vision of her last agony and the sight of her smashed body would come before my eyes.  I could not eat.

I tried writing poetry.  Terrible stuff!  I sang a lot.  Kentucky songs.  Illinois grows - at least then it did - a lot of corn - mostly corn.  From our house any way one looked - across the road, on either side and in back of our house - were fields of tall corn at this time of the year.  I was so bored that sometimes I would cross the road, crawl through the fence and walk down those long rows of corn.  After awhile of this I would head back to the house.

There was a small empty building in our yard.  At one time it had probably been used as a stable.  During that summer I was rummaging around in that old building and came upon a small stack of ancient magazines.  Those magazines were a God-send and assuaged my loneliness to some degree.  I read them over and over throughout the rest of the summer. 

I hated washing dishes.  In the evening, to get out of that chore, immediately I finished my supper I left the table and headed for our garden.  I began hoeing hoping Mom wouldn’t make me wash dishes.  (Darkness would not come on for another hour or so.)  My obvious ruse worked. 

My mother never taught me to cook.  About as close to that as I ever got while at home was stirring the gravy.  Later, as I got older, I did wash dishes.  And cleaned house.  Mom wasn’t fond of dusting.  I liked to dust and Mom was glad to have me do that.  I’ve always enjoyed keeping a clean, orderly home and dusting, to me, is the finishing touch.  I also like to wash windows but that takes a bit more elbow grease.

~25~

There are many other things I like to do, however, besides keep a comfortable home.  Traveling is one.  Bud and I have vacationed many places during our forty-four year marriage.  There will not be much more traveling long distance, however.  This year (1991) will be our third year without taking a traveling vacation.  Since we’re retired some folks might say we’re on a perpetual vacation.  Each of our previous years we traveled to some place for two weeks.  In the early years of our marriage neither of us got a paid vacation.  Nevertheless we always took a week off and drove to some desired place, usually the California coast to swim in the Pacific (Bud was an excellent swimmer) and take in the surrounding sights and amusement parks.  Bud went deep sea fishing once or twice during our stay.  As soon as I deposited him at the fishing pier, I headed for downtown Los Angeles either to our car or more often I took the Freeway Flyer, a non-stop bus from Long Beach.  That took about an hour.  I spent my time until late in the afternoon browsing and shopping in the huge department stores.  Phoenix had no big department stores or really nice specialty shops.

Usually, I did at least some of our Christmas shopping in Los Angeles.  From Long Beach we traveled down the coast to San Diego - and often on to Tia Juana, D.F.  Almost always we browsed through Old Town in San Diego.  One place I never missed was The Candle Shop.  There I bought candles, enough for birthdays, Thanksgiving and Christmas.  There were no candle shops in Phoenix.  Of course we swam and lolled on the beaches around San Diego too.  On one such occasion Bud got too much sun and came close to being taken to the hospital emergency room.  I was worried about him.  He almost shook our motel bed down from chills.  Finally he became more calm and drifted off to sleep.  We covered a lot of territory in one week.  And dreaded the return trip across the hot, hot desert to Phoenix.  No air conditioning for cars then. 

        ~26~

Well, well, I’ve been wandering again.  We’re living a mile and a quarter outside Rantoul, Illinois on the Engelman farm.  My mother’s garden ran along the road that passed our house.  In Illinois, as she had in Kentucky, she planted the first two or three rows along the fence next to the road in sweet peas.  They’re climbers and had to be staked.  When in bloom, a lovely sight.  And the heady aroma!  Ah!  And each passerby enjoyed the pretty sight. 

Our water came from a well in our yard.  It was hard and filled with iron.  It was impossible to keep the water pail and dipper free of iron rust.  Ugly!  But the water was potable and ok to drink.  The pump often had to be primed.  You’ve heard the expression “priming the pump” - could it be that it came from priming the pump on the family well?  I think so.  In the freezing winters of Illinois one had to be careful about touching the pump handle with bare hands.  They could freeze to the handle!  Some farm wives were lucky enough to have in their kitchen a sink with a short pump handle from which water was pumped from a nearby well. 

Here in this setting I had my first snow ice cream.  Much of Illinois land is flat.  In winter strong winds cause the snow to drift.  Often, when we arose in the morning, the snow had drifted as high as our second-story window.  Mid-morning and with the sun shining brightly, I’d race out into the bitterly cold weather, fill a big bowl with the clean snow, rush back into the warm house, add milk or cream, sugar and a bit of vanilla flavoring.  Stir and eat!  Very tasty.

Speaking of strong winds reminds me that my mother was very much afraid of storms.  In summer, Illinois often has electrical storms with resultant gale force winds, torrential rain and hail.  Tornadoes are not unheard of.  When a storm was approaching our area, Mom would go to bed, cover up her head and there she would stay until the storm subsided.

One winter day Ewell appeared at our door.  He had been living and working in Cincinnati.   He was probably 17 and had been exposed to measles.  He arrived for Mom to wait on while the disease ran its course.  Mom put him to bed in the one that she and Dad slept in downstairs.  And I - I insisted of going to bed too though I wasn’t a bit sick.  Mom and Dad set up another bed across from Ewell’s for me.  Can you believe my parents allowed me to get by with this childish whim?  Mom waited on both of us bringing our meals and other items to our bedside.  During this time Ewell - when he felt up to it - read to me from some Western pulp magazines he’d brought with him.  He enjoyed reading to me and I enjoyed listening.  Who knows?  Perhaps it is from that brief time that my interest in the West was piqued. 

Ewell had measles, recuperated and went on about his business.  Along about this time I came down with measles for real and had to stay in bed because I was too sick to do anything else.  Measles have a peculiar odor - at least to the patient - and sometimes, even today, if I think about measles I can smell that odor.  Imagination?  I don’t know.  I think our parents had the doctor from Rantoul out to our house at least once during this time.  Yes, doctors made house calls in those days.

~27~

Poor as we were, Dad had a car.  Mom wanted to learn to drive and so, some evenings after supper - it was by then summer - Dad began giving her lessons.  Mom at the wheel practiced driving up and down the dirt road that went to our house.  One evening and some distance from home, she killed the engine.  And my father could not get it started.  They had to walk back home.  Dad was furious.  That was the end of my mother’s driving lessons.  For days, after his chores were done for the day, Dad tried to start that engine.  He tinkered with any part that he thought might start it.  No luck.  Mechanics were scarce in those far off days and Dad was certainly no mechanic.  On the dashboard there was a tiny, seemingly insignificant screw.  By happenstance, Dad pushed on that screw then cranked the car.  The engine turned over and finally started up!  He never learned what the screw had to do with this, if anything.

There was a couple with a small baby boy living a long walk from our house.  During one winter, the mother, carrying her baby, walked across a big cornfield to our house every day Monday through Friday.  She would spend the entire day with my mother, walking back to her home late in the afternoon.  They were there every afternoon when I got home from school.  Mom said this little family didn’t have enough food to eat nor fuel for their heating stove.  Though I’m sure Mom must have grown weary of their company, she always greeted them hospitably and prepared lunch for them.  My point: When this mother and her baby began coming to our home, I thought he was the ugliest one I had ever seen.  But being and playing with him so often, it came to me one day how beautiful he was.  The thought surprised me.  He hadn’t changed but I had.  The old saying “Familiarity breeds contempt’ isn’t always true.  It caused me to love and appreciate that little guy.

Two anecdotes about Dad - Aunt Opal Wooldridge was a good cook.  But when she made biscuits, as she did every morning for breakfast, they were so dainty that each one was about one good bite.  Though she made plenty of them, Dad always complained later to Mom that he got tired, even embarrassed, at having to say so often, “Please pass the biscuits.” 

In Kentucky it long has been said that Kentucky is noted for its beautiful women and fast horses.  To aggravate Mom, Dad sometimes - and always when company was present - quoted the saying this way: “Kentucky is noted for its fast women and beautiful horses.”  Mom didn’t always appreciate the laughter that followed. 

~28~

Motion Sickness - One Sunday Dad took Mom and me for a long drive.  We drove as far as Champaign-Urbana then turned around and headed back home.  On the return trip we stopped at a farmer’s roadside fruit and vegetable stand where Dad bought apple cider for us to sip on.  It was delicious!  A little later I became sick and vomited.  I’ve always thought I drank too much apple cider, but lately as I’ve thought about the episode, perhaps it wasn’t that at all but motion sickness.

As all know, Bud likes to fish.  During the years when we took our vacations in Southern California, we usually stopped in Long Beach and rented a motel room on the beach.  Sometimes Bud would go deep-sea fishing, going out on one of the commercial boats.  Once - and once only - he persuaded me to go with him.  This trip we were staying in San Diego and left from a San Diego pier.  We’d been out in the open sea, the boat bobbing up and down, for a couple of hours.  In those days, fish were plentiful.  Every time I threw out my line, almost immediately I’d have a big one!  I was having such fun - I like to fish too you know - casting out and reeling ‘em in when I began to feel peculiar.  You guessed it.  Suddenly I was miserably seasick.  I went below to lie down but seeing a dozen or so people in all stages of seasickness - which made me even worse - I staggered back on deck.  About then death would have been welcome.  (The captain does not turn his boat around and head for shore just because he has these poor human beings in all shades of green messing up his boat with vomit.)  Hours later, what blessed relief to set my feet on terra firma.  Immediately, I felt better, even if I did look like ‘death warmed over’ as Agnes Goldman used to say.

Years ago Bud and I drove to Georgia to visit the Tumlins.  Returning, we drove by way of Kentucky to visit Grandma Wilson and Aunt Ora Perkins.  From there we headed for Phoenix.  I was driving.  Suddenly, instead of one line down the middle of the road (it was a two-way road) there were two.  Bud immediately took the wheel and I crawled in the back seat to lie down.  There I spent the rest of the trip back to Phoenix.  Of course we had to stop at night in a motel so Bud could sleep some.  And we had to stop for food and gas during the day, but aside from that he drove as fast and as straight home as possible.  I was miserable the whole time.   There have been many such incidents through the years.  In Lebanon in a mini-van on the road from Damascus to our hotel in Beirut; in a tiny commuter plane in Kentucky on my way to Grandma Wilson’s funeral; and New York state heading for Niagara Falls, to name a few.

I’ve been plane sick, car sick, train sick (the smell of the smoke from those old coal-fired engines, plus I suppose the motion of the cars, made me ill).  I also had a problem with streetcars.  One day in Cincinnati, Mom took me with her to visit a friend, Martha Wisdom (a sister of Walker Wisdom).  Going there was no problem but on the return trip I became so nauseated that I begged Mom “Let’s get off and walk home.”  But we were miles from home and she said we just could not do that.  The rest of the ride to our particular stop is one big blur.  I finally learned - and what a long time it has taken - to take one half of a Dramamine tablet about one half hour before boarding a plane, or riding in a car.  If I sit quietly it is enough to take care of the nausea but not enough to put me to sleep so that I cannot enjoy my surroundings.  When riding in a car, it helps to look straight ahead not out the side windows.

~29~

BACK TO CINCINNATI

I cannot recall any part of the trip back to Cincinnati from Illinois.  I was certainly old enough to remember.  Probably, we went back the way we came - by train.  I have wondered what regrets Dad may have had (after the Great Depression hit our country) that he had not stayed on the Engelman farm in Illinois.  Mr. Engelman had urged him to stay saying that he had plans to retire in the near future and move his family into Rantoul to live.  He told Dad that when that time came he wanted him to move into the Engelman home and manage the farm for him.  Well....no one can see into the future; and Dad chose to return to Cincinnati. 

I believe we arrived in Cincinnati just before the 1929 New York Stock Market crashed.  We moved back into the same two-room flat that Mom and I had vacated so quickly months before (on Mansfield Street).  Ewell and Pearl soon followed and rented one room at the rear of the building on the first floor.  They were newlyweds, having stopped in Goshen, Indiana, after leaving Illinois, to be married.  Pearl had saved some $400 working as a live-in housekeeper/cook for a farm family.  Ewell may have had a few dollars saved.  Dad and Mom had very little, if any, savings.  Jobs were almost nonexistent.  With no money coming in to either family our circumstances became grim.  Dad ran up a huge grocery bill over the next months at a tiny nearby grocery store.  He could not pay the rent on our flat but Mr. And Mrs. Cooper allowed us to stay anyway.

Pearl paid for their one room $2.50 or $3.00 per week) out of that $400 she’d saved.  She bought food and paid for it from the same source.  During those dark, jobless days, she sometimes paid our family’s way to the neighborhood movie house.  We called it going to the ‘show’.  Of course Pearl and Ewell went with us.  All of us enjoyed those old silent movies.  Mostly cowboys and Indians.  Someone played a piano either loud or subdued, fast or slow, depending on what was taking place as when the hero, Tom Mix, on his beautiful horse, and chasing after the villain, would come to the edge of a mountain and with a deep canyon below, would jump from that mountain across the wide canyon onto the other side of the mountain.  Exciting!

Someone has said that Pearl and Ewell were down to their last five dollars when Pearl was hired by the Model Laundry Company.  For weeks she had been going early each workday morning to stand in line with many other unemployed men and women, hoping to be hired.  Usually, however, only one or perhaps two people might be hired.  More often there were no openings.  Pearl stayed with the laundry for several years.  She and another woman folded (clean) sheets as they came through the mangle.  Laundries were extremely hot and humid especially in summer.  No air conditioning back then.  Pearl sometimes fainted but after resting for a short while would get up and go back to the grind.  She was a very determined person because she had to be in such times.  She and Ewell needed that money. 

When I visited Pearl in 1985, she told me she has been making her own way since she was ten years old!  She comes from a large family (most are now dead) from Kentucky.  Pearl explained that her Aunt Crenna and family went back to Kentucky (from their home in Illinois) for a visit.  While there the aunt asked Pearl’s parents if she could take Pearl back to Illinois with her, saying she could find work for her as a live-in cook/housekeeper.  Pearl’s parents consented.  One less mouth to feed and clothe. 

Pearl also told me that she was sewing and making her own clothes, as well as for other family members, at that early age.  She is a fine seamstress.  Like many others of her day, she has had almost no schooling.  She has always been extremely frugal - knows very well how to pinch pennies.  When my brother died she was working for a company that made thermometers.  She continued at that job.  Later, she worked the soda fountain at a drug store near her home.  She would go directly to the drug store from the thermometer company and work until closing time, nine or ten o’clock.  This was her daily routine for several years. 

Pearl’s weekly wages at the laundry were less than ten dollars - nearer seven or eight.  I can’t recall exact amounts of items but the following are not far off: movie, ten cents; milk, five or ten cents a quart; a loaf of bread, seven or eight cents; pinto beans, two or three cents a pound.  (We ate a lot of beans, not knowing we were getting good protein.)  A couple could and did live easily, including a quart of milk a day, on five dollars a week.

~30~

At a later date I, too, worked at the Model Laundry.  The forelady didn’t want to hire me because she said I was too short.  But Pearl put in a good word for me and I was hired.  I was put to work sorting dirty clothes.  It was then I knew what the forelady meant.  The laundry cart, a heavy thing on rollers, was so deep that I had to balance myself on my stomach on the cart’s edge to reach the clothes on the bottom.  Later I was put to work scrubbing men’s shirt collars before they were tossed into the washer.  I needed that job.  Nevertheless, I hadn’t worked there long when the employees went out on strike.  That was the end of my job at Model Laundry Company.

Ewell was eventually hired as a laborer in a cemetery.  Graves were dug using pick and shovel.  Acres of grass had to be mowed using push mowers.  Later Dad was hired at the same cemetery.  But there were long months during those gloomy Depression days when he had no work at all, when he and Mom had to put aside their pride and accept welfare.  That was a bitter medicine. 

Phil, I pause here to tell you how you got your names.  While Ewell and Dad worked at the cemetery, they came to know another employee whose name was Phillip though they always called him Phil.  Phil must have been a fine man for Dad and Ewell so often mentioned that “Phil” said this or “Phil” said that.  From their conversations I gathered that “Phil” was someone worthy of knowing. 

In sixth grade I had a crush on a boy in my class.  Kendall was good-looking, mannerly, and an excellent student.  And so when you arrived, I named you Phillip Kendall.  You were never called anything but Phillip until we came to Arizona.  Even today, my Kentucky relatives call you Phillip, not Phil, when they speak of you.

~31~

WOODWARD HIGH SCHOOL

A regular four-year high school, Woodward also offered seventh and eighth which I attended (1930-31; 1931-32).  I have only my seventh grade report card to show for my school years.  The school stood on a city block at Sycamore, Thirteenth and Woodward Streets.  The edifice is still there or was in 1985 but is no longer used as a school.  The property was ringed with a very high iron fence with iron gates that could be closed and locked.  Classes were forty-five minutes and changed with the ringing of a bell.  We lived on Thirteenth across the street from the school in a two-room flat, third floor rear.  The usual dreary tenement.

Gymnasium/Swimming Pool/Auditorium/Cafeteria - There were two gymnasiums, one each for boys and girls, and swimming pool all located on the top (fourth) floor.  I liked gym, especially volley ball swimming, though I never became a really good swimmer.  I never seemed to have enough breath.  My mother and others thought one should not swim, or get one’s head wet, in winter.  They said, “You’ll catch cold or pneumonia.”  I caught neither.

In eighth grade we had one semester of French and one of Latin.  Our teacher was a tiny, somewhat sickly-looking woman.  She also taught our Health class.  We had a book on the subject and were required to turn in a written report.  She was a fresh air nut!  Outside the weather could be below freezing.  And those old tenements never warmed up in winter.  The drafty halls were not heated.  At night Dad allowed the fire in the heating stove to die down and the flat became very cold.  Nevertheless, I tried to follow her advice and would open the window a crack.  I’ve often wondered what the years had in store for that teacher.  I wish I could remember her name. The only teacher whose name I can remember was Mrs. Lusby, my history teacher.  She was very likeable.  And history was a favorite subject of mine. 

Lunch in the cafeteria cost fifteen cents.  How Mom came up with money for my lunch, as well as other extras I was required to have, I don’t know.  When I get to heaven, I shall ask her about many things. 

Glee Club - I enjoyed singing in the Glee Club.  As Christmas drew near, we learned, then sang in Latin Adestes Fidelis (O, Come All ye Faithful) for the entire school.  We sang other songs of course.  I like Latin.  It was easier than French.  And has been helpful here in Arizona in figuring out the meanings of Mexican/Spanish words. 

Cooking/Sewing - I liked cooking.  I never became adept at sewing though.  For my class project I decided to make a pair of pajamas to wear to pajama parties, the “in” thing at the time.  Mom came up with enough money for the material and a pattern.  I chose a Simplicity Pattern.  What a misnomer!  It wasn’t simple at all.  Even with the teacher’s help, I never quite finished them but wore them anyway to parties.  (Pajama parties were like any other parties except the women wore wide-legged pajamas.  They were made from dress material.) 

When Phil was in grade school he forever had holes in the knees of his Levis.  Sometimes I sat in the evening, on my day off (Monday) sewing patches on his pants.  I enjoyed this, it was relaxing.

Piano Lessons - In my seventh grade year I took piano lessons.  Cost: twenty-five cents each.  I love piano music.  I did well.  But the next fall when I tried to enroll in a piano class (they were actually private lessons) the rules had changed.  One had to have a piano at home to practice on - to take lessons.  That left me out.  We did not have a piano.  We did have an old pump organ that Mom could play.  But have you ever pumped one of those and tried to play at the same time!  Forget it!  I never touched a piano again until 1961 when Bud wanted me to have one and we bought the Henry F. Miller that we still have.  I took lessons for a couple of years but that is not long enough to become really good at playing.  (My Angina got so that it “acted up” when I practiced - I suppose too much sitting and probably not enough exercise throughout the day contributed to this.  At any rate I quit my lessons.)

~32~

TOUGH DAYS

These two years at Woodward (1930-1931; 1931-32) were difficult ones.  My father off and on was a fearful problem.  Because of the Depression there was no money to speak of for anything.  There was a time when Mom had only thirty-five cents to buy our evening meal.  She told me that she would lie awake at night trying to figure out what to have for our next day’s supper.  She perused the daily newspaper for possible recipes.  As I look back I realize she always had nourishing meals.  Meaty soup bones could be had from the butcher for free.  She would give me fifteen cents and tell me to go to the corner vegetable store and ask for “15 cents worth of soup vegetable.”  The Italian owner (he and his family lived in rooms in back of the store) knew exactly what I wanted.  He would pick out one or two, or even three of whatever vegetables he had on hand:  potatoes, carrots, turnips, onions, etc.  With the vegetables and the meaty soup bones, my mother would make a nourishing delicious soup.  We didn’t always have dessert but she sometimes would make a cobbler or rice or tapioca pudding.  We never went hungry thanks to her frugality and planning. 

The cheap sandals I wore to school had holes in the soles which I tried to patch with folded newspaper or cardboard.  The paper would come right out.  Standing still the sandals looked good - walking in them was another matter.  They were all I had so I had to wear them.  Pearl, Ewell’s wife, made two dresses and gave them to me.  I truly appreciated them.  I would wear one dress to school.  That evening I would wash and iron it.  Next day I wore the other dress, washing and ironing it that evening.  My shoes were my embarrassment.

Clothes were cheap.  Mom was able to buy me a black chiffon dress with a full skirt and built-in slip for under five dollars.  My hair was very blonde with reddish glints (remember I’ve a redheaded Irishman in my background, the one who, long ago, was married to our Cherokee grandmother) and I thought I looked stunning in that dress.  Perhaps I did  - perhaps I didn’t - but the fact that I thought I looked good counted the most. 

During eighth grade I dated.  But I did not neglect my studies.  I sat at the old round oak dining table in our kitchen and often studied or read library books until one or two in the morning.  My parents never once scolded me or said “It’s time to go to bed.”  Most of the time they were sound asleep by the time I crawled into bed.  My bed was a leather couch that opened up to make a bed.  It had no mattress only quilts thrown across the springs. 

Phil, I remember the first pair of hard-soled shoes I bought for you.  I got them at Alms and Doepke, a nice store on Main at the Parkway.  They cost five dollars.  I enjoyed choosing those shoes, trying them on you with the help of a salesman, and finally buying them.  I think boys are just as much fun to shop for as girls. 

At Woodward one of my friends was Nettie Pigg.  Nettie had fiery red hair and wore makeup - too much.  Her home life was worse than mine.  Her father, also a drinker, and mother had several children.  Two or three were mere babies.  Nettie’s father was cruel to her tiny mother.  Nettie ran away from home during eighth grade.  I knew where she was but she asked me not to tell and I didn’t.  She borrowed my only pair of high heeled shoes saying she would return them soon and set the day.  She did not return them.  I was desperate to get those shoes back home before my parents found out.  Uncle Travis, one of Dad’s brothers, was living in Cincinnati.  A very amiable and likable person.  He often visited us.  (He was not well and later died of tuberculosis.)  He came to our flat one day and I explained to him about Nettie and my shoes and asked him if he would walk with me to the West End of Cincinnati (an unsavory area) to where Nettie was living with a married sister.  He readily agreed.  And so we walked there, retrieved my shoes, and returned to our 13^th Street flat.  Uncle Travis did not reveal my secret to my parents.  I have such warm feelings toward Uncle Travis.

~33~

OUR MOM

 For some time - long before we knew she was ill - Mom grocery shopped for the four of us.  (Phil, you and I were living with my parents at the time.)  She would climb the three flights of stairs to the flat, unload everything on the kitchen table, then fall into a chair saying, “I’m so tired!  I have to rest!”  Three flights of stairs are tiring for most folks to climb but we’d been doing it for years.  Neither Dad nor I gave it much thought.

In the spring of 1938, Phil, you and I were in Kentucky for a short visit with relatives.  One day I received a letter from Ewell and Pearl saying that Mom was not well and they had taken her to their home in Blue Ash, a Cincinnati suburb.  This alarmed me.  (Dad was in Indiana visiting Sally Ann and Thomas Smith, his parents.)  I quickly packed our belongings and you and I boarded a bus for Cincinnati.  Once there we stopped at the Thirteenth Street flat long enough to unload our things, then walked the half block to Reading Road where we caught a bus to Blue Ash. 

When we arrived at Ewell’s (he and Pearl were of course at work) the front door was open.  I could see through the screen door that Mom was lying on the couch.  I called to her, “Mom it’s me, Zula.  And Phillip.”  At first she did not respond but then she raised up slowly and looked around.  She appeared dazed and didn’t recognize us.  I kept on talking to her and finally she smiled recognition. 

That evening Ewell drove us back to the flat.  Next day I took Mom to a medical doctor who readily diagnosed her condition as Addison’s Disease.  She was very weak, had lost weight, and her skin had turned bronze color, all classic symptoms of the disease.  Immediately the doctor had her admitted to Cincinnati General Hospital where hospital doctors took over management of her case.  (Of course there are other symptoms besides those above.) 

Because the disease is rare (according to the 14^th Edition of Merchk’s Manual the ratio is about 4:100,000), many doctors never see a case of Addison’s Disease in their entire years of practice.  Mom received much attention and good care at the hospital.  The sad thing was there was nothing to do for the disease.

Some time after being admitted to the hospital, Mom was being x-rayed.  She was standing upright when suddenly she collapsed.  Her doctors alerted us to the fact that she was not going to live and suggested that we might want to call in her relatives.  Mom was critically ill for a time but finally to the surprise of all, especially her doctors, she rallied.  Later she was discharged.  She was sent home with a five-gallon bottle of saline solution.  She was instructed to drink a certain amount daily.  It was not/is not possible for a human being to drink saline solution daily.  She COULD NOT do it.  But that was the only thing doctors in those far off days knew to do for her.

Never again was Mom able to resume any of her usual duties.  To emphasize how weak she was, I bought her a colorful housecoat.  The skirt was floor-length and had sixteen gores.  After a time I knew she didn’t appear comfortable wearing the housecoat.  She finally said, “It’s pretty but the skirt is so heavy that it weights me down.  It tires me to move about in it.” 

The night of April 12-13, 1939, I awakened to the sound of labored breathing.  Mom was unconscious.  She was dying.  Dad was home.  Pearl was also there sleeping on the floor.  She was most helpful during this time.  We decided to call an ambulance.  I ran down the stairs and about a block to a fire station where I made a telephone call.  The attendants had difficulty maneuvering the stretcher with Mom in it, down the stair-ways.  (Over the years I’ve thought about this and wished many times I had not called the ambulance but allowed Mom to die peacefully in her own bed.)  I rode in the ambulance along with the attendants.  Mom was dead by the time we reached the hospital.  It was April 13, 1939.  Mom was forty-eight.  I was twenty-one.  Phil, you were three. 

Visitation for Mom was held in a Cincinnati funeral home on Freeman Avenue, after which Mr. Pruitt of Pruitt’s Funeral Home in Jamestown, Kentucky, drove to Cincinnati and brought Mom’s body to Aunt Ora and Grandma Wilson’s farm home about fifteen miles or so from Jamestown.

For several days it had been raining and had rained off and on the day Mr. Pruitt arrived with the hearse.  The roads were dirt and muddy.  Aunt Ora’s house was situated on level ground at the top of a short but very steep hill.  In attempting to climb the hill Mr. Pruitt ran into trouble.  He had barely started up when the wheels began spinning.  When he took his foot off the gas pedal they would slip back into the deep ruts.  Even with several strong neighbor men pushing from the rear, he could make no headway.  (At the house we could hear the roar of the motor and the spinning of the wheels.)  Finally, it was decided to hook up a couple of Aunt Ora’s mules to the hearse.  With the mules pulling and the men pushing, the hearse, with Mr. Pruitt still in the driver’s seat, made it up the hill and into Aunt Ora’s yard.

~34~

Mom was “laid out” for viewing in a bedroom.  It was customary for a couple of neighbors to “sit up” with the deceased all night, chatting quietly throughout the time.  Others might take their places at intervals.  Many relatives, old friends and neighbors came to pay their respects.  Some lived too far from home to travel back and forth.  These were invited to stay the night with relatives or friends.  Aunt Ora’s home was small, four rooms.  The upstairs was unfinished and used for storage.  New quilts that Grandma Wilson had pieced and quilted hung across clotheslines stretched across the attic.  Home-canned meats, fruits and vegetables in glass jars sat on the floor.  Dried apples and peaches were stored in flour sacks and hanging from rafters.  And much miscellaneous.  There were a couple of beds where Ewell, Pearl and I slept the short time we were there.  I can’t recall where Donna Jean and Sonny were.  Phil, I had left you in Cincinnati with a sitter. 

Services were held next day at Salem Baptist Church.  We buried Mom at McBeath Cemetery near Old Eli.  When Dad died, he was buried beside her.  Grandpa and Grandma Wilson and Aunt Ora are buried side-by-side.  Our Indian grandmother is buried there as are many other relatives.

The rain had slackened the day of Mom’s funeral.  But that night as we lay in our beds in Aunt Ora’s attic, the rain came down in torrents.  The roof was tin and the noise of the deluge beating down was deafening.  For me, however, it was a time of relief, of peacefulness which even now I don’t quite understand.

ZULA SMITH CRUTCHER

 SOUTH MOUNTAIN PARK, NEAR PHOENIX, AZ

FEB 13TH, 1944

COURTESY OF W.H. DOWELL

EPPIE JANE WILSON (RIGHT)

MOTHER OF ZULA SMITH CRUTCHER

WITH SISTER BERTHA MAUDE WILSON AND BROTHER HANSFORD WILSON

COURTESY OF W.H. DOWELL

Bertha Maud Hart, Nancy Paul Wilson and Eppie Jane Smith

(Eppie Jane Wilson Smith with her mother and sister)

Courtesy of W.H. DOWELL

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