I was born 1/11/1933. It was in the middle of the depression. Mother and Dad already had six children; Ruby, Dorothy, Maxine, Helen, Frankie, and Gene – five girls and one lone boy. I’m sure one more mouth to feed wasn’t such a great thing since they had six already.
Before Gene, the lone boy, came along, so the story goes, Maxine was named Maxie Mozell, wore overalls and was quite a little rascal. When she got into trouble, she would run under the house. Mother would tell her that it was okay that she would have to come out to eat some time or another. Another time, Ruby said that Frankie caused her to get more spankings when she was a baby. A neighbor’s daughter was always taking her out of her carriage and causing her to get hurt. Ruby said that she got a spanking every time she did. Mother told her that she had better not ever let that girl take Frankie out of her carriage again. Finally she got either brave enough to stop her or she was afraid not to stop her. Dorothy used to tell her teacher that she was born on her mother and daddy’s wedding day. In realty, she was born on their anniversary, but I don’t know if the teacher understood that at first. They told me Dad got a little tight when he found out that he finally had a boy.
I was the seventh, another boy. Following my birth, they had five more girls; Betty, Mary, Sarah, Linda, and finally the baby, Billie. By that time, Mother was 48 years old. They laughed and said she had one pain at home, another at the hospital, and then Billie was born. Later on Mother said that Linda was really jealous because she had been the baby for six years.
I was born in the winter in Lee County, Arkansas, near Haynes and Marianna. My folks had been in Lee County for a number of years.We lived near the L’Anguille River between Marianna and Haynes. Since it was so near the river, the house was on stilts high enough for a person to stand under.
At any rate, as I said, it was in the middle of the depression. During the depression families had little money. They drew maybe a few dollars a month. Dried beans were a penny a pound, as was flour, sugar, and other necessities. In most cases there was usually a farm store where these things were sold in jars on shelves. Crackers, pickles, and such were stored in these or in barrels. There were some general stores that would let you charge until your crops came in. What things you couldn’t buy in a store, you made or raised. We raised most of our own food. At the end of the crop year in the fall, you settled up wit h t he land owner and sold your crop. Sometimes the bonus at the end of the year was a good one, sometimes it wasn’t.
I remember that Dad made a $100.00 a month and bonus at the end of the year. However, we had chickens, pigs, and a big garden. We had no electric bills, no water bills because we didn’t have those things. A man came by once a week to leave us a big block of ice. We had an ice box that would hold 50 Lb block of ice. Unless the weather got really hot, it would last us almost the whole week. Instead of running water, we had a cistern that held really cold water. We dropped a water bucket in to draw the water, just like you do from a well. All in all we mad it fine, especially for a family of fourteen. My sisters said that Mother went to the field with my dad to work. They got everyone up for school and cleaned the house when they got home. They knew it had better be done when she got home.
By the time I was five years old, we moved to Helena, a town about twenty five miles from Marianna and my older five sisters were grown and some were married. We moved out Hway 20 to the Spivey farm. We were living there when I started to school. I started to school late because my birthday was in January. I did not want to go to school, but I had to. My first teacher was Mrs. Lee in a small schoolhouse near where we lived. When I was given my books, I gave them back and told them that I didn’t want those books. When I was in second grade, we went to Jefferson school, where they later built a Safeway Grocery. I didn’t pass that year, but the next year, I started to school with my sister, Betty and we went to school in a two story brick school on Biscoe Street in Helena. The building was condemned, but they held classes in it until after Billie Sue started to school. My teacher was Miss Bobby Miles. I thought she was really mean and she was very strict. Whenever she thought I did something wrong, she would bend my fingers back and spank me in the hand. She did that to all the students in her class. I was so scared of her and I was really glad when I was out of the school where she was a teacher. That was the only time I remember Mother coming to school to see about one of us. She came to see why I was so afraid of Miss Miles and why she spanked me in the hand.
I remember one incident while we were living on the Spivey place. I was about seven years old. Apparently everyone carried a gun in those days. A black man, who worked for Daddy, and his family also lived onthe farm. He seemed to get up mad every morning. He would beat the mules that he was trying to harness and he would do it with a trace chain. Dad had warned him several times about beating the mules. However, this one morning Dad got mad at him and drew his gun and was going to shoot him, but the man grabbed his arm and drew his own gun. Daddy grabbed his gun arm. There they stood, Dad holding the man’s right arm and gun and the black fellow holding Dad’s right arm and gun. Neither was strong enough to pull free.
Then my mother entered the picture.. She had a gun hidden behind her skirts. After much haggling with both men, she made Dad promise not to shoot the man if he would turn Dad loose and leave; which he did.The man and his family had to leave the farm and we never saw them again.
Later on, after this incident, Daddy was shot. We thought the shooter might have been that man, but later we decided it might have been Tolley Shannon. Tolley was an older, divorced man, who owned a bicycle shop in Helena. He convinced my sister, Dorothy, who was only about 16 or 17 years old to marry him. To all of us, he seemed a very greedy, selfish man. Because my parents objected to him so much and tried to talk Dorothy out of it, we thought maybe he decided to shoot Daddy.
However, Tolley and Dorothy had two daughters, Betty and Dottie. Dorothy went to work for the telephone company and was finally able to buy a house on McDonough Street. It was behind Mother’s and Daddy’s house and across the street from Mother’s brother, my Uncle Joe and his wife, Aunt Liddy. When Tolley died, Dorothy married twice more; once for a little while to Joe King whom she divorced and later to A. J. McDowell. They bought my sister Mary’s house and lived there until Dorothy died this past year and A. J. went back to his former home with his family. They were married for 26 years and he was the love of her life.
Another thing that I remember about living on the Spivey place was a bridge that we had to cross to get to our house. It was very narrow and we used to stand on it whenever a tractor or farm truck crossed over it.Once we had a very bad rainstorm and the water came down under that bridge in floods. Not only were there floods of water, but there were floods of crawfish. Daddy had the black families on the place come and get them out of the water. They got them out by the tubs full. I don’t know whether Daddy told them how to cook them or whether they already knew how, but they cooked them and we helped them eat them.
During the time we lived there, I was playing with Gene on the back of a tractor and fell off. Then tractor was pulling a disc (sharp round blades used to break up ground). My head hit one of the discs and sliced the back of my head open. I don’t know how deep the cut was, but I was unconscious. Gene was scared and ran to get my dad. When he got there, I was still unconscious. He took me home, laid me out on the porch, and told Mother what happened. By the time they took me home a kind of a bubble of thin skin came through the cut. I must have bled a lot because I was pail. I think they all thought I was dead. I think Mother did, too, but either she or Dad decided to take me to Dr. Sears at Helena Crossing. He treated it, gave me shot, sewed me up, put on a bandage and sent me home. Needless to say that I lived and if I have a scar, it doesn’t show.
The first Christmas I remember getting anything other than an orange and an apple and hard candy, I prayed and prayed for a cap pistol. I really wanted a cap pistol. Finally Christmas came and I got my cap pistol. I used to play in the barn. I would get up in barn and shoot at the bad guys with the cap gun. Then one day I got too near the edge and fell out. I got hung upside down by my leg on the side of the barn and broke my gun. My leg got hurt, but my heart got broken, so I never looked forward to getting anything or asked for anything again after that.
Gene was forever getting me in trouble. One time we were playing around a pond near the house. Gene had a shotgun and there were ducks all over the pond. He decided to shoot at the ducks and told me to go to the opposite side of the pond and chase the ducks back toward him. So I did. It didn’t take me long to realize that I didn’t want to be on the other side of that pond while he was shooting.
When we moved from the Spivey place, we first lived on Hway 20 about three miles from the farm from the farm headquarters. This was on the Wooten place, where Daddy was the farm manager. When Mr. Wooten moved out of his house at farm headquarters and into town, we moved into the big house with electricity and running water. It also had indoor bathrooms. It was off the road near the Mississippi Levee. We just knew then that we had it made.
There was a pecan orchard on the farm and we could pick up a lot of them. We played in it as well. I rode my first horse there. Gene drove a tractor some. We also chopped and picked a little cotton, but not much. I rode a combine one year and tied sacks of oats. It was a hot tiresome job. I remember once, Gene and his friend, Buddy Waddell, were picking up hay bales and putting them on the back of a truck. They put me in the truck and told me to steer it. I could barely see through the windshield of the truck .
Mr. Spivey owned a hosiery mill on Arkansas Street in Helena where Maxine, Helen, and Frankie worked. It was a cross the street from Sam Levine’s Junk Yard on Arkansas Street. I remember once when Maxine worked there, (we must have had a truck or car by then) that she and I had been either to Helena Crossing to get something or we had been somewhere else, I don’t remember which. While we were there, we bought some raisins. On the way home, we opened them up and started eating the raisins in the dark car. We had eaten about half of them when we got home. It was quite a surprise for us to discover that the raisins had small bugs in them. It really turned me away from ever eating raisins again. We also had so many fresh green peas that year, that I didn’t eat them again until after I had been married a while.
We lived on Wooten’s farm during World War II. Mr. Wooten let the military train men to fly on one of his fields. I believe it was while training to fly, John Baker met my sister, Helen. Either that or he was working at the local funeral home. Like Dorothy’s husband, Tolley, John was older than Helen. Somehow he talked her into marrying him. He was an undertaker by trade. After they married, they moved around finally settling in Lake Charles, Lousiana.Years later they moved to Batesville, Arkansas, with their children, Mike, Bill, and Barbara. He became Governor of the Kiwanis Club, ran his own funeral home and lived in Batesville until he died.
Another thing that happened when we lived on the Wooten place during the war, there were prisoners of war brought here. They were Japanese and lived in a camp near where the drive in movie was later built. It was near the air field where the soldiers and airmen were stationed out on Airport Road. As I remember it they were let out to work on the different farms in the area and I don’t know whether or not it was a detention camp for Japanese people who were citizens of America or whether they were soldiers. I do know it was not uncommon for the detention camps to be built in different places. It was terrible what the government did to people who were German and Japanese Americans, but feelings ran pretty high against them because of what was being done in Europe and the Philippines and after Pearl Harbor. After the war they were all let go and the air field became the Helena Airport.
Dad was still managing the Wooten place in 1943-1944. One day he and a black man, who worked on the place took the pickup and started driving to Helena. On the way, an electric line fell from a pole onto the truck Daddy was driving. At first no one knew what was wrong with him. He drove on into Helena and went to Wooten Epps store to get supplies and the people there thought he was drunk. It took a little while for anyone, including himself, to realize that Dad had been electrocuted. He was in the hospital for a while and he was off work for several months. Mr. Wooten let him go. Probably because he needed someone able to raise a crop and Daddy wasn’t able to do that.
So we moved to the Loggy place. Then we moved to Poolar Street in Helena. I must have been a wanderer because I was all over the hills there. I roamed the hills so much that Mother tied me to the bed post one day she brought me my food and water. I could have gotten loose any time, but I didn’t. My sisters felt so sorry for me because they thought that I couldn’t get loose.
Gene and I went to the old brick two story school on Biscoe Street and walked home. We crossed a vacant lot where they finally built Jefferson Elementary School and later the old Biscoe Street School was closed. When I was about ten or eleven years old, I was baptized into the Baptist church. I didn’t really know what it was all about, but I joined because everyone else did.
During all this time Mother was trying to get a settlement from the Electric Company. By then it had been six months since Dad had gotten hurt.
In 1946-1947 we moved to East Prairie, Missouri. We had to go through Memphis and cross the Mississippi River. We had crossed it before, when Dad had to go to Memphis for the farm and every time I would lie down in the back of the truck because I was afraid. Anyway we lived in Missouri four about nine months. My sister, Frankie, didn’t want to leave school and her friends, but she had to any way. One of the things I remember about living there was fishing in a creek and catching the fish and cooking them outside. It was a good time. We started to school and Daddy worked on a farm.
One day a big storm blew through. We later found out it was a tornado.It almost blew our house away. I remember that it felt like the whole side of the house was lifted up. My mother told my dad that we were moving back to Arkansas. Well, Frankie didn’t want to move again. She didn’t want to go back to Arkansas, but again, she had to anyway.She never went back to school to finish. I had five sisters and my brother, who never finished school, but I graduated and so did the younger five sisters. Anyway of the first five, almost all of them worked for the telephone company for a little while. Frankie’s husband, Doyle, worked for the telephone company as well. They met there and got married.
By the time we got back to Arkansas, my parents got a settlement form the Electric Company. They got $1600.00. It was enough to buy a four bedroom house. Actually, it had a front room and parlor, a dining room, and two big bedrooms and a big kitchen, a front porch and a back porch. Later on, a room was built off the dining room for a bedroom and a room of the kitchen for a bedroom for Gene and me as well as a second bathroom on the back porch. The parlor was used as a bedroom and after we grew up it became a living room. This was in Helena at 1009 Ohio Street.
They tell me that I used to walk and talk some in my sleep and I guess Gene did to. We got a football at sometime or another because they said Gene and I would stand up in the bed and yell at each other and play football.
The Kitchen was where we always seemed to wind up around the table. Gene was bad tempered and wouldn’t get up in the morning. He had gotten a job with Hendrix shoe Store. One morning he was fussing about his breakfast not being cooked and he threw a cup. By this time I had gone to work for Maurice Glorioso’s Grocery.
