Della Rhodes
My name is Della Jean, I was a Starkey Roach.
And when were you born?
I was born 11-1-1935.
I was born down below Marquand, close to the Whitener Cemetery, in a two story house.
I was born in an upstairs bedroom.
I don't remember the name of the doctor's name.
And you were talking about D.D.?
It's D.D. Highway.
Tell us where it was called then.
D.D. Highway is the name of the road as of now.
What was it you were saying?
Now they cast a river road.
That's what we always called it.
What are some of your first memories growing up?
My first memories is living down a little about a mile down below that, and my grandfather and grandmother lived there also, and my dad built a home there on the property, and they were quite truck farmers.
They did a lot of truck farming, and they hauled a lot of—my dad owned a truck, a dump truck, and he hauled a lot of lime and things for the farmers, and my grandfather hauled logs.
What is truck farming exactly?
That means they grow large fields of produce.
They had corn and beans and sweet potatoes and potato patches, and they called that truck farming.
But I moved from there when I was ten years old, so I don't remember a lot about it.
Where did you move from when you moved from there?
We moved down to—dad bought a farm about a quarter of a mile below that.
In fact, the property joined, he bought 325 acres, and we moved down below that.
My dad was working at that time at the mines here at Fredericktown at National Ed. We had no electricity in this area, didn't have at all.
Whenever the electricity came in, when they put the lines down there, my dad and my older brothers wired most all the houses up and down through the area.
That's quite an accomplishment, and he did it when he was off work from the mines.
He did it after he worked all day at the mines and then went and did this in the evenings.
If he worked evenings, he did it in the mornings.
He did it also.
My dad worked many hours.
A lot of times I lived in the same house as my dad, and a lot of times I'd never see him all week because he was always working.
So after you turned ten, you moved and— We moved down to this place.
And did you change schools?
No.
No.
I went to one school all but one year, and then when we were on the farm, they opened up the little one-room schoolhouse, and I went there one year.
Gladys Brotherton was my teacher, and I learned an awful lot that year.
I've really done a lot of learning.
Did you like school?
I did.
I loved school.
Do you have a favorite topic?
Math.
Math.
Did you end up graduating?
No, I did not.
I got sick.
I had allergies real bad, and they had no allergy medication at that time to help me out, and my eyes would just swell, and I couldn't see enough to follow the reading and things.
That's why I read more now, but I was an A student.
Do you still enjoy math today?
I still love math today.
My whole family loves math.
Really?
I do remember your sister coming in one time and saying that she read through the night.
She did.
And she would stop and turn the light off when your father came home.
Came home, yes.
And then when she knew he was finished whatever, walking around downstairs, she turned the light back on and read.
There was ten of us children, so I was the oldest.
I am the oldest.
There's two of us deceased, so there's still eight of us still living, and we all live within a hundred-mile radius.
But you let your sister turn the light on and read all night?
Yes, yes, she did.
Did she ever read aloud, or did she read quietly to herself?
She did to herself.
At that time of night, she'd have to.
Oh yeah, I guess so, right.
She's younger than me, and I was already gone from home.
I just never could figure out how she could get up and go to school.
She did, though.
She was an A student.
Well, we lived down on the river, and we did a lot of swimming.
Yeah, okay.
Because you didn't have electricity, so you stayed cool by— Well, by having screen doors.
We had screen doors, and that was about it.
There was no fan.
But the Castor River, you said?
Castor River.
It went right through your property.
It just cut through it, yeah.
We always did a lot of swimming, yeah.
Did you ever have trouble with flooding?
We lived high enough off the hill that we didn't.
Our home was always safe.
But during the flooding, it was difficult to get out, and we had to go up through fields and over a big hill to get out if the flooding was very bad, because there was no bridge across the river.
You forwarded it.
That sounds like history is important to your family.
It was.
Yeah, it is.
If you would see all my picture albums and my scrapbooks—I've got a stack of scrapbooks that high.
I don't know what I'm going to do with all of them in these days.
Now, Mark Kwan's high school was a different building.
Is it still standing?
No.
What happened to it?
They destroyed it.
That mean they tore it down when they built the other one.
They just also have a paper down there for whenever you became a school teacher, follow the requirements it was to become a school teacher.
I have that down there, too, and that's really something, too.
Have you ever seen any of that?
No.
Tell us about it.
Well, you couldn't have a boyfriend.
I can't think of all of them right now, but you couldn't wear your dress.
It had to be a certain length.
A man had to have certain clothing.
It was pretty strict.
I guess a man couldn't have a girlfriend.
A woman couldn't have a boyfriend, because it went both ways.
What about their education?
Did they have to have special training, go to a teacher's lounge?
Dad started right off high school, teaching school, because they only went to the eighth grade.
Dad started right off high school.
When you were young—let's go back for a minute—because when you were young, and you had your siblings, and you—how big was your house, and did you all share rooms?
Yes, we all shared rooms, yes.
We shared rooms together.
When we lived on the farm, we had no electricity.
We had a well.
We pumped the water.
Dad did put a pump on the well.
We pumped the well.
We raised most of our food.
We had horses.
They had to plow, and that's the way they plowed it, because—and then later, Dad did buy a tractor, because we had a big field over across—Caster River ran through our farm over there.
We had a—Mom had a gas stove.
She didn't have to cook on a wood stove.
She bought a gas stove, and we had a refrigerator, and I believe it used kerosene, but I'm not positive of that anymore, but it was a refrigerator.
It wasn't an ice box, and so he fixed us up in that line, and so it wasn't as difficult for us as it was for some people without electricity.
We heated our water in big kittles where Mom done washing.
We had—we also had a Maytag washer, and it was gasoline powered.
Now, was the pump outside, or was it inside?
Inside.
Outside.
It was one long with a long handle on it, and Dad concreted it over so us kids couldn't get in the well.
It was hand-dug well when we moved there.
He was working the mines.
Did you and your siblings help your mom with the gardening?
Yes.
We did a lot of—most of it.
Now, I wasn't 10 to 11 years old, and my brothers was younger than I, so we weren't very old, but we still did a lot of work, and Mom overseed us.
He'd come in at night and sometimes worked, and I had to too, and helped with some of it.
Did you sell any of the produce, or was it all just for— We did sell some, potatoes especially.
I can remember selling a lot of potatoes and corn from out of the fields, and yeah, took it to the store local.
That was the main thing that we did.
We took care of the garden, we fed the hogs, and we butchered our meat, raised our chickens.
What did you do with all the meat?
Well, the meat, you took it and salted the pork whenever you did it in the wintertime, and you salted it down, or you canned it.
You worked and you canned it, fried it up and canned it to preserve it, and the chickens, we killed them as we ate them.
Mom would go out there and kill the chickens, and we did it.
Would it have been beef that you had to cook and can?
Pork mostly.
Mostly pork.
Yeah.
What a huge job to cook all that.
Did a lot of that happen at one time, or did you do it throughout the year?
The meat?
Yeah.
We did it several times a year.
The chickens, we raised those, that seemed like it was about 200 at a time, and then we killed some of them, and then we took some to the store, sold them, if they got to be pulled, and we had them market for them at different times.
Did you have any favorite, thinking back to food and holidays, did you have any particular things that you did for the holidays, like did you do Thanksgiving?
We had Thanksgiving, yes.
We had big dinners on Thanksgiving.
We had a Christmas dinner, and we usually got gifts.
We had Christmas tree, and we had gifts, and Dad always said we had gifts under the tree.
It wasn't much sometimes, but we all had gifts, and always had a toy or something that we liked, and Easter was a big time for us.
We all got new clothes for Easter, always, and we always had good gifts.
Did you have a turkey at Thanksgiving?
Very few times.
I remember the first one, I can remember the first one we had.
Did you have capons or something?
No, most of chicken, chicken or beef, it might be a beef roast, because that would have been a special thing for us, yeah.
So this turkey business is kind of new.
Well, we knew it was, but we always had so much chicken, and we just never did, I remember the first one, I'll tell you a little funny story about that.
We had it, and Dad brought it in early, and so we kept it fed, but none of us could kill it.
That is a problem.
Were any of your animals, they're livestock, but weren't any of them pets like this chicken?
Yeah.
Okay, we had hogger too that way, and horses.
Horses, uh-huh.
Did you use them for transportation at all, or just for farming?
Farming, sometimes to go to town, depending on whether we had a riding horse or a work horse, sometimes to go to town, because if we had kids in the town, we had to walk, it's two and a half, three miles.
And then carry things back.
Yeah.
So did you have saddles?
Yes, they had some saddles.
So that's how you ride them?
Yeah, they had some saddles.
How about mules?
No, we didn't have any mules.
My Grandpa Starkey had mules, but we didn't have any mules, just horses.
Did you say, okay, yeah, so your mom mostly was running the household?
That's it, yeah.
Well, she worked a little while at Angelica Uniform after us children were older, but mostly just running the household.
That was a full-time job, because she served three meals a day.
Our kitchen was mopped every day, every bed was made every day.
And how many siblings you had?
I had nine brothers and sisters, just ten of us.
And we were all born within thirteen years too, so we were all little together, and so it was a job.
You know, one story I've heard a lot is people talking about when it was bath time, oftentimes it was like a big shared tub where the youngest got to go first and the oldest got to go last.
Did you have that situation, or did you have that?
Not exactly.
We all had a bath, definitely regularly.
I remember hair washing time, but we all got lined up and washed our hair, but it was always clean water, but we did more sponge-bathing, it seemed to me like.
We did have a tub bath too, but we did a lot of sponge-bathing.
Did you have a bath there, or what kind of plumbing did you have?
There was none.
So you had like an outhouse?
We had an outhouse, because we had no reason for plumbing because there was nothing there.
Even our water bucket sat on the table on the counter with a dipper in it.
It's just hard for people to imagine.
Where was the bathtub in the kitchen?
It was most of the time in the kitchen because it would be warmer.
It never occurred to me about that, yeah.
It would be warmer because we would have to eat the water and it would be warmer in there, especially in the summertime, it wouldn't matter, summertime probably went to the river.
Yeah, exactly.
Yeah, but in the wintertime, I'm sure we had a lot of those.
Did you ever have any adventures with predatory animals?
We only had a pet deer.
I think were there bears or coyotes?
No, they never bothered us.
When we moved there, there were snakes everywhere, had a lot of copperhead snakes.
So dad, whenever he said he'd take care of that, that's when he went and bought the hogs and put them out in the field out by the barns and stuff.
That pretty well took care of the snakes, the copperhead snakes.
The hogs would eat their cats.
I don't know what they did to them, but it pretty well kept them away.
I can remember him doing that.
I don't know.
That was something I remember him talking about.
I had a neighbor tell me once that if a mouse can get in, a snake can get in.
That's probably true.
We never did have any snakes in the household.
They were out in the yard.
I would kill for you out in the yard, but we never killed anyone in the house.
Nobody ever got bit by one or anything like that?
Joanne, my sister, if you know, got bit by one when she was pretty small.
What kind?
A little copperhead.
It was before we moved down to the other place.
Dad had put rocks up for us to have steps on, and it was in them rocks.
The rocks went immediately.
They had changed immediately.
She come in and told mom the snake bit her.
Mom didn't really believe her because she was so small.
They took her to the doctor then whenever they found out it swelled.
She wasn't real serious.
But that's a poisonous snake.
Yeah, it is a poisonous snake.
How did they treat her?
I don't remember.
No, I just know that it happened.
I do know they took her to the doctor.
I do remember that.
Were the rest of your siblings born at home?
Yes, we were all ten.
My grandpa was all at home, though.
Who helped you out?
The doctor.
Did your grandmother help you?
She did some, but Dad always hired someone to come in and stay with us for about six weeks.
Like a girl?
A lady.
She came in and helped us, yeah.
But the doctor came to the house?
Yes, yes.
For the birth?
Yeah.
I guess, just generally, did you have anything in common with your parents?
Did you need a doctor to come in, or did you go to the doctor when they did?
At first, you could just call them and they would come, but then in later years before, they had to go a time or two to the doctor, once or twice beforehand.
Were there home remedies for things when possible?
We didn't use a lot of home remedies.
We used some, but not a whole lot, no.
Some families did quite a bit, but we weren't, Mom wasn't much on that.
So not a lot of herbs, or mon-tea?
No, no.
What about sweet oil, I think, for ear aches?
Ear aches.
I may have used that, but I mean, something of that order.
She would come there using heat, something warm.
You were talking about stores and stuff in Marquand, was there a pharmacy or like a medical type?
The one time there was a small one, I don't know, I don't remember very much.
Well, there weren't really antibiotics until one of the sixties.
Right.
No, I know, I had pneumonia, and before they had antibiotics and- Oh, you did?
Yes.
I was very, very old.
How old?
I was in fifth grade of school.
How was it treated?
The doctor kept an eye on you?
Yes.
I was in bed for a long time, and I ended up with it the fifth time before the antibiotics came out.
Wow.
Was whooping cough a problem?
We all had whooping cough.
And all the measles, and the mumps, the chicken pox.
Oh yes, we had all those, yes.
But we then suffered a lot from it, you know, we all- Mom made us stay in the bed and took care of us, but I mean, we weren't, any of us ever got critical with it.
Was there the practice of keeping the kids in a darkened room when they had the measles?
Yes.
Did you hear about that?
Yes, yes, we were.
And that was to prevent blindness?
Eyes.
Yeah.
Was that advice from the doctor or was that just- Yes, the doctors would tell you that, yes, that was something that was supposed, you know, they knew that.
Whenever the shots came out, we always got the shots that was available.
The vaccinations.
The vaccinations, yes, that's one thing.
And when polio comes through, and we had some neighbor children that had polio, and some of them said, well, they wouldn't take their child and get polio, but we all got what we needed.
And then they got the polio.
Yeah, no, the children had the polio, the little kids had the polio earlier.
And so mom took us kids whenever it came out and gave everybody a polio shot.
I think I was already married by then, but I mean, it was its own kid.
How did it affect those kids?
Did they have to go somewhere else, get treatments, did they get hired mums or something?
Yeah, they never did, I don't think, do that.
I don't think they had it that bad.
Could they walk afterwards?
Yes.
Did it affect their physical?
One of them still lives in Mark I, pretty close to where she lived as a child.
And she's in braces, she has to wear braces on her legs and things.
But she was, what, maybe 60-something years old when she, her sister lives in Minnesota that has it, and she's still able enough to be up and walking, so they've survived pretty well.
Sure there was pain.
Oh yes, miserable.
Oh yes, they're crippled.
They were crippled.
But I do know when the shots came out, everybody, you don't hear of it much anymore, it helped that situation.
How about when kids got earaches, and we talked about sweet oil, but eventually, I mean, there weren't any antibiotics, so the only way to really get rid of an earache is to have it abscess and then burst, and then scar tissue over it, it kind of heals, but it affects your hearing.
Had you had any experience with that?
I had a brother one night, and the rivers was up, and we had a big old hill to cross over, and when Dad came in from work, he was just screaming, and they started with him to the doctor, and it broke, and so they come back home.
There was no need to go then to the doctor, because there was no...
Right.
Oh, how about discipline?
Here's one.
Oh, this one.
My mother did the discipline.
Dad wasn't home a whole lot, so I told her, you always work, and her discipline was to sit you down in a chair.
Well, that sounds like time out.
And she didn't mean to get up either, and she didn't mean for you to say anything either, just sit in a chair.
That was about it.
Yeah.
And if she ever scolded you, you knew that was coming next.
She failed once in a while, but not very often, not very often.
Did you say how many grades did you go as far as...
I went through the ninth.
Ninth grade.
Mm-hmm.
What do you remember as far as being a kid?
What did you do for fun?
You would swim, but what did you do in particular?
You worked a lot.
I mostly, I was busy.
We did read.
Mom read, and we played games, and we listened to radio.
See, we had no TV.
We had a battery-powered radio.
We had that, and I just can't remember, except maybe just playing out in the yard.
I can't remember doing a lot of...
We had a swing.
Dad had a swing tied to it fixed on a tree.
We had a swing.
What were your favorite radio programs?
Country music.
Country music.
I can remember my dad teaching school.
Wow.
Tell us about that.
Well, the one that I can remember of, I was only four or five years old, and he taught up here at Crossroads School that made me think up here.
And I didn't like it up there.
I told him I didn't like it up there.
I can remember that.
I wasn't old enough to go to school yet.
So they sent me back to my grandpa and grandma's one.
That's kind of a sad story, but that's the way it was.
He said he made, Dad made $95 a month to work up, to teach school up there.
I seen that here.
You were pretty close to your grandparents.
I was to my grandparents.
Yeah, my mom and dad, yeah, I was very close.
I was my other parents.
In fact, I worked in the store with my grandpa until he passed away, but I was actually closer to my mom and dad's mother, Dad.
What were some of the things your grandmother taught you?
How to make quilts.
Cool.
For one thing, how to sew, and how to can.
What did you use for batting?
They used a cotton batting at that time.
It wasn't like it is today, and you had to fold it real close together.
So it was just little pieces of cotton in between?
No, it was in a sheet of some kind of a form.
I don't know.
It was knitted together some way, but we had a cotton batting.
So it was a big square?
Yeah, big pieces.
But that's all I remember.
Did anyone ever use wool?
I don't think so.
I don't remember them using wool, sometimes a blanket.
I've seen them put blankets between them, especially if they tacked them.
But if you used that cotton, it had to be sewed real close.
Do you have any of those quilts?
Yes, I do.
I have one on my bed right now.
And it was one you made?
One that I cut out the pieces, and she pieced it, and I quilted it.
I kept her, after she got disabled a lot of times, for a week or two, sometimes as high as a month at a time.
And she and I sat and quilted after I quit work.
I quit work after my daughter died, and we did a lot of that.
We did a lot of things like that together.
But she taught me to quilt, piece quilts, and I just did them all.
Did she have a big room where the quilt frame was permanently set up?
No, no.
It hung from the ceiling.
She rolled it up and down.
Did your grandmother tell you any stories about her childhood or anything?
Not that I can remember.
Her life, to put it well, mostly was in farming.
It was taking care of the farm, and where she lived, and raising vegetables.
She did a lot of the gardening, but that's about all I can remember.
Were your grandparents born in this area, or had they come from somewhere else?
My grandma was born where they lived, where we first lived.
And my grandpa, I think, was born down more in Bullinger County area, down off of 34, I think.
But then, how they met or what, I don't know the story there.
And my grandpa, Starkey, was born, they were born right in the area they always lived.
And my grandma was an orphan, a faithful orphan, a lady took her when her mother died and raised her and her brother.
Which grandma was this?
That, my grandma Starkey.
She was a mouser, and she was a faithful orphan.
And then her dad then married again, but they still left them, them two older ones, out.
They were out, and they never went back home, never took them back home.
And then she had a couple more siblings, but she kept up with them, but that was all.
And she was a church worker.
My grandpa and grandma Starkey were good big church workers.
They went to the Baptist church, and mom and dad, and mom and dad went to the Methodist church, but they all mingled together.
What would you say was the difference between the Methodists and the Baptists?
Very little.
Whatever was closer?
Yeah, just everywhere, starting very little, very little.
Not enough to fight over.
And what about anything that, did you have any nearby neighbors?
They weren't close.
They were probably half a mile.
Okay.
Do you remember any particular goings on in the community from that time, in festivals or get-togethers, or what about church maybe?
We attended church at the Mark I Methodist church.
And when we did get to go, that's where we attended.
And most of the time, we managed, some of us children, Lisa Stangley, my grandfather and grandmother Ward lived in town, well both my grandparents lived in Mark I at the time.
And we would go stay with them, the kids especially would, and go to church.
But a lot of times mom and dad didn't get to go.
Did you travel, how did you get around traveling once?
Dad had a car.
He had a car.
Oh, okay.
And sometimes a pickup truck, or a truck with a bed on it, wasn't a pickup, it was a bed.
We had one car too, no telephone either.
So your communications was very poor and when a river was up, you were stuck.
Right, very different.
So did you consider Frederictown the big city?
No, they never considered that.
Compared to Mark I?
No, not growing up, no.
How big was Mark I, do you remember?
350 at that time, bigger then, and as clean as a pen back then.
And the school was very thorough, we had two, and first and second grade was together, the third, fourth and fifth was together, and the sixth, seventh and eighth was together with one teacher before you went into high school.
And I was just thinking, I hadn't asked this before if anyone, but thinking about Mark I and Frederictown as being sort of close enough that there was some back and forth, did the people that were living in Mark I, were there a lot of farmers there?
There were farmers and loggers.
Farmers and loggers.
Mm-hmm.
I'm guessing a few maybe came up and worked in the mines.
Yes, they did work in the mines too.
And the train went through there at that time too, also.
And they had a big tie yard there, and they had the streets, Mark I, they were stacked full of ties, and they loaded them on the cars to haul out there.
I forgot about the train.
Do you remember anything else about the train, or the train yard, or any?
Well, the train, the engineer of the train was actually a cousin of ours and lived in Bismarck, and he would go by and always laugh and wave at us, the children, because we were close enough we could see us.
But Mark I was self-sufficient then?
It was pretty well, yes, yes.
It's so different than it is today.
About how many stores were there?
Oh, I even had a picture of them.
Like a department store?
There was two or three restaurants.
There was, I can't think of, they had clothing, and that home and store had clothing and shoes and groceries and material and just everything in that store.
It was pretty well self-sufficient.
Do you think the restaurants were to accommodate people who would arrive on the train?
No, they had a hotel for that, and the people that ran the hotel took care of that in the name of Reagan, and they still have the table there, and any ward still has that fixed up or like they did whenever the trains would come through there.
Was it like a full-on hotel or like a bed and breakfast or what?
They serve three meals a day.
Okay.
Two-story?
Huh?
Two-story hotel?
It's at least two stories, yes, it's where you can go in there and do it yet.
I think I have, yeah, Danny Ward gave me a tour of your hotel.
Danny Ward, yeah.
Uh-huh.
Danny Ward is my first cousin.
Oh, okay.
Now we have some other questions you can ask.
Okay.
You talked about the trains, what about any other public transportation, buses?
There was no buses, no buses like Gary Hound or nothing like that, nothing like that.
The school buses, we did have some school buses that picked up the country children.
They had one that may make two or three routes, you know, but other than that, I don't remember anything.
So the Marquand School District was maybe bigger than it is today?
No, it's smaller then than it is today because they had some country schools.
Like Buckhorn had their school, Mouser's community had their school, so we only, so they didn't have all that.
And then Zion, what do you call it, Zion area, it wasn't there either from down in 67, wasn't involved at that time.
Here's a question we haven't really heard much in previous interviews, but do you recall any interesting community members?
As of what they're speaking of, I've had Sunday school teachers that were very outstanding.
My grandpa ran a grocery store until he died.
Homans were very outstanding people in the area.
They owned not only the grocery store and clothing store, but they owned also the funeral, they were funeral directors, or I guess you would call them, they had a hearse and took care of that and donated a lot of things to the community.
Was there a doctor?
No, they ran this grocery store.
No, I mean, was there a doctor there?
Yes, there had been.
There wasn't in my lifetime, but there had been doctors there.
And there was a little drug store one time there, I can remember.
Always had a post office, a bank.
That sounds really pleasant.
My grandpa had also, back before he had the store, a big sawmill there, a very active sawmill, and he later on built his home there.
And then that's where Mom and Dad lived until they moved in with me.
Did World War II have much of an effect on the community?
A lot of people went to World War II, a lot of people, there were several killed from the area.
We didn't really ask about during the Depression, did the community, do you remember people helping one another, or was there any kind of?
I was born in 35, and I don't remember, but I have heard them talk about feeding the people.
And we were talking about these truck patches.
They did that, and they fed a lot of people with this type of thing, and they also always had cows, and they milked cows, and they fed a lot of people.
It was desperate.
Things were desperate.
Were there any important community traditions, something that happened every year?
Not that I can think of, right?
If it was, I probably wasn't involved in it.
Living in a country, sometimes you wasn't involved in it.
Maybe church?
The church had always had different things that we did.
We always participated in everything that was going on at church.
Did a lot of the community life center around church activities, I guess?
Yes, yes.
That was your entertainment.
I guess you'd say your social life was your church's.
And as a teenager, I can remember going to different country churches, and we'd all get together and just go as a group to the fact that they were having a revival or something.
We did a lot of that to all the little community churches.
That was special.
Uh-huh, yes.
That was special.
I remember, I imagine.
Probably.
What about—did you have any extended family?
You had your siblings.
What about any cousins?
Anything like that?
My dad had one brother, had three children, and my mother had one brother, or two brothers, and one of them had three, and the other one was the Ward family, and they had thirteen.
Oh, wow.
But they were all younger than I. I mean, the thirteen were.
They were more my children's age, because in fact, Irvin, my uncle, was actually nine months younger than me.
And then the other Ward children, we communicated with those, Irvin's children—I'm sorry, Elwood's children, and Clyde and Rosie was my dad's brother, and they had three children.
They're all deceased now.
But you, you're older than your uncle.
Yes.
I'm nine months older than my uncle.
I'm nine months older than my uncle.
That's just an unusual situation.
Yeah.
But my mother, I was born when my mother was sixteen years old, too.
Wow.
What about Fourth of July?
Fourth of July, yeah, we—sometimes they would have a picnic in Mark One, and we would go up there to the picnic.
They'd have like a—sometimes they'd have a little carnival, and we would go up to it.
They played bingo.
I remember playing bingo.
My mom liked to play bingo.
I remember a few things like that.
Soda was a big deal then.
Back then, ice cream was a big deal because you didn't have much of it.
But something else I didn't mention was my grandmother, Starkey, owned one of the restaurants out there for a number of years.
And she not only—today you'd be put out of business because she raised most of her vegetables that she served in the restaurant.
She was really a good cook, and she ran that restaurant for a number of years right there on Main Street, right by the Holman store.
I can remember her doing that.
She had a pinball machine in there.
They had an electric there.
Had a pinball machine in there, and they had a music of—what do they call them, music— Like a jukebox?
Jukebox.
Jukebox.
This would have been in the fifties?
Mm-hmm.
It was before the fifties, because I was married in 1952.
It was, let's say, probably in the forties.
They had that back in there.
I was just a little girl, and I can remember her being in that restaurant.
And I can remember the first woman I ever seen smoke, too.
Scandalous.
Yeah.
Mm-hmm.
Did you work in the restaurant or help here?
Oh, I'd go in there and help her wash dishes and things like that.
I was up there quite a bit in the restaurant with her sometimes.
It was interesting, though.
The people that would come in the restaurant, were they mostly Marquand residents, or did folks on the train come in?
Well, mostly Marquand residents who were busy.
People was out logging and things like that.
They were busy.
They were busy.
Mm-hmm.
And everything was home-cooked, too.
Sounds wonderful.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Everything was home-cooked.
You don't really get that in restaurants, do you?
Uh-uh.
Mm-hmm.
What about the—in Marquand, was there anything for the kids?
Were there dances, a 4-H club, any kind of activities going on?
Mm-hmm.
Was dancing allowed?
Dancing was a no-no.
Oh.
A no-no.
Oh.
I mean, it was a no-no.
And the—I don't know really anything.
I can't think of anything.
The Royal Neighbors was an insurance company, and they had different things there, like the Halloween parties and things like that for the kids.
But other than that, the church activities was pretty well the only thing that you didn't hear kids getting in trouble.
You said you liked country music.
Mm-hmm.
Did anyone in your family play instruments?
Did you have music?
My brother played steel guitar.
Steel guitar.
Mm-hmm.
My dad played horn, triplet, and banjo, but he didn't practice it after, you know, when I was a kid, for a little, but he did.
He played it in college, and was in the band and stuff, but he never played it.
I can remember him playing a time or two, but very little.
He went to college.
My dad.
Yeah.
He had a hundred—he said there were 119 hours, and I said 120, so I was pretty close.
He went to Cape.
And Flat River.
At Flat River at that time, it was called Flat River.
But he ended up, most of the time, at Cape.
He worked during the summer in the saw mills, and went to school in the winter.
Well, it sounds like he was qualified to be a teacher.
Yeah.
He went to work in the mines.
He ran a tax office.
He'd done many things.
You knew, I think, Tina knew my dad or not.
I don't know.
I knew him.
Yeah.
He was always good to me.
That's your love of math from your father.
And Mom, too.
Oh, she liked it.
She loved math, too.
But not as much as Dad.
Some of these questions are really interesting.
For example, yeah, like, what kind of crime did you have?
What?
What kind of crime did you have?
According to your father, he said it was just petty theft.
That's true.
You didn't hear of much crime back then.
You didn't hear of it.
Well, you could walk the streets of Mark One any time, a day or night, and you didn't have to worry about it.
It said mostly the theft was chickens.
That's true.
They'd go in the chicken houses and steal the chickens and take them out to the river bank and cook them.
Oh.
You'd heard that, probably.
Yeah.
And what about company?
Like, did you have people over or did you just visit them when you went to church?
Well, we always had a house full.
And I can tell you something else.
My dad, another story, my dad was in town one night, one afternoon, as he came in from work.
There was a little boy there that didn't have no shoes on his feet.
It was winter time, or if he had shoes at home.
At your house?
It was at the grocery store, home and store.
He bought that boy a pair of shoes and brought him home with him.
And he lived with us until he went to the high school, until he went to the service.
Where were his parents?
He was just abandoned?
They were just so poor that they couldn't help themselves.
My dad and mother finished racing that boy.
It was only 10 of us, but that went to 11.
And he stayed with us until he went to service, lived with us.
And when you get out and work on the farm there, my dad had a farm after we moved into town.
We moved into town, I think I said that when I was in high school, started the high school.
After we got electricity in the farm, we moved into town.
Dad built a house, and he stayed, and dad, if he went down to the farm to work, do anything, dad would pay him.
Did he ever have any contact with his parents?
Yes, he did.
He did.
They just let your babies?
Yeah.
They just, they knew.
And what about later on?
Did he stay around, or do you still know?
He did until, yes, he contacted and stayed close to mom and dad, and he passed away, oh, I'd say 15 years ago.
And he lived in St.
Louis, and he worked on the garage, a mechanic's garage, for diesels and things like that, and made good living for his family.
But he was still in touch with you all the time?
Oh, yes, definitely.
And his children come and visit mom and dad as long as they live.
Did he have brothers and sisters?
Yes, yes.
But only he came to live with you?
Yeah, only he.
Now, mom and dad, whenever they were out of food at home, they fed them their lunch.
See, we didn't have a lunch program at school, and they would, and mom and dad would fix lunches and have enough food there that they could come to the house and the children could eat their lunch at there.
It's hard to tell how many families.
You came home for lunch.
Yes, from school.
That's different, yeah.
Coming back to the house.
Yeah, when we lived in town, we did that.
Right.
Yeah.
When did you learn to drink?
Oh, when did I learn to drive, let me think.
My daughter was two years old.
So, eighteen.
Eighteen.
I don't know, let's see, my daughter.
My daughter was two years old, let's see, hmm, I have to stop and think.
See, there was six, two, four, six years between, seventeen, about twenty-three, twenty-four, about twenty-five years old.
Okay.
So, you had been married for nine years.
Yeah, yeah.
About twenty-five years old.
What kind of car was it?
I don't remember.
No?
It says here, your father had a Model T. Uh-huh.
So, but that was his car, so you went out.
Yeah, that was his car, yeah.
But I never driven, didn't drive anything from home down there.
In fact, my husband made me learn to drive.
He said, you have to.
He said, these kids have got to go school.
I was glad I did after I moved to Annapolis.
Yeah.
Right.
So, the question for your father was, what was the greatest event when you were a child?
And he said, when World War I ended and people celebrated for three days.
Uh-huh.
What would you say for you?
Hmm.
What was the question really?
What was the greatest event?
Greatest event.
I guess maybe that means for the nation or something.
I don't know.
Just a memory.
Yeah.
I don't really know.
I had an aunt who said that every Independence Day, you would hear booms go off from early morning to just the whole day.
There would constantly be explosions, gunfire or something.
People would just be shooting, making loud noises, I guess, instead of firecrackers.
We had a lot of interest and worked hard in a celebration Annapolis had.
I think it was a year or a century, I don't remember what year it was, and the men grew beards and we wore old dresses and that was a big thing.
Was it 100 years or 200?
I don't remember.
I can remember celebrating it and it's been several years ago now and there was a lot going on and it was an enjoyable time.
But I think the main thing I think of growing up, it was Christmastime.
We all get together at Christmastime.
We still do today.
Was it just on the one day?
We go on one day and we all get together and last year we had 92.
Did you have to rent a hall?
We did.
We rented the building at Mark I, the community center at Mark I last year.
But there for several years we went out to the Pinecrest Nazarene kitchen there, a dining hall, and rented it.
Several years.
And the first year that I had mom and dad, I had it at my house and I only had 102.
So we decided that was too much. 102 in the wintertime in your house.
Wow.
In December.
And we always had it the Sunday before Christmas.
Oh, okay.
That was a big celebration for all of us.
My sons say we can't change the date.
It has to be the Sunday before Christmas.
I guess they'll have to keep all of that.
Christmas is on Monday?
Still have you had it on Christmas Eve?
We have, but we've backed it up.
We're going to count just too many generations now involved in it.
But we had 92.
I think that's pretty good for my dad and mother to be gone for a while.
But we had 92, so that's a good cry.
Would you rather be 13 today or 13 back when you were 13?
That I don't know.
Your dad says today.
Yeah, I know he does.
Because things was more convenient.
Right.
But see, I had the conveniences as far as that.
And I think today there's so much crime and things out there today.
And the children face so much more that we didn't face back then.
Liquor was the main thing that we were worried about, not drugs and all these other things.
So I'm not sure.
I think I was better off 13 back then.
I really do.
I think the world was safer.
New challenges today.
We have to beat them though.
We have to be able to solve them.
I hope we can.
But I think that as far as behavior and things, I think it was better as far as that was concerned.
It's more simple.
I remember the only thing mom would warn us about when we'd leave home was if you have a drink sitting on the table, and you go to the restroom or leave it, don't come back and touch it.
That is the advice that they still give to people.
Like my daughters went to Truman today.
That's like an ironclad rule.
Yeah, but she would tell us that back then.
But then it was concerned of liquor.
But now it's drugs and many, many things.
So when you were finished with school, what were your next things that you did?
When I finished school, I was dating my husband at the time.
And he stayed at home and take care of mom a lot.
And then after that, I was married when I was 16.
And he was 19.
And we moved here to Fredericktown.
And he went to work for Missouri Natural Gas.
And he worked there until he passed away.
But we lived in Farmington.
And then also, then they moved us to Annapolis.
And we lived there for 21 years.
That's where we lived whenever he passed away.
And how many children did you have?
I had three children.
I had two boys and a girl.
I lost my girl.
It's been 43 years, but I still miss her.
She was 16 years old.
She was killed in a car wreck.
A leave in our house had grown up to a long march, which was shopping.
And it was just bad down there.
And she was with other children, other young people.
And it's just one of those things that happened.
She lived eight days, but she never came to.
I have other sons.
I have two sons.
And one of them is a minister.
Are they still in the area?
Are they still in the area?
One of them, they both were until about six weeks ago or so.
And Gary has moved to Dixon, Tennessee, where he is a caretaker of a camp, a religious camp.
He's in the ground area.
And he's been down there since the first of February.
That's when his work cycle started.
And my other son lives about a mile off from me.
And he had worked over at the church camp over here and built a lot of the buildings for several years.
And then he is driving a truck right now.
He's 66 years old, but he couldn't stay.
Did you say where you worked?
I have been a teller.
I was a teller at the Annapolis Bank.
And then I went to Arnton Bank.
And then when I moved here, I worked the first exchange until they closed.
And then after that, I worked Hallmark Cards at Walmart.
Well, that's working at banks is a good place, if you like math.
Yeah.
Well, there used to be a Hallmark store in Frederick in the 80s.
I didn't do it.
It was in the 90s and they had them at the Walmart store.
So that's where I worked at.
I worked for a Hallmark company though.
Oh, okay.
So you took care of, you sort of managed the cards at the time.
Yeah, the cards came in there and I took care of them.
And this was at the first Walmart?
Uh-huh, yeah.
Whenever they went to the new one, I told them I didn't want to move there because they were going to make me work on Sundays and holidays.
And I said, no, it wasn't worth it to me.
You said your husband worked for?
Missouri National Gas.
He worked there for 33 years, I believe it was.
Did you say how you met your husband?
I met him at school.
Okay.
And a church.
Okay.
School and church.
Uh-huh.
And he was of a large family of six.
Okay.
But you moved around to the different communities.
Was that difficult?
No, it wasn't for me.
We moved to Frederick Town because this is where he started at.
We moved here and we lived here two years.
And they moved us to Farmington and we lived there 10 years.
And then it transferred him to Annapolis, which was a small town, of a little over three or four hundred.
And we really did like it there.
And our children got a very good education in that school.
Did you have to buy a house?
We did buy a house.
We did buy a house.
We first had to rent because there wasn't nothing to buy.
And then they built some homes because the plant had went in there and then we bought our home.
But the city was your favorite?
Annapolis?
Yeah, we enjoyed Annapolis.
Now, I love Farmington.
When I lived in Farmington, I liked Farmington.
In fact, I thought after my husband died that I would go back to Farmington, but I thought now that won't work.
Because you don't go back, that don't work.
My family was all here, so that wouldn't work.
So you came back to this area?
Yeah, I came back to Cherokee Pass and built me a home.
In fact, I first lived with my mother and dad for a year because they advised me not to just jump into something.
And my husband didn't want me to live in Annapolis because it was 40 miles to the doctor.
And so I left there, I was so lucky he asked me to, and I moved in with mom and dad.
And then I later built me a home at Cherokee Pass.
And then the highway to this apartment didn't like where we were sitting at.
So they bought it and I moved about a mile or two down the road.
So I'm still in Cherokee Pass, but not in my new home.
My dad and mother traveled the last years.
After my daughter died, we didn't have any children at home, and mom and dad didn't have any children at home, and his parents were already gone.
And we teamed up with them, we bought a camper, a traveling camper, and we stayed in the United States.
That's awesome.
The southeastern part is the only state that we weren't in.
So how long were you gone?
Oh, sometimes we'd be gone a week, sometimes two weeks, sometimes three.
Clarence's job, us being the only one in Annapolis, he accumulated days off.
And he ended up with seven weeks a year that he had to take off.
And his office was at the house.
So we got out and traveled.
Wow, you saw the whole country.
We mostly just traveled and seen the parks and all that.
You think that's good?
Yeah.
Thank you.
So many interesting things.
Thank you.
Well, I think Tina probably knew a lot of them.
Well, actually, I learned a lot.
Did you?
Yeah, very, very interesting.
You've seen a lot of changes, haven't you?
Yes, I have.
Thank you so much.