Glenda Pierce

My name is Glenda.

My maiden name was Robinson.

I was married to John Skaggs who passed away and then I was married to Jud Pierce who also has passed away at this time.

When were you born?

I was born July the 2nd, 1934.

July the 2nd, this year I'll be 85 years old.

I had six brothers and sisters.

I had two brothers and four sisters.

There were seven children in the family and I was born north of Petton Junction on a farm and a farmhouse where we lived until I was about five years old and I remember one thing about the farmhouse where our car was parked in a little garage was about the length of a football field from the house and we got ready one day to go to church.

We all got out to the car and realized we didn't have the little sister. She was back at the house with her dress tail under a table leg to keep her from crawling around and everybody thought the other one had her and we were without her so we immediately went back to get her but back then you didn't have play pins, you didn't have strollers, you didn't have pumpkin seeds so you put their dress tail under a table leg to keep them from crawling away.

That's genius.

Yeah now that's the first thing I remember of where that was. We were all born there in that area and then we moved out on highway 51 north of Patton Junction.

My father started a filling station on on that street road whatever and we lived there until I was nine years old when we moved to Fredericktown. But while we were there the thing one of the things I remember best about that is again my youngest sister was still very young and we had a truck garden what you called a truck garden you know we grew vegetables for neighbors too and when we'd go to work in the truck garden my mother and all of us would work in the truck garden while my dad was at the filling station and in order to keep the little one from crawling away they sat her in a horse collar so you know she would fit in a horse collar and couldn't crawl around then she was a small baby.

And like I said they had no play pins no strollers nothing to hold them so that's what they did, they put them in a horse collar that's what my mother did put her in a horse collar to keep her there while we worked in the garden. And I remember I started school of course when I was there I was going to this little one-room school at Patton Junction and they started me when I just turned five and my older siblings were going so they sent me with them and I went there four years until we moved to Fredericktown.

And a couple of things I remember at school that are kind of strange one of our teachers was named Carl Fadler and he was originally from down there the Fadler family but they were up here later and he had lost a leg when he was 12 years old and I don't remember what had caused that but he was our teacher and he just got out of high school, he didn't have any college, he was 18 years old and he was our teacher.

Well one of the years that I was there one of the four years we were it was snow and ice and we were out playing in the yard or on the driveway and he was in the car running after us he was chasing us around the around the parking lot with his car, 18 years old.

And then another thing I remember is it was just me and a boy called Lee Grimestaff in one grade in the same grade and you had double seats back then some of the some of the schools had the desk with double seats so we sat in the same room. And one day we had to go up we had to be punished and I can't remember if it was Carl Fadler or one of the other teachers Bessie Crites was another one but anyhow to punish us they made us the two of us go up and stand in front of the class with our noses together. A boy and a girl so you can imagine about the second grade that that was really punishment.

But then we also had the seat we sat in had a broken place it kind of separated when you sit down on it so they knew there was a book salesman coming that day and our teacher and that was same teacher and a couple of the eighth grade boys decided that they'd play a trick on him. He was a big big heavy man huge so they separated that crack with some rocks so they stood open till he sat on it and the rocks fell out and pinched his rear, and they thought that was really quite a trick, that they did that day. Which it was it was onry.

But other than that when I lived out on 51 I don't remember too much. I do remember that what we used to take for lunch most every day my mother would have sweet potatoes baking on the wood stove overnight and we had a baked sweet potato and a fresh baked biscuit with butter on it, because we had our own butter and everything. And that was our lunch we'd take to school. And I, the best I remember, just just about every day is what we had.

One other thing I remember is while we were living there my father wasn't making anything out of the filling station and he closed it up and he went to Fort Leonard Wood and helped build the army camp at Fort Leonard Wood. He was a carpenter and he went there and he'd stay two weeks at a time and come back so we had no car or anything. And one night my youngest sister who's six years younger than me fell against the wood stove in the living room and her palms left places on the stove. Well, we had nothing and my oldest brother who's 10 years older than me. walked from there to to Patton Junction where they had a little kind of a store of a thing a little neighborhood store to get vicks to put on her hands to ease the burn on her hands. Now that's about the only thing I remember of back then.

After that my dad got a job with St. Jolette Company as a carpenter and we moved to Frederictown and that was when I was nine years old and I started fifth grade in Frederictown.

Did you as far as the burns did you ever use like just cold water to plunge her hands in to ease the...

Oh yeah, yeah. I think mom did that. But it was it had taken the palm, the skin off the palm and so she knew she needed to do something different and back then it was cloverleaf salve or Vicks. That's what you used for everything. That's what my dad would put put on our chest if we had a cold or something.

The other remedy they they used if we had an earache he would blow smoke in our ears to ease it the warmth of the smoke he'd smoke a cigarette or a pipe which he didn't normally but he would and blow smoke in our ears. And the funny part of that was we had a lot of earaches and a lot of toothaches. And they would doctor our toothache but I never saw a dentist till I was 15 years old. And my dad used to get really angry when we'd cry at night with the tooth, toothache. You know, we did, a lot.

So many, many years later my mom called one night and she said I want you to come over. She said get a hold of your other two sisters that live in Frederictown come over. And I said what for and she said just come over, I want you to see. And we got over there and my dad had a toothache and my mother called us so we could see what dad was like with a toothache. So uh that much I remember about it.

Did you use anything special for the toothache?

I can't remember.

Clove oil or something?

I don't know what we did for his. I know no he just he just put vicks in her mouth or in her nose and that was supposed to help it. And I don't even remember if we had aspirin or not. We of course didn't have indoor plumbing. We didn't have electricity, none of that. I mean I'm talking about almost 80 years ago 75 to 80 years ago.

So about how many miles was it to go from your house to Patton Junction.

About two miles, I figure it was, I tried to figure up recently because I started going down to Patton to the saddle club grounds where they have what they call happy old people's. And they have a dinner and bingo once a month and and I started going down there. And so I started trying to figure out just about how far he walked and best I would could come up with is about two miles.

And I just can't get over your teacher who played a trick on a book salesman, how mischievous, well you can just see being 18.

Yeah he was, he was quite a quite a guy and I knew him up until the day he died. I when I moved to Fredericktown and then grew up I got acquainted with him and his family and one of his sons now is a real good friend of one of my children now.

But uh yeah we moved to Fredericktown when I was nine. I can't, I don't, well I remember when my dad had the filling station, he had a man, his name was Earl Mills. And he delivered the gasoline down there all the time. And I was terrified of him, I was absolutely terrified. And he would bring me treats and things trying to you know get, well one day when he came, now they tell me this I don't really remember this, but my mom and my sisters told me, one day when he came I was so frightened that I got in dad's car and locked all of the doors. And they couldn't convince me how after he left, couldn't convince me how to unlock the door, so I could get out you know, and I was even more terrified then you know. And they said I was sitting there with my arms straight out on the steering wheel bracing myself you know. But they eventually had to break a window to get to me. They finally did that and I was so, so frightened it was so terrible.

But and then we moved to Fredericktown in September after I turned nine in July in September and I started, not, ah, fifth grade. I was younger than everybody else because I'd started at five except one other girl that lived around the corner from where we moved. And she was the first person I met, she was in my grade. And now 76 years later we see each other every two weeks. We've been friends for 75 plus years, and best friends. We lived together in St.Louis when we worked there and all of that. But that's where I met my first real close friend and that's when I moved there at nine, nine years old. And as it happened she had started school at four. So she wasn't going to be nine until November. So she was even younger. So all through our school years we were the two youngest students in our classes. youngest of all of them.

Now that's up to Fredericktown. And then Fredericktown, I remember, again, we didn't have indoor plumbing. We did have electricity and the first house was on High Street in Fredericktown and we did have electric. I remember that.

And of course that was just two or three blocks from school so I went home every day for lunch and once in a while I'd ask some other little kid to go with me and and have lunch with me. And I never thought anything about it my mother would have maybe corn bread and beans you know well, some of these kids never heard of corn bread and beans. You know because they didn't grow up on farms and didn't grow up as poor as I was, because we were poor.

And a story that I tell all the time has something to do with this. My oldest, my brothers are the oldest one was 10 years older and one was eight years older, two years. Then it's two years down to my sister Wanda Green, who passed away the eighth of this month. And then my other sister was four years older than me. And then it's four years down to me and then four years down to my next sister who was two years older than the younger one. And so I said to them one time, why is there two years between every one of the family except me and there's four years in front of me, four years behind and my dad was real dry with it, real funny, but dry. He said well it took four years to get you and it took another four years to decide if we wanted to do that again. So he really had a sense of humor and he always told me that my mother didn't like me as much as all the other kids. He'd say she doesn't like you. But I mean, I said to him one day, why? He said because I named you after my old girlfriend. And I asked my mother, she said that's true he named you after his old girlfriend. And he had dated my mother, this is going back something else, maybe I'm backtracking. He had a first date with my mother on her 17th birthday. And while they were out on this date, she had an older sister who had six little children, a baby and then five bigger ones. And her husband had gone off and left her with a tramp. And she was driving a horse and buggy, and a man came out of a side road with one of the very few automobiles they had back then and blew his horn and frightened the horses and they ran away and threw her out of the wagon and broke her neck. So there were six, that was my mother's birthday, her first date with my dad and there were six children that were orphaned that day, same as. So each each one was taken by some member of the family or something and my mom and dad, after they got married, they took the youngest one. He happened to be a year and a half older than my brother but they took him and raised him. But six different families took those children and raised him as their own.

And later, years when I was married to John Skaggs, and his dad died, Paul Skaggs passed away, we were going through his papers and he was the one driving the car that honked and, and frightened the horse that ran away and killed my aunt. Just strange things, you know.

Your husband's father...

Yeah my father-in-law at the time, yeah. And he was uh, my mother-in-law was going to school in Cape, she was a teacher, and she was going back for summer courses, and he was taking her back to cape in this new car that he got, and of the few cars that anybody had, and he was driving her around to show her the car and drove out of the side road with his horn honking and frightened my aunt's horses. And then we found out, and as I said earlier her husband had left he was a tramp. You know like they had tramps back then. We used to have tramps would come to the back door and ask for something to eat, and my mother would fix a sandwich and a glass of water and take it out. And she wouldn't let him inside but take it to the back porch, well that's what he was doing now. Well Skaggs's father then got a hold of him and paid him a hundred dollars not to sue for anything over his wife's death or his kids. So he came out with a hundred dollars and nobody else got anything. And we found the papers on that after Paul Skaggs died. So that was kind of a shocker to to all of us. but it truly did happen so that's that's up to about the time that I started school in Fredericktown.

I remember one time when we were coming to Fredericktown from Patton, before we moved there that down there where they had the original Azalea festival park you know where that was yes we came up on a terrible terrible accident. Not us, we weren't in it, came up on it. And they were like three people dead out there on. On the grass you know. My mother was trying to find blankets or coats to cover them up and everything. And I remember that quite well. And the reason I remember it was because they were bringing me, come to think of it, I went to a dentist sooner, I was having my front tooth was really bad hurting me. And dr mcdavid was the dentist in Fredericktown at that time. And his office was above the Sonderman furniture building, you know which one?

Yes.

Okay Dr Mcdavid's office was up there and he was rough and they brought me to the dentist and he did a root canal with no medication so I never forgot that. When I didn't go back the dentist saw us 15 years old I'm sure because I was afraid to. He was really rough you know. But that's all we had that's the only dentist we had. And I do remember that.

And then I remember in later years they told us that Dr Mcdavid's wife had a nephew that was a well-known movie star that came to town a lot. Well he did. He came to our classroom one time and I met him. And it was I i don't know if any either one of you remember William Holden.

Yeah.

That was Dr Mcdavid's wife's nephew. And he spent a lot of time in Fredericktown. Back then. You know back then. And he was probably 22 or 23 years old at the time and very popular and good looking and all of that. He was well known. But that was a side thing that I found out afterwards that that's who that was after I met him. Then I didn't like him too much because he was dr mcdavid's nephew. Probably why I didn't, but yeah.

And then after I came up Fredericktown it was pretty confusing to me because i'd been in little one-room school with eight grades you know while I was in one grade all everybody else was in the same grade that I was. And it was confusing and my two younger sisters the one just below me was four years younger, had just started school. The other one wasn't in school yet, but the one, dean my sister that had started school, contracted scarlet fever. And she couldn't go to school and they quarantined the house so the people that lived next door let me and my other sisters who were still in school too, live with the people next door. It was uh John and I can't think of her name, Walker. He was a city, city patrolman or whatever they had then.

Weren't they worried about the quarantine for you to go over there?

Well I don't know but that's, they took us in. They took you know so that we could go ahead and go to school and dad could work, you know. And my mother would, get fix food and bring it over there so that she didn't have to feed us all the time. But anyhow we lived with them for about three weeks. Well then my sister missed that whole year of school after that. Uh I would, they tried to get her to go to school and they'd try to get me to take her to school. And i'd have to drag her around about a block her crying and everything so i'd take her back home. So they kept her out for a year. And then she started the next year. So she happened to be a year behind in school. But anyhow that was some of our first experiences when we got there.

And we lived on that house on high street for, I can't remember, it's about five years. And then we my dad bought a house up on a hill next door to what was called the cobalt mines here. And you know the mine that's being rejuvenated now and there's a house up there pretty close to it, my dad bought that house and we lived there for a couple years. And he built a new house down on the road in front of that one. And so I lived there almost all through my high school years until my senior year and then they bought a house in Fredericktown. In fact now it's what is now uh Hill Insurance, Hill's Insurance. Catty-corner across from Domino pizzas. And yeah it was a big two-story house at the time and so my senior year is when we lived there.

So they tore that down.

Oh yeah they tore it down, yeah. It was a good a big old house had the porch around half of it and I used to say you know I could go out one door and then dad wouldn't know I came in the other door. But didn't do that many times. But it was a nice big old house and we had a lot of sleepover parties with the girls in high school back then.

I don't, I don't remember too much about my fifth grade through eighth grade but I, I remember more from my high school years than anything, you know then I began to you know remember things. Anyhow I, I remember uh my first boyfriend his name was Jim Roseberry. And when I was 15 my sister who lived out in the country near village creek, they had a house out there. She had her first baby at home a little boy my first niece or nephew or anything. And at noontime that day same day Jim Roseberry was out of high school, he was five years older than me, he came to school and picked me up and took me out to see the new baby. So I got to see my first niece, nephew whatever, you know, 1951. I graduated, yeah, 68 years ago. We had a 60th reunion but we haven't had one since that. Uh I think there were 72 graduates I believe, 72 or 78, I can't remember. But the last time we had a reunion we we could not get in contact with but about 28 of them. So most of them are gone already.

Like I said my brothers are both gone one brother died when he was 67 years old of bladder cancer. And he was like my dad. I told you my dad was so dry-witted and everything. Well he was in the hospital in Columbia, Missouri. We went up to visit him one time and my sister, well four of us, and my sister and I decided to go in first. We went in and he said uh I should have known you were out there somebody just came in told me there were two people uglier than me out in the hall. So and that was the same kind of sense of humor that my dad had shown. But he died right away from that. And then my other brother who was in Second World War, well both of them are Second World War, but Paul didn't get any injuries. My brother Lindell was trapped behind enemy lines and he lived in the crawl space of a house for 11 days with the German soldiers in residence in the house.

Oh my gosh.

And the people who owned the house sneaked him some water and some raw potatoes and raw turnips and that's what he lived on for that length of time. And uh...

How did he get away?

Well the enemy got pushed back and he crawled, they said he crawled two and a half miles to get to his troops. But he knew that the Germans had left you know and so and I remember when, uh, that's hard. Uh I remember when we got the telegram in December about the 10th of December saying missing presumed dead and uh that was just for Christmas. Well we happened to have a mail carrier and his name was Gus Waggoner. And he, you know back then they delivered twice a day on foot, you know and everything. He was a good, good, good man and he knew what we were going through. So Christmas morning he went down to sort mail to get ready for the next day and and he found a letter from my brother in a hospital in england. He got in his car and came to our house and made our Christmas. I'll never forget that's that's the most unforgettable Christmas I've ever known. Yeah. So he came home with shrapnel in his legs and his back. But he was okay. He did well um and he lived to be 87. So he's only been gone, you know he's 10 years older than me so he's only been gone eight years.

uh and my, but my younger brother died at 57 he was very young with the bladder cancer. so that was different and we lost him.

And then I lost one of my sisters three years ago she had been on kidney dialysis for six and a half years. In fact her her husband did one of these interviews, Norman. Norman Bowland, well his wife was my sister. And she died three years ago and then my oldest sister who was 90 would have been 91 in August died the eighth of this month. So i'm the oldest living member of the family now. Well other than Norman of course. Maple's husband Norman is going to be 89 I guess. But as far as the Robinson family, our family, I'm the oldest one still alive.

In high school I just you know, I, I love school and when we had our uh graduation the top 10, I was, I was in the top 10. I was ninth I think, but I was in top 10 of the graduate. And I loved school especially art. I loved art and Leo deRaven our teacher. She had been our teacher in in middle school when I was in fifth, sixth grade. And when we moved to high school she moved to high school at the same time. So we carried a teacher with us that we liked, you know really enjoyed.

And then I had a really good teacher in high school named Eloise Metter, who was the business teacher, typing, shorthand, all of that.

And when I was about, I think it was the year that I turned 15, a gentleman that lived up the street from where the Hill Insurance is uh, rodenberg motor company, it was an old motor company Pontiac Motor company, he had gone to the high school to ask our teacher Leo deRaven if she would recommend somebody to come and work after school on Saturdays and she recommended me. And so I lived within the block of where that was. So I worked for him until I graduated, and I graduated when I was 16. I was going to be 17 in July after I graduated in May. And I, I worked for him until that summer when I went to Saint Louis and worked for Carter carburetor.

I went to work for Carter carburetor. So a long time ago, but yeah that's what I did and then uh I stayed up there a couple years and then I came back and married John Skaggs.

And this is John Paul.

John Paul Skaggs, yeah.

Carter carburetor was that in Ferguson?

No well Saint Louis Avenue ran beside of it and Grand Grand and Saint Louis, and uh back, the back one, back here, I can't remember, Sprig I think Sprig maybe. But anyhow Carter carbureted itself with the offices and everything, was on on the corner of Saint Louis Avenue and Grand. And that was the, that was the manufacturing place. Now their offices, main offices, were down in the theater district, down Grand Avenue.

Because what you did when you went to work up there, went to work in the mail room first of all. That was where you started. So for the first three weeks, twice a day, I would go on the streetcar down to the theater district to the office down there and pick up the mail and take it back up to the manufacturing plant. And I did that twice a day for several weeks until I was assigned to uh engineer drafting with 36 men. I was in the office of 36 men, and that's where I worked the whole time. I handled their blueprints and and kept records of things and so forth. But that was quite interesting being there with 36 men. And you know I loved it, I loved what I did and and the people. And when I did get married a couple years later, several of them came down from Saint Louis to the wedding. I was married at Saint Michael's in Federicktown and several of my, my original boss and several that I worked with came down for my wedding. So that was quite an experience too. Okay.

Was the fare for the streetcar, was it the plastic mills?

Yes, yes. yeah.

Instead of money.

Yeah, yeah. and it was kind of like, what did they used to call those little things, now, there was a name for them and I can't think what it was now but.

A mill?

Yeah, a mill that's what we used was the mills. But we had some kind of identification that we used that let us get on those the streetcars. Because of our frequent visits down there twice a day and so, yeah. And then my friend, my friend Bobby that was up there, she went to work in one of the other offices, I can't remember which. And then her sister and her husband were working out in the factory. There were quite a few people from Fredericktown that worked at Carter carburetor. Now a real good friend of mine and also a fellow graduate Loyd Lamb that I'm seeing part of the time, now, uh he worked there, in, in the Carter carburetor. Now I don't know if you've had any of the Lambs in here or not, uh Rita Yount, Rita Lamb, you probably haven't.

I don't think so.

Well they all live out west of town, everybody like that. And one time and it was the Royer family, the Lamb family and the Means family, which one of my daughters is married to one of the Means, and lives out there. And one time one of the Royer men said to me, you know that everybody west of the courthouse is related. And that's, that's sort of the way it was. This friend of mine, brought me here today, he told me that when he was in high school, he was in my grade. When he was in high school, the Royer family lived across the river from him out there in the community. And he said if it would rain, he'd pray that it would rain hard enough that they couldn't cross the river because the one, his buddy, got to stay all night with him that night. And each one of them had a different place that they'd spend the night with if they couldn't get back across the river. Part of the roads weren't in that...

The Saint Francis.

Yeah, yeah. And uh out there uh Millstream Gardens out in that area. And west, well the Lambs and the Royers and all of them lived out, I guess past what you'd call Rozelle out in that area. And there was a they had come into school. They didn't come to grade school at Fredericktown, there was a little one-room school down the road. But they all came to high school in there and they were like the Royers was, I believe, eight boys and two girls, and when they'd, when they couldn't get home, they had to find a place to stay, you know. Because they were and he got to have one of them at his house all the time. He said he always looked forward to it, saw it rain and thought, oh hope it rains enough that they can't get across the river, so. And his friend died recently, Charlie Royer, and they told that at his funeral. That ,uh some of the fun things that they did, uh it in spite of all this other.

But I started to tell you about my boyfriend, first boyfriend in high school, Jim Roseberry. I dated him up until the time I went to St. Louis and we went our separate ways. And about eight years ago, my daughter who's a nurse, and she was a nurse at Claru Daville then, Joan Means. She called one day and she said mom I think this is Jim they just brought in here, Jim Roseberry. Said they brought him and his wife and his wife is in the alzheimer's unit. And she said I've never seen anybody here with him, never. So I said okay I'll come up and find out. Well I did and it was Jim and he had something called aphasia. He couldn't couldn't speak his thoughts. But he could kind of get through to me a little bit those things you know. And, and my daughter took care of him a lot.

And I come to find out, the day his daughter turned 16, they lived in Piedmont, he was head of the highway department in Piedmont, the day she turned 16, she and a friend drove the car out to Wappapello, or not Wappapello, to Clear Water, and turned it over and killed her. So the girl with her survived was injured but survived. And about three years later that girl married her older brother, the other girl's older brother, the Roseberry boy, Jim and Berna's boy. And he went to work down in Oklahoma with Pence Brothers drilling and a pipe came around and hit him in the head and killed him. So Jim had lost everything. I mean his wife didn't know him, she was there, but she didn't know him. His children were both gone and his brothers, one brother lived in Arkansas, that's all he had anymore.

So I started, I started spending time with him and finally Dr Byer told me that I needed to take him out, take him for a ride. So they gave me his car, Jim Roseberry's car. And any time that I had time that I could do it, I could come and get him. He was in a wheelchair, I could come and get him and take him out for a ride, do things with him. And I'd go up and eat lunch with him two or three times a week. They'd, you'd pay so much to eat with him you know. And that's how I spent time until about three years ago when he died.

And my another my sister that died recently was in the same nursing home then, so i'd just get both of them. And I, he, he could indicate where he wanted me to go you know. Turn this way or that way. He couldn't, couldn't verbalize uh but he knew what he was doing. And I taught him to write his name. He did get to the point he could write his name. And so that's how I spent up until three, three and a half years ago was taking care of them you know.

And then, and of course I have six children, had six children. Uh I actually gave birth to seven but my seventh one was a stillborn. I raised six children, uh two boys and four girls. I'm sure you know some of the girls. Ruth Ann Skaggs. Uh Beth Matthews I think she comes in here. Joan Means who's married to Otis Means, that's my oldest daughter. And then my son was next, John Paul Skaggs the third and he died in 06 of, he had staff infection for several years fighting it, and he passed away with staff infection when he was 50 years old. And then soon be, well my my second husband died in 2010.

Well in 2011 my baby, my youngest son, was diagnosed with lung cancer. And when we went, I went with him when he was told that. And I asked if they could do a transplant because I figured I'm ideal I've got two perfect lungs, you know and they said it was too late because it had already metastasized to his spine. So he died four months to the day he was diagnosed he died, and, December of 2011.

So I have my four girls left. And 44 grandchildren. I have 11 grandchildren 26 great grandchildren and the sixth and the seventh great great are on their way. One's due in june and the other one this fall. I'll have 45 by the end of the year. 45 grandchildren. And I was at church one day when they were having a contest or something and I won the most grandchildren. They said, do you know all of their names? And I said yes all their names and all of their birthdays. I don't know what year they were born. They might be 10 or they might be 30, I don't know their age. But I know the day they were born, I do know that much, I have that much of a memory now.

But I lost my mother, well I lost my father in 1977. He had a stroke and uh my mom had called and said can you come over something's wrong with your dad. So I went over and called the ambulance and he never, he never came to again. He died on tuesday morning. That was a sunday night. Tuesday morning, Dr. Byer, bless his heart, met with us and he said his brain stem is severed, he's not going to get any better. And my brother, oldest brother said well I can't make the decision to take these things off of him. And Dr. Byer said you don't have to. And then my mother passed away in 1991, she lived another uh 14 years after he died. Yeah, now, yeah 14 years after he died and then she died in 91. And she was 86 when she died. My sister was 85 and this one was 90. So I'm, I'm at the limit now. I'm, I'm almost as old as many any of them have been, but I'm the oldest one of the family.

And I, I have, like I said, I have four girls, Ruth Anne, Beth here in Fredericktown and Joan here in Fredericktown area and then I have a daughter Donna who lives in California. She's, she and her husband are both retired Navy people. He's uh, he still teaches at the naval base in California and flies across to Rhode Island, Newport, Rhode Island once a month and teaches there. Uh she's retired. She had gotten out of the Navy when the, uh Desert Storm, at Desert Storm, she had been in 14 years, she got out of the Navy. Because she had two little children, she was afraid that she was going to get have to go. And so then she became the uh I don't know if you call the manager of what, of the big aquarium out in California and she was there for quite a while. And then she elected to go back and work on a ship and she worked on shipboard about 10 days out of each month and photographed marine life on the bottom of the ocean. They had a camera that they lowered and on my computer she would send me the strangest looking pictures you know, but she loved it she did that. And a year or so ago she retired, she has uh some grandchildren now. And she retired. Oh I guess you'd say she retired for her 50th birthday she wanted two black labs. So she got two black labs, so then she decided to foster black labs. So now she sends me pictures of her running down the street with three black labs on leashes pulling her down the street, and that's what she does now.

But I have, that's the only one that's away from here, the rest of my family are all in this area of Farmington or uh some live at Terre deLac, different, you know, but in the area. But Donna's always been uh somewhere else. She's been, lived in Hawaii, Italy, everywhere. And when she graduated from Mizzou she graduated with a degree in marine biology. And her second degree was Russian language. And I asked her one day, what are you going to do with marine biology in the middle of the United States? She said i'm not going to be in the middle of the United States. That, and first job she had in the Navy she was in Florida teaching Russian sailors underwater warfare. So her Russian came in that, that way. And then also her, her water things.

when she was in the, my kids were all one after. The day my daughter was six years old I had my sixth one, exactly the same day. Six years later. So I had them one, two, three, four, five, six, here, well, they were all in grades next to each other and the catholic school was still going then and they were like three of them in one room. They had first, second and third together. Well she was in there with her brother and sister. And, but she was bored. So our pediatrician down in cape said find her something else to do. So we bought a great big aquarium and I said I guess that's where it started. Because then she loved that from then on and that's what she did and still does. That still do, well no she's got dogs now. So anyhow go ahead and ask anything you want I'm...

Do you remember when Saint Michael's school closed?

Okay my son went, my baby, went there one year. So he was born in 1960 and the year he was six years old he was first grade so that would have been 66 and the school closed at the end of that year. He his second grade he went over to public school and we had a lot of problems because he was not happy with the atmosphere over there you know. But and he was used he just his first grade and he wanted to go back to kindergarten. He didn't want to go on further, and so it must have been 1966 I guess is when they closed either 66 or 67.

Were there still nuns?

That's what the problem was, they couldn't get any more nuns. they had the nuns you know the house next to the church was the...

Then convent.

Yeah the convent where the nuns lived and my son John was kind of a my John, John he was kind of a devil. But he didn't like one of his teachers. And so one of his teachers wrote a note and said we think you need to take him to a psychiatrist. You know and see what's, what's wrong with him. So we had Dr. Kinder was our pediatrician in cape that we'd always gone to. So he recommended we take him over to the university, to someone who was a psychologist over there. I took him over there. He was eight years old at the time and he said leave him with me and go shop for a while. And come back and when I came back he sent Johnny out and he said I gotta tell you something. He said I think you brought me the wrong patient. He said there's nothing wrong with this boy. If he can sit down, and an eight-year-old can sit down and draw me four-cycle engine and everything that it does, there's nothing mentally wrong with him. Well come to find out he didn't like her. So he'd wad up his papers throw them under his desk or he'd do anything to irritate her. And he didn't like her and he made it obvious if Sister Zeta he did not appreciate it all.

So but yeah my other kids all went to two or more years of Catholic school and Joan went to full eight years. They didn't close until she started high school, yeah.

Was there a Catholic high school nearby?

but no uh, yeah, Farmington had high school at that time. Yeah but most of the girls like the girls in her her grade, a lot of them went over to Arcadia where that, where the uh home is over there. That was still a school, a boarding school then. And so the two or three of the girls that were in her same grade, that's where they went. But we decided not to send her over there. But from then on when they closed the school they would have someone pick up a nun from over there and bring her back to Fredericktown and she would have the classes the psr and, you know, the religious classes is what she would do. And uh I went many a time on Saturday morning to pick up Sister Joan from the academy over there to bring her back to teach the kids.

Like I said my my baby Rob who died when he was 51, he didn't like school at all. And we had a lot of trouble with him till the fourth grade. In the fourth grade he got a male teacher Basil Starkey from Marquand was his teacher. And he became a different child after that. Basil Starkey told me he said, we all, we're all readers. I'm a big reader, Ruth and Beth and Joan are big all of us are big readers. And of course John Paul was, he was the historian around here, it reminds me of something I'll tell you about that. But anyhow uh Rob wouldn't read and so Basil Starkey said I don't care if you have to buy Lou Brock's book on baseball, uh comic book, get this kid to read. And then till the day he died he never missed a daily paper, he read. And and I'm sure Basil Starkey is what brought him out of it, male teachers what brought him out of it. Which I, you know, I thought that was great you know.

He was, my son, I guess okay to tell these things, my son was uh dry-witted like my dad. And when he got cancer it was really tough and his little grandson, he had a little grandson by then, he was two years old in october after he was diagnosed in august. Well he went somewhere and hired a team and wagon to bring to the birthday party to take the kids on hay rides and everything. And my son was, I said, was really dry, and he said mom they've got a mechanical bull they can put in the back of that wagon for the kids to use. I said, oh well, now somebody will enjoy that. He said, and by the way mom, they have a stripper pole they can they can put in the back of that wagon. I said rob why would you tell your mother that. He said I thought maybe it's on your bucket list. I said, you know you're so smart, how do you know I haven't already done that? So but that's he was that kind of witty.

But one time he called me and I said what are you doing? He said I'm riding down the highway in my jeep. I said okay and he said I can't even roll the window down my hair's flying out the window, it's when his hair was all coming off. He said, I'm I can't even roll the window down my hair's flying out. So yeah he was real, he was like my dad, he was dry like him too. Of course John Paul Skaggs was too. But I started to tell you something that I thought, did any of you know John did you know John Skaggs.

My husband did.

Did you, yeah, well one Sunday in the bulletin, Sunday bulletin, there was always that interesting saying of some kind. And this one said when an elderly person dies it's like burning down a library. And that was John Skaggs. I mean when he died, it was like burning down all of that information. Never a day goes by that I don't think I wish i'd ask my mother that I wish I'd ask my dad about that. But you don't think of it when you need to. But him dying was like burning down a library. Because he was really the historian of the, of the town of the county everything you know he really worked at it.

Well you're a pretty good librarian yourself.

Well somewhat. But anyhow.

Well I had a question. Okay so you had gone to St. Louis and worked there, how long did you work there?

A couple of years, yeah.

And did you then like come right back or did you stay there for a while?

No, no I married John Skaggs after that. I had started dating him my senior year in high school. But I went on and went to Carter carburetor for not, not quite two years. I'll explain why. I married John in April and uh I had gone in July a year and a half before. So I was up there over a year. Anyhow, but yeah, I uh, yeah I came back in April of 53 when we got married. Yeah.

Okay, so that was a pretty short time period.

Yeah well I, I had uh gone up there before I turned 18. And I couldn't work a full shift. Back then you could work anyone under 18 a full shift. So I had to leave, my girlfriend and I, who's even younger than me, we had to leave 15 minutes before everybody else. We had to clock out 15 minutes before everybody else, until we turned 18. And then I turned 18 in July and she in November and then the next April I got married after that I was 18 not quite.

Then came back.

Yeah. we lived down here.

So how had you met him? did you go to school with him or, I don't know if you told us that?

No. You know Raymond Skaggs? There are three boys. Raymond, Charlie and John, and John was the oldest. Raymond was my age. Well he's a little older, but he was in my grade. And the way I got to know John was one night a bunch of us kids, us teenagers from school, it was big snow on the ground and we wanted to go sleigh riding. And so we all went out to their house. This house that looks like, out there on OO, looks like a terror house, big brick two story. Okay that's where they lived at the time. So a bunch of us went out there and John got his pickup and pulled us around our sleds around with his pickup. And then when we were done done sleigh riding we went back to their house and his mother had a wood stove still in the kitchen as well as another. And she had made hot chocolate and all kinds of stuff. And we put our feet in the oven of the stove to get warm. Well when it came time to go home John offered to take me home. The other kids, I don't even remember what they did, but he offered to take me home. And from then on we started dating shortly after that. And we dated, and see he was 10 years older than me, so that didn't set very well with Raymond who was my age, or my parents either for a while, but it got to be okay.

Was that considered dangerous to pull sleds in the dark with a truck?

A rope with the pickup. And I was on one of the sleds are you all familiar with the Village Creek Road, what you call Village Creek Road. And that curve out there where there's a big house, right over here what used to be Marvin Cooper's house. Well John was pulling, pulling me and Bill Priday on a sled with a rope from his pickup and dumped us in that ditch over there. But and I talk about wet cold and everything. So we went back to the house and stuck our feet in the stove, you know. And that's what, that's how John and I met to begin with. I'd known Raymond all that time and didn't like him. Raymond and I did not like each other at all through high school. But anyhow that didn't matter but...

Okay so I had a question, um so you had gone to St. Louis, you stayed there for a year and a half to two years, you came back you married John Paul and at that point you, you were here?

Yes.

You stayed here. yes okay, now you, you said you know where the house that looks like terror is, the little house next door to it.

Right.

That was ours.

Okay.

And that's where we lived until we had uh four children and it was too little. And they had a farm that their farm helper had decided to leave. And we moved out at village creek on a farm and we lived there until uh Rob my youngest one was five when we moved into town. And we lived in a big brick down behind uh you know where Syd Skaggs's office is, the, okay there's a brick across the street and down the street, we lived in that big brick for several years. Used to be Maple Street but now it's uh...

Is it not Park?

Oh yeah that's right, that's right, now it's Park, but when we lived there it was Maple Street and then we moved up on Maple Drive which is a cul-de-sac up there across from the New Era bank satellite place.

Is the brick house still there on Park.

Oh yeah, yeah.

So it's Park and College.

No it's up from College, almost at Park and West Main. There's a house on West Main facing. West Main and then ours is behind that one facing Park. The big brick it's a big brick facing Park.

Okay.

We lived there until uh until 70 I believe and we bought a house up on Maple Drive which is the dead end circle up you know circle drive up there. And we lived on the right side at the end of it and then dr tenants were there and then dr brycens were over here. We had a nice little neighborhood down there. The tenants had two girls and brycens had two girls and boy and then I had mine. So we put a swimming pool in the backyard so we had a sign that we put up. If the sign had a green flag on it. Flag was flying it's okay to come over and swim. If we had a red flag flying nobody was to come around. So and dr michaelus lived in the house behind us kind of in the end of wood avenue and he had three little kids. So we had kids in the backyard all the time.

We had an and a raccoon one of my daughters brought a raccoon home one night. She and her dad were out one sunday and they saw a dead mother raccoon and a baby raccoon. Well she couldn't stand it. She brought that raccoon home so my dad built a huge cage with the tree branch through it so that, for the raccoon. But she'd bring the raccoon in the house and he'd drink out of the toilet, and in our family, down in the family room. But she had braids and she'd go downtown with that little raccoon wrapped around her neck, walk downtown all kinds of things. He was, rocky was a real pet. But when he got, when he got, one time there was about 15 kids in the backyard playing ball, and he bit her. So dr reisen, the veterinarian said, well you know, it's mating season we don't need to leave him here, we'll keep him pinned up to make sure he's not dangerous. So we took him cage and all, out to millstream gardens and put the cage under a tree out there, with the door left open. And a few times we went out and we'd find him. But then finally you know he was gone from there. But she went out to visit him real often.

She brought all kinds of things home with her. she had these newts, these, some kind of a thing that's a newt.

Yeah.

Well it was down in our basement in a jar, and, in our family room. And one morning I went down and they weren't there. And so she was at school and if you know how scared I am of anything that crawls and so I got on the phone I called high school and this mr smith who was the principal at the time. Nicest man in the world, but I told him, I said I need to talk to Donna and he said well she's in class now. And I said when she comes out of class you have her call home. And he said what's the problem can I help. And I said well yeah the newts are missing and I'm locked in the bathroom because I don't know where the newts are. He said, well no, he, I said I don't know where they are. He said why tell you what, go lock yourself in the bathroom and get in the bathtub stand the bathtub because they can't crawl up the side. As if he knew what they were talking about. Well when they had her call back she let him out the night before, outside she just turned him loose. But she failed to tell me and I thought the newts were there in the house with me and that wasn't, that wasn't proper. I couldn't do that.

Listening to these stories from you I almost feel as if the movie please don't eat the daisy could have been made about your life.

It could have been. It was interesting. I've had, uh we had a lot of problems. I haven't talked about a lot of problems. My, when my son john was 13 he was playing baseball and slid into base and got hurt and we thought he just pulled something. We'll come to find out the top of his hip bone, cap on the top his was sliding off, was dislocated. He was 13 years old and we went to st louis and dr lord was the surgeon he said we have to go in and take stainless steel pins called a slipped epiphysis is what it was. So okay we did that, 13 years old, on crutches, going to high school, kids making fun of him and all that kind of stuff. And a year later he started having trouble again and I said something and he said no it's the other leg. So we went back to dr lord and they called me in the office after then both of them were crying, even dr lord. He said now it's the other leg has done the same thing, it's coming apart. Well he had like 16 operations after that, he had operation after.

And he was going to high school and i'd take him to school and he was on crutches. And there was a group of boys that invariably hollered oh what's the matter with you Skaggs, can't stand on your own feet and mom has to help you. Well there was a young man finally came out to the car one day. And he said uh Miss Skaggs, can I can I help John. Can I carry his books and help him so you don't have to do all that. I said sure. Well come to find out that boy went to prison for something later. He was he was a rough neck but he said they won't bother him anymore, I guarantee you that. And they didn't bother him. His name was Sye Merriman, you know who that is, right. Well anyhow this young guy was in John's grade and from that day on he carried his books and helped him in school. And time he got out of school he was a rebel. I mean he did all that and he went to prison. And I said don't tell me there's not some good in everybody, because there was good in him, you know. And he took care of him.

And John was operated on many, many, many times. His bones started dying and then he spent his last nine years in a wheelchair. He'd been in a wheelchair nine years when he died. So we had our ups and downs we really had our ups and downs. Anyway I've probably said enough.

This has been really great.

Yes.

Good I'm glad you've enjoyed it.