Rita Kayser
Okay, my name is Rita Kaiser.
I live outside of Marquand with my husband of 55 years.
We have four sons and three daughter-in-laws and six granddaughters and we're expecting our first great grandchild and also a daughter, a girl.
I was born in 45, but I grew up down in the boot hill.
So the reason I want to talk about the way this Glenville and Willamette, they were kind of like sister or maybe squabbling sisters settlements, the St. Louis Archdiocese bought that something like 14,000 acres and it was sold to the people as this wonderful place to get out of the city and build a home and all this sort of thing.
Well, actually it was nothing.
It was a dismal swamp and the priest that was sent there, he was a very, I think the people have canonized him, but he was a great guy and he did a lot of work and they just jumped in and there was a certain man, Mr. Kenny, I've never heard of him before or after, but there's this one reference where he was an ad man and he was good at his job and he sold his place to people as such a wonderful place.
And so people moved there.
Well, you know, they stayed and they built homes and had families and that's how, but now my parents came from Kentucky in 1925 and this is one of the stories I really would like to add.
My parents, Ed and Lucille Larkin, moved from Kentucky to Willametta, which is Willametta and Glenville were the two towns in December of 25.
Mama had just turned 24 and daddy was 27 and they had two little girls.
And this is Mama's story in her own words, because I thought it was so delightful the way she told it.
Ed had been to Willametta and found a place to live and had made friends with Lawrence Feasor.
Mr. Feasor brought Ed back home to Kentucky and we packed our things in his little truck for the move to Missouri.
Our cabs were real tiny then and just Mr. Feasor, our two babies ages one and almost three and I would fit.
Ed stood on the running board and hung on as long as he could before his hands got so cold he couldn't hold on any longer.
Then Mr. Feasor would stop the truck and Ed would crawl out into the cab just long enough to warm up a bit then would start up again.
It was a long trip.
We had to stop at a service station to get it flat fixed and the babies and I went in the station to keep warm.
There was a cot there and the girls wanted to lay down on it so bad but it was infested with bedbugs.
It made me shudder.
I sat on a straight chair by the stove and held the babies on my lap.
So that was one that really gets me.
And life was bad.
I don't know why they left Kentucky.
I never did here.
I think it was that, you know, every man wants to own a piece of land and I think that he read these articles, you know, this wonderful place and that's why they went.
And once they got there they didn't have any money to leave again.
They were kind of stuck and they rented, you know.
But the flooding, you may have heard of the flooding on the St.
Francis River.
Lots and lots of flooding.
It was just awful.
And they would lose their crops in their gardens just about every year.
I mean it was, and they almost starved.
It was just, it was bad.
And here's another one of Mama's stories.
Ed went to Kansas to work in the wheat harvest one year, but before he left he spent just about the last of our cash on hog feed.
We had one hog left and I was supposed to fatten it out to sell so we'd have a little cash.
Just about the only thing we had to eat was white dry beans and oh, the smell of them cooking made me so sick since I was pregnant again.
One morning I caught Loretta and Mary eating the hog feed out of the sack.
I got kind of upset at first, but I watched them real close.
And after a couple days they hadn't had any ill effects.
I decided that if the hog feed didn't hurt them, if they ate it raw, it sure wouldn't hurt them if it was cooked.
So I beat some of it into a powder and used it to make biscuits.
Kind of gives an indication of what my parents were like.
And she also said that, she said we really didn't know much about the depression until years later.
We lived so far back in the woods, no phone, no radio, no newspaper and certainly no money invested.
We were already so poor, couldn't get any poorer, but they did have some tough times.
They really did.
And I don't know how many stories you want of theirs, but I find them fascinating.
She said, one time we were butchering and Ed cut his finger.
We probably doctored it up with Watkins Sab.
I don't know if you've heard of Watkins Sab.
It was that cure-all.
But instead of healing, his finger got infected and he got blood poisoning.
One night he was in such pain that he crawled out of a good warm bed and walked to Campbell, which was about 10, 12 miles, to the doc's office.
When he got there, the doc was just opening his office and doc lanced the finger and it finally healed, but it was always crooked after that.
I always remember he played the guitar and he had this crooked finger.
But they did, they almost starved.
They were really, it was just a toot.
And of course they didn't have any welfare or anything like that and probably wouldn't have taken it if it had been offered.
But later then they moved to another farm, and still they were just renting, but they moved to this other rented place and they had fruit trees and all kinds of good land.
The land was good and they could grow good crops.
And it was higher up so their flooding didn't affect them quite as bad as it had when they were at lower.
What year was that?
That was in about 30, 32.
So they stuck it out for five to seven years.
Yes, they did.
And they were tough.
My mom and dad were tough people.
But they didn't have any of the modern conveniences and they had a small well that would go dry in the summer after all this flooding in the winter.
They'd have all this, you know.
And so mother would hitch a mule to a sled and take their laundry down to the river to wash it.
And she'd fill the kettle with water and then build a fire.
And the little kids, my sister was talking, she said, we ought to play around while she washed the clothes.
And she had tied the mule to a tree and he was usually content.
But one day he tried to get loose and he struggled and he struggled and he broke his neck.
Loretta said things weren't very happy around their house for a little while after that.
And she said, that's when daddy drove a pump and built a pump house.
Were they near the town at that point?
They were, like I said, maybe 10 or 12 miles from Campbell, which was just a small town, but a little bit larger than Glenville and Bulimena.
Okay.
So they were, but they were outside.
They were way out in the boonies.
And they were on the St.
Francis River, right there on the river.
And did they go into town very often?
Did he work or did they work?
They just farmed.
They just farmed.
Okay.
At that point, I don't think they went very often at all.
Now, by the time I was a child, they'd used to go on Saturday, but I don't think they went very often back then.
I mean, they had, you know, a team and wagon to get to town.
It was, it was quite a different life.
I can't imagine it, even though I've heard these stories.
What about schooling for the kids?
Okay.
They had their own school there.
Both Glenville and Bulimena both had schools.
Okay.
And at first they had lay teachers and then they got nuns from Kentucky to teach and they taught in their schools for several years.
And then in 1953, the state of Missouri said that, uh, nuns could not teach in public schools anymore.
So they had the decision, do we lose our school or do we go into a private school?
Cause it was a public school.
And they decided that they would keep the nuns because they did give us a good education.
It was our one little smidge of culture.
Um, and so it became a private school.
And then what happened to the, were there any public schools?
Yeah.
In Campbell.
Okay.
In Campbell.
And that's where we went to high school.
But, then they, and then the school is still there at Glenville.
Wilhelmina slowly but surely faded away.
Uh, Glenville survived and Wilhelmina is just, uh, actually it's, um, the Missouri conservation department bought it and it's a wildlife refuge now.
Oh wow.
And were there many people, I'm trying to get a sense of this as a community and how your parents were situated was sort of in that, like did they, were they literally off on their own and they would only see people that once a week when they went in or was it like a village where there?
It was a village.
It was, there were several families and they, of course the church was a center of their life.
There was always church and it was their, not only their spiritual center, but their social center and everything.
You know, they had, you know, they had, uh, box suppers and what all kinds of things, you know, to get together.
And, uh, so though they had, they had good friends.
Um, so, uh, mama was a midwife and she, she had had, she was only about 30 at this when she started.
She had had five children of her own by that time, but she had never delivered a baby.
But her best friend said, you know, I wish, I want you to deliver my baby when the time comes.
And mom said, well, Virgie, I don't know anything about that.
And she said, oh, you know, you can do it.
So sure enough, you know, babies seem to be one of born, be born in the middle of the night.
And, uh, Virgie's husband came over to get her and mama said she was so nervous she couldn't get her shoe on.
And so she went over and she told dad, she had known, she told daddy, she said, well, I'll be home in time.
Her baby was like about five months old, the youngest one of the kids.
And she said, uh, I'll be home in time for his early morning feeding.
Well, it took a lot longer than mother knew about.
And, uh, the baby woke up and he wanted his 2 a.m. feeding and daddy patted him and he rocked him and he walked the floor with him and he did everything that he could think of, even made the little, uh, you know, the milk and, and, uh, sugar, you know, on a rag and, you know, tried to feed.
Well, Larry just, uh, he was not satisfied.
So daddy bound, you know, wrapped him up real good and walked about a half a mile through the woods and took him in so he could nurse and he just got back home.
He had to get back home though, because there were four other kids and the oldest was seven.
So, yeah, I mean, I just can't, you know, nowadays you, you'd be arrested for child abuse if you did that, but that's the way they had to do it back then, you know, but, uh, it was tough.
It was fun, but I mean, they, they got to it.
Mother always had, uh, even when their house was flooded, uh, you know, they had to live upstairs because the bottom was water flowing through and they were little kids were worried that this Easter bunny wouldn't come, but he did.
There was a, there was a barrel or a bucket or something that was hanging off the side of the house and that's where he put the Easter eggs.
So mother, you know, those kids never were disappointed, but you said she was, so she was a midwife.
Is that something she did often?
Like she did very often and she did that up until I can remember her up in the fifties, I guess she was still, you know, and when I had my last baby, I asked her, my sister and I were both going to have a baby like in the 80 or 82, something like that.
And we said, uh, would you deliver our babies?
And she said, no, she said, I'd love to, but she said, I'm too old now.
She said, I'm not, I don't move as quickly.
And she said, I'm just not up to it.
But I thought that would have been so cool.
Were there, were there other midwives in that?
There were.
So she was one of a few.
There were, there were probably, I think I could name three or four others maybe.
And were there any doctors of any kind or did they also do a lot of the doctors?
There was one doctor in Campbell, you know, in the town.
Uh, and he was called often, but a lot of times they didn't even bother with the doctor.
Uh, and I know the doctor, mother said that he would ask her, you know, when are you going to get paid?
Cause he always got paid.
She never got a penny.
And they, uh, the doctor said, well, when are you going to get paid?
And she said, I guess when I get to heaven, I'll get my pay.
My mother was a little saint, you know, but uh, she, and of course she had a little sense of humor.
She said she delivered this one baby and the doctor finally got there and she already had the baby cleaned up and you know, and she met him at the door and she said, there's, you're not going to be delivering the babies today.
And he was, oh, I came all the way out here for another.
And she's been about that time the baby cried and mother started laughing and the doctor knew he had just been a butt of her joke.
But yeah, she, she delivered probably, she said she knows she could count 12 that she delivered by herself and at least that many more with a doctor.
So it was quite the thing.
You know, I don't think anybody ever actually went to a doctor to have their baby.
The doctor would come out to the house.
Right.
Well, thinking also about like, for example, her getting paid or the doctor getting paid, was there much bartering in the community?
Did that, was there trading going on?
I think there was, uh, I don't, like mother said, sometimes she would get some apples when the apples got ripe or something, maybe a butchered time, she'd get a roast or something like that.
And so maybe that would be their bartering.
Uh huh.
Okay.
And the people stuck together, neighbors were neighbors.
They really were.
Were all of her deliveries successful?
I think so.
That's wonderful.
I know.
Cause I myself have had a lot of children and I would not want to deliver another person's child.
As you said, times are quite different.
I guess it was necessity.
It was.
And that's the thing.
They just did things because they had no choice and it made them stronger.
Okay.
Some men from Campbell, which was like I said, eight, 10 miles away, they were businessmen and they came out every summer to hunt and fish on the banks of the St.
Francis River that was right behind mom and daddy's house.
Well, one Thursday night a storm came up and the guys thought, well, you know, it's about over rather than staying and, you know, enduring the storm, we'll just go on back home.
So they gathered up all their food and they took it up to mom and dad and said, we're leaving.
Okay.
Well, this was a problem because Catholics didn't eat meat on Friday back then.
And there was barbecue chicken.
Well, they didn't have a refrigerator or a freezer.
They'd left the meat till Saturday.
It would spoil.
It was a sin to spoil, let food go to waste.
It was a sin to eat meat on Friday.
What were they going to do?
So they woke up the kids and they all had a barbecue supper about a little right before the clock struck midnight.
That was just kind of a little bit of their, yeah.
So their ingenuity.
Yeah.
But, uh, and then my oldest sister there, again, Loretta, she was quite a bit 21 years older than I, she said she was about seven and she was helping daddy get some stove, care stove wood in, you know, to the, to the, up to the lot.
And, uh, cause they use a lot, they had cook stove and heating stove.
And she said, uh, all of a sudden daddy jumped up and he ran and he started running and cussing like crazy and running to the house.
You know, she didn't pay, she was only seven.
She didn't pay a lot of attention, you know, she's putting her out, but when he didn't come back, you know, she said, well, maybe I better go check and see what, what was this all about?
So she went up to the house and a rattlesnake had bitten daddy's hand and he had gone to the doctors, the doctor, he went to the neighbors to get a ride to the doctor.
The doctor wasn't home.
So daddy came back home and he stuck, this is, I don't know, voodoo, I don't know, but anyway, he stuck his hand in a bucket of kerosene, one hand in a bucket of kerosene, the other, daddy wasn't a drinker with the other hand holding a bottle of whiskey.
And he sat like that for three days and that kerosene drew that venom out.
And mother felt so sorry for him and so helpless to help him.
You know, she couldn't do anything, but she was also mad at him for getting drunk.
So that was a good fact.
But anyway, they, they just, they survived.
And then this, this was in Wilhelmina.
And then in November of 37, they moved over to Glendenville, which was the other town.
And that's when they finally were able to buy some land.
It was not good land, but they bought it.
At least daddy owned his own land.
I mean, my little, my brother was about seven at the time.
And he said, my life ended when we moved over there.
He still, and he was an old man when he told me that he said, you know, that was such a wonderful place.
And he said that when they moved over to Glendenville, he said his life ended.
But in 1941, they got electricity finally.
And it was, it cost $5 to subscribe to, you know, to electricity.
And a lot of the people said, I'm not going to spend that kind of money.
That's too much, you know.
And, and this father, Peter's this priest, he said, oh, and he said, well, can you take it for three months?
Cause he knew that if they had it for three months, there's no way they were going to go back.
And he got his full, his full subscription and it was, he had to have two and a half customers per mile of line.
And that's when they first got electricity.
I barely, barely remember getting electricity and you had one bulb in each room.
That was it pulled on a string.
So you had a light bulb in every room.
What else was it used for?
Well, they got, we got a stove about two or three years later.
We got an electric stove.
Oh, that was great.
Electric stove and a refrigerator.
Yeah.
So that was good.
Now I learned to sew on a treadle sewing machine though.
I don't know when mother got an electric sewing machine.
Well, you would have radios.
So where would you plug that in?
We had the radio.
Well, I don't know what they did about radio before they got the electricity.
I wrote, I like I said, that was before my time, but I do remember listening to the radio when I was a little girl child, real tiny, we would listen to a dragnet.
Oh, and what was that?
George Burns and Gracie Allen.
I always remembered that she'd said that at the end of the show, they'd say she never could watch the show or listen to the show because they always said to tune in next week at this time.
And it was always at the end of the show.
That was her little joke.
Kind of corny, yes.
We watched, we listened to dragnet, five of those best, but then in 1958 our house burned and mom and dad were nudging 60 by that time.
And so they had to start all over.
But there again, these people, we were not related to anyone, but the community came together.
They gave us everything that one couple had a almost new house that they weren't using at the time.
And they had us just move in and we got to stay there for two weeks.
And then this other couple gave us or loaned us travel trailer, a little dinky travel trailer.
And there were three kids and my mom and dad in this little travel trailer, but at least we had something to live on.
They said, no questions asked, use it as long as you want to.
That was the kind of people they were.
And my brothers slept out in the corn crib and mama felt so bad.
The poor kids.
Well, they were teenagers.
They loved it because as soon as they'd sleep at night and party all night, my mom and dad didn't know about it.
So, but now they had to rebuild, you know, and they're nudging about 58, 60, something like that.
Was that a community effort, the rebuilding?
There was a little bit of help, but there was one man who was a carpenter and daddy used to say between Bernard and me, we make about a half a carpenter, but they got it together.
So what sorts of things did you do as far as, you know, play time?
What did you guys do?
Did you jump rope, jump rope a lot, play any over, you know what that is?
Everybody knows that.
No, you throw the ball over the house and there's some on each side of the house and you throw the ball over and they have to catch it.
And if they catch it, then they get to run around the house and catch you.
What's it called?
There's, I've heard Auntie over, Annie over there, but we always call it Annie.
How would you know if they caught it?
You're on the other side of the house.
You just have to watch and if you see them coming, you have to run real fast.
But it was a lot of fun.
Yeah.
And we had snacks.
When we got home from school, we would get a leftover biscuit or piece of cornbread.
That was our snack.
And then the spring we could get radish or onion out of the garden.
And in the spring we would go crawdeden.
Anybody know what crawdeden is?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Mama would give us some lard and a skillet and we would crayfish or crawfish.
Yeah.
We, they were crawdeds and we'd go crawdeden out in the ditch and we'd, you know, they're a little bit like shrimp.
Shrimp.
Yeah.
And I don't care for shrimp now, but I liked the crawdeds back then.
But my mother was a saint.
She really was.
She put up with us and I don't think I ever heard my mother raise her voice.
Seriously.
There were 10 of us at home at one time and then my sister got married in 49.
She got married.
So, and then right after that, then a brother joined the service.
So we dwindled down, but yeah.
Daddy made up for it, though.
Daddy did a lot of it.
He was very vocal.
He was a hot-headed Irishman, but they, they went through a lot.
They went through.
Did they ever go back?
Excuse me?
Did they ever go back to Kentucky?
We went back to, to Kentucky almost every year, the Sunday after Easter.
And mother always called it home.
She always said up home, we'd go up home.
And earlier years ago, Loretta, the oldest sister said that daddy played music with an old band there, but they would never, mama would never let him play my old Kentucky home because it'd make mama cry.
Well, I was just thinking about this this morning.
Mother was always teaching us our lessons, you know, on our religion.
And, and one time when this is way before my time again, but she was telling, you know, one of my brothers that Jesus says for us to love everybody.
And of course, you know how little kids are.
Do you love daddy?
Yes, I love daddy.
Do you love me?
Yes, I love you.
Do you love anyone all through this other kid?
Yeah.
And finally, well, daddy's best friend and played music, a guy that played music with was Albert Porter.
So my brother said, do you love Albert Porter?
And mother says, yes, I love Albert Porter.
Jesus said for us to love everybody.
Well, at the back of our honor, he went around telling people mama loved Albert Porter.
And my mother, like I said, she was a saint.
That was probably, probably galled her.
But anyway, she had to tell about it.
I had a good life.
I really have.
Oh, did they ever make their own instruments?
You know, like banjos?
I don't know.
I don't, but I do have an instrument that my grandfather over in Kentucky started to make and never to get finished.
I have that in my living room.
And I also have the fiddle that my daddy learned on when he was about 10 and my daddy would be 120.
And so it's, and it was used then.
So it's, it's truly qualifies as an antique.
What is the instrument?
The fiddle, the fiddle, both of them are fiddled.
My dad, my grandfather tried to make a fiddle and I don't know if he gave up or whatever, but it's just a beginning, you know, but my cousin, when my uncle gave it to me, my cousin just laughed at me like, what do you want that piece of junk for?
But I said, you know, I like stuff like that.
And now I can start remembering in 49, my, one of my older sisters got married and she bought us an ice box and that was, oh, we were uptown then, you know, and we, we had an ice box, but it was my job to always, I was just four and it was my job to empty, I don't know if you know, but there's always a drain pan underneath and I was supposed to always forget it and it would run all over.
It was back on the porch, thank goodness, because otherwise I'd have been in trouble, but it always, you know, ran over, but that was my job.
The best part about that was the Iceman coming.
Oh, he would come, you know, and he'd have these big old blocks of ice and he had these metal tongs, you know, to drag it off his truck with, you know, it was a bed of sawdust and it would, these tongs hit the big chunk of ice, it would make these little ice babies.
And of course, we had never had ice before and oh my goodness, we'd get a chunk of ice, you know, he'd always saved me because I was the most pitiful looking probably and the youngest and she'd, and we'd have these chunks of ice to lick on until they melted, you know, dribbled on our dirty arms.
It was wonderful.
That was great.
We would, we would get up in that oak tree and watch and we would wait because we knew what day he was coming and we would wait, you know, if we weren't in the cotton patch.
Oh, I have a question.
If the refrigerator was or the ice box was electric.
No, no, the ice box was not electric.
No, that's where you just put those big chunks of ice in there.
And your sister bought you, she bought us that ice, she bought, yeah, but she bought us the ice box to keep the food cool for her wedding.
See, and that's why mother and daddy couldn't afford an ice box even much less of a refrigerator.
And to keep her, to keep the food cool as much as possible, she'd put it in a container and then put it in a water trough with a cold water, you know, and for I guess me, the younger ones, she would send an older person out to the cow to milk enough milk for the baby's bottle.
That's how, you know, I don't know, I can't imagine living like that, but they did.
And I know that mother didn't lie and my sister didn't lie.
They told me these stories, so I loved them.
But Christmas was always special, you know, midnight mass.
Oh, I always thought I was going to stay awake, but I was a pretty good size before I did.
But the Sears Wishbook, of course, everybody remembers the Sears Wishbook.
Even if you don't, weren't old enough, you've heard stories about it.
And one evening I remember my mother came rushing in, she said, oh, the brownies have been here, the brownies have been here.
You know what a brownie is?
They were like Santa's elves.
They were the brownies and they would sneak around about a month before Christmas and check and see if we were being a good kid.
And if we were fighting over the Sears Wishbook, you know, they would tell Santa, my brothers always want to watch, you know, look at the cars or the guns or whatever.
And I wanted to look at those dumb old dolls as they called them.
But anyway, she said the brownies, the brownies have been here.
So we all ran outside, sure enough, from the path to the kitchen window and then to the dining room window.
There was this little, these little foot marks.
Well, we were believers, my gosh, though.
You know how she did it.
She did it with her fist.
She made a little in the snow.
Yeah, but we thought it was real.
We didn't think mother lied.
We just knew that what she said was true.
So it was right.
And of course, you've heard about taking baths, you know, you pump enough water in the, in the big old galvanized tub that you wash clothes in and, you know, we all took turns.
And I was lucky.
The small ones went first.
Yep.
Yeah, exactly.
And of course we had rusty water, you know, oh that old rusty water.
And at first it was still pretty clear by the time about the fourth or fifth kid that water was getting kind of, besides being grody, it was also rusty.
So anyway, but anyway, in the same way with laundry, you know, the laundry wasn't, it wasn't just picking out brand X detergent.
It was a, you know, everything was high.
You made your, the soap.
Lye soap.
Lye soap.
Yeah.
And you used that for washing yourselves and your kids.
And dishes too, probably.
I imagine soap was for everything.
Like, you know, now it was funny how we'd go and we'd buy this soap for this and that soap for that.
And you just have one kind of soap or did you?
You had blood soap.
And it was kind of strong and, yeah, you know, and of course we didn't have hand lotions and all that sort of thing.
And washing your hair, halo shampoo.
Oh.
That was basically it.
You'd get water and you'd get one pan for washing and one pan for rinsing and you'd, you know.
But we had a lot of fun too.
We, my brothers played the guitar and the fiddle and we all sang and had a good time, you know.
And my brother's friends came over and we played, you know, we're not, we weren't good like these country music stars talk about.
They all said, holy, we weren't that good.
At this point, how close were your nearest neighbors?
Were you still kind of off or were you still sort of in the?
By this time, when I could start remembering, we were about a half a mile from each direction.
Did you have community gatherings of any kind that you remember?
Oh yes, lots of them.
We had socials, what we call socials, every two weeks.
Oh.
And then at night, and we would have dancing and I think they might have had bingo, I'm not sure.
But we got to flirt with the boys.
Yeah.
With you on Friday or Saturday?
You know, I don't remember.
I know they weren't on Saturday.
We were never, we were supposed to be at home being good, getting ready for Sunday morning mass, you know.
So we didn't go, I don't really, I think they were in the middle of the week.
Oh really?
Yeah.
And they had a, when I was real small, they had a hall where I don't know what kind of screen, I think they just used a sheet or something, but they had movies like, I remember seeing Donald O'Connor and Francis the Talkin' Mule and the Pepper Family and Ma and Pa Kittle.
And if we had a dime, we could go up, now those were on Sunday night, I remember that.
It was about two miles to church and the school and to the hall.
And we could walk up there and watch that.
And so the movies were in like a hall, you say?
In a hall.
Okay.
Yeah, they had built a hall.
And that was a gathering, that's where we had our socials.
And then we had the holiest of holies, the Glenville Picnic.
That was the, you know, that was our, the highlight of our year.
We kids talked about it and did chores to get a nickel every day, you know, for weeks in advance.
And it was so much work for the adults.
But it was great.
They had started in, let's see, they started the town in 05 and I think in 08, 1908, was their first Glenville Picnic.
And it started out just as a, you know, it's the last Saturday in July, the crops are laid by, you know, there's a little lull.
And it was sort of a Thanksgiving type thing for good crops.
And, but then as it went on, now it's, and they're still doing it now, 110 years later, every last Saturday of July.
I don't think they did it for a couple years during the Second World War.
But other than that, it's been every year and now it's a fundraiser for their school.
Was this a parish picnic?
A parish picnic.
What's the name of the parish?
Glenville.
St.
Teresa's Glenville.
Okay, St.
Teresa's.
And like I said, it was the highlight of the kids.
I mean, we loved it because we got out a whole day out of working in the cotton field.
And when we were young, we ran around like, you know, while they didn't have a good time, went to the fishing pond and all that.
But when we got, as soon as we graduated from the eighth grade, then the girls got to be waitresses at the meal.
The dinner, the meal was wonderful meal.
And they told me that was, I don't have to get, we couldn't afford to eat it, but anyway, they had a great meal.
But we would, we would flirt with everybody and we'd talk about the dance that night.
And it was just, we got a new dress and it was, it was, it was the highlight.
And I've often wondered if the kids nowadays, you know, look forward to it that much.
I really don't know.
I don't know any of the children down there now, but I've gone a few times since I've been an adult and it's not quite the same, but it's, it's good.
And it's a, it's a holiday thing and they, they keep some of the traditions and they came up with some new ones and it was a big deal.
Did you, you talk about, you know, like getting a dress, was there a lot of, did you, did those things get bought or were they made?
And mother was a 4-H leader and we all joined the 4-H by the time, I think he had to be nine, you know.
So naturally the first thing I took was sewing and we learned to sew.
And then in high school, we took home.
So no, there were too many store-bought clothes.
Right.
When you went to high school, did you do the FHA?
Is that one of those?
Oh yes.
Oh yes.
Was your school, was it like a bigger school or was this like a smaller, like a one-room school or what kind of school was this?
Oh no, it was, there were a lot, those people were pretty prolific.
There was a lot of people.
Okay.
There were, there were probably 10 or 12, maybe 15 kids in my first and second grade, you know, when we were small, then that we went there for eight years.
And then we went to high school at Campbell and I graduated in 63 and there were 63 kids in my class.
So it was a pretty good size school.
It was, it was a consolidated school that drew from all the different areas.
So the grades were broken up.
You didn't like share grades, like a lot of rules.
We had first and second grade together, third and fourth grades together like that, two grades together.
But like I said- Was there tuition?
You know, I don't really know if my parents had to pay a tuition or not.
I think just their Sunday donation probably took care of it.
I don't, I don't remember that there was a tuition.
Now there may, like I said, I was kind of a care for a kid.
I didn't really pay a lot of attention to what, you know, anything cost or- I'd kind of be interested in hearing about the stories of the nuns teaching.
You know, do you hear a lot of negative things about nuns?
You know, sister was so mean that, you know, they were, they wrapped our knuckles.
Well, you know, to be real honest, I don't think nuns cared for boys as much as they did girls.
Girls are easier to teach.
You know, they don't learn the same and they expected them to learn the same and they can't.
And I love school.
I love the nuns.
They were good to me.
Matter of fact, I was going to be a nun.
But one of the nuns taught me out of it.
Really?
No, the nuns were good.
They taught us.
And like I said, that was our little touch of culture.
They taught us a little bit of the finer things of life than what we would have learned if just out there in the boonies without them.
And I can give, I, and you know, like I said, I read at church, read the, not the gospel, but the epistle.
Read the readings at church.
And I have been complimented because I do a good job.
And I said all the credit goes to the Ursula nuns.
They taught us how to read aloud.
And so many people don't know how to read aloud, but they, I can't, I can't say anything bad about them.
I really can't.
I really admire them.
Did you have any favorite topics in school?
Reading.
Reading?
Absolutely.
Reading and writing.
Uniforms?
No, no, no, we were lucky to have anything decent, you know, but we allowed our clothes out of a poor box.
But we didn't think anything of it.
But like I said, mother was a 4-H leader.
We had, that was another social thing.
And we always would go all the way down to Kennet, which was, oh, I don't know, 35 miles maybe for the once a year.
When all this, all the 4-H clubs from all the whole area would come and they'd have a big award night, you know.
And I got the highest honor when I was 18 and I got a hundred dollar savings bond.
Oh, was I rich.
But I had to spend it to pay for a baby.
We got married, I got married and then I had two babies right in a row and we were broke.
And so I just cashed it in.
It was worth $83.
So we laughed.
Our second child was, we got a bargain.
But I haven't mentioned cotton, picking cotton.
I was thinking about that.
Oh my goodness.
We grew up in the cotton patch.
And I did a book recently.
My granddaughter started asking about what was, you know, when they started realizing that I had not always been an old woman, they started asking what it was like when I was a child.
And so I was telling them how our fingers bled when we picked cotton.
And one of the little girls said, but grandma, how could cotton be hard?
And so that became a metaphor for our life in the cotton patch.
And I sold it.
You know, I wrote the book, How Could Cotton Be Hard?
And I sold a few, but it's fun.
But it was.
We chopped cotton as soon as we put down our pencils in the spring, we picked up our cotton hoe and we chopped cotton all summer long.
And then we went back to school for about a month or six weeks.
And then we had cotton vacation.
Well, it wasn't exactly a vacation, but we didn't go to school for six, seven weeks and we picked cotton.
Then by the time we got back to school, we had forgotten what we learned earlier.
We started all over again and we picked, we got three cents a pound.
And so if you put pretty hard all day, you could make, you know, three, four, five, six dollars a day.
And this is all every, basically all the kids in the family were doing this?
Yes.
And every, all of our neighbors, everybody, the whole, everybody, you know, and you know, that's, it was, it was the thing.
Three cents a pound and you could make.
Well, if you got a hundred pounds, you'd have three dollars.
Yeah.
But have you ever heard the expression, boy, now we're in tall cotton.
Have you ever heard that expression?
No, probably not.
Well, it means that cotton can be that short or it can be that high.
It depends on, you know, fertility of the soil and whatever.
Well, if you're a tall cotton, it's a whole lot easier to pick because you're not doing the bending, you know, the back breaking bending, you're more standing up.
And usually if it's a larger, taller stock of cotton, it has a lot more cotton on it.
So you get more, it's much easier.
So, uh, but usually, you know, we'd, I got a lot more than my brothers did because they would rather throw bowls at each other than, or at the airplanes.
There was a mall that had an air training base, air force training base, and the planes would come around every day and, you know, and some of them were hot dogs.
They, you know, they would see us out in the cotton patch and they'd dip real low and everything.
And my brother says he hit a plane with a cotton bowl.
I don't know, a green bowl.
I don't know if he did or not.
He told everybody he did, but that was a really fun, you know, we didn't see airplanes back in the fifties and that was kind of exciting.
And then at five o'clock, we always knew what time it was because at five o'clock we'd still be picking cotton and all the planes would make a big line up, a circle, and then they'd go back in and land and we'd say, okay, it's five o'clock.
Oh good, not too much longer to chop or to chop or pick either one.
Oh, like going to school and just getting around, were there lots of cars in the community or did you?
Everybody had a car.
I remember my daddy had always a junk car and I can really remember because I just verified this with my older brother.
He's two years older than I am.
He's the last one left with only two left out of 13.
But he said, I said, now, did I really remember daddy cranking a car?
He said, oh yeah, you remember daddy would crank the car and cuss, crank the car and cuss.
I thought you had to do one with the other.
I didn't.
And I remember he said one time he got a good deal on a car and he said, but the thing will probably blow up.
And I was so scared.
I would always ride with my hand on the door thinking, maybe I'll jump free before it blows up.
I didn't understand anything about motors, you know, but anyway, yes, everybody usually had at least one vehicle, but we did not have a truck.
So we would put our cotton in a wagon and when you get about 14, 1500 pounds, that made a bail and then you would have to get up to the, well, sometimes daddy would drive the tractor in, but usually he would borrow a truck from a neighbor and then we'd have to get all the wagon and put it back into the there, you know, transfer it again.
But then that would make about 500 pounds of gin to cotton and that's how they did it.
But yeah, but we liked picking cotton because we got our money.
See, chopping cotton, we never did get paid, but we always got paid for that and we had to put enough back for our school lunches and any new clothes we wanted for school, but then the rest was our mad money.
So we always had a few dollars for mad money.
That was wonderful.
Like what was your favorite store?
Did you like a dime store or something that you would go and Woolworths?
There was a Woolworths in Popper Bluff, which was about 30 miles away.
And every year on December the eighth, it was a holy day.
We didn't have school.
We went to mass just like we did on Sunday.
Then we had the whole day and we would go to Popper Bluff and we would shop or do our Christmas shop.
And I've even done it as an adult a few times just for old time's sake.
But we'd separate.
Daddy and the boys would go one way and mother and I would go to the other.
And mother and I would hit Woolworths.
And I got that story published in a magazine and then they made it into a book, you know, a compilation.
But Woolworths, it had everything in the world.
I mean, I don't even know if there is a Woolworths anymore.
I think it was taken over by Kmart.
But they had a lunch counter there too, didn't they?
Oh yes.
And that was why we got our once a year meal out.
You never, I mean, you didn't eat at a restaurant.
But we had, and everybody would pour over the menu.
What were they going to get?
I knew exactly what I was going to get.
BLT on toast to get bacon.
We had bacon, but it was country bacon.
Lettuce and tomato in December.
You know, that was just unheard of.
And so I, every year BLT, I could, oh, it was wonderful.
You were growing cotton and everybody, it sounds like everybody kind of had their own cotton that they would grow and sell.
We had a, we had an allotment.
Okay.
Depending on how many acres you had, that's how many acres of cotton you could grow.
Our allotment was 15 acres.
And so we chopped 15 acres.
Well, that don't sound like very much, but we had to chop it about three times.
So that's 45 acres of cotton that we had to chop in the summer.
And then, you know, I don't know how they, how they figure that out, but yes.
What about food?
Did you also like a separate home garden that you did or?
Hundreds, hundreds of quarts of vegetables that mother put up.
Plus, she always went to the woods and picked blackberries.
And I remember one year, my brother, older brother was telling me that mother can 365 quarts of blackberries one year.
She said, because now we have dessert for once every day of the year.
That's how he remembered it.
You know, I don't know how she did it.
She was a powerhouse and she was just a little bitty woman.
And did the kids, I imagine helped out with a lot of that?
Yes, but we were usually chopping cotton.
Okay.
So I was wondering, cause you were talking about that.
Yeah.
And I didn't know.
We, if we had any time off, we chopped cotton.
I mean, we helped in the gardens, but we didn't pick blackberries too much when we were kids.
There were so many snakes and things like that.
And she'd take her trusty dog and, and she put lard and sulfur and she would smear that ankles, rest of anything.
And she said that would keep the chiggers off.
I don't know if she knew that, but she did.
That worked.
I've heard of sulfur.
Did you, did they, your dad keep, did you keep livestock and that sort of thing?
Oh yeah.
We always had a few cows and hogs, horses.
I can actually remember we were, I hate to say this, but we were about 40 years behind the times back then.
We really were.
I mean, we were pretty back there.
But I can remember my daddy farming with a team of horses and we were quite uptown when he finally got a tractor.
What about things like air conditioning and how did you stay cool?
And how did you, we didn't, you didn't have it.
So, okay.
So we didn't even have an electric fan.
No, we didn't, we just, we just, and I, I was the designated fan over life.
We had a meal and mother had food on and we had company with her.
Stand there with the newspaper, waving it back and forth, you know, to keep the flies off.
No, we didn't have anything like that.
Did you have a creek or anything like that where you could go?
No.
And that was, I think, why my brother said that his life ended, because they were right there by the river to go fishing and all that, but there was no water anywhere except the flood time.
Now the flooding got better after the Wapopelo Dam.
That helped some, except in the spring sometimes they would let the water out to level it off for the fishermen.
They liked the fishermen more than the farmers.
And then the Mingo Wildlife Refuge was also being drained a lot and that made the flooding even worse down there.
And then in the 60s, I want to say 60s or 70s, they took out 17 miles of the St.
Francis River and straightened so that the water could go on through faster because the St.
Francis is a real winding river and water and debris would get stuck and then it would flood.
And so they took up all this area and that made it, this flooding is a thing of the past basically now, but it was it was major.
When they did the Wapopelo Dam, was that when Greenville was flooded?
I think so.
They flooded a whole town.
Yeah.
And then they, I guess they relocated it to a new one or did they just forget about Greenville?
No, Greenville is still there.
Yeah, they had to relocate it because there's still Greenville.
Because under that is like the city hall and everything.
But yeah, flooding was a real, there was there was a newspaper article that I found when I was researching and it was a hundred thousand acres in Duncan County were underwater, if you can imagine that.
Back to the beginning of your story, you said that you were enticed, your families were enticed to go down there, but it was a swamp.
And did they not just look at it first or did they buy it sight unseen?
Because why would they have bought that?
Well, that's a real good question and I don't know the answer.
Archbishop Glennon, who also, he later on became Cardinal Glennon.
He was the archbishop of St.
Louis and he's the one who bought this 1400 or 14,000 acres.
And then he, like I said, he had the ad man to say, you know, to tell, I guess they put it maybe in magazines or whatever, church bulletins, I don't know.
Their idea, their reasoning was that there were a lot of immigrants.
In St.
Louis, there were German immigrants.
In Chicago, there were a lot of Dutch immigrants.
Their theory was that the children would be healthier if they lived out in the country where they would get fresh air rather than in the crowded cities, which I guess they thought they were crowded at that time.
And, you know, so that's, that was their reasoning.
They thought that the children would be healthier and happier or whatever.
And I guess there were some good places, I don't know, but it was, it was pretty swampy.
It was pretty bad.
But the enticement of land.
Men want to own land.
Every man, I mean, every man I've ever known has wanted to own a piece of land and I think that was the enticement.
And one of, there's several different reasons as to why Glennonville thrived.
Well, as best as you could thrive in a little hip town, but, and Wilhelmina did not.
And there are several theories.
I take the theory that partially the people in Glennonville were German.
I don't know if you ever heard the expression, a hard-headed German.
And they were all related.
They worked together.
And to this day, they are that way.
They, they hang together really close.
The people in, from Dutch, the Dutch people from Holland were more skilled craftsmen.
They were plumbers.
They were painters.
They were people like that.
And they weren't quite as, shall I say, hardy.
And they just couldn't quite handle the severity of it.
I'm not sure.
I don't know.
And there's also a theory that the Glennonville priest, Father Peters, was a better leader, but Father Tesler was a great leader also.
He was, he was a good leader.
He, they were, the priests were not only Christian leaders, but they were social, you know, leaders during the flu epidemic, the Spanish flu or whatever they call it in the early, what, late teens.
Father Peters and Father Tesler both, they were the doctor basically, you know.
And Father Peters, they said he didn't, didn't lose one patient at all through the whole thing.
And then one old guy said, oh, I know how I did it.
He said he just gave him a shot, told him to take a shot of whiskey and sweat it out.
And he said, yes, it worked.
But my parents weren't there yet.
They, like I said, they came in 25 and.
How did you end up coming to this area?
When, when?
You mean to, to the, okay.
My husband followed construction a lot and we moved, I think this is our 23rd move.
We moved to a lot of different places and mostly we lived in Festus.
We lived there for 17, 18 years, something like that.
But then there again, he wanted to own land.
We had 40 acres up there, but he wanted to raise cattle and we didn't have enough.
If we'd had enough, we'd have to clear the land, you know, and we liked the woods.
So there just wasn't enough room.
So he said, you know, I want to find a bigger place.
I can raise cattle.
And so we got online and started looking at places, you know, just put a dot where we live and went around and so, you know, how far out we could go and what we could afford.
And we found our place in Obermark one and we bought 120 or 130 acres and a little head of herd of cattle.
And we raised cattle for about nine or 10 years and now we're retired.
He retired from construction.
He worked in St.
Louis construction for years.
So that's how we didn't know anybody here or anything.
After 23 or so years, I mean moves in 55.
Well, we've been down here 15 years, so 40 years, I ended up about an hour, hour and a half from where I grew up, which is a little weird, but it has worked out real well.
This is a good area.
People are good here.
And since you've been here, do you find, so you've been here about 15 years?
15 years.
And you're down towards Marquand.
Do you, are you involved in any way?
Are you like with the church or with any of the, do you come up for like a Zalia festival or do you, you know, what is it about the community that you today?
Well, we go to church here in Frederick town and I'm active in the church.
And we used to go to their whatever, you know, the fair and whatever, you know, just most of the people will say, oh, you live in Marquand.
Do you know so and so?
Well, no, we don't because we don't ever, there's not, you know, our church is not there.
Our church is here and, and there's more going on.
But we still go back to Festus for our doctor and dentist, you know, that's, we haven't really gotten used to that yet.
As, as we get older and not so willing to drive that far, maybe we will get local.
I don't know.
And do you often, do you ever go down back down to where you grew up?
I do.
I visit relatives.
Unfortunately we go down there a lot for funerals.
There's a lot of, now it's gotten to our peer group and we go down to the Glenville picnic once in a while.
You didn't really mention cousins or anything.
You have any extended family down in that area?
I have nieces and nephews.
My oldest sister lived there, the one that I have quoted.
She lived there and so her two or three of her children still live there.
And we see them, but most of our actual, my cousins were from Kentucky.
They were all from Kentucky and Jim's people are in the Crystal City, St.
Festus area.
So how did you meet him?
At church.
Okay.
Was he visiting from that area?
No, he was, they had moved to that area from Cheyenne, Wyoming.
It's really strange how people get together.
Of course now I am a writer.
I've been a writer now since many, many years.
And was that, did you ever work, work employment wise writing?
At the newspaper.
I was the food editor for a while and then I did a column for five years, just a freelance column for five years.
Which newspaper?
Of the journals in the Festus, journals in the Democrat News or News Democrat, or opposite of what this one is here.
Daily Journal, the opposite of the French.
So I, and I've written for quite a few different magazines and put out a few books and stuff, but I'm not a, I can't really call myself a writer, but I do like to write.
And I've compiled family history books from where my sisters took off.
Then I went from the time my husband and I got married up until the present with our boys, because I think, I think our children and grandchildren need to know what life was like.