Today is my mother’s 90th birthday. Christmas Eve birthdays sometimes get lost in the holiday rush but she never lets us forget! She is housebound and is confined to her wheelchair but she enjoys life, and treasures every day she can be in her own home. Her house is small and well guarded by two large attack cats, but all her children and as many of her stepchildren and grandchildren as possible will be stopping by to visit with her sometime this weekend.
She asked me this week what kind of “spiel” I would be putting in the paper for her. She is just now learning about the picture and request for a card shower I had published last Saturday. All week she has been calling and asking why she is getting birthday cards from people she doesn’t know or remember!
We have talked in recent months more about her childhood and days gone by. She was born and raised on a farm in Laclede County. She loved to read and on rainy days she would climb up into the barn loft with her books to read in the soft clean hay. The library books from the Shakespeare Club which started in 1896 were housed in the Laclede County Courthouse from 1920 until 1936 and my grandfather would go to the courthouse and get books for him and for her to read.
She loved country music and old church hymns. One of my most vivid memories as I was growing up was looking through the stacks of her “songbooks”. These were the brown Spiral Composition Books she would buy at the “dime store”, and she would sit by the radio for hours writing the words down to the songs she liked as they played on the air. They were written in her beautiful cursive handwriting with an ink pen, and the colors of the ink would vary within the songs because she would finish out a line or a verse the second or third time she heard it on the radio.
I called her several years ago to ask if I could have one or two of them to keep and show my granddaughters. She told me she had thrown them all away after my sister had typed off the lyrics she wanted to keep. I thought I was going to have a heart attack!
She said she couldn’t imagine why anyone would want those “old tattered and faded pages” but she promised to see if she had any left. It turned out she still had several covering the years of 1941 through 1951 (she always dated them), and they are now proudly displayed on my piano as some of my dearest treasures.
She and her older brother, Loran Dame, started school together at Flatwoods when he was six. Coming into Lebanon for high school after they graduated from 8th grade was difficult. My grandfather would bring them in on Sunday nights to stay with my Aunt Nerva Conn-Appling who lived close to where the high school is now.
Her house was small. My mom slept in the 2nd bedroom but Uncle Loran had to sleep out in an old shed beside the house where Aunt Nerva kept her woodpile. It had a small bed and heating stove. On Fridays my grandfather would come get them and my grandmother would do their laundry so they could go back to school another week.
My mom only had two dresses, made from feed sack prints, and she would alternate them on the days through the week. To make matters worse she and my uncle were bullied and mocked as “hillbillies” by some of the other students and even told by some faculty members they would never be able to learn. I guess they didn’t know my mom had been valedictorian of her class and had written and delivered a beautiful speech. So they quit school after two months.
She started dating my dad when she was 14 and he was 17. They ran off to get married and lied about their ages to get a marriage license. It was November 1942. I was born in August 1943, just 3 months before my mother turned 17.
My sister Lois Nichols was born two years later, and our sister, Kay was born in 1948. In the meantime my parents divorced.
In 1950 my mom married Clarence Lindsey, a soldier stationed at Fort Leonard Wood. She started her second family - five boys born in a row, like stair steps. You may know them as the Lindsey boys. Kenny is the oldest, just exactly ten years younger than me, then came Densil, then Donnie, then Leon, and finally Delbert Lynn.
Life has not been easy for her. She has buried two husbands and two children. Clarence was killed in a tragic car-pedestrian accident in downtown Lebanon in 1974 and she was left with 5 boys to raise alone. Her third husband, Bill Ward, died in 2004.
My brother Densil was murdered by a drunk driver shortly after being honorably discharged from the Navy in 1988. My sister Kay was killed in a car accident in 1964 when she was 16.
Over the years I have come to appreciate my mother’s innate intelligence, but she never had the opportunity to realize her full potential. I see it in her love of words and reading, her strong writing skills, her musical talent (she used to play the guitar and sing). That DNA was passed down to all of her children in some form or another and the only reason we have been able to expand on it has been our education and other life opportunities which she never had.
It is a blessing for me at my age to have both parents still living. My dad and stepmother live in Eldon. He is now in the final stages of Alzheimer’s disease. My mother still has a fairly good memory after ninety years. Sometimes it comes slowly, but then so does mine!
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