Vintage Valentines

(These families were well known in Lebanon and Windyville and Bennett Spring (Brice) and Flatwoods, all over that area so I thought a lot of you might locate a relative’s name. I wrote this column for the Lebanon paper several years ago.)

How many of you remember in grade school in the 40s and 50s we all made valentine boxes and took to school and exchanged valentines? Boys to boys, girls to girls, made no difference in gender, we all were friends and we loved to take and receive valentines, homemade or "boughten" . This was even more true back in the 20s and 30s. It was like families sending Christmas cards to other families like we do nowadays.

The picture I used for the cover picture are just a few of the Valentines my Uncle Loran Dame received in the 30s when he was a teenage boy. Uncle Loran saved these all those years in a box where we found them after he died in 2008. The valentines and the friends were most precious to him all those years.

First there are Valentines to Uncle Loran from Cassie Jennings, Charline and Broox Jennings. They were sisters to my mother - in - law Pauline Jennings Hart. So its the late 30's. These "kids" are 12 to 16 probably and here is what blows my mind: The 3 Jennings girls were sending Valentines to Loran Dame (not one year but several years). They could never have known that in due time their nephew Milan Hart as yet unborn would grow up to marry Loran's niece (also unborn)!!!!! Isn't that just the coolest thing ever? That's how you know when your "family roots" are buried deep in this Ozark soil.

Most people papered their walls back in those days and they liked the big colorful floral designs so kids would take leftover pieces of wallpaper and cut them to size, usually 3x3 or 4x4, and draw hearts on them and make up a poem or just sign their names. If you looked on the back of these wallpaper scraps you saw instructions on how to make wallpaper paste and apply the paper to the walls, and sometimes the name of the design, etc. Apparently kids always had crayolas or pencils and they colored them. They made do with what they had.

A favorite inscription was "My love for you will never fail as long as a piggy wears his tail."

DORTHA AND JAMES JEFFRIES were probably siblings and their names appear on several Valentines.

There was also a RAYMOND THOMAS and HOWARD THOMAS, probably siblings. Howard wrote this poem inside in long hand. Here it is as he wrote it: from the toe of your shoe to the top of your lid ill say you are a dog gone nice kid

There was a HATHAWAY family, and GLENN AND WILMA WISE, also siblings. One from DARRELL DAME.

Police officers were a popular picture theme as in "To My Valentine How I'd like to "cop" your heart.

A girl named WILMA FLANAGAN ( beautiful handwriting). And PEARL BUCK. WILMA CLAYTON was a sister to Asa Clayton who married my great aunt Inez Hawk. She was one of the ladies in the picture I posted a few weeks which had been outside the dining lodge at Bennett Spring. Another sister was a teacher several of us had in Lebanon school. Her name was VERA JONES. Another CLAYTON (ZELMA) married a Medley and they had a daughter I went to school with named SANDRA MEDLEY. And there is a valentine from a WILMA CLAYTON.

There was a GENEVA MARLEY.

And a CLIFFORD which I am guessing was Uncle Loran's cousin, CLIFFORD SMITH.

There is a beautiful card dated 1935 from PAULINE JENNINGS (Milan's mom) to NELLIE DAME (my maternal grandmother) Again this was 8 years before Milan and I were born.

Several valentines from Otto Phillips who was a teacher I think (maybe at Flatwoods?)

Someone used a lined tablet to cut out a valentine with scalloped edges and wrote this poem on it: Roses are red and vilets are blue angles in heaven oh I love you. (I copied the misspellings as they were written).

Passion

“Better pass boldly into that other world, in the full glory of some passion, than fade and wither dismally with age”.. (James Joyce) I’ve often been accused of being too passionate, of caring too much about certain things. But I believe that passion, also defined as fervor or zeal, is one of the essential core values of human life, along with the Apostle Paul’s Biblical list of the virtues of faith, hope and charity. Passionate people have strong opinions and usually articulate them very well. We are also perfectionists, and we don’t handle incompetence in the public arena very well, all of which tend to preclude us from being the most popular person in the room. I long ago accepted the fact that I won’t have the largest funeral in Lebanon, nor will my obituary make the front page. But not everyone seems to care that much about anything other than their own lives. T.S. Eliot once said, “It is obvious that we can no more explain pas...

A RIVER RUNS THROUGH IT

Years ago, there was a movie called “A River Runs Through It” based on a novel by Norman Maclean. I didn’t see the movie, but the title has been running through my head for several days now. The Rio Grande is just one of hundreds of rivers that runs through this great North American continent. More than 60,000 illegal immigrants have crossed the Mexican border in the past nine months, many of them using the Rio Grande as their point of entrance. Louie Gohmert, a Texas Congressman describes his recent trip to the river during the pre-dawn hours. He saw pregnant women and those with nursing infants and small children, and many teenagers, 72 people in all that morning and a third of them were children unaccompanied by adults. Border agents pulled on blue latex gloves when they saw them arriving. One told the Congressman that many of them have scabies, lice and even more serious infectious diseases that probably won’t be noticed until after they have traveled with others on buse...

LIQUID PRAYERS

I'm often asked why Tears fall from my eyes When my prayers ascend to the throne; It's so easy for me To shed tears, don't you see; That's the way I make my needs known. For the tears that I shed In the prayers that I've said Have all been kept by Him In a bottle rare; He has placed them there He has never forgotten them. For every tear Is a liquid prayer That waters the seed that we sow. Through the good times and bad Whether happy or sad The tears help our prayers to flow. Feel a tug in your heart? Then let the tears start When you take to God all your cares. He knows what you need; He hears when you plead; For tears are just liquid prayers. Written by Joan Rowden Hart 12.17.01, based on Psalm 56:8, “Thou tellest my wanderings; put thou my tears into thy bottle; are they not in thy book?” This poem was inspired by my dear friend, Betty Shanks of Farmington , Mo , who coined the phrase “liquid prayers” after I had preached a sermon ...

Straight From The Hart

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