(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).
© Joan Rowden Hart
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