Earning a Living (#52Ancestors Week 6)

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Week 6: Earning a Living

 The vast majority of my ancestors were farmers.  My father, however, took a slightly different path.  After being raised with farming and being active in 4-H Club and FFA (Future Farmers of America), he graduated from Murfreesboro’s Central High School in May 1950, where he was the winner of the Agriculture medal his senior year.  

He attended Middle Tennessee State College (now MTSU) for two years. In September 1952, he joined the army and went through basic training in Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri; then, in May 1953, he went to Korea as a carpenter with Company A of the 378^th Engineer Combat Battalion, where he helped to build bridges and an orphanage.  He went in as a Private, was promoted to Corporal and then squad leader, and then was promoted to Sergeant in May 1954.  He returned stateside in the fall of 1954 and was transferred to Fort Riley, Kansas, early in 1955.

After his discharge in 1956, he and an army buddy named Jack went to Elk Creek, California, to manage the ranch of his cousin, Enon Maddux.  In the summer of 1957, his cousin Donald McDonald worked with him there.

While back in Tennessee for a visit, he met his future bride on a blind date, introduced by his cousin Bobby Hayes and wife Amelia (“Sis”).  They married in February 1959 and returned to California, this time to Willows, where he worked independently on a ranch there.  His cousin Ernest Burgess worked with him in 1959, and his cousin Gerald Lee worked with him in 1960. 

In the fall of 1960, he returned to Murfreesboro and began driving his own trailer truck, hauling produce.  It was this career that led to his early death in December 1965.  He was overnight at a truck stop in Leesburg, Florida, when his heater malfunctioned and he died of asphyxiation in his sleep.

Influencer(s) (#52Ancestors Week 5)

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Week 5 - Influencer(s)

Most people probably consider an “influencer” someone who has an influence on a large number of people.  I am going to write instead about several people who have had a large influence on me in the area of hospitality.

First up is my mother.  She has hosted countless people for meals.  We once had a chalkboard on the wall by the back door that became something of a guest book that everyone signed.  It was quite full.  We had a neighbor whose parents worked full-time, so when he got home from school, he knocked once on the back door, opened it, announced “I’m home!” and came on in.  We had teens and young adults who considered our house a second home.  My mother welcomed a young lady who needed a place to stay for a while.  She hosted several of her young-adult grandchildren at various times.  She learned from the best, her mother.

Grandmother told me her house was never perfectly clean, but that certainly didn’t stop people from coming.  She and Papa hosted family reunions, church picnics, hay rides, extended-family Thanksgiving dinners, Christmases, weddings, and watermelon feasts.  As children, we spent part of most summers there, and she kept a list inside the cabinet door of what each of us preferred for breakfast.  She packed sack lunches for us when we wanted to go exploring on the farm.  She welcomed my college friends and me, and she, too, had some of her young-adult grandchildren live with her while in transition.  She told me that her mother-in-law told her, “If there’s room in your heart, there’s room in your home.”

Grandma (my great-grandmother) was beyond the age of preparing meals when I knew her, so I don’t remember her for hospitality as I do for the things she made for us as children.  Her taking time to sew and crochet special things for us made a big impression on me.  But obviously she had a heart for hospitality because of what she taught her daughter-in-law.

Grandma (Minnie Loftis Williams) told a story about her mother, Louisa Chaffin Loftis, who was on her knees scrubbing clothes on a washboard when she got word that a neighbor had lost a child. She got up, left her laundry, dried her hands, and immediately went to offer what comfort she could.

My paternal grandmother’s home was a second home to me, especially when I was younger and Mama went back to school.  She did her best to instill in me a love of nature, even though I’ve never had a green thumb.  Many visitors left with flower cuttings or bulbs that she shared.  My yard has buttercups, irises, four o’clocks, arrowhead plants, surprise lilies, and day lilies from her yard, as well as a bridal wreath bush, hawthorn bush and burning bush.  When I went to visit with my children when they were small, she would fix a “goodie bag” for each child to take home, with various kinds of treats (especially Reese’s peanut butter cups).

I never met my great-grandparents, Ernest and Fannie McAbee Burgess, but Grandma Mac told me that some of her early memories were of her mother and father putting the children to bed and then heading off across the field by lantern with a tin pail of food for neighbors who were going through hard times.

None of these godly ladies will ever be famous, but each of them has had a profound influence on me, and for that I am very grateful.