Good to be back home again!

This beautiful photo is the Frio River flowing down a canyon at Concan, TX in the hill country.

We spent last weekend there at Neil's lodges. The cabin we stayed in was located on a cliff overlooking the river. Our son Ron and his family spend a week every summer here and wanted us to go see the Frio.

On our way to the Frio, we traveled thru the Texas Hill Country and stopped at the LBJ ranch and Fredericksburg, an old German settlement.

The area is very rocky and lots of pretty cypress trees along the river bank. The water was clear and cold.

Jim is outside the cabin we stayed in which was on top of a cliff. The cement picnic tables are used for the bird watching groups that come there in the spring.

My sister Carolyn and her husband Dave from Black Mountain, NC were here at this same spot last April on a bird watching trip.

Inside our cabin in the kitchen. James is watching Liz as she talks to her dog Luna.

The cabin was very rustic with nice Mexican tiles on the floor. It was cold at night and we built a fire outdoors and sat around it and enjoyed the star studded sky.

Lizzie, Ron and Ally standing outside our cabin with the river deep down in the gorge. It was a long way down there. Liz is a student at Univ. of Texas in Austin and Ally attends North Texas University at Denton, TX. We were happy to spend the week-end with all of them.

Heading out West to Texas

I will be taking a break from posting daily entries on my blog. We are heading out to Austin, TX to visit our son Ronnie and family for a few days. Ronnie is our oldest son and he and his wife Cindy have two daughters, Liz at Univ. of Texas and Allison at North Texas State University . They will both be home for the weekend and we are spending 2 nights at the Frio River at a lodge near Concan, TX. They go there every summer for a week of tubing on the river and want to take us there to see the area. That should be fun. We have seen the sights in Austin since we've been there several times so this trip will be just to spend time with our family.

Texas Gilmers are the last 4 on the back row. Nov 2006 at our son James (red shirt in front) 50th birthday. Our youngest son Bill is behind James and the other 3 girls belong to him. And then there's Jim and me. This is our entire family. We don't get together at the same time very often.

Bird watching

I love to hear birds singing, especially the mocking bird. We have lots of these birds in your yard and I find nests in the low shrubs, the pomgrante bush, the rose bushes, and in the grape vines. The mocking bird is easy to identify with its white markings on its wings and the skinny black legs. I do not get credit for this photo which shows the markings that helps one identify this songster.


Mocking birds sing any time of the day or night, and at times you aren't too happy to hear them singing like at 4 a.m. outside your bedroom window! I'll never forget the mocking bird that sang all afternoon outside my daddy's bedroom window the afternoon he was dying from cancer. He kept hearing the bird and thought it was beautiful. That bird stayed in the grape vine all afternoon and sang until my dad died late that night. It was eerie!


My mother loved birds too. When I was 5, Christine was 3 and Sue was a baby, we would accompany mother to the cowpen each evening and sit on the grass while she milked the cow. We walked down a sandy lane with trees and bushes on each side to get to the cowpen in the woods. Mother would see birds building nests and as soon as there were eggs in the nest, she would lift us up to see the speckled eggs, and told us to never touch them or the mother bird would not return to hatch them. Then we watched every day to see if the birds had hatched. Then one day they would start breaking out of the shells and were fuzzy little things and their eyes would be closed and they had no feathers yet. Then one day we stopped and mother told us to be very quiet and she would show us how the mother bird fed her babies. The mother bird eats and the regurgitates the food into the mouths of her babies. Mother ate some berries, and put some on her finger and dropped in into the open beaks of the baby birds and they enjoyed eating the blackberries. As she neared the nest they could hear the movement and would start making noises and opened their mouths. I found a photo to show exactly what we saw.


We have a birdbath in a flower bed in the back yard and this summer when we had a drought and it was so hot, we enjoyed watching the birds taking baths in our birdbath. Before we moved to town in 2003, we enjoyed redwing blackbirds (they used to chase the crows), kingfishers, herons, swallows, wrens, quail (we called them Bob Whites), and a variety of owls, as well as the noisy jay birds with the tall combs on their heads.


It was fun watching the mother bird teaching the littles one to fly, often pushing them out of the nest. They would land on the soft ground and were so helpless. After a lot of struggling they would eventually lift their wings and take off, with the mother bird in the background protecting them.

We saw a lot of quail on our farm and they look like little brown chickens. Daddy would bring home quail eggs if the bird had a nest on the ground where he was plowing and would have to destroy the nest. Mother would boil the tiny eggs and we would eat them.

Where we live now once was a wide open field and we have a large variety of birds. My favorite are the pretty bluebirds with bright red breasts. Our bluebird houses were filled this spring and summer. We have a variety of birds migrating through in the spring and summer. But the robins and mockingbirds are with us most all year long. We enjoyed a lot of brown thrashers this year and had to get out the bird book to identify them. I had not seen them here before this year.


Bird watching is a great sport and you can find such a variety at any time of the year, anywhere in the world.

Peanut Picking Time

Peanut stacks in the field

It's hot, dry and very dusty and a lot of the dust is from farmers picking peanuts in this area. It brings back memories when I see the tractors in the field loading peanuts into the big trucks and dust so thick you can hardly see the equipment.

Peanut picking takes place in the fall when the peanuts are mature and ready to be plowed up and today they are mechanically picked and taken to the peanut warehouse to be dried. The peanut picking machine came along after I grew up and left home in the 1950's. I will explain how we harvested peanuts on our farm before modern times.

But I have to tell you that before the peanuts were harvested, we could pull up a few vines, pick the raw peanuts off the vines and boil them in a big black wash pot outdoors. A fire would be built under the pot to boil the peanuts. We would add a lot of table salt to the water to make the boiled peanuts salty to taste. Young people would be invited to a home for a peanut boiling and play party games while they waited for the peanuts to boil (cook). Peanut boilings were very popular in the 1940's and 1950's. Now people go to the grocery store and buy raw peanuts which are ready to be boiled. I think that's cheatin' a bit!  Or better yet, they stop at a roadside stand and buy "boiled peanuts".

Let me begin at the beginning. Daddy would always save a basket of raw peanuts when he gathered them and in the winter, we would have peanut shellings. Families would get together and shell the peanuts and they would be packed away to be planted in March. This is where they got their seed. The peanuts were put into a planter and either planted with mules or later by using a tractor. Some fertilizer was included in the planter with the peanuts. It was the children's job to load the seed peanuts and fertilizer in the planters when they became empty. And to furnish the person doing the planting with water to drink. I always liked planting time because it was warm enough to go barefoot and walk in the soft plowed dirt. During our spare time we would build "frog houses" in the dirt and decorate them. More about games we played in the field in another blog. Maybe I'll build a frog house and take a photo of it so you can see what I am talking about. When the dirt was "broken" or plowed prior to being planted, and after a good rain, we would remove our shoes and go "bogging" to see who could make the largest holes in the ground. I can still feel the dirt squeezing between my toes. What fun!!

Once the peanuts started coming up and filling the rows with little green bushes, the weeds would also start coming up among them. We had to go to the field and "hoe" the peanuts, which meant digging up the grass and weeds and try not to dig up the young peanuts. I really didn't care for this part of the peanut farming. This usually took place in hot weather, June and July.

We would go to the field early in the morning after having had a big country breakfast. But by 10 AM, it would be so hot and humid. We would stop to have lunch at noon and rest a bit under the big pecan trees before heading back to the field around 1 PM. And we would work until the sun went down. We didn't have to work on Saturday or Sunday. Our friends liked to work on our farm with us because my dad would bring us cold drinks from the store and maybe a moon pie or candy bar. And at the end of the hoeing season, he would take us to Pond Creek to go swimming. He knew how to get us to work. We didn't receive any money for working as kids do today. And if he grew cotton, we had to chop the excess cotton plants and hoe the weeds just as we did for the peanuts. I'm glad he wasn't much of a cotton farmer. He preferred peanuts.

Ah, peanut picking time. A large plow was used to lift the peanuts out of the ground, with all the peanuts hanging underneath the vine. The peanuts were covered with soft dirt. The family got involved again and this time we walked behind the plow, lifted the peanut vines (little bushes) and shook the dirt off the peanuts, leaving the peanuts exposed to the sun. You can only imagine what a dirty job that was. Once the peanuts were shook, the men came to the field with a wagon load of poles and slats, and dug holes in the ground, put a tall pole in the hole and filled it with dirt, and then nailed two boards near the botton of the pole with the boards crossing near the pole, like an "x". Then the peanut vines were picked up with pitch forks and placed high on the poles like in the photo at the top of this page. The children would drag the peanuts to the poles for the workers to stack them. We were not allowed to use the dangerous pitch forks.

Once the peanuts were stacked and dried for about 4 weeks, they were ready to be picked. My daddy had the only peanut picker in the area and he kept busy for many weeks, picking his and most of his neighbor's peanuts. The peanuts were separated from the vines as they passed through the picker. The dried sweet vines were baled into square bales with a baling machine that was behind the picker. This hay was taken to the barn to fed to livestock during the winter.

Peanut picking took place in late September and there was always the danger of tropical storms and gales (that's what they called hurricanes back then). Neighbors helped each other and worked day and night if they thought there was going to be bad weather. We didn't have weather radios, TV or any way except the newspaper to know about weather.

After the peanuts were separated from the vines (picked), they were gathered in big tubs and then poured in the back of my daddy's big red truck, and taken to the warehouse to sell. He put the money in the bank and this was what we lived on until the next fall. He found lots of odd jobs to do throughout the year, including lots of bartering.

I have a great respect for peanut farmers and really appreciate peanut butter much more than those who have no idea all that goes into getting it in the grocery store. Of course we made our own peanut butter and peanut brittle.

If you want to learn more about picking peanuts, go to this link, to page 4. I found the photo used above of stacked peanuts on page 2 of this website: www.rootsweb.com/~ncbertie/peanut.htm

The 22nd Curtis School Reunion was today

The Curtis school reunion was held today and approximately 100 attended. It was a beautiful fall day - not too hot and there were no lovebugs flying about today. The food tables were filled with delicious homemade dishes including fried chicken, chicken and dressing, vegatables, salads, and dozens of desserts. Plenty of sweet tea, as well as unsweetened tea, lemonade, and other drinks. People started arriving at 10 A.M., coming from FL, GA, north AL, and even Michigan.

Pictured here are two of our older alumni, Jimmie Lou Cowen and Dot Daniels. Jimmie Lou, soon be be 89, and Enoch Cowen(deceased) had 10 children and all of them went to Curtis School. Dot and her deceased husband Dick (one of our school bus drivers 

Dot (88) and Dick Daniels(deceased) had twins, Judy and Jim, and two other sons, Fred and Frank. Judy came from Scottsboro for the reunion today. Her twin Jim came to the reunion

also.



These are some of my classmates at Curtis. There were 18 in my graduating class (Jr High) and 9 were at the reunion today. Several are deceased. Most of us are 73 now.

Pictured, L to R: Fannie Lou Jacobs Cowen, Floyd Griffin, Sally Prescott Mitchell, Janice Cowen Hudson, Ralph Crocker, Nell Wilson Gilmer, Herschel Archie, and Mae Evely Grimes Hildreth. Not pictured: Marion (Junior) Anderson.

We all remained at the church after the reunion was over and visited for about an hour. In previous years we met on Sat. night but we're all getting older and those who live out of town don't like driving back home late at night. Ralph Crocker invited us to his new home next year for our get together after the reunion. Ralph, Janice and I are so busy with reunion duties that we don't get to visit with our classmates during the reunion. Each year we think the crowds will get smaller and smaller but they don't!

Anatomy of a country school - what was inside

Here I am in the 3rd grade at Curtis School. Miss Mollie Bell Cook was my teacher most of that year. Mrs. Doris Pickard finished out the year when Miss Cook moved.


I entered the new school at Curtis when I was in the 2nd grade. I remember being afraid that I would get lost and not be able to find my room. I would love to write about my second grade but will spend time today telling you all about the new Curtis school.

We rode a school bus to school. My bus driver was Mr. Grafton Young. He owned his own school bus. Upon entering the school at the tall front steps, you stepped into a large foyer. On the left was the principal's office. He didn't have a secretary or telephone. Just a large desk and some chairs. The closet in his office was always stacked high with things for school use. Later his office was used for a classroom when the 3rd grade classroom became the lunch room. On the right side of the foyer was the teachers' lounge and music room. There was a piano in the room and this is were we would go to practice during lunchtime when the teachers were not there. And Mrs. Ringsdorf taught piano lessons here when she wasn't teaching 7th grade history and some other subjects. This was a special room and you always knocked before entering. Mr. Griffin's door was always open. You still knocked to get permission to enter.


You went to your classroom after entering the building. We did most of our homework at school so we didn't have big bookbags to carry around. When I was in the 3rd grade, we had to bring our lunches. The lunch room wasn't built until I was in the 4th or 5th grade. They used the 3rd grade room for the lunch room. The students all had to bring their own plate, glass and silver for the lunch room. I guess there was no money in the beginning to buy those. My daddy helped build tables and benches. We had 2 cooks and they used student helpers during lunchtime to help serve, clean up, wash dishes, etc. The food was good most of the time.


We had outdoor toilets at the back of the school yard when the new school opened. We didn't have indoor restrooms until I was in the 5th grade. I don't know why they waited so long unless building supplies were scarce due to the WWII going on.


Our class rooms were large and plenty of windows for lighting. A big pot-bellied stove was at the front of the room and the boys took turns keeping the stove filled with wood. We had a janitor that came early every morning and started fires in all the stoves. There was a big closet at the front of the room behind the blackboard and teacher's desk. It was called the "cloak room" and this is where we placed our lunches on a shelf over the coat racks. I remember in the 3rd grade that we had a long sand table at the back of the room where we could go after we finished our work and play. We cut buildings, etc. from paper and made a city, with streets, houses, etc and this was placed on the sand table. At Christmas time that year, we were making presents for our mothers and painting privet hedge berries red by dipping them in a pail of water that had red paint floating on top of the water. We put some silver paint in another bucket of water to dip cedar branches. We had painted a gourd green and cut the top of the gourd to use as an opening to put the red berries and some silver cedar into the gourd. Someone knocked over the red paint beside where I was working and it went down the front of my new dress. I had to stay in the cloakroom while the teacher took my dress to try to remove the paint. She found something for me to wear home. And I never got to wear my favorite dress again. We didn't wear pants to school until I was in the 8th or 9th grade, and we started wearing blue jeans.


Every Friday morning we marched single file to the auditorium in the middle of the school for "chapel". Each week a different grade was in charge. We sang songs, had a Bible reading and prayer, and then we usually had a play.


We had recess in the morning and again in the afternoon after lunch. We all ran outside to play while the teachers retired to the lounge to have a cold drink. There was no organized P.E. - just free play. Different age groups played together sometimes. Jacks were a favorite game of the younger girls. Or jump rope, hopscotch, throw the can, hide and seek, Red Rover, and many other games of the day. I don't remember the teachers ever coming out to check on us. When the bell rang, we all came inside to our classrooms.


After we ate our lunches, our scraps were put into a large can and someone would take them outside to give to Curtis, the big hog that was in a pen behind the school. I guess they sold him when he was fat enough and got another one to fatten. We didn't have garbage pickup so this was a good way to dispose of left overs.


I loved going to school and never wanted to miss a day. I remember that I couldn't wait to get to the 4th grade so I could be a 4-H club member, and  to own my own books. The state didn't provide books past the 3rd grade. We  picked cotton and bought books from students promoted to the next grade.


These are my memories of being in the 3rd grade and some of our activities, and what our school was like.

School Memories - 6th grade

Click to enlarge photo
5th and 6th grade classes at Curtis School, 1946
I am on 2nd row from top, in front of the principal, Mr. E. C. Griffin
My teacher, Miss Arvie D. Fuller, is on back row, 4th from the left

I thought about which year I wanted to write about and I selected the 6th grade. My teacher was Miss Arvie D. Fuller from Elba. I learned so much from her. First of all, she instilled in us a desire to learn about a lot of things. The first thing we did every morning was have a devotional time and a student could select a Bible passage and read it. Then we would say the Lord's prayer. Then we said the Pledge of Allegience. We would go to the teacher's desk and turn in our lunch money unless we paid by the week. My dad furnished the lunchroom with milk, vegetables, wood for the furnace, etc. so I almost never had to pay for my lunch as there was always credit.

I remember that we had to draw maps of North and South America and label the countries. We had to put in the states and capitals for the United States. I can close my eyes and visually recount all of the states and remember the capitals. We colored the maps (on poster board) and I kept mine for many years. I had to help several of the boys fill in the states. Some of the maps were really wierd. All we had to go by was a small map in our geography book. We had to each bring 5 cents to pay for the poster board which our teacher bought in Elba for us. We shared the crayons.

Miss Fuller was a great English teacher. She taught us the parts of speech and we would go to the board and diagram sentences. I loved doing this. It was so helpful in learning about adjectives and adverbs. We learned to write. She let me write a play and we performed it for "chapel" one Friday. It was about Doctor Doolittle and I made the costumes for the animals (heads only). I directed the play and that was exciting.

One thing I will always remember was our Easter egg hunt. She took us to some woods nearby for a picnic and egg hunt. She wore her black crepe dress or suit (she wore black every day) along with stockings and "old lady" shoes with a small heel. Her hair was light auburn and she wore it short and it was always frizzy. She was a large lady and not very attractive, but we all loved her. She led the way to the woods and there were probably 20 or more students marching along behind her, carrying our lunches and we each brought 3 dyed eggs from home. I can't remember who hid the eggs for us (probably some older students came and did that). We got hot walking to the woods, so she let us go to a creek and splash our faces with water to cool off. I spyed a tree filled with pretty white flowers and decided to pick some to take home with me when we were ready to leave. After hunting the eggs, we sat down on the grass to eat our lunch - and the Easter eggs. We saw a large black snake nearby trashing about and the teacher saw that he was swallowing a bird, alive. She told us to sit still and she found a stick and killed the snake. Then she did something I'll never forget. She found a piece of glass (we were at an old homesite) and she took that piece of glass and opened the belly of the snake, and the bird escaped and flew away!!! What a brave lady. Before we left to walk back to school, I got permission to pick a bouquet of the pretty flowers to take to my mother. Guess what! It was a plant called thunderwood and was poisonous. Soon I began to itch. I had to throw the flowers away and I had a terrible rash for several days.

For Christmas that year, she gave each of us a new toothbrush and we were so happy to get them. We made all the decorations for the cedar Christmas tree in our room. We had a Christmas play with a manger scene and sang Christmas carols. When we finished our desk work, we were allowed to go to the back of the room where there were some new library books and choose a book to read. I read every book on the shelves that year and some I read twice.

The 6th grade always had a graduation exercise and we were promoted to Jr High School. We had to wear white dresses and my mother made mine from one of her sister's dresses. It was so pretty, made of white dotted swiss and starched stiff. I was selected valedictorian of my class and had to give a speech. Our graduation was in the daytime and parents and grandparents were invited to attend. Only my mother came from my family and she brought my baby sisters Alice(8 mo.) and Judy (2). The Jr. High 9th grade graduated the same day, but in the evening.

I never saw Miss Fuller after I left Curtis and often wondered what happened to her. When our son James was born in 1956 in Opp hospital, they put me in a room with an older lady from Elba and it was none other than Miss Arvie D Fuller - my 6th grade teacher that I loved! She was recovering from minor surgery. We had so much to talk about.