Remembering the stories my mom shared of the good ole days

I believe it was January 1988.

I was working for the Newspaper Printing Corporation in Tulsa. NPC was the joint operating company that printed and distributed the two Tulsa newspapers at the time.

A family member had died in the Bootheel of Missouri and my mom asked if I would take her to the funeral in New Madrid, some 425 miles away.

New Madrid, which runs along the Mississippi River, is the name given to the New Madrid Fault Line where the Mississippi River ran backward in the 1811-12 earthquakes.

We left Tulsa that evening and drove east on the Interstate, taking the MM Junction shortcut on the west side of Springfield, Missouri where we connected with Highway 60 east.

We stopped for the evening near Van Buren, Missouri, where my mom graduated from high school in 1955. We enjoyed breakfast at the New Madrid Café the next morning, and my mom ran into a classmate from back in the day.

We made the 100-mile trek to New Madrid and attended the funeral. I didn’t care too much for funerals, so I stayed in the car while my mom attended the service.

My mom was born in New Madrid in October 1936 and lived in various shacks in that part of the state.

Her grandparents on both sides of the family, the Jacksons and Hortons, had migrated to southeast Missouri from northwest Alabama.

The Hortons where the first to arrive, in 1924, after my great-grandfather had been caught making moonshine in Alabama.

The Jackson side of the family arrived from Alabama in 1932.

The families knew each other. My grandparents were married Oct. 30, 1932 in the New Madrid County Courthouse.

I’ve visited that neck of the woods many times as a youngster.

We always took a family vacation in August, and many times a stop in New Madrid was on the agenda. My mom loved to visit her old stomping grounds and share her many stories of growing up there.

She had many photos from those days along with many stories she shared.

Some years before that trip in 1988, we were packing up for a trip to the Bootheel. We left way too late, which was a usual trait in our family.

My uncle Leon, my mom’s younger brother, had a summer cabin east of Van Buren and we stopped there for supper. It was dark, and my dad was ready to stay the night. Mom said we were going on to the Bootheel. We probably should have stayed, but I wasn’t in charge.

We arrived in Bertrand, Missouri, on Highway 60 and stopped at the Raymond and Margaret Morrow house. Margaret was my mom’s cousin. We slept in our camper the rest of the evening. The next morning we got up and enjoyed a huge breakfast.

The Marrow family were big time farmers in that part of the country. Near their home was Wolfe Island, which is owned by Kentucky but accessible from Missouri.

The Marrows farmed the nearly 10,000-acre island and had much of their farming equipment in sheds on the island.

At one time there was an old river house on stilts on the island. A flood in the 1970s washed the house down the river.

I remember one year riding with my dad and Raymond Morrow. We stopped at a hardware store near Charleston and picked up hoes for the workers they hired to clean weeds.

The next day, I went to the island and hoed a few rows of soybeans. I got paid $10 by check from the Marrow’s oldest son.

My mom’s aunt, and mother of Margaret, was remarried and her husband had a tackle box he wanted to sell me. He offered to cash my check if I would buy the tackle box. At the urging of my dad, I bought the tackle box and still had $7 in change.

It was in the Bootheel in 1948 that my mom got sick. My grandparents didn’t have a vehicle, so my grandfather would make a bed on the plow and pull her to town with a tractor.

The doctor was ready to carry her to the Mayo Clinic but wanted to try one more medicine. My grandparents said they didn’t have the money to travel to the clinic.

The doctor gave my mom penicillin and it cured her.

I remember hearing the stories of my mom and family taking bathes in a #7 wash tub and how they took care of their business in an outhouse.

It had to be a hard life. My mom often talked about picking cotton on hot summer days. Each kid was required to pick 100 pounds of cotton by hand each day.

Their reward was a cold Pepsi on the Fourth of July.

My grandmother was a longtime cook in schools and nursing homes and my grandfather worked as a sharecropper.

In 1951, my mom’s family moved from New Madrid to Van Buren. She shared a story once of an ice storm hitting New Madrid. Not wanting to break her perfect school record, my grandfather carried her to school in his old pickup, and when they arrived, they saw that the school had been closed.

After my mom moved to Tulsa following graduation, my grandparents, along with a sister and brother, followed, moving to Oklahoma in the early 1960s.

Another time on a trip to the Bootheel, we decided to stop for the evening at a campground. We pulled in and my dad told my mom that we were not cooking supper on the Coleman stove. Instead, we stopped a small restaurant where I enjoyed a large pizza. I ate the whole thing.

In the late 90s we enjoyed many Jackson family reunions in Van Buren on the Current River, a popular floating destination in the area. And around that same time, the Horton side of the family started gathering every other Labor Day for a reunion.

Those reunions and family get-to-gathers have since gone by the wayside, as much of the family has since passed.

But the memories of hearing my mom tell stories of the hard and good times will live on forever.

Have a great week, and always remember that “Good Things are Happening” every day.