My Mother and Her Family

My mother turned 82 years old last week!  She is in great health, too.  She recently had her yearly physical and the doctor and nurse made so much of her great cholesterol numbers that she said she's going to make copies and send one to me!  She's a spry old bird, that lady is!

Her father farmed most of his life and her mothers' family did, too.  Her mother's father really thought that my Papaw Roberts wasn't good enough for their little girl, but she married him anyway, and they were just right for each other.  They had eight kids. (9 actually; one died at a few days old.)  The oldest was Leland, who died in 1990.  The next was the baby who died, whose name was Morris Monroe, but who was forever referred to by the other children as "Baby Brother", even though he would have been older than all of them, but one; all of us grandchildren refer to him as "Baby Brother" also whenever we mention him or visit his little grave.  Next was Elnora, my mother's only sister, who died in 1996.  Then came my mother, Eler Frances (she was named after both her grandmothers; my middle name is Frances after her; my daughter is Eler Beth after her and Thomas' mother.).  Then there were six more boys, Calvin, who died in 1968, Sam and Carl, still living, Delmer who died a few years ago, and John, also still living.

As I said, my grandfather Roberts was a farmer.  He raised corn and hogs.  My mother was born in 1923, so she was still growing up during the Great Depression.  Times were hard, but their family quite often had more than a lot of the families around them.  My grandfather had one of the first cars in the neighborhood and he had the first radio.  On warm Saturday evenings friends and family would stop by and sit out on the porch and the radio would be turned up as loud as it would go, and they would listen to whatever programs were their favorites at the time.  My father told about how he was too bashful to join everyone on the porch, but he was fascinated with the radio and loved the music, so he would walk "the circle" (the road they lived on made a big wide curve and doubled back on itself, like the eye of a needle, and both families lived on that circle), because he'd be able to hear the music almost the whole way around.  (Of course this was when they were both still very young, before they started courting!)

My mom and her siblings went to a little one-room schoolhouse that was still standing until a few years ago.  They walked to school, of course, down a long, steep hillside.  Even when things were really bad, economically, even at the end of winter when the supply of canned summer food was maybe getting low, Mom's family still always had enough to eat.  My grandmother was a good cook and sent her kids to school with sufficient lunches.  But there was a family in the neighborhood that had next to nothing.  The two boys of the family often came to school with nothing but cold corn bread for lunch for days and weeks, especially toward the end of winter.  They had plenty of it, but that's often all they had.  So Mom told how her brothers, Calvin and Sam, around the same ages as those boys, would take a little extra with them and ask the boys if they'd mind trading some of their corn bread.  So they'd have, say, ham and biscuits with cake or cookies.  They'd have plenty of everything, so they'd trade some of each thing they had for some cornbread; and they'd make sure they sat there with those boys and ate every bite of that corn bread, too.

I never knew my mom's mother.  She died two years before I was born.  But I know a lot about her.  She was very ladylike, but tough as well.  My older sisters tell about how her sons always treated her like she was something fragile.  When she got older and had a lot of trouble with arthritis they wouldn't let her lift a finger to do anything that they could do for her.  My mother has all her personal things she left behind, and when I was little I loved going through the old camel-backed trunk going through her old letters and things.  She was very funny and witty.  She wrote poetry and stories and she saved everything!  I remember a candy wrapper that she'd saved and written on it the date, who she was with (probably her sister or cousin) and where they'd gone and why.  Her letters to my grandfather before they married always gave me a peek into her humor and intelligence.  My mother is very like her.

I knew my mom's father; I was 18 when he died at the age of92.  He was a funny, smart man.  He had bright, merry blue eyes and loved to laugh.  He and my grandmother must have been perfect for each other.  My mother is very like him as well.

    My mother on the left, along with her sister Elnora (Aunt Noni).  They were about 18 and 20 in this picture.

Tags: Lonzo Roberts, Eler Roberts Dowell, Elnora Roberts Dowell, Iva Myrtle Roberts