The last week has been interesting, with calls from people, things I learned from reading and tidbits you may enjoy knowing.
Ella Elmore, a friend I seldom see but have known for years called after she read my column last Sunday, saying how excited she was to read about her aunt, Fairy Lowery, a Liberty School teacher who conducted our art classes at Enterprise Church.
Elmore had heard of the WPA (Works Progress Administration) but had no real idea of what it was or how and why it came into our lives during the Great Depression. It was my opportunity for an enlightening history lesson. I even told her more about her family — information I remembered when the terrible tornado hit Gloster and her uncle’s wife lost her leg.
We called him “Turner” Lowery. As I got older I wondered if we were saying that because he was an attorney. That really was his name, she said.
The WPA conducted many projects. One that really helped folks with food preservation was the cannery that began in the little red building that later served as the creamery, located on Main Street in Liberty, right across from the then-high school football field. The building is still standing.
The workers were all people with the WPA. I wonder about the heat source. I do not recall big wood burners. This made canning corn, which required processing under pressure, a snap compared to the several hours of boiling at home, and often not having success. They even preserved meat.
Oh, it was a sweaty, strenuous job, moving steaming pressure cookers to cool down and adding others to heat to that high temperature for 15 minutes or so.
More memories of those days will come later.
My doorbell beckoned after Elmore’s phone call. There stood friends David and Kitty Bryan of Kentwood, La. I spent a wonderful day with them last November. They immediately brought up Sunday’s column, saying, “That WPA art teacher was my Aunt Fairy, not really, but a close cousin who lived nearby. She was old enough that we called her aunt.”
I asked about my telephone caller, who also was David’s cousin. We discussed Turner Lowery’s wife’s tornado tragedy. David knew all about it. I wondered when it was and if it was the same time that a tornado struck near Gillsburg. One of our Enterprise School classmates, my third cousin, was killed. She was married and had a little boy. She was the same age as my older sister.
David said, “That was the year (1935) we had the hurricane. I was just a little boy, but we sat up all night, just hoping and praying we would not be blown away.”
The tornado we discussed did not touch near the Bryan familiy home but picked up one home near Mount Vernon Church. It set it down nearby and almost destroyed it, with a toddler boy trapped underneath. He was badly bruised and had an injured leg. He now lives in Louisiana.
It is hard to believe that this one column so quickly brought these interesting, touching stories to light. I feel a part of each one.
I later found out that was the same year we had bad weather we called the June storm. The wind blew sporadically all afternoon, sometimes sending sheets of rain going completely horizontal. Young Sister and I would sit on the front porch in the rocking chair and let the gusts send us along from one end to the other. Daddy, who had gone to town, did not come home but arrived the next morning soon after daylight, riding a horse he had borrowed from Cousin Charlie Hazlewood.
That was when the big pecan tree at the edge of our garden was uprooted and fell, flattening the fence, and landing in a pasture. This was home to another animal — a goat — that was banished from the yard and had become a pest.
I’ll write more about the goat in a future column.
