An autobiography of our beloved
Inez Faultner Proffitt Hanes
Janice & David Ledford
Smashwords Edition
Copyright 2001 Janice & David Ledford
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Dear Family,
When Grandma lived with us in 1996, we asked her to write her memories. The last time we visited her in Stigler (July 2001), she handed us this treasure. It is too valuable to keep it to ourselves. We hope you will treasure it as we do.
We love you all,
Janice & David Ledford
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Inez Faultner Proffitt Hanes
October 27, 1910 -- December 08, 2001
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I was born in Chandler, Oklahoma, Lincoln County, on October 27, 1910. My father was a dairyman at the time. He worked for my grandfather, George Washington Smith. The first memory I have of my childhood is we were living in Ness County, Kansas. My grandmother made my brother and me each a little white hat. She drove a one-horse buggy across the prairie to our house. I started to school there and my two uncles, John and Ernest Smith, were dating two big girls. One of the other of my uncles would drive us to school in the one-horse buggy and of my grandmother. There weren't any cars then. I had a pair of button up leggings to slip on over my shoes and button up the sides that came up almost to my knees. One of the big girls, Bertha Croft, would let me wear her muff to keep my hands and arms warm. She and her cousin, Myrtle Croft, finally became my aunts the next summer.
I was six years old and my mom and dad were making a garden. Of course I thought I was helping, but I saw and a big rattle snake all curled up. So I just stood there and stared at it until it charmed me. Dad called to me to run but I couldn't move. Dad heard it rattling and came with his garden hoe. He killed it and I fainted. He put some water on my face and I was okay. He made me go to the house while he finished hoeing the garden.
In that summer there was a prairie fire. My older brother, Buefort, and I wet gunny sacks for my dad to fight it with. My younger brother, Gene got very ill that fall. Mom cooked him fried sweet potatoes. He wanted one in both hands at the same time. My youngest brother, Ted, was born in February that winter.
In the spring, we went by train back to Oklahoma. My dad was a cook for the thrashing crew in Kansas. They raised lots of wheat there so he was gone most of the fall months. We lived in a place called Dagget, Oklahoma. My dad was a sharecropper then. My sister, Viola, was born there in 1917. Then we moved to Stroud, Oklahoma where my dad worked on the railroad. I was almost eight now. I remember one day a little girl got her foot caught in the cattle guard. My dad did everything he could to free her but a train came before he could free her and she was killed. My dad would never let us come to the tracks after that unless he was with us. Many times we walked the tracks to Davenport where my dad's mother, Grandmother Fowler, lived. We had to be very careful crossing the trestles. By rail it was only a few miles, but to go on the roads is was several miles to Grandma Fowler's. She had a neighbor that had a swing in her yard with two seats. I really loved swinging in it.
I loved to go about a mile from home and stay the night with the neighbors. They had a girl about my age. I forgot her name but she let me wear one of her pretty white dresses and black slippers, and we would sit in the back of a wagon and go to church. Then we moved back to Chandler and lived on the old fairgrounds. Dad worked for a farmer named English. He gave us a gallon of milk every day from his cows. I do not wish to write what I saw one day when I went for the milk, but I will never forget it.
Dad's sister lived across the pasture from us. My three brothers and her son took some eggs, a gallon syrup pail with water, and red onion peelings and went out in their pasture where there was a canyon. We made a campfire and boiled our eggs and onion peels in the can. When the eggs were done, we had red Easter eggs. We had lots of fun. Before we went home, we ate all the eggs.
There was a pond in our pasture. Dad and Mom said, "Stay out of the pond." but we went skinny dipping anyway. We all got leeches all over us. Us bigger ones had to help the smaller ones pick them off. No more skinny dipping for us, and of course we got a terrible scolding!
Right before Easter, my mom had a baby girl. She was born with pneumonia. She lived two weeks and a day and an hour. After that, the five of us kids got the big red measles. My dad had to go outside of the house and change his clothing before he could go to work. He put them in a big iron pot. My mom would go out and build a fire and boil them and hang them to dry. He had to leave them outside until we went out to change again.
On the Fourth of July, we had milk, eggs, sugar, and vanilla to make ice cream, but no ice. God provided the ice. He made a big hailstorm. We picked up enough hail stones to freeze ice cream in a gallon syrup pail in a small washtub. Boy, was it good!
There was also a big canyon in our pasture. A den of four panthers lived in the rocks and on one bank of it. We kids weren't afraid. We would go down there and crawl as far in the cave as we could without getting stuck. They only came out at night to do their screaming and hollering.
We walked almost three miles to school. One day I got sunstroke walking home and was out of school for two weeks.
On Christmas, we had a Christmas play at school. I was the first speaker. I said, "You're very welcome, one and all. We're very glad you came. I have a present on the tree, and I hope it's a doll." My first doll was on that tree. My mom got a doll head from Montgomery Ward and made a body and clothes. I really loved it.
Then that year we moved south of Chandler so we only one mile to walk to school. My dad worked on the scavenger wagon. I came home from school, stood on a stool, washed up all the supper and breakfast dishes. On Saturday, I made up homemade bread and my mom baked it. One day my youngest brother broke my doll's head and I don't remember ever getting another one. My sister didn't get any either, I don't think.
I remember when one of the boys named Fletcher Hoyt in our school accidentally got shot. The whole school was invited to view his body. The casket sat on a couch in his home and his mother sat at the head of the casket and said "thanks" to each of us as we marched by. My mother's cousin, Bessie Gibson, lived across the street from the schoolhouse so I went over there and babysat sometimes after school.
When I was eleven years old, we moved to Depew, Oklahoma. We lived there for four years. When we first moved to Depew, we lived on the north side of town. My Aunt Nancy Desha had two girls age six and eight, Opal and Lola, so she talked my dad into letting me stay with them and going to school with her girls. We lived four blocks from school, and they lived two and a half miles. So I stayed out on the farm with them and walked back and forth to school with the girls. I stayed the whole nine months, going home on the weekend and to church on Sunday.
My Grandpa and Grandma Smith had come from Kansas by covered wagon and camped there, they and their other four children and their companions. My oldest uncle had two lovely children. His wife Myrtle left her wagon to get some water. It caught fire. The baby girl couldn't get out. The little boy stuck his head out of a hole in the canvas. My dad grabbed him and pulled him out, then picked up a pitchfork and got the baby on it and threw her away from the fire. Her shoes and clothes were so burned onto her body they couldn't be removed. Her little head hit another wagon wheel and burst. My dad was a heavy smoker until the little boy was brought to our house to recover. Dad couldn't stand the smell of the linseed oil, burned flesh, and the RJR he smoked in his pipe. So he laid his pipe up in the window and never smoked it again. He lived to be ninety-four years old.
My grandparents remained in Depew for two years. Grandpa rented a big house about halfway between our house and the schoolhouse so I could stop in to see them on the way home from school. In 1926 they moved by wagon train west to Carnegie where they lived until death took all of them. Their wagon train was the last one in Oklahoma. My Gramp's family moved to Carnegie where he died March 3, 1927. My mother went to the funeral. When she came home, she wanted to move to Carnegie too. My dad was ill so after I graduated from the eighth grade I took a babysitting job for a family of six--five dollars weekly and room and board. I did the cooking, housekeeping, laundry, and cared for four kids and a sick woman. With my five dollars, my mom could buy enough food to feed my family for a week. My oldest brother did odd jobs around town.
We owned our own home. Dad traded a team of fine mules for it, so he traded our home for a Studebaker touring car. The seven of us loaded into it with some of our belongings and headed for Carnegie. My brother did the driving. On the way, he was passing a wagon and ran head on into another one. The tongue went through our windshield and out the rear glass. One of the team got on the hood of the car. No one or the team was hurt and the car was fixable. We lived in town for a few months. Dad got another sharecropping job and we moved twelve miles south and four miles west of Carnegie. There my dad hired a hand to help him. We all worked hard making a crop. Our garden was great. The seagulls came to eat the earthworms behind the plow so some of the men folk would shoot two or three of them. My mother would dress and fry them to go with our bread and gravy. They were really good eating.
My brother Beufort met and married Bonnie Downs September 19, 1928. I eloped with the hired hand, John Robert Proffitt, December 29, 1928 and was married in Anadarko. My mother was ill with pneumonia so we kept our marriage a secret for five days. The first night sleeping with my husband was a pallet on the kitchen floor at my dad's house. We continued living with my folks until we all moved in to Carnegie. My husband and I got an apartment. We lived there until after our first child, a girl Iva, was born. It showed that night, November 13, 1929. It was the worst winter in Oklahoma for a long time. One month later, we moved across the street into Mrs. Forces storage shed in back of her house. My husband did odd carpenter jobs. We loved our beans, potatoes, and cornbread. Times were hard.
Six weeks later, I got pregnant again so we moved to another apartment at Foot's Apartments. My husband chopped cotton that spring. During the summer he did more carpenter work. We lived there until after our second child, a boy Frank, was born September 28, 1930. My husband was picking cotton at this time, so when he lift in the morning I had him lock the door (my mother had our little girl) so the nosy neighbors couldn't get in. I stayed by myself and took care of the baby. When my husband came home, he would cook dinner, usually fried potatoes, salt pork and gravy. Then he would wash out the baby's diapers on the rub board so we could use them again the next day.
He did carpenter work for Mr. Foot to pay our rent. The first of the 1931, we rented a two-room house close to the railroad tracks. We lived there for nearly two years and he did carpenter work for the rent there too. When he got the house remodeled he was working on, we moved into it. It had three rooms.
Before we moved there, I found out I was pregnant again. I had terrible headaches. I had real long hair I could sit on. The doctor said I had to get rid of it so my headaches would go away. So a friend of mine gave me a shingle bob and a finger wave. She braided my hair, tied it, then cut it off. I wrapped the braid of hair in a newspaper. I went to the house where my husband was working and tossed it at him through the window. He said "I'll be damned! I never thought you would do it!" My dad didn't speak to me for two weeks. I shall never forget it.
My third child, a boy Robert, was born on September 9, 1932. I owned a cast iron dutch oven which I used on top of the wood stove to bake light bread buns. They were good in our bean soup and to sop up our gravy. My husband hot his arm broken and winter had come, so I sold bootleg whiskey to get money to feed my family. I kept it in the manger in the barn with the mules. One time I almost got caught by the cops with thirty gallons on hand. Someone told me the copes had been tipped off, so I had a friend put it in his car and keep it until the next day. We still lived close to the railroad. My friend ran in front of a freight train, but it was too close for the cops to make it so he got away. Next day he brought it back so I sold it.
Christmas came and went. A little candy in the kids' socks was it. Never did I teach them there was a Santa for they never got any presents for Christmas. Then we moved two blocks away from there. We ordered another baby in March. We always went to church before and after we married. We met a family at church that lived in the country. My husband did some farm work for them. They brought us green onions, roasting ears, watermelons, cucumbers, and green beans when they came in to church. After several years, my second brother married one of their daughters, Ruth.
On December 18, 1934, my fourth child, a girl Eva, was born breech. They dipped her in a pan of hot water, then in a pan of cold water until they brought her to. She wouldn't breath for them. I had to have two doctors. Her diapers were ten yards of unbleached muslin, each yard cut diagonally to make two diapers. On Christmas day, my lady friend from the farm brought us some of the best chocolate pies I have ever eaten.
About this time the Social Security started. My husband was one of the first one hundred to sign up, my dad and brothers too. Women and children didn't have to have numbers then, just working women.
In the spring of 1935, we moved out of town, one and a half miles east in a tent. My husband was working on a farm. A horse kicked him and broke his arm again. A storm came and blew our tent away. We salvaged a few things and our clothes and bed clothes, then we moved in a place made by setting twelve poles in the ground and putting up tin roofing around it and over it with a family of five named Sells. We stayed there until fall, then we moved into the wagon shed part of an old Indian's new barn. He made us a small teepee to cook in. My boys were big enough to do little odd jobs so the Indian (Tennyson Eunapp) let them help him around the farm and he bought us groceries and gave us a cow to milk. He even furnished the feed for her.
When my husband's arm got well, we moved back north of town across the Washatah River in an old filling station. We lived there until after I gave birth to our fifth child, a girl we named Ester, on November 16, 1936. We got some welfare help -- $9.00 per month. Our two oldest children were in school. My husband and I cut wood on the halves. We sold ours to buy food. Many days our children carried corn bread and salt pork in their lunches. Many meals at home consisted of fried taters, corn bread and corn meal gravy. They ate it and didn't complain. Our friend that lived on the farm got a job in the grocery store. I went to the store to spend my $9.00 from welfare. He was the delivery man so he put half a bushel of potatoes and fifty pounds of flour in my order when he delivered what I had bought. The store keeper never knew. All that winter we cut wood to sell and to burn in our oil barrel stove. We had a wood cook stove too. We never had electricity as long as we lived in Oklahoma.
My husband took a job of breaking a team of big white horses from running away. I took my children to my Grandma's and I went to help him haul dead logs out of the bottom land. He put a running W on them. When they started to run, he pulled the ropes and jerked their front feet out from under them.
I kept a throw line in the river and checked it daily. Sometimes an eel would be on it. I didn't like eel meat very well but we ate it anyway. The largest fish I caught was a 12 1/4 pound buffalo. I like that kind of fish best of all.
I planted a garden which I spaded up by myself. My neighbor had a bunch of chickens. By the time my garden was ready to eat out of, she had a flock of fryers and they liked eating up my garden. I asked her to put them up, but she refused. So a few times, I put bread crumbs by my door and inside the door. So when a fryer came in to eat, I caught it and squeezed its neck until it died. Then I dressed it and fried it for our dinner. It was really good. Then I put the feathers, insides, and bones in a bag and threw it into the river so no one could tell I had killed it. I think I only killed three of them.
I made homemade light bread and sold it for 10 cents a loaf. That way I could keep bread for my family. I used everlasting yeast so all the cost of baking was the flour. My friends from the farm continued to bring us food. Somehow we survived that summer, and it was a hot one. We put our beds outside and I fanned my children most of the nights.
When fall arrived, my two boys and I walked three miles and picked cotton. We bought a Model T two-seater car. My husband was a good driver so put what of our stuff we needed and our five children in the car and started to Arizona where my parents were living. Our first stop was at Hollis, Oklahoma. We rented a cabin and my husband and the two boys pulled bowls to get more traveling money. My oldest daughter, Iva, stayed at the cabin with the two little girls. One day they got hungry so Iva made some bread and baked it for them. She didn't know to put baking powder and salt in it, so her biscuits were hard as rocks when they were baked. We moved on the next day to Lubbock, New Mexico. We camped in a dugout with a Mexican family. They lived in one end and us in the other end. We made a frame of 1" by 6" boards and filled it with corn shucks that even had the cob in them. We spread our blankets over them and all slept together on it.
We were there when my grandmother died in Oklahoma. My mother, one brother, and my sister came back from Arizona where they had moved in 1936 when my brothers got work there. On their way to the funeral, they passed by where I was within one block of the dugout and said they couldn't find me. We stayed there until spring.
All winter we just barely made enough money to feed us between snow falls. When we made enough to go on, we got to Gage, New Mexico and the car broke down. My husband couldn't fix it so he sold it for $2.50. Someone wanted the tags off of it. Then we called my folks in Arizona. My two younger brothers came for us. We had to leave everything there but part of our clothes. So we landed in Arizona, broke and on foot! Our first house was about four blocks from my parents, close to a cow barn. The scorpions were terrible! We wet gunny sacks at night and lay them on the floor. Next morning there would be from three to eight scorpions under each sack. That was the first place we ever had electric lights.
My husband worked at the barn feeding and hauling cow food. While we were staying with my folks, my children went across the street to hear Shirley Temple sing. She was a five year old radio star. After they finished broadcasting, she would come out and play with my children.
Arizona had a relief program called F.S.A. so we got on that. It meant Farmer's Social Association. It gave us food stamps and paid our doctor bills so we lived pretty good from it. We moved from Tempe, Arizona to about half way to Phoenix in an apartment. I met a widow woman who had two little boys the ages of our two boys. She became a very special friend. I took in laundry which I did on a rub board for 15 cents a dozen pieces. Three of the kids went to school.
Then the government started the W.P.A. and put people to work. My husband worked for them as a carpenter, mostly building farms. We stayed there the winter of 1937, and then we moved into a tent closer to Phoenix. We lived there all summer. My oldest daughter got what was called "blind boils" in her stomach and had to go to Mesa, Arizona to the hospital for about ten days. We lived next to two bachelors who also became real good friends. They used their Model T to take me to the hospital to visit her and to bring her home when she was able to come home. We lived there nearly a year (1939) and I was pregnant with my sixth child. In February of 1940, the five children and I had the mumps. My baby was born on June 26, 1940, a boy we called Joe. He only had one testicle and has had numerous prostate troubles, all because I had the mumps while I was carrying him. Before he was born, we moved out tent into my parents’ back yard. They had moved to Phoenix by this time. My mother cared for my other children when I had my sixth child.
My husband worked in a wrecking yard and got a Starr car for $20.00. We drove it a long time. In the fall of 1940, we moved to Coolidge, Arizona where he worked for a big farming outfit irrigating. We lived in an adobe building that didn't have any doors or windows but it had a tin roof. We hung our worn out cotton sacks over the holes that were in the walls for doorways and windows and the floors were dirt. We sprinkled them with soapy water to keep them from being dusty. While we lived there, my middle son was playing on a trailer load of cotton with another boy. Somehow it caught fire and he got a burned leg. He still has a big scar.
Then while we were still there on November 4, 1941, I gave birth to my seventh child, a girl we named Betty Jean. The doctor came to the adobe and delivered her. About one month before she was born, I fell on a 4"x"4 that had a spike nail sticking up out of it. It went into my right knee. My husband stood on the board and pulled my leg off the nail. Then he went and called my doctor. The doctor came to the adobe and put a sage poultice on my knee. It never got sore at all, hardly.
In the spring we moved over by Florence, Arizona, closer to my husband's work. It too was an old adobe house, only it had floors, doors, and windows and bats in the attic. It had a fireplace but we couldn't use it. We used a three-burner kerosene stove there. We had to haul water from town to drink and cook with. We used water from the irrigation ditches to do our laundry and for bathing. After it sat a while, it got clear. It was muddy when we dipped it up. The five older children went to school in Florence.
I got my first driver's license on September 9, 1942, in Phoenix, Arizona. My husband took me to Phoenix to get it. My mother took care of my two little children while I went to the highway department. We got home by the time the big ones got out of school so we picked them up in Florence.
On October 23, 1942, my husband ruptured an ulcer pulling a tarp. I took him Florence County Hospital. He had surgery three times and never got any better. My good friend with the two boys from Phoenix came down and stayed at my house with my children so I could be at the hospital at night with my husband. I would go and haul some water and take food out to the house. I would go to the dairy and get eggs and milk, and then go back to the hospital until the next day. Then on December 3rd, my husband asked his doctor if he could see his children. The doctor said yes, so I went home and fixed them all up and took them to see him. They stood around the foot of his bed. Only the two little ones sat on his bed. He talked to them about one hour, wanting to know what they had been doing and so on. Then he hugged and kissed each of them and told me to take them home, so I did. Then at 5 a.m. on December 4, 1942, he went to sleep forever. He kept telling me, "Stay awake until I go to sleep, then you can go home." So I went home by myself and told my children that their father had died.
As soon as I got home and the cops found out he had died, I couldn't drive the car anymore as gasoline was rationed and the gas stamps were in his name. So I had to spend most of that day at the courthouse getting possession of a $20.00 car and getting my own gasoline stamps. I couldn't use his food ration book anymore either. I had to give it back. His friends and the people he worked with made up money for his burial in Coolidge. He is buried in Florence Cemetery in Arizona. Someone came with a truck and moved me and my children to my parents' house in Phoenix and took my friend and her boys home to Phoenix too. By this time, I was thirty-two years old, the mother of seven children, ages from 13 months to 13 years. I had no money and a $20.00 car.
I moved in with my parents and got on welfare which paid $90.00 a month. As soon as I got a check, I rented an apartment for me and my children. We moved seven times the first year, and then I found a house where I could work for the rent. We were there for about one year. I helped my parents run their fruit and vegetable stand. I used my brother's car to go to the market. So we had plenty of fruit and vegetables to eat.
My five oldest children went to Wilson School. Then in 1943 I met a bachelor who had two children, 13 and 11 years old. He took a fancy to me and rented me his house for $25.00 a month. Then in August of 1944 he coaxed me to marry him. He said, "I make pretty good money and can support you and these children." So we went to California where his sister and nieces lived. They treated me good. We picked tomatoes, hulled almonds, cut grapes, and got married August 24th in Visalia, California. We had a big fried chicken supper at his sister's.
We went to Chowchilla with his sister's daughter, Lucille Cole. Her husband, George E. Cole, welcomed us. Our car broke down. It was a Ford coupe with a rumble seat. We could all nine ride in it comfortably. Mr. Cole worked for a cement company making pipes. Lucille, my husband, and I and the two older boys cut grapes to tide us over until we could get the parts to fix the car. School started the first week of September. The Coles had three children. Two of them and five of mine were school age, so they all went to school. One Saturday when we were cutting grapes, Lucille had an attack of appendicitis. I took her car and took her twelve miles to Madera, California to Emergency. They admitted her and operated on her that evening. I went back to the grape vineyard picked up the rest of my family, and went back to the Cole's house. By that time, Mr. Cole was home, so he took the car and went to the hospital to see his wife. Before she got able to leave the hospital, we got our car fixed and went back to our home in Phoenix.
My husband went back to work for the plumbing company. I took in some laundry and still helped my dad get his stuff for the fruit stand. His brother was married to his children's grandmother. They had always raised his two children so they kept them. All of our children grew up in Phoenix.
On January 2, 1958, my husband was buried in a sixteen foot deep ditch. In twenty minutes they had him out and took him to Emergency. A neighbor boy took me to the hospital and to pick up the car from where my husband worked. He had worked at the same plumbing company for nine years. After the doctor saw him, I took him home. Then I had to take him to the doctor's office every day except Sunday for a long time. Not long after that, my youngest daughter became pregnant and I had to take her to the doctor too. Then in a few days my mother had a heart attack so I had to take her to the doctor most every day. Still I was going to the market six days a week.
A short time later, my sister Viola was in an accident. She got slapped up beside her head with a telephone pole that crashed through her windshield when the trick turned a corner in front of them. They had just picked up their two daughters from high school and were going home. She was a nurse's aide and had just been picked up from work. She turned her head to talk to her girls in the back seat. Her teeth were knocked loose so I had to take her to the doctor's office and the dentist too. A lot of days I went to five different doctors’ offices in one day.
On July 5, 1961 my mother died in a hospital in Tempe, Arizona. One of my sister-in-laws helped me take her to the hospital. She only lived five days. My two sister-in-laws would sit the night with her, then my sister and I would relieve them in the morning. I went behind her bed to see how she was doing. She said, "Where's Daddy?" I said "He's at home." She said, "Oh my goodness!" then she said "Jesus" and went to sleep forever.
My dad closed the fruit stand. He stayed in their home for a while. In 1963, my husband had run out of a job so he went to Nevada and found work there. He belonged to the AFLCIO union so it didn't take him long to get on in construction there. Then we moved up to Henderson, Nevada. We rented a one bedroom apartment. Soon after we moved there, my dad came to live with us. Then my husband got a porter job in a casino. He worked at night. Dad slept in the bed at night. He slept in it in the daytime, and I slept on a couch in the kitchen room.
In 1956 we moved to a two bedroom apartment. In 1957, my husband stepped out of a pickup and fell and broke his right leg halfway between his knee and hip. He had to be hospitalized for one week. Then he came home with a cast and crutches. I rented him a hospital bed for one month. In six weeks he was able to go back to work. Two years later his eyesight began to fail, so he had to have eye surgery in 1969. After that, he went to work for another casino as a kitchen porter. My dad had eye surgery the next year.
On April 17, 1971, we bought a new three bedroom home in Henderson. My dad had a room to himself. On July 5, 1974, my dad died. I sent him back to Phoenix to be buried beside my mother. He had purchased a nice stone with both of their names on it. They just had to put 1974 on his side of the stone. My Ledford children had moved in with us. Lucille and her husband were visiting us too. My dad was hospitalized twenty-one days. My sister and her husband were living in Texas but they came to be with him and me until the end. My sister's husband died two years later in Texas from a heart attack.
Several different ones of our children and their families have lived in our lovely home over the past twenty years. In 1978 my husband had a heart attack and retired. He recovered pretty good but still had to take medicine. Then on October 30, 1979 his brother died in Oklahoma. We went to his funeral. One week later we were still in Oklahoma and one of his sisters died so we attended her funeral. My husband and his oldest sister were the only ones out of fifteen kids left. She lived with Lucille there in Oklahoma.
In 1979 my husband's sister took ill and they didn't think she would make it from one day to the next. We went to Oklahoma so sit up with her. She never got any better so she was put in a nursing home. We rented an apartment across the street from the nursing home se we could be with her a lot. My husband had another heart attack. He was in the hospital there for fourteen days. Then we went back to Lucille's until he got able to be up and about.
We were there in Oklahoma most of the time for the next three years. Then my husband wanted to go home so we went back to our home in Nevada. It was getting close to Christmas time. My daughter and her family were still there. He and the children were eating popcorn and having fun. He got up out of his rocking chair to go to the kitchen to take his pill. He staggered so I sat him down in a chair. My daughter dialed 911 and in a very short time the paramedics were there. They took him to the hospital three minutes away. I called my Ledford son-in-law and he met me and my daughter there and stayed with us. It was 10:00 p.m. then, and at 11:50 a.m. he was gone. Family and friends came from all over for the funeral. All seven of my children and my two step children were there. We buried him in Henderson where he had lived for nineteen years. My husband had enough live insurance to pay his funeral and medical insurance to pay his doctor bills.
In four years from October 1969 to February 1983 I lost two brother-in-laws, two sister-in-laws, six nephews, and my husband. I don't know what I did to survive these last eight years. I depended on my Ledford son-in-law for a lot. He always took me to Oklahoma to visit whenever I wanted to go. He took me to see my two sons and my youngest daughter on June 26th, and he told me it would be his last trip. Then in the later part of September, he took sick with cancer and was in the hospital for a long time. He died November 3, 1986 in the hospice. He too is buried in Henderson.
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It is now June 22, 2001.
I am now the oldest living person living of the fourteen generations of my mother's people. Four generations of them are my children and their children. I am living with Eva in Stigler, Oklahoma. I celebrated my 90th birthday on October 27, 2000.
So many things have happened to me in my live. Most things I am thankful for. Others are heartbreaking, like losing my three children, my parents and grandparents, my aunts and uncles, and three grandchildren. I have no living relatives as old as I am. I now have twenty-three living grandchildren, seventy-four great grandchildren, and forty-six great, great grandchildren that I know of.
I cook a little, wash a few dishes, and eat whatever I want. I crochet a little and make a few quilts, big ones and little ones. The stroke I had four years ago keeps me from doing everything I want to. I would like to go outside and make a big garden, remembering the last time I helped make a garden. A lot of the ones that helped then are now deceased and no one makes a garden here anymore.
Today I made apple butter. It's good too! Yesterday I baked three pies, two apple and one coconut.
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Today is Sunday, June 24, 2001.
I enjoyed a good night's sleep. The ice storm this winter and the recent tornado have left this little town a wreck.
To the best of my knowledge, all my life I have believed in God and trusted him in everything. I know I owe my good health to his healing power. The stroke I had was made a lot less serious by the prayers of a number of believing people and my faith in God. So many times I have been real ill and asked God to heal my body. He has always answered my prayers. I have been saved, sanctified, and received the Holy Ghost by speaking in tongues as the spirit gave me power to speak.
My life has been spent living the best I know how and doing unto others as I wish them to do unto me. It's been a rewarding life and I think God for it. I shall endeavor to continue living a good life until God calls me home to heaven.
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On December 08, 2001, our beloved Mother and Grandmother, Inez Hanes, passed away in Stigler, Oklahoma. We can only imagine the glorious reunions happening in heaven when she arrived. We are who we are because of her. We all love our sweet Grandma. If we follow her example, we will see her again.