Children of Prent & Thelma Stearns
June was born in January and Boyd was born in November,1929. They began first grade together and finished High School together since there was only ten months difference in age.
We attended grade school at Parnell and since we lived so close to the school, we went home for lunch. The minute we were dismissed for lunch we had quite a foot race for home to see who got the largest ear of corn for lunch.
Just back of our house was a branch where we waded and played during the summer. Our cousin usually spent the summer with us and he helped us dam up the stream of water and make a raft.
Our neighbor boys were quite good at making a wooden truck wagon so we all had "fun flying over the hill" and swinging on grapevine swings.
It was always fun to ride in the rumble seat of Dad's car and in our grandfather Caylor's Model T. We waited anxiously for Papa Caylor to crank the car up so we could head out for church. He became very upset when it refused to start and used a few choice words.
A favorite pastime was running with a wire that pushed an iron wheel along and competition was great to see could run the fastest without loosing your wheel. We also had home-made "stilts" and it was fun to see who could go the longest distance before falling down.
Since Dad operated a country store children's shoes were always available on the first day of school. Boyd and I always got a new pair to start school. On returning home after school one day Mother was raking and cleaning on the yard, we decided to help. She told us not to get into those piles of sticks, etc. that she had raked. Boyd decided to try her out so he proceeded to stick his foot over in the pile of rubbish and immediately she said " Don't put your feet over in the pile" so Boyd thought he would try out a second time he did that. Mother picked up an old stick and began spanking him and it seemed to go on so long. I had heard the expression "Don't run it in the ground" so I repeated to mother what I had heard and she forgot all about Boyd and I got a much more severe deal than he did.
Another fun time was when dad had a car with a rumble seat and we got to ride back there. To us, that was a real treat with the wind blowing our hair away we felt so grown up and lucky to get to ride in the rumble seat.
On Sunday morning, mother would get us ready for church and when we were all "fixed up" we had to sit in a chair until Mother and Daddy were ready so we wouldn't get our clothes all messed up and dirty before we left. Our chairs were placed all the way across the room from each other and Boyd made faces at me and I would yell I'll tell on him". Of course Mother had to come and settle us down - I guess she felt like shooting us.
A very fond memory I have is the time that mama, Mark and I went to Aunt Betty and Uncle Howard Caylor's farm for a cook out. Betty, Howard,Joyce, Janice Duard , Mark, mama and I were going out on their farm on the Frisby road and we were in the field and Joyce was driving the wagon and got going to fast and the wagon almost got away from her. At the time it sorta scared me but now looking back on it it was rather a fun experience. When I was young and before I started school I remember staying at my grandparents house.(Thelma and Prent Stearns) I can remember Tee cooking and doing alot of sewing and making me dresses. I remember her making a dress for Tammy,my cousin, for Valentine's day and Mark and I wanting to put M&M's in the pocket of the dress to send to her. Tee was rather upset we wanted to this because the dress was of silk material and she told us if we did that it would ruin the dress. Needless to say I reminded her that M&M's didn't melt in your hands that they melted in your mouth. At the time of this incident I was about 5. Tammy was about 6 or 8 months old.
Click on the appropriate link below:
The Caylor Family
The Alexander Family
Life on Cooper Road
Life on Frisby Road
A letter from Aunt Betty
I have been glancing over the Memoirs story. As I read the one on page 10 where Howard tells about the telephone-this little story came to mind... This family had put in a phone but Mr. Eads had never talked on it-one day he was at another house visiting-his wife called and wanted to talk with him- they finally got him to the phone-just as he started to talk-it lightened and thundered REAL BIG whereupon Mr. Eads remarked, "she's in there alright!" Howard got a kick out of telling this!!!
I also remember him telling about the time you and Mac were visiting Mama and Papa Caylor. You boys told Papa Caylor that you wished you could make you some money. He gave you a bucket of apples and Howard said you were sitting down close to the road with your bucket of apples and as somebody would walk by that you would say , "would you like to buy something?"
Love to you both,
Aunt Betty
Memories of My Caylor Grandparents by Janice Ramsey
My grandparents were Leander Sherman Caylor and Joey Frances Alexander Caylor. My earliest memories of them were when they were living on Cooper Road. They lived in a big white house with a wrap around porch that went across the front and around one side. On the porch near the kitchen door there hung a long slim bailer which at one time was used to draw water from the well that was located under the floor of the porch. In the back the yard sloped steeply toward the back of the house and a few feet from the door there was a cellar built into the hillside. It was cool inside and Mama Caylor stored butter, canned goods, etc. there.
I remember going to their house on Saturday mornings which was the day we went “to town”. Papa Caylor would be sitting in the kitchen drinking coffee.
Papa Caylor died when I was ten years old and I don’t have as many memories of him as I do Mama Caylor. I mostly just remember him being around their house and riding with us in the old black Chevrolet truck. I remember staying with my aunt and uncle during the time of his death. He was carrying in buckets of coal on February 6, 1964 when his leg broke and he fell. He was taken to Somerset Hospital and died there on February 8.
When I think of Mama Caylor I think of holly hocks, “Tommy Toe” tomatoes and tiger lilies that grew at the side of the yard, Luden’s wild cherry cough drops, canned red beets, “sweet biscuits”, and 2 layer yellow cake with chocolate icing. She was a very spiritually minded person who studied her Bible and loved God. I have various papers where she had copied verses, wrote little articles, etc. She had a bad hearing problem and attended worship services for many years without being able to hear much of what was going on. Someone asked her why she went when she couldn’t hear hardly anything. She replied that she wanted to show whose side she was on!
After Papa Caylor died, Mama Caylor moved in with our family. She lived with us until Daddy built a garage with a small house over it on the other side of the driveway. Then Mama Caylor moved into that house where she lived until her death. She was afraid to stay by herself at night and so I stayed with her. When it got near bedtime, I would go over to her house. But, I was afraid to go to her house by myself. Daddy would go out on the front porch and watch till I went inside her house (the door was on the far side) and waved to him from the window.
Mama Caylor was a firm believer in an old “remedy” which was turpentine and lard mixed together. She had a pronounced hump on her back and every night I had to rub her back with turpentine and lard. Later, when she began to get forgetful I was glad when she would sometimes forget to have me rub it on her back!
Sometimes the dogs would start barking and it would scare me. I was afraid that meant that someone or something was outside. Mama Caylor would tell me that hearing them made her feel safe because she felt they were protecting us.
When she lived in the little house, I remember her making what she called “sweet biscuits”. They were not very sweet and were like a cross between biscuit dough and cookie dough with sugar sprinkled on the top. I did not care much for them, but I remember that my brother seemed to like them and was always glad to get one of Mama Caylor’s “sweet biscuits”.
Mama Caylor lived to be 88 and died in bed at her little house on October 15, 1970. The house sat empty until 1973 when I got married. My husband and I lived there for about 15 months before we moved into Mama and Papa Caylor’s house on Cooper Road. It had been used as a rent house after Mama Caylor moved out and was in terrible shape. We did major renovation and lived there for about nine months before we moved out of the county.
The kitchen had a coal burning stove with a flat top that could be used for cooking. The foods that I most associate with my Caylor grandparents are “sweet biscuits” (which weren’t very sweet), yellow cake with a very thin chocolate icing, jello, and coffee. Mama Caylor canned lots of things. Any time I smell canned potatoes, I instantly think of eating at my grandparent’s, because that was the only place I ever remember eating canned potatoes. Mama Caylor also canned meat, which I thought was quite unusual. She had an unusual way of making biscuits. She put a large quantity of flour in a bowl. She made a well in the middle of the flour. Then, using her fingers, she worked a spoonful of lard into some of the flour. Then she added milk. She worked as much flour into the mixture as needed to make the biscuits of the right consistency. But she never used all the flour.
Another food combination that Mama Caylor liked was strawberries and rhubarb. I enjoyed helping pick strawberries in the garden, but thought combining them with rhubarb, was a terrible of waste of good strawberries!
When I smell a kerosene heater, it always stirs memories of my grandparent’s house. They had a fireplace and coal burning stove in their bedroom and a coal burning stove in the kitchen. However, the dining room was an area that was unheated. They kept a small kerosene heater in the dining room which was used for heat when the dining room was used in cold weather. The smell of kerosene burning always reminds me of this room.
Mama Caylor liked to quilt. She had a large wooden quilt frame that hung from the ceiling in the parlor. I remember when we were very young, she made a quilt with very large stars for me and one for my sister Janice. My quilt was red, white and blue. But she was a little bit short of material and there is one plaid star on the quilt!
Mama Caylor liked to wear a hat to church. They were usually very small dainty hats. She also wore white gloves and carried fancy handkerchiefs. She kept these special items in a trunk with a rounded top. I always liked to get a chance to look in the trunk. Other items in the house that fascinated me were a globe, a large dictionary and a telephone. The telephone numbers were a combination of long and short rings which were produced by turning a hand crank on the side of the telephone.
Mama Caylor didn’t play with us much. But I do remember when I was very small she would “ride” me on her foot. She could make a clicking noise with her tongue that sounded like horse shoes clip-clopping on pavement.
In the corner of the yard sat a building that had been a general store run by Mama Caylor’s parents. It was not in operation during my lifetime, but it still had lots of the store equipment such as show cases, a string cutter, scales, and a button case. I liked to look around at these things and smell the smells that still lingered from the past.
On Sunday, we would pick Mama and Papa Caylor up and take them to church. There were four adults and two children in a pickup truck. We were packed rather tightly. Luckily none of us were large people! After church we would often eat with them.
The 50th anniversary of my grandparents was a rather festive occasion. I remember they were both dressed up and had flowers on their lapels. Three gifts I remember are an anniversary clock, a large mirror and an ironing board!
I don’t have as many memories of Papa Caylor. I do remember I thought he was very tall, he smoked a pipe, and he liked to tell jokes. I also remember he had a mantle clock of which he took very good care. He would occasionally put a drop of oil in various spots and he very gently dusted the clock mechanisms with a feather. I now have that clock, but it no longer keeps time accurately. I just don’t have the “right touch”.
I remember Mama Caylor as a quiet, gentle person. She studied her Bible often and loved her family very much.
Anecdotes from George Thomas Caylor
I lived with my grandparents, Sherman and Frances Caylor, for a short time when I was quite young. One of my memories while living with my grandparents involves an outhouse, a peach orchard and honey bees. The outhouse was located in a small field adjacent to the home on Cooper Road. The distance from the main house to the outhouse was about 100-150 feet. Like everyone who lived there, I had occasions where I needed to visit the outhouse. However, at my tender age, this was an adventure that I did not look forward to with enthusiasm. You see, my grandfather kept several bee hives at the edge of the peach orchard and they just happened to be located adjacent to the path and about midway from the main house to the outhouse. When it was necessary that I visit the outhouse, I would attempt to sneak up close to where the bee hives were located and when it appeared that the bees were not looking, I would take off lickety-split running as fast as I could to reach the outhouse. Unfortunately, upon reaching the outhouse, I still had a feeling of great anxiety as this was a quite old outhouse and the door did not fit the doorway exactly(it had a gap of an inch or more between the door and doorway), so I just knew that the bees would discover the door gap and attack me when I was in no position to defend myself. Just imagine my relief when finally I realized that I had escaped an attack by the bees and now I must return to the main house(whoa, I must return back on the same path-this means that once more I must repeat the 100 foot dash).
In spite of my harrowing experience with the aforementioned bees, I still relish other memories involving the bees. For instance, one of my favorite treats was to spoon out some of the honey that my grandmother had put up in Mason jars into a plate and then mix in some home-churned butter(butter that I churned myself) into the honey and then dip warm home-made biscuits into the mixture before popping them into my mouth-better than store-bought'n Danish!
For those who like chewing gum, you haven't lived until you chew on some honeycomb that is soaked with honey and I'm not talking about the processed honey that you can buy in a store-no, I'm talking about raw, unprocessed honeycomb just as it comes out of the hive.
While I lived with my grandparents, my parents who were still in Ohio, would occasionally send me an allowance in the mail(about $2.00)-this meant a trip to Monticello on the following Saturday. Come Saturday about noon, I was ready to go, cleaned up more or less, so I would start walking down Cooper Road to town, about a two mile hike-Why? you say, well to get to the movie house in time for the Saturday matinee which included a cartoon, a newsreel, a to-be-continued serial, and the main feature-all of this for $.25. After the movie, I would go next door to the drug store which had a soda fountain for a made-in-heaven culinary delight called a "pour-a-vanilla"(at least, I think that is what it was called-after 60 years, the ol' memory is not quite what it used to be)-I believe that this was something like a nectar soda. I can honestly say that never again did I ever encounter another soda that I enjoyed as much as I did the pour-a-vanilla! Sometimes on the way back home, if my finances were stressed, I would stop at the restaurant that my Uncle Bob and Aunt Edith Gibson owned & operated. If my Aunt Edith was behind the counter, I could usually expect a free dish of ice cream. Uncle Bob also had a Buick dealership next door to the restaurant.
Other than the wood burning cooking stove in the kitchen, the only heat in the house during the winter came from two fireplaces, one in the master bedroom and the other in the living room(or great room, as it is sometimes called). These were not like the fireplaces that are common today. The were small, shallow openings that were set back in the wall. Instead of andirons, there was a kind of a cast-iron grate that was an integral part of the fireplace as it was attached to the back wall of the fireplace and raised about 6-8 inches above the floor of the fireplace. The hearth was a well worn field stone that was about 18 inches wide and two feet long. Although it was possible to burn small pieces of wood in this grate, it is my recollection that usually small lumps of coal were used as the fuel. Sixty years later I can still remember the sensation of standing with my back to the fire in the fireplace while blisters rose on my backside and icicles formed on my frontside. It was necessary to rotate the body on a regular schedule to insure an even cooking.
During the winter, I slept in a room that had no heat. To compensate, my bed was with a feather-tick mattress and 12 inches of blanket over me. When I jumped into bed, the feather tick mattress would sink down and then roll up over me. Why I never died from suffocation is beyond me. To avoid late-night trips to the outhouse, there was a porcelain chamber pot adjacent to the bed. I could never bring myself to use this pot, especially in the winter, as I had experienced the thrill of sticking my tongue to a cold steel pipe and the idea of sticking my warm butt on a ice cold chamber pot was more than I could accept-I swore that I would die from a burst bladder before I would ever use that chamber pot.
My grandparents had an instrument called a stereo opticon(I think). Anyhow, it was made of wood, metal and glass. You would place this instrument up to your eyes and a special opticon card in the front holder on a sliding bar. By moving the sliding bar towards or away from you, you would cause the picture to come into sharp focus. The uniqueness was that the view was three-dimensional. The opticon card was actually a card with with two side-by-side photographs of the same subject taken with two cameras simultaneously set at certain dimensions apart. When viewed through this opticon viewer, the effect was a 3D scene. I enjoyed this tremendously as a child.
Here is a sample opticon card:
This is an opticon viewer:
My Uncle Howard had a pick-up truck that he used to get around town. When necessary, he would transport Papa Caylor to wherever he needed to go. Once, while I was staying with my grandparents, Papa Caylor needed to go to Parnell for some reason, probably to Prent and Thelma's. When Uncle Howard arrived to pick up Papa Caylor, I asked if I could ride along. "Sure", said Uncle Howard and said that I could ride in the back if I wanted. I immediately jumped up into the bed of the truck and sat close to the tailgate. Uncle Howard said that I probably should not sit there, but I said that I wanted to feel the wind in my face. Uncle Howard just grinned and said "OK". He then got into the driver's seat and Papa Caylor was on the passenger side. Well, we started down Cooper Road towards Monticello and we had not gone a mile before Papa Caylor leaned out his window and spit out his tobacco juice. Sitting where I did at the tailgate, I was in Papa Caylor's direct line of fire and I caught the full blast of it. With disgust, I wiped my face with my sleeve and immediately scooted forward so that I could sit with my back against the cab of the truck and that is where I remained for the rest of the trip. Upon arriving at our destination, Uncle Howard turned the truck off and exited the cab. When he saw me, he never said a word but just grinned. To this day, I cannot ride in a truck bed at the tailgate!
My cousin Janice mentioned the cellar in the hillside behind the house on Cooper Road. I too recall that cellar with fondness. In particular, I recall the earthy smell of the cellar; it was as intoxicating to me as gasoline is to many people. The cellar was simply an area that had been dug out of the hillside and then a frame was installed that supported a peaked roof and an entrance door. There were shelves around each wall on which all of the canned garden goodies were stored. I mentioned that the cellar had a peaked roof-this was one of my play areas. The roof, which was metal, had a substantial angle and was quite high, but it reached all the way to the ground. This roof became my playground slide. I found that if I ran fast enough, I could run up the roof all the way to the peak of the roof. Then I could turn, sit down and slide all the way back to the ground. I could do this until the sun had warmed the roof to the point where it became too hot for me.
Adjacent to the cellar was a cherry tree and behind the cellar was a grape arbor. At the right time of the year, I spent considerable time helping myself to the goodies that the tree and arbor offered.
Although I was quite young, about 7-8 years old, when I lived with my grandparents, they did not pamper me. There were chores to be done and I was expected to do my part. For instance, every morning I was obliged to walk up the hill with my grandfather to the barn. The barn was where the dried corn was stored. My grandfather and I would then shuck(remove kernels from the cob) about half of a bucket of corn for feed for the chickens. Then, while my grandfather milked the cow, I was responsible for taking the bucket of corn into the chicken yard to feed the chickens. I hated this! The way to feed the corn to the chickens was to take a handful of corn and then simply broadcast the corn on the ground. However, I swear that these were the wildest chickens that ever lived. When the chickens saw me with the bucket, they knew what I had and here they came as fast as possible, cackling, whooping and hollering. It was like a chicken riot! Remember, I was 7-8 years old and not very tall, so these chickens looked big to me and frankly I was a little scared of these chickens. Sometimes, if something occurred that increased my fright, I would just up-end the bucket of corn on the ground and leave the area as rapidly as I could leaving each chicken to fend for herself. Another chore that I particularly detested was hoeing weeds in the garden behind the house. The house and land on Cooper Road was actually on the side of Morris Hill which at that time was biggest mountain that I had ever seen. Its location made my grandparent's land very rocky. When you are wielding a hoe to chop weeds, the last thing that you want to do is strike an unseen rock. It will make your hands tingle very noticeably.
Another chore that I performed, although not every day, was to go up the hill to drive the cow home to the barn if she failed to come on her own. This meant that first I had to find the cow while picking up a stick on the way and then persuade the cow, with the stick, that it was now time to go to the barn. I learned at an early age that cows are not God's smartest creatures. No matter how much persuasion that I used on the cow, she would just look at me and then meander along at her own pace. Sometimes when I finally got the cow to the barn she would not want to enter her stall; this required even more persuasion by me. One thing that did not occur to me at that time but later it did, was why, since I lived in area rife with copperhead and rattlesnakes, I never saw a single instance of either type.
Although, as I said, my grandparents did not pamper me, I do believe that I tested my grandfather's patience severely. I had a bad habit of leaving the bar soap in the pan of water after I washed my hands and my grandfather tried repeatedly to break me of this habit for one good reason; the bar soap was home made by my grandparents and when I left it in the water, my grandfather must have seen all of his work to be for naught. Finally, another event that occurred regularly was the Saturday night bath. Connected to the house but only accessible through a door that opened onto the porch, was a small room that I believe was referred to as the laundry room. The term 'room' is being generous, I have seen many closets that were much larger. Anyhow, every Saturday night a large washtub in this room would be filled with warm water and I was required to get into it and bathe myself whether I needed it or not. It struck me as a total waste of very good water and home made soap and I tried to impress this on my grandparents but to no avail.
An 8 page letter from Patti's Great Aunt Aimee to Patti's mother Roberta
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