When I was quite young my grandmother Swope died. I was about four years of age and death was a very hush-hush affair and children were bewildered at the older people’s reluctance to discuss it. Grandmother Swope died at age 59, which was young by modern day standards. She had dropsy – a kidney failure – and her body was swollen with the edema several days before she died.

I remember that the body was put in a little room at the back of the large two-story house to be "laid out" and prepared for burial which would be the next day because this was before the days of embalming. Kindly ladies washed the body, arranged the hair and the next day she would be put into her best dress. If one were to be sick for a long time she would usually have selected a dress and clothing for burial.

Grandmother had been placed in the cool little room to await the morning and the finishing touches before the funeral the next day when some woman screamed "There’s a cat on the body." The cat was quickly driven out and the door secured for the night.

I remember well the horse-drawn hearse which came next morning and following it in our car to Hopewell Church and cemetery where she was buried in the Swope plot.

My memories of her are of a small gray-haired, dark-eyed plumpish woman who thoroughly enjoyed having her grandchildren come for breakfast. My brother, Marcel, would sometimes decide grandmother was having hot biscuits or something he especially liked and after a breakfast at home he’s slip over to grandmothers to eat a second breakfast. I went with him sometimes when Mother was especially busy with a new baby or not feeling well.

Grandmother Swope had a high-pitched voice that quavered if she was excited. She was tender-hearted and dearly loved to have me come to see her. Her name was Laura Ann Wasson Swope. I was named for my two grandmothers really. The Ann part was a part of both grandmother’s names and my mother was very diplomatic. I have her stick pin. Women wore these at the neck of their long sleeved blouses. It has an R on it for Rhuanna Lee. It is of metal but not gold. I treasure it.

She always was partial to me and I wish she hadn’t been because my sister Wilma and I were very close together in age – a little over a year difference but Grandmother always favored me. Mother would take things in hand when Grandmother gave me taffeta material for a dress and Wilma cried so mother bought material for Wilma, one that was even prettier than mine – a blue taffeta.

Mother usually made all of our clothes and usually dressed Wilma and I like twins. Many thought we were even though Wilma had light brown straight hair and blue eyes and my hair was dark brown and curly and I had light brown eyes.

When I was approaching my senior year in high school grandmother Dillard showed signs of high blood pressure and seemed unable to be alone so much. So Mother took me over to help with chores and do the cooking. I was a very poor cook but I could wash dishes and clothing and keep an eye on grandmother. She was very bond of me.

My brother, Marcel, was also there helping Grandpa with field chores and sawing wood so there were four to cook for, to wash for, etc.

They had cured hams and bacon and this was usually the meat cooked at meals unless we’d have a fat hen.

Grandmother slept a lot and would get up bewildered as to where she was but when she’d see me she’d seem to be calmer.

I don’t recall that she took any special medicine for her high blood pressure and certainly as I think back I feel sure she should not have had salty meat such as we prepared at meals.

She improved and my brother and I decided I should go home to enter my senior year in high school.

A few days later we were called and went to Blue-Lick, Missouri where she had a stroke. Family was around the bed and when I walked in the door a great look of recognition and love spread over her face. Everyone remarked about it. I was the only one she’d recognized. That night she died.

She, too, was buried at Hopewell Cemetery north of Sedalia and several years later my Grandfather Dillard had a stroke of apoplexy and lies buried by her side.

They had nine children: Aunt Lena who died at 25 with TB and left a small son, Uncle Bryan and Tom also died of TB, Aunt Amy died young at 25 after a series of deaths and it was thought she had taken poison, Opal, the youngest daughter, died of a heart attack at about 64, Aunt Oma, had cancer of the stomach and died in her early 70’s, Uncle Jim died at 40 and Mother in her 70’s at age 75.

In July or late June wheat was usually ready to be cut and bound into bales. As soon as possible the farmer was eater to have these threshed; that is separating the grain from the straw. Wheat heads up when it reaches mature growth and turns a deep tan color.

The farmer has already made arrangements with some one with a thresher and usually the threshing crew.

Wagons pulled by horses usually picked up the sheaves of wheat which had been placed ‘heads up’ in a stack to dry and mature and await threshing day. Wagons would be drawn up and the sheaves of wheat picked up and hauled to the thresher where men on the wagon using pitch forks quickly lifted shocks of wheat and filled his wagon and moved quickly to the thresher. Here the shocks were lifted by forks and tossed into the threshing machine. The hay was blown by a hose into a pile on the wheat field and the grain dropped on a conveyor belt into a bin. It was later sacked and sold for making bread or other things or sold for seed, etc.

Years ago the threshing days were exciting times for the farmer’s children. Preparations for feeding the threshing crews was an awesome task. Chicken or ham was often fed to the threshers. Vegetables usually included green beans, potatoes, homemade bread cake or pie, pickles, salads and iced tea. The farmer’s wife and helpers knew they were feeding hungry, hard working men and large quantities of food was usually served on a crisp clean tablecloth as the hungry men soon were to face a hot, busy afternoon and perhaps several days before the job was finished and they moved on another field.

Living on the farm with my Mother, stepfather and brothers and sisters was a happy experience but some things stand out as disagreeable. Some things as when our dogs tangled with skunk and came back to the farm with watering eyes and a stench that would go away soon. Sometimes in sheer exhaustion from the pungent smell we’d lock the dogs in the corncrib for a few days until the stench became more bearable.

Coon hunting and possum and raccoon trapping were favorite sports providing the boys pen money for pelts sold in town.

Horse riding was usually done on Billy, a branded small western type horse, and Dixie, a short horse with a short gallop and an undying desire to race. Billy was a mustang. Shortly after getting Billy at a neighbors sale my brother was rising him and planned to go over by the Fristoe School and as he galloped down the road he leaned at the curve to go right to Fristoe but Billy knowing his former home was another direction took the control and turning left he went toward his former home and the horses he knew there. My poor brother leaned one way and Billy went the other and my brother fell off and was very angry at Billy but by the time he walked to Communes farm he saw Billy with his ears up and forward, standing there waiting for him so all was forgiven. My brother always tried to play it safe by reigning Billy in as he approached that corner.

My sister and I later went to high school at Hughesville, Mo. Part of the time we rode horses the five miles and when the weather became cold we drove a buggy which protected us from the northerly wind.

The heavy snows which fell sometimes closed schools but often we’d ride thru on a horse who would plow through the deep drifted snow across field and on to roads piled high with drifts.

My sister, Wilma, was cute, a year younger than me and very athletic. She would do cartwheels all over the yard and one day astonished us by yelling, "Look, kids, what I can do" and proceeded to vault upon a pig house roof and do cartwheels off of it until she was exhausted. She had an admiring audience until her hand slipped and she tore her leg on a overhanging spike, tearing a great gash in her leg. Mother used all of the home remedies she knew – bathing it often in hot water as hot as Wilma could stand, putting powdered alum on the gash and in the ankle with Watkin’s salve. Needless to say the cut should have been stitched but it wasn’t and Wilma has a scar to show her children of her misadventures on top of the hog house.

Marcel, the oldest child, was the artist from the day he went to school and acquired pencil, paper and crayons. I remember how sitting in Fristoe school in rural central Missouri he’s open up his class book and place a sheet of paper in it upon which he would sketch someone in the room or a fictitious bandit with gun in holster and complete with a sombrero, chaps, sometimes with a smoking gun or sometimes on a beautiful horse rearing on his hind legs or galloping madly across a pasture with distended nostrils and flying tail.

While still in grade school he saw a correspondence course in lettering and sent for information to enroll in it. Every lesson he sent in received an "A" and a complimentary note about the excellent work he sent in. The rest of the family were very proud of his talent and encouraged Marcel in continuing until he got a diploma, which he did later.

During high school days his love for drawing and lettering continued.

Several years later, TWA hired him to do lettering on their planes where he worked for many years.

He and his wife, Maudie, could fly complimentary on TWA anywhere. So they flew to Germany to search for an ancestor Swope and found some who were members of the Lutheran church and baptismal records and even burial records and tombstones to verify our link with the Swopes (Schwaabs) who later fled Europe seeking religious freedom in the New World.

Marcel’s caricatures of his fellow workers at TWA were treasured by each man in the Paint section. For instance Marcel drew picture of one man who dearly loved dill pickles and showed the man with a look of anticipation opening his lunch box full of dill pickles. Another showed a fellow worker who had bought a little farm on which he planned to retire, so Marcel pictured him with his head looking out the door of a fine out door privvy and the well-known smile engulfing his face. Needless to say, he and the others as they retired treasured these special pictures.

GRANDMOTHER DILLARD

I remember my grandmother Dillard very well. I was named for her and she always let me know she was pleased I was her namesake. The pictures of her as a young woman showed her to be very pretty, tall (5ft 8in), auburn hair and lovely blue eyes, fair skinned and very slender. Even after giving birth to nine children, she was and remained slender.

Her name, Rhuanna Lee Henderson, was often mentioned. Her father returned from the Civil War to a ravished land of West Virginia, sought out a wife and settled down to a farmer’s existence. When their first son was expected, he decided it could be a son and he’d name it for Robert E. Lee, under whom he had served as a soldier against the North. His admiration for General Lee was more than hero worship. He had seen the General in prayer for his ragged soldiers during the victories of war and the defeats. All of his soldiers knwe him to be a fine Christian gentleman and a superb soldier and general, a man of courage and of love for the ragged beaten troops he commanded. Each of them would have given his life for their noble commander. Grandfather Henderson’s dream of a noble son was dashed upon the birth of a baby girl who was named Alice. A year later the Hendersons were expecting another baby. Grandfather Henderson staunchly predicted that it would be a son, but it was my grandmother. Grandfather fiercely said, "Well, I’ll name her after General Zlee and so she was clled Rhuanna Lee and bore the initials RL Henderson. She was always called Lee by the family of four girls and two boys. She was her father’s favorite. She had noble traits and a sense of justice and love which each of the family saw in her.

Lee grew into a beautiful young woman and was chosen as a bride by Benjamin Dillard and bore nine children: Lena, Neoma, Pearl, James, Amy, Bryan, Thomas and Opal and a little sister who dies at two years from "summer complaint", probably diaohrea. My mother was so impressed with them putting the small child in a tub of cool water to bring down her fever, but she died. My mother remembered the tragic lost of the small sister so beautiful and of her golden curls. One was cut off and placed in a Bible in remembrance. It was a deep tragedy for the family—one my mother never forgot as she was just older by a few years and hovered over the sick little sister whose death left a deep impression upon her, the little angel they had for such a short while, had returned to God—little Rosemary.

THE UNUSUAL ROMANCE OF MY OTHER GRANDPARENTS

Malachi Keener Swope was a young bachelor and fell in love with Laura Ann Wasson. She was only sixteen and her father did not like young men to cast their eyes in her direction. But Malachi and Laura found a way around it. In an old oak tree along the pat that led from Thornleigh store to Fristoe School, they found a good place to deposit their love letters in a hollow hole in it. Years later my father looked at those beautifully written love letters of his parents, both dead, and feeling the passion of their love for one another, cried and said they should not be read by others who might laugh at the passionate outpouring of their love, and he quietly lifted the latch on the heating stove anddropped them into the flames. He meant well, but mohter said later that they were so beautiful in their outpouring of love for each other, that she was sorry they were destroyed. I remember grandmother’s soft, little voice as she smilled up at her "Mal" and knew that they love was forever. She died at 49 of dropsy. He was 72 years old when he contracted pneumonia from is fll through the ice as he fished in December. A great romance!

When I was young they lived near to us. Grandfather operated the store at Thornleigh, 4 or 5 miles north of Sedalia. Grandpa was a daily part of my life as I’d slip over to the store to catch any excitement. His sons, Ryland and Hiram, my father, helped in the store. I remember the pot bellied stove which was in the center of the several large rooms. It was a favorite gathering place for news, the mail, calico, hats, thread, and shoes. Salesmen who came calling were fast talkers and they thrilled us with their wares and catalogues of shoes, hats, calico and trimmings. They traveled in buggies, but later progressed to cars. If they came late in the day, grandfather would invite them to sleep at is home and have breakfast before moving on to another store. His horse would be cared for too. These men were called drummers. I have never known why, but wonder if it was not for "drumming up business".

A country store was a favorite loafing place when crops were laid by or it was a rainy day. Stories of the big fish that got away, a good joke, a sorrow or illness, an impending wedding, a death, the church, the picnics, the pie socials at the schoolhouse, births etc.

Sometimes Grandpa would scolding give us piece of Yucatan gum or a stick of candy to get us out of the store and out of the way. He was a small man, slender of build, dark brown eyes and brown hair, sprinkled with grey. His voice was often sharp, but it was to keep grandchildren in check and the store was "off limits" if he had had his way.

My mother was delighted with new bolts of calico from which to choose for sewing into school clothing. A pretty hat for church going was always a delight to her. She was very pretty, blondish red hair, beautiful skin and a figure that belied the fact she had given birth to five children.

My father and his brother took more responsibility as Grandfather took more and more time to fish at Muddy Creek, about a mile away south. His chief joy was to go fishing, and he never seemed to come back empty handed.

One day my father was in the store along when a band of gypsies descended upon him. There was no phone to call mother, and he could not watch all of them. Many things were taken and slipped into clothing and not paid for before they left. After that Mother had us children help her spot gypsies that came again and again slipping things into concealed pockets in long skirts, etc. Later, Daddy would hastily put out as "closed" sign and lock up staying inside for he had had heavy losses from the gypsy visits and wanted them to pass his store by.

Later, my father sold his part in the country store (probably the store at Newland) and started selling automobiles, a new means of transportation which everyone was eager to acquire. He did well financially. My recollection of early cars was one with isinglass curtains which snapped on for winter and warm bricks under laprobes to keep us warm as we drove to Sedalia. During the summer the dirt roads created much dust and women wore veils and dusters to keep dust from settling on their better clothes.

My father and mother sold their interest in the Swope store at Thornleigh and moved to Sedalia where Daddy continued selling cars. He had a bout with rheumatic fever which stretched the valves of his heart and was to kill him with a massive heart attack at 35 years of age. (May 24, 1924) Mother lost much money from people who had paid on part of their automobile and Daddy had carried their notes. After his death, no one wanted to pay their debts to mother. We owned a nice bungalow a mile south of Sedalia. We owed some on it, but Mother and Daddy had wisely put his inheritance from Grandfather Swope’s estate into it.

Mother later married Gus Ream, cousin of Daddy, and we went to his farm north of Sedalia and lived in his big roomy white two storey farm house……

(My text breaks off here. Mother wrote these things about 1980 at the request of my sister. Carol Anne sent copies to me. Mother was in the early stages of Altzheimer’s at this time. I note traces. Some stories are telescoped. There is some repeating. In re-reading and preparing this document, I was impressed with the attention she gave to the reason for death in her relatives. I wonder if she was realizing the beginning of her decline and was seeking some explanation.