Surprising Information!!!

Last week I was asking my mother for some more stories. She waited a while but then said......

Did you know my mother was in a movie? (that would be my Grandmother Willis) Well, of course I'd never heard that one!

Apparently while they lived in Cincinnati, a film crew who were filming a movie caught my grandmother walking out of a store carrying a milk basket with quarts of milk in it. They filmed her walking down the street. That part of the film was used in the movie.

Later they were given tickets to see the movie (doesn't remember name of movie or the year it was made). Grandma didn't want to go but they talked her into it. Mama said that was the only movie Grandma ever went to. Must not have enjoyed it much.


Another memory is of a basket of Concord Grapes.

Grandma had bought a large basket of grapes to make a pie or to make jam. Mama says she can still close her eyes and smell that delicious aroma.

At the boarding house that Grandma Willis ran, the boarders were all friends of her son Lovin (whom we called Uncle Bill). There were either three or four of Uncle Bill's friends, Uncle Bill, and Edsel (?). So with Grandma, Grandad, Mama, Uncle Bill, Edsel, and three or four friends, that house held at least eight people (maybe nine). Grandma cooked three meals a day for everyone and kept up the house.

Mama said the ceilings in that house were very high. She remembers looking at them one day after she fell and was carried into the house and placed on a bed. Thankfully the fall wasn't serious.

There is a picture of Mama on a tricycle riding down the sidewalk. She doesn't remember if the tricycle was hers or belonged to a neighbor. The interesting things to me is that we have a picture of Daddy on a tricycle also.

When it came time to return to the farm Grandma didn't want to leave Cincinnati. But, Grandad was a farmer at heart and was more than ready to come home.

She was not old enough to go to school in Cincinnati but when they came home she went to the one room school house in Sadler, Kentucky. The past few years she has attended reunions for Sadler School.

The walk home was not much fun. The other children were not very nice to her and harassed her. She said one even burned her with a cigarette. She put up with it until one day she turned on the girl in the group and held her own. After that they didn't bother her anymore. I asked her if she told her Dad or Uncle Bill about them bothering her. She said she didn't remember for sure but didn't think she had. I wish she had because she wouldn't have been bothered for such a long time. Uncle Bill could have put the fear of reprisal in them. Hearing about it, I wish he had!

I wonder if her clothes made her different. Grandma sewed very well and made her dresses out of feed sacks. She may have looked like she had more money than they did. Jealousy can be a terrible thing. She remembers one day when one of the girls came to school with NEW shoes. The girl was so proud of her shoes. During the depression you only bought something if you couldn't make do with what you had. You wore hand me downs or "made downs" because there wasn't money for new clothes or sometimes even for new fabric. The quilts were made from clothes that had worn out to the point they couldn't be remade for another use. Those quilts were called scrap quilts because they used the scraps of clothing pieces that were not worn out and cut them into quilt pieces.