My last living sibling, an older brother, died last June. He was a history buff and an avid reader who preferred to own books rather than get them from the library. After his death I inherited quite a few books from his library. A few days ago I picked up one of them and found tucked inside a letter our Mother had written to him. The book, entitled “Too Good to Keep” was a collection of short articles, poems and letters that had been written in a publication called “Cappers Weekly.” This was a homespun weekly newspaper that was first published on July 10, 1879, as a weekly edition of the Topeka Daily Capital. During the next 35 years it changed its name almost as often as a Kansas weather forecaster changes his mind until on September 6, 1913, it settled on “CAPPER’S WEEKLY.”
Mother was a devoted subscriber during the `40’s and `50’s and when they printed a collection that might today be called “The Best of Capper’s Weekly” she immediately bought it. A few years later they printed a second collection which Mother also bought. She soon sent this second collection to my brother with the following letter - written exactly as she wrote it with the exception of a couple of parenthetical insertions for clarification:
“Gene here is the book I sent for. I don’t like it as good as the other one. Some of the letters are true for I have done some of the things in AR and OK. You can keep this book or give it to some old-timer to read.
Carrikers homesteaded in Western OK in 1905. My folks homesteaded in 1898 in AR. I was borned on the place and then they left when I was very small. Down east to Clinton AR about ten miles farther from where I was borned.
Carrikers burned cow chips (for heating and cooking). We never did. We always lived in the timber where we had lots of wood. Carrikers lived in Northwest OK for years without a heating stove they used their cook stove for heat. They had 7 kids while they lived there. 40 miles was the closest doctor at Woodward. (There was a) Country store 9 miles.
A neighbor woman of there’s was coming to Carrikers to visit and she got rattlesnake bit and died in there house. She died a few days after she got bit. Daddy said she sure suffered a lot. She was bare footed and it bit her on the toe. I wish Grandpa Carriker had talked more about things like that. She (Grandma Carriker) did talk about them. Guess Daddy had a harder time growing up than maybe I did. Carrikers had two chairs for 7 people. By (Goodbye) Mother.”
Sometime later my Beavers grandparents moved their family to a backwoods area in SW Arkansas where Grandpa eked out an existence for them raising cotton, cantaloupes, watermelon and other vegetables. Their closest store was in a little hamlet called "Figure 5," which today is a pleasant suburb of Van Buren AR. Mother attended grade school up until about the 6th grade in a one-room country school house near a little waterfall called "Dripping Springs." At that time in AR a person who graduated from 8th grade could then "turn around" and teach grades 1 through 8. One of Mother's teachers had done that, which led to an interesting argument between Mother and that teacher. While reading out loud Mother pronounced the word "island" as it should be pronounced. Her teacher corrected Mother, telling her that the word should be pronounced "IS land," pronouncing the first syllable as "is." Mother, a staunch person with Scotch-Irish roots, was never one to back down when she believed she was right. She challenged the teacher and the matter stayed unresolved until the County Superintendent made an official visit. Mother, who also remembered "slights" more than she probably should have, brought the incident to the superintendent's attention and the matter was settled in Mother's favor.
Around 1947, when I was somewhere between 10 and 13, I went with my parents and maternal grandmother when they took a vacation to visit their respective one-time homes in Arkansas. Both Scotland, the town where my Mother was born, and Carrolton, where my Dad came of age, no longer exist. They found crumbling foundations and a few landmarks. The photo below shows Dad, Mother, Grandma Beavers and myself at one of those landmarks called "Dripping Springs."