Mom was born into a family of eight children, she being the fourth child to Mary Holder and Matt Craycraft.
Mom often spoke with fondness of her parents. They reared their children with a lot of love and were taught a respect for God and man at an early age. Her childhood home was at Kendall Springs in the midst of four neighboring brothers homes (her dad being one of the brothers). They always had plenty of cousins to play with. The two who were closest to her age were Beulah (Craycraft) Carpenter and Stella Craycraft. She often spoke about them.
She attended school at Kendall Springs. I’ve heard Mom tell about going out at recess, and they began to play ball. She said her teacher took her aside and said, “Helen, you know it’s not ladylike for girls to be playing ball.” That was the end of her ball playing.
Mom married Dad in 1929. I guess out of necessity and partly because of going through a depression, Mom was always very saving and never wasted anything. She made many quilts and rag rugs out of scrap material. She continued to make these in her last years. When I start to throw away something now, I can hear Mom say, “Waste not, want not.” She was a recycler before we ever heard about recycling.
Mom and Dad raised us with a lot of love. We always had plenty to eat and everything we needed. Mom was always kind and encouraging to us and others she knew. She and Dad helped other people a lot. Mom always took us to church, and we learned mostly by her example what it was to be a Christian. Her home was always open to friends and relatives. Mom died in January of this year after suffering a severe stroke on New Year’s Eve. She left a void in all of our lives, but she still lives on a little in each of us.
(This article was provided by Sherri Spencer Pergrem, after the death of her Grandmother, Helen Craycraft Goodpaster. Helen provided numerous articles to this newsletter and all who read her articles enjoyed them.)
If a known homosexual or lesbian should ever be put in as teacher of our children (or grandchildren) should we just submit and be quiet or what would we as Christian do about it?
All the text books which teach anything about good morals or about God, seem to have been banned from all our schools, and it seems like our children may be vulnerable to a lot more impurity being taught by some one whose ideas of right and wrong are warped (to say the least).
When I was growing up and until the past 25 or 20 years, we didn’t know anything about any kind of sodomy. There may have been a few who practiced such, but we were not aware of it. Neither was sex education taught in the schools (very little, if any in our homes).
Our parents just watched out for us to see that we had the right examples before us and that we had the right companions. Girls were not allowed dates unless chaperoned by an older brother or sister or maybe a cousin. Girls and boys both had chores to do. Boys carried in wood, coal, and kindling and learned to milk cows at an early age; and help some with the field work as they grew older. Girls washed dishes and swept floors sometimes and learned some sewing and cooking. There were games played outside in the summer, such as marbles and baseball, when girls were allowed to play sometimes.
In winter we read stories (my Mom played checkers and dominos with us sometimes) and we nearly always popped big pans of popcorn and ate it by the fireside at evenings. We didn’t have a lot of the worldly goods, but we were happy (a lot happier) than most children nowadays who have a lot of toys, videos, fine clothes, cars and every-thing money can buy.
We went to a country school where one teacher taught 50 or 60 children. Later a two room school was built and at one time there were about 90 children enrolled with two teachers, teaching the basics.
Our teachers started by having all of us sing religious or patriotic songs and either she read some Bible verses or had us recite verses from the Bible. We had half an hour at noon and two 15 minutes recesses. Everyone carried lunches from home and played games at noon after eating lunch.
My Mother wanted all of my brothers and sisters to attend high school and she and Dad scrimped and saved to have money to send us to school. My older sister, Carrie, (oldest one of our family) didn’t go to high school because my grandfather objected. He felt like she would be subjected to a lot of temptations I suppose.
My Father and three of his brothers lived within “hollering” distance from each other, and another a short distance from one of these first who lived at “Grandpap’s” home place in-between my Dad’s place. All of Grandma’s and Grandpap’s children had a lot of respect for them as well as the grandchildren and in-laws and most of the people around them respected and loved them and called them “Aunt Rye” (for Mariarh) and “Uncle Tiff” (for John Tilford). My grandmother died in Jan 1919. The war had ended in 1918 and the soldier boys who lived through the war had contracted a bad strain of influenza “Flu” from oversees and some of them gave it to many families who hadn’t gone to war. There was hardly a home in our neighborhood (and everywhere else) that was immune from this “flu”. My Mother and all six children (one of whom was only 3 months old) were very ill with this . My Mother took pneumonia and my Dad tried to take care of us all, along with doing his chores (cutting wood and feeding livestock). About all he could cook was oatmeal, which we couldn’t eat, we were so sick. He finally got a neighbor woman in to help after my grandmother took the flu. She had gone from house to house visiting sick children and oldsters until she became sick, took pneumonia and died a few days later. They didn’t have the medicines for pneumonia that we have now and people waited for their “fever to break” or they died.
Many in Bath County died from this strain of flu that winter. Snow was on the ground and it stayed real cold for days and they couldn’t have funeral services for them, just dug their graves and buried them. Several months later when my grandfather died in the fall they had funeral or memorial services for both my grandmother and grandfather.
I would like to write sometime about a lot of things that happened as we were growing up and later, because I believe Kendall Springs was a unique place in many ways. I am thankful that I was allowed to live there for so long because there were many “good” kind people around us. Even though our knowledge was limited, I think most all did the best with what they were endowed with and were content, whether they had much or little. As Dolly Parton would write “we were Rich” and all had a healthy respect and fear of God, which helped make us “rich”.