My Mother Lillian Mae Rolo Sinor

My Mother was named Lillian Mae Rolo Sinor.  Her family called her Lilly but for some reason my Dad always called her Sally.  Most of our friends didn't know that her name was Lillian.

She died when I was 11 years old.  But she managed to teach me a lot even so.  I remember when we moved to California for her health she was in bed a lot.  She would write out a menu for dinner and write the recipes down for what we were having and I would fix dinner and if I had a problem I would go ask her what to do and
she would tell me how to fix it.

My Dad's parents really loved my Mom.  Grandma told me once that she was ashamed to admit it but she loved my Mom more than her own kids.  I really could understand it.  She was just a lovable person.  Grandpa Sinor and her would wrangle over who got the back of the chicken when fried chicken was for dinner. ( I know most of you don't know what the back of a chicken looks like as store bought cut up chicken doesn't have a back piece, They cut it right up the middle and it is part of the thigh.) After she died and I was living with my grandparents we were having fried chicken and Grandpa didn't take the back.  I asked him why and he said he didn't especially like it but just enjoyed arguing with my mom for it. 
She was born in Washington State and lived in Kansas for most of her younger years.  She married my dad when she was only 16. They lived in Arkansas when they first married. One day my grandpa Sinor and she were doing something in the field and Grandpa asked her to go to the barn and get a tow sack.  She went and then came back and told Grandpa all she could find was gunny sacks.  For those who are ignorant about terms in the South, tow sacks are burlap sacks and so are gunny sacks.   Grandpa thought it was really funny that she didn't know what a tow sack was.

I remember when we lived in Detroit when she went shopping or anywhere out of the house she always wore a hat.  Women did in the thirties and forties.

My Mother was a very Independent thinking woman. 
She didn't take any guff from my Dad.  One time they were playing cards with some friends and Daddy started giving her a hard time about her plays and she picked up a unopened bottle of beer and whacked him along side the head.  He decided her plays were just fine.  My Dad was very self centered and she kept him in line.
She didn't let him run over her or us kids. 

When she went to the hospital in California where she died we children came up to Washington to stay with her parents. My Grandma and Grandpa Rolo in Klickitat Wa.  She wrote us and my cousin Patty found some of them after her mother died.  I don't know how Aunt Elsie got them but I am glad she did.  It is nice to have something that she wrote to me.

 

Lillian Mae Rolo

 

I have not been keeping up with this blog every week, as I am on vacation.  I have been to Allicia's and we went to the San Diego Temple while I was there.
We also went to the Los Angeles Fabric district.  For someone who does a lot of sewing it will blow your mind.  There is about four blocks of Fabric stores and they have the fabric displayed on the sidewalks. I took a couple of pictures.  If I can figure out how to get them from my phone to my computer, I will upload one to this blog.

My Grandpa Sinor was my favorite Grandpa.  We got along really well.  I was his helper.  I helped him get in the winter wood.  He taught me how to use a crosscut saw.  We would go into the woods and find a fallen and dead live oak tree and saw it up to use in the kitchen stove.  We used black oak trees for the heating stove.

Grandpa would go squirrel hunting. He used a twenty two rifle.  He would take Checker (the dog) with him.  Checker would tree a squirrel and he would be on one side of the tree barking.  The squirrel would of course go around to the other side of the tree.  Grandpa would be there  to shoot it.  Sometimes if the squirrel was on a small enough branch he would  do what we called barking it.  He would shoot the branch right under the squirrel and it would cause the squirrel to fall off. That way no meat was hurt.  These squirrels were big Fox squirrels. Not the little ones out in the west.
I used to help my Grandpa cut cedar posts.  They were the hard cedar used in cedar chests, not the soft cedar in the West.  Grandpa used post oak for his fence posts and cut the cedar  posts to sell to farmers in Kansas and Nebraska where they didn't have a lot of trees to make posts with.  Now they all use steel fence posts.
Grandpa would cut the  trees (they were not big like out west cedar trees are.) mostly  8 to 12 foot tall.  He would trim them of  their branches and cut them to size.  I would hook of a chain to them and use the horse to pull them to a pile where a truck could load them up to haul them away. 
Grandpa would pile all the ends and branches in a big pile.
When we went hunting in the fall we would come across one of the piles and set it on fire..  It went up like gasoline.  Sparks would go up in the sky like fireworks. Grandpa would always wait until we had  big rain so the woods wouldn't catch fire.
When I was telling about Uncle Don and his having us hoe his corn on the White River I forgot to mention that is where
my Grandpa taught me to swim.
Grandpa had bought the place where he was living in the Forties.  It wasn't cleared of trees so he had to rent land to grow his hay and corn.  He did have about two avers for a garden but  not enough for crops.  He rented a  mile stretch of railroad right of way from the railroad.  He only had 6 rows of corn but they  were a mile long.  So, when you said you hoed a corn row it was saying a lot.  He had two horses that he did his farm work with.  He raised corn and hay to feed his horses. He had horses to raise corn and hat. I never could see the point of that.  But, Grandpa did love his horses. One of them went missing and we looked for hours.  We finally found her.  She had fallen into a ravine and had broken her leg.  Grandpa carried 2 five gallon buckets of water to her. It was a mile that he had to carry them. He did this knowing he was going to have to shoot her as there was no way to fix her leg and get her out of the ravine.  I asked him why he carried water to her when he knew he was going to have to shoot her. He said he wasn't going to let her die thirsty.  I never saw him cry.  But when he had to shoot his horse her cried.
He and my Grandma moved to Okemah, Oklahoma when he gave up farming.  My Grandma Sinor's mother lived there and she needed them to be with her as she was getting up in years.  He is buried in the Highland cemetery  in Okemah.

I have to go show a lady how to crochet a scarf.  I will try to bog again next week but don't count one it

Memories of My Great Uncle Don

Uncle Don was married to my Grandpa Sinor's Sister, Aunt Ellar.  He was also my Grandma Sinor's Cousin.  He was really a very kind hearted man, but he did have a few things that made him a very
human person.  He was a binge alcoholic.  He would stay sober for about 6 months. Then he would go
over to the next county and go on a drunk. Baxter County was dry so he had to go over to Marion Co.
to be able to buy booze.  He used to have his own moonshine still but that is a story for another time.
He went over to Marion Co and got drunk and when he came home, he wasn't quite sober enough to go home to Aunt Ellar so he built a fire by the creek, but he used the log we used to cross the creek when it was running full.  My sister Dolores got a little upset with him. She was his favorite.  So he
cut down a tree big enough to cross and creek and big enough around so we could walk across it safely.
Uncle Don could play the fiddle good enough for Nashville.  But in those days they didn't put up with the stuff stars get away with now.  They didn't put up with alcoholics.  When anyone in the neighborhood (within a ten mile radius) wanted to have a dance, my Uncle Don would play the fiddle, My uncle Estel (my dad's brother) and my Aunt Dorothy ( Uncle Estel"s wife) would play the
mandolin.  We had our own country band,  We would just move all the furniture back or into another room and have a square dance.  When my dad was there, he would call the square dance. That takes a pretty good memory, as there were different names to the dances.
Uncle Don had some land on the White River.  I have to say, he was a little lazy.  He hired my Grandpa and I to hoe the Johnson grass out of his corn. We went down and camped along the railroad track.  Grandpa set up a trot line on the River.  We used mussels that were in the creek bed for bait.   The creek was named for My Great Great Grandpa Cunningham who settled that land when he move to Arkansas.  We mostly caught catfish. Not the little bullhead kind but the blue catfish.  They are really good.
 The railroad tressel over the creek was close to where we set up camp and the first night when the train came and blew its' whistle I sat right up from a sound sleep and screamed.
The next night after hoeing corn for 8 hours, I never even heard the train.  That's what a little hard work will do for you.  Give you a good nights sleep.

 

This is a picture taken in the late Thirties of my Uncle Don and Aunt Ellar.

 

This is my first time at blogging so you will have to forgive mistakes and I will take advice as to how to make it better