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According to Edith Brownlee, it took a
little effort, but she is now quite adept at using a computer. “Four
years ago, my grandson gave me this computer,” Brownlee said. “I just
had to learn how to use it. It wasn’t easy learning to use a computer
at my age, but I just did it.”
That attitude seems to have been a trait
Brownlee shared with her ancestors.
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CHERISHED
WEDDING GIFT. Edith Robinett Brownlee is pictured here with
an iron that was presented to her as a wedding present when she
was 17 years old. |
“I was born July 31, 1917,” Brownlee
said. “I’ve been around a long time. When I was born, they guessed
that I probably weighed three pounds.” She said that hopes for her
survival were slim at the time.
“The doctor who delivered me, Dr. Inzer,
also delivered my babies,” Brownlee said, “and while we were waiting
all night for one of my babies to be born, he told me all about it. He
told me that my great-grandmother, Sarah Robinett, held me up against
her, under a blanket, and she kept me alive. We didn’t have bottles,
and mama (Ina Robinett) had two other kids to take care of.” Brownlee
went on to say that her grandmother, Mary Robinett, took “dried sugar,
tied it in a cloth and dipped it in milk” to feed her. Thanks to the
warmth and ingenuity, and an “I just did it” attitude of a
great-grandmother and a grandmother, Edith not only survived, she
thrived.
Edith married Olon Brownlee at 17. “We
had one girl and three boys,” she said. “Dolores, Samuel “Sam” Lester,
William “Bill” Chester, and Joe.” Three of the Brownlee children have
moved elsewhere, but Edith and Joe currently share a house. “I’ve
lived here about 52 years,” she said. “My husband and I lived here
before he passed away in 1999.”
In addition to the four children,
Brownlee has 14 grandchildren, 37 great-grandchildren and five
great-great grandchildren, “with four more on the way.”
The house Brownlee shares with son Joe is
only about one-half mile from where she lived when she was born.
“My parents were Steve Robinett and Ina
Roberson Robinett,” Brownlee said, “but my father died when I was two
and my mother remarried when I was six years old, to Wes Sadberry.”
With both Ina and Wes Sadberry already
having children of their own, Brownlee recalls a large family. “There
was a crowd of us when we all went to the table,” she said. “Now I’m
the only one left.”
Although she admits she “never cared for
cooking” and didn’t spend any unnecessary time in the kitchen,
Brownlee recalls her mother being a good cook.
“Mama started from scratch on
everything,” Brownlee said. Though she didn’t help with the cooking,
she does remember wringing the necks of chickens for Sunday dinners.
“If they were pretty good size, I’d cut the head off with a hatchet,”
she said, “but usually I would just wring it’s neck.”
A vegetable garden was a fixture
throughout her childhood, and again as a young married woman. “And we
had a big fruit orchard,” Brownlee said, recalling that her all-time
favorite meal was “corn and pickled peaches. That was my birthday
lunch nearly every time.”
Brownlee recalls that her first year of
school was at DeLeon, but that she later went to school at the nearby
community of Bowman. “I came back to DeLeon when I got to the eighth
grade,” she said. She remembers a married couple, Jiggs and Fay
VanZandt, who taught school at Bowman. “They taught school for five
years while I was going there, so I didn’t have many other teachers,”
she said. “But the first year I was there, I had a teacher named Ina
Dingus. I don’t remember the lady much, but I’ve never forgotten that
name.” The Bowman schoolhouse was a two-room building with a
wood-burning stove.
Some of the teachers at DeLeon also made
an impression on Brownlee, including Tip Allen, Lucille Duke and a Mr.
Bolter. “I can’t remember the home economics teacher’s name,” she
said, “but I loved her.”
Brownlee’s family attended Morton’s
Chapel Methodist Church in her earliest years, but she says that when
her mother remarried she and Wes Sadberry went to the “Assembly”.
“Then as I got older, and got married, I went back to Morton’s
Chapel,” she said.
Although she didn’t work outside the
home, Brownlee, like many other women of her era, recall that there
was plenty of work inside the home. “With four children, and no
electricity back then,” she said, “I was always busy. You didn’t just
run and stick something in the microwave.”
Laundry was an all-day endeavor and
required a rub-board and a wash pot. After the clothes were clean, of
course, they still needed to be ironed. “I had a gasoline iron, and
that helped,” Brownlee said. “It was big and bundlesome but it worked.
It had a little globe on the back of it, and you’d pump it up and turn
it on, and it would heat the iron.”
The irons she used prior to that time,
heavy flat irons, were also big and difficult to maneuver. “You heated
those on the stove, or in the fireplace,” Brownlee said. “When I got
married, at 17, my mother gave me one, and my grandmother gave me
one.”
Downtown DeLeon has changed some since
Brownlee first shopped as a young wife and mother. “We shopped at
Higginbothams, Smiths and Holdridge’s grocery store,” she said. “And
we went to the show every Saturday night.”
The very first show Brownlee saw in
DeLeon left a lasting impression on her. “When mama and my stepfather
got married, he had a son, Glen, who was seven years older than me,”
Brownlee said. “He asked me one day if I’d like to go to the picture
show -- they didn’t call it the movies back then -- and I asked him
what it was. He tried to tell me. I wasn’t supposed to go, but we
slipped off and went to that picture show. It was a silent movie, and
I thought it was great to sit there and watch those people move around
up there on the screen. I was only six years old and I couldn’t read
very well, so I didn’t know what they were saying, but I enjoyed it.”
Brownlee said that to the best of her knowledge, her mother never
discovered she’d gone to the show. “I was supposed to be playing in
the sand bed,” she said.
Early day entertainment in the Brownlee
household (that one trip to the picture show aside) included listening
to a battery-operated radio, and Edith remembers being especially
partial to the musical programs. “I enjoyed jazz, western swing,
anything,” she said. “I wasn’t picky about it.”
That love of music would prove to be
long-lasting, and both Edith and Olon enjoyed playing musical
instruments. “We even played in the Senior Citizen’s Band,” Brownlee
said. “Olon played the fiddle and I played the guitar.” For many
years, Edith enjoyed painting, but she said now her eyesight is too
poor. “Getting older takes away so many things,” she said, “and I
can’t see the colors the way I should, so I gave it up.”
These days, one of her favorite pastimes
is growing flowers. “I like irises, roses, geraniums and petunias,”
she said. “I really like to be outside, when it’s cool enough.” Edith
also enjoys her visits to the DeLeon Senior Citizen’s Center. “I go up
to the center and play chicken foot,” she said. “Usually, there’s a
group of us, maybe 16 to 20 people. It’s a chance to talk and visit.
Everyone brings a dish and we share lunch.”
One of things that many people find
intriguing about Brownlee is her tolerance for snakes.
“I’m not afraid of snakes,” she said,
“except copperheads. But chicken snakes and grass snakes don’t bother
me.” She goes on to tell of a recent episode when a roofer working on
her house asked her if she knew there was a snake in the attic. “I
said no,” Brownlee laughed, “but I had kind of guessed there was one,
because I don’t have any mice. You won’t have a mouse if there’s a
snake around. I don’t like mice -- I’d rather have the snake.”
Brownlee told the roofer to leave the snake alone, “that it wasn’t
bothering nobody.” When she had a problem with mice in her barn,
Brownlee said she “caught a snake and put it in there” and hasn’t had
any problems since. She said she remembers that even as a child she
was not afraid of snakes.
As she talked about her childhood,
Brownlee felt it was important to note that “none of it seemed hard.”
“I remember always having fun,” she said.
“It didn’t disturb me. Back then, there was always something to do.” |
