Martha Applegate – LILLIAN'S CUPBOARD

In Memory of my Mother

My mother was born 100 years ago today: Martha Evelyn Mount born on November 28, 1916, in Morrow, Ohio. Passed away on July 31, 1991.

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Mother’s Family Stories–Installment 12

My mother’s 100th birthday will be this November (Martha Evelyn Mount, born November 28, 1916, in Morrow, Ohio and passed away on July 31, 1991). When she was 72 in 1989, she made a taped recording of family stories for both sides of the family. In her honor, and still incredulous that she sat and dictated all of this into a tape recorder by herself, I’m going to post what she wrote along with pictures whenever possible. She had a rather rambling, random method and said whatever came to her mind at that moment, punctuated by hearty laughing. I’ll post the stories in the order she told them and will only edit the posts to keep out anything that might be offensive or embarrassing to other members of the family.

8/89 – Family Stories Tape by Martha Applegate
Transcribed 5/19/01 by Lillian – notes in parenthesis by Lillian

INSTALLMENT 12

I used to love to go and visit my Aunt Hettie (Hettie Conover Gillis) – she lived on a farm and I had one cousin one year older than me and one, one year younger (Alberta or Roberta and Mildred Gillis), so we made a good group. We would play in the barn – oh, I loved that old barn and I still love old barns to this day. I can just imagine I can smell that hay and those cows being milked. We’d play in the hay mow and we’d play all kind of things. We’d put on shows and we’d put on everything and I love an old barn – there’s just something about that.

Belle Baker (Belle Hutchinson) used to live up on the hill where the funeral home is now – the big funeral home just before you go into Morrow. She used to call for me to come up there when they had pears and I used to climb up these wooden steps that were all broken to go up there and get pears. I used to love to go there – she had the biggest cookie jar and always would give you the biggest cookies – she was my father’s aunt – my grandmother’s sister – and her sister and her husband lived there – Aunt Becky (Hutchinson) and Uncle Warren (Warren Brunson). They didn’t have any children and I used to love to go and visit with them. They were real old at that time and Aunt Becky always had a little clay pipe in her mouth turned upside-down. They’re buried up in Morrow and I always remembered their grave – I loved that little old couple.

Alice Mae (Mount – Mother’s older sister) had it kind of rough. She was a good little housekeeper and she had to take care of the little ones while Mom worked but we would always go to her if we wanted to do anything – we’d always ask her first.

Alice Mae, ca 1925

Alice Mae and Mom (Helen), ca 1925

And I’m scared to death to be closed up in anything – I can’t stand ….any kind of a meeting or church or anything like that where they close the door and I can’t get out. My sister told me the reason for that is one time my mother was sick and my father had to get someone to take care of her and the woman put us in a cupboard and shut the door on us – shut us up in that cupboard – and my sister would say – she was just 3 years older than me – I guess I must have been about 3 and her about 6, I don’t know – no, not that old ‘cause my father wasn’t dead yet – but she’d say, “Oh, we’re not going to get out and we’re scared, she’s not going to let us out” and to this day I can’t stand to have a door closed on me.

I had a very happy childhood – lived in Morrow and in the summertime the carnivals would come through and I loved when Bartone’s Tent Show would come through. We’d go to all those tent shows and then we’d go home and we’d act out those shows. Every once in a while down in the town square they’d have what they called the Punch and Judy Show and they would sell medicine. They would put on this Punch and Judy act and I don’t know, it seems like there was something nice going on all the time. We’d go to church on Sunday and I just had a very happy childhood all the way ‘round.

Epilogue:

Although each of my parents came from a troubled childhood and married when they were teenagers, they were determined to give my sister and me a stable family life and they did. My father gave up the horse business and worked first on the WPA, then for the City of Cincinnati, for Dayton Acme during the last part of World War II, and then as a self-taught television repairman. After I graduated from high school, he returned to the horse business he loved and stayed involved with that until he died on the track at the end of a race in 1978.

The Applegates – Johnny, Martha,

Lillian and Shirley, 1943

Mother was the perfect stay-at-home Mom until my sister and I were grown. She then went on to a long career and retirement from Shillito’s, a large Cincinnati department store.

Mother with her new White sewing machine in 1954.

She was wearing a dress she had just made – we thought the matching ruffles on the gloves were a nice touch.

In her 60s and 70s Mother finally got to dance as much as she wanted when she took round dance and square dance lessons and danced right up to the last months of her battle with breast cancer in 1991.

Mother died on July 31, 1991, and I sat under a clear blue sky in the back yard and wrote in my journal:

Mother went dancing today with her skirts swirling and petticoats flouncing, her golden red hair in perfect order and wearing her matching shoes and earrings. She was smiling and light on her feet, happy at last to be able to promenade and do-si-do and twirl and swing. She barely glanced back at the rest of us still struggling with our affairs. She was going dancing!

Mother, ca 1981

This concludes my mother’s taped family stories from 1989. It was the best gift she could have left for me.

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Mother’s Family Stories–Installment 5

8/89 – Family Stories Tape by Martha Applegate
Transcribed 5/19/01 by Lillian – notes in parenthesis by Lillian

My father, John A, and his mother – 1933

Grandma loved this picture of Johnny. She exclaimed, “Oh,

he looks just like a movie actress!”

INSTALLMENT 5

Mother tells some family stories about the oldtimers – my grandfather and his brothers.

That whole Applegate family was a wild bunch – those boys would get on the rampage – I don’t know what they’d do – they’d carry on and the sheriff would get after them and they’d run home and Granny had a great big sea trunk and she’d hide them in there and the sheriff would come looking for them – he’d look all over and finally he’d find them and he’d take them down to his house and he’d make them work around his house until they’d served their time and they wouldn’t run off – they’d serve their time – and he’d let them loose and they’d go back home and first thing you know, he’d have to pick them up again for something.

One day Uncle Jim (Note: actually reported to be Uncle Court) and I guess Will (another Applegate son) were going hunting when they were boys and they were going through a fence and Uncle Jim’s (Court’s) gun went off and he shot Will in the leg. They took him home and they laid him on the kitchen table and they got the two doctors in. They were going to operate on him there on the table and Uncle Jim stood there with a gun and said, “He’d better live – if he don’t live, you’re both dead”. They operated on him and they didn’t say one word – they went out and they got on their horses and took off. Well, Will had died and they knew Uncle Jim was going to shoot them if he did. Of course, it wasn’t their fault.

Granny, she just went nuts – they buried him and they didn’t bury his leg with him and she just went crazy and she just carried on and carried on until one night they had to go out in the night and dig him up and put that leg down there with him and from then on she was OK, she got over it.

My great-grandmother Emily Jane Reddick Applegate (Granny)

Uncle Jim (James Everett Applegate) was really a character – he was about the best loved one of the whole bunch, but he was quiet, a little quiet man, kind of put you in mind of that man on Lonesome Dove (Robert Duvall), about that size, twinkly eyes, but could fight a buzz saw.

My great-uncle, James Everett Applegate

If it wouldn’t be for Uncle Jim, none of you children, great-grandchildren or any of you would be here today. He saved Johnny’s life (John A) when Grandma-up-Dayton (Lillian Illie) was about to have him. Two of the brothers got into a fight and she got in the middle of them and she got pushed out a window backwards and she come near losing the baby. They called Dr. Forman in and he said, “Oh, the baby’s breech – he’s going to be a breech birth”, he said, “I’m going to have to cut the baby in two to save the mother” and Uncle Jim said, “No baby gets cut in two in my house” and with that she went ahead and had him and that’s the only reason any of you are here today. Johnny always had a very bad temper and his brother, Frank, told him the reason he had a bad temper was because he came in back side first and from that time on he always had his backside up in the air over something.

My grandmother, Lillian Illie Applegate, hard at work

on some fairground – son Frank in the foreground

If Uncle Jim would get to drinking and carrying on they’d have to call the sheriff down and he would get his back up against the wall and he’d just take them all one by one – nobody could whip him. He never went far in school but he could just figure, read, write – just as sharp as he could be.

Front row: a neighbor and Uncle Jim

back row: a neighbor, Goldie and Bill Applegate, Aunt Rose (Jim’s wife)

In installment 6, we’ll hear about some of the Applegates in the 1930s – as wild as ever.

My Mother’s Family Stories–Installment 2

My mother’s 100th birthday will be this November (Martha Evelyn Mount, born November 28, 1916, in Morrow, Ohio and passed away on July 31, 1991). When she was 72 in 1989, she made a taped recording of family stories of both sides of the family. In her honor, and still incredulous that she sat and dictated all of this into a tape recorder by herself, I’m going to post what she wrote along with pictures whenever possible. She had a rather rambling, random method and said whatever came to her mind at that moment, punctuated by hearty laughing. I’ll post the stories in the order she told them and will only edit the posts to keep out anything that might be offensive or embarrassing to other members of the family.

8/89 – Family Stories Tape by Martha Applegate
Transcribed 5/19/01 by Lillian – notes in parenthesis by Lillian

INSTALLMENT #2

In 1921, John B and my grandmother, Lillian Frances Illie, were divorced when my father was 9 years old and his brother, Frank, was 7. John B got custody of the two boys and took them with him on the road to blacksmith at county fairs. Here is my mother’s version of some of their adventures.

Frank and John A. Applegate

Ca. 1920

Then when John (B) and Grandma-up-Dayton (our name for our paternal grandmother who lived in Dayton, Ohio) had separated, John had the boys (John A. and Frank E. Applegate), he was taking care of them – he’d get drunk. Well, Frank was so little they couldn’t leave him out so when he’d get drunk and they’d put John in jail, they’d put Frank in with him and he’d get in there and he’d climb up and down the bars like a monkey and rattle the tin cup up and down and they’d finally have to let John go to get rid of Frank.

One time John (B) and Frank and Johnny (John A) were shipping horses on a boxcar train out to Missouri, I guess it was, and John was drunk as usual and they were all shut up in this boxcar with the horses and for some reason they got side-tracked and put onto another track and was left sitting there for days. They didn’t have a thing to eat, nothing to drink, and the horses and Grandpa drunk – that was a bad time for the boys.

When Frank (Applegate) was a little boy, Grandma-up-Dayton (Lillian Illie) and Grandpa (John B) were still married at the time, gypsies came through and they wanted to tell their fortune and they said, “No, no, get out of here, we don’t want our fortunes told”. Grandpa said, “Get out of here”, John (B) said, because gypsies, they’d steal anything that wasn’t fastened down and they said, “Either tell your fortune or we’ll put a spell on that baby”. John said, “Get out of here, get out of here” and he chased them off. Well, right after that, Frank just went into convulsions and had fits and they thought they were going to lose him. John got on a horse and he took out and he hunted those gypsies until he found them. He found this woman and he said, “You take that spell off that baby or it’s going to be the end of you” and so she did, she took the spell off the baby, she took the spell off of Frank and he didn’t have any more convulsions.

When Frank was little and hadn’t gone to school yet, Grandma-up-Dayton made them both little baseball suits to match and Johnny took him to school to visit and all through school they kept smelling something and smelling something and thought what on earth is that? When he got up to go out of the room, they found out what it was – Frank had pedooped all over the back of his baseball suit, it was all yellow – Johnny was so mad at him.

School Picture – John A (4th from left, row 2) and Frank

(3rd from right, row 1)

Next time, we’ll hear some stories about Johnny before his parents divorced and about life in rural Ohio in the early 1900s.