Mount – LILLIAN'S CUPBOARD

Mother’s Family Stories – Installment 11

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 11

Ralph Mount, age 4 years

Don’t remember too much about my brother (Ralph Mount) – he was so much older than me but I remember he always had a car and I remember when I was little he had an old car. I remember we were going over to Ft. Ancient and the durned old thing couldn’t make the hill and we had to get out and he put rocks behind the wheels and we had to walk up the hill so he could drive up the hill.

But he would take us for rides and he took us over to show us that big meteor or whatever it was that fell over there between Morrow and Lebanon – a great big rock that was as big as a building. Now, it’s way down, it’s really small now but it’s still there. He used to write stories – I think that’s where Nancy (my daughter, Nancy Breen) gets it – they were good stories, he could write real well and used to write stories and then he decided when he was about 18 or so he was going to be a magician. And he was good at that. He had me and my girlfriend – we used to put on little skits and sing songs and we’d sing Ramona, I can remember singing Ramona. The only funny part was I always dressed like the little girl and sang alto and she dressed like the boy and sang soprano – that was kind of an odd mixture. He belonged to the Juniors and he’d have us come over and he’d put on his magic act and we’d put on our little skit, but then he got married about that time and Hazel (Hazel Wilson) didn’t care for the magician part of it – she broke that up.

Ralph Mount, ca 1925

As long as I can remember I’ve always loved to dance. My girlfriend and her mother liked to go to dances and she’d take us and we’d get out there on that floor – I was only about 10 years old – and we’d Charleston and we would dance and I’d go home and I’d wind up that old Victrola and put on records and I taught everybody around how to dance. I taught Alice Mae (Mother’s older sister) and her girl friends, they’d come in and get me to teach them how to dance. Alice Mae never could dance and she’d get so mad because I could teach them how to dance. I guess I still love to dance to this day – I guess you never lose that.

Mom was good to us and she done very good – done as good as she could – she’d take in washings and do everything. We were very poor but we always had nice holidays – nice Christmas and Thanksgiving and we always had good things – she’d see to that. I remember one time when I was real little, the day before Thanksgiving the Ku Klux Klan came in – oh, it scared us all to death – they were all dressed in white with pointy hats and all you could see were their eyes, but they had a great big basket of, oh, everything – turkey and the whole bit – and we were scared to death but we didn’t even know them, of course, but we kind of suspected it was our next door neighbor because we’d be out of coal and Mom would say, “Just go down and see if you can scrape up some coal dust or
something to burn – just enough to get supper with” – we’d be out of coal, and we’d go down and that coal bin would be full of coal and we always kind of suspected the neighbor of putting it in there. The Ku Klux might not have done any good but they were good to us.

Mom (Helen Conover) in her garden

Next time – the final installment of Mother’s stories.

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Mother’s Family Stories–Installment 10

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

Friend Virginia and Mother (Martha Mount)

Wearing necklaces made of buckeyes

One time, I had a little friend named Virginia and she was crippled because she had infantile paralysis when she was little and Morrow had never had a fire engine – they always had the kind of engine that men had to pull and we had just gotten this new red fire engine this day. This is the day that Virginia and I decided to go up in the graveyard. Alice Mae (Mother’s older sister) and her friend, Jeanette, had told us that there was a monument up there that had six screws in it and had two hands pictured on it. If you took those six screws out and you looked in there, those two hands would be shaking up and down, up and down. This was the day Virginia and I decided to investigate and see if the hands were there. We got one screw out and they let loose with that new fire engine siren and like to scared us to death and we took down over that hill. I’d run a little ways then I’d wait for Virginia, then I’d run a little….and to this day there’s one screw missing in that monument. I don’t think anybody ever did look in and see if the hands were there.

My daughter and I made a trip to Morrow on July 16, 2016, to visit the old cemetery. We visited my grandfather’s grave and remembered how Mother considered the cemetery her personal playground because her father was buried there.

The monument with the clasping hands is a big beautiful piece.

We checked the “shaking hands” portion of the monument and the screws were all in place on this side….

…but one is still missing from the back plate.

Then one day Alice Mae and Jeanette – we never were allowed in the house, Alice Mae was a very good little housekeeper – she’d clean house and she wouldn’t let us in. So, one day she told us, she said, “Come in the house”, her and her friend said. We went in and everything was real dark and all of a sudden they jumped up from behind the davenport, they had two of Mom’s sheets on – Mom would have killed them if she knew they had her sheets – and made like a ghost – like to scared us to death.

Brother Ralph and sister Alice Mae (with her Susie doll)

ca. 1916

One time when we were little and going to school we lived beside a preacher and Mabel (Mother’s younger sister) was little at the time and she called them the “peachie kids”. We went to school one day and we used to always just go get our lunch and we’d just stand around the table and eat and Mom would always leave us money and we come home and the neighbor next door told us that the preacher’s kids – she looked over there and they were in the house, they were eating our lunch and taking the money. So, Mom went to the preacher to ask him about it and he said…he got ahold of the kids then and yeah, they had candy and balloons and everything bought with the money and he made them give the balloons and everything to us and he gave Mom back her money but he said it was Mom’s fault because she tempted the kids by leaving money lay out.

The “peachie” kids

I used to love my grandmother – that was my father’s mother – and I’d go and see her – oh, just any time I’d walk over and see her – she lived a couple of streets away from us. But she was a very little woman, would rarely have anything to say. Lillian reminds me so much of her. The only thing I can ever remember her saying was – she’d look through those old bifocal glasses and she’d say, “New dress? Did your mother make it? Hmmmm.” On cold winter days she’d have our cousins stop at school and tell us to stop in for dinner and she would have beans and dumplings and all kinds of jellies and relishes and all kinds of things like that – Lillian reminds me of her like that – just every kind of a jelly thing you could think of and oh, we loved that.

Minerva Alice Hutchinson Mount, Mother’s paternal grandmother

My mother’s grandmother, older brother, Ralph, and mother

Next time, Mother will tell about her big brother, Ralph, and about some mysterious day-before-Thanksgiving visitors.

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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.