My Chunk of a Century

A FATEFUL MOMENT That she would never again see him alive was the last thing on Mama’s mind that fateful morning, March 28, 1930, when she kissed Daddy goodbye and turned to her work. He had hitched his rather skittish new team of horses to a wagon filled with grain and headed to the town elevator. We four older girls were in school and little Alyce was playing with a doll as Mama settled down to finish making some Campfire Girl skirts. The happy hum of the treadle sewing machine was interrupted by the ringing wall phone, a short and two longs, our party line signal. Uncle Henry’s grave voice delivered the shattering blow, “Olive, there’s been an awful accident: Stanley has been badly hurt. Grace is on her way to come and get you.” Thelma Ewing, a next door neighbor, came onto the line with “How can I help, Olive? I’ll be right over.” To this day Alyce remembers Mother’s uncontrollable crying. “What’s the matter, Mama?” she kept asking, but there was no answer. Not until our thirty-one year old mother was in Aunt Grace’s car headed for McComb did she learn that her beloved husband was already gone, killed when he rushed to stop his newly-bought horses who had not yet learned instant obedience to his “Whoa!” Daddy was caught between the wagon bed and an elevator beam. He was instantly crushed to death. Uncle Henry’s next sad task was to collect us girls from our schoolrooms, with the help of a teacher, and take us a short block to join Mama, by now there at his home with Aunt Inez. I can’t believe my memory is correct when I recall the abrupt way Miss Roberts broke the news to me. I was taking a history test when Mr. Slater answered a knock on the door. He looked toward me with utmost gravity and said, “Carol, you are wanted outside.” Foolishly, I thought “Uh-oh, I’ll bet Uncle Rex has died,” not realizing that I would hardly be called out for that. His illness had been much on my mind and he did die two days later. Sadly, I went out into the hall. There stood the short, trim, brisk Miss Roberts. She wasted no time in giving me her bitter message, “Carol, your father has been killed and you are to get your sister Edna and meet your Uncle Henry in the office.” And off she went. This sledge-hammer blow froze my brain and jellied my knees, but I managed to stagger over to the water fountain, mercifully but only a few feet away. I can still feel the cold, hard, firm reality of that fountain as I leaned on it to get my bearings before carrying out the mission so suddenly thrust upon me. I must have done it in a zombie-like state for my memory is a blank until we were all outside. Walking behind Uncle Henry on the short block toward his home, Irene and I remember staring fixedly at cracks in the sidewalk, trying to block out the reality of the blow we had been hit with. Our uncle had told Irene and Mary only that something awful had happened. When seven year old Edna had been called out of her room, she told a classmate that she was probably going to be taken to an ear doctor. For once we could hardly expect comfort from our shattered mother. We found her crying hysterically as Aunt Inez and Aunt Grace brought more and more hankies and a glass of water to keep her from fainting. Like us, Cousin Evelyn was in a state of shock. We sat on a sofa across the room from Mama, all in dazed silence. Edna says she still didn’t understand about Daddy until she saw his body in a casket in the big front bedroom back at the farm. For days, the house was full of supportive, shocked, grief-stricken relatives and neighbors. The floor of the large front room was covered with sprays and baskets of flowers. Later, whenever I smelled carnations I could recall the awfulness of those days. The fine metal and soft quilted white satin lining of the casket held a cruelly unresponsive statue of our Daddy. But where was HE? The finality of his death was hard to comprehend. Was our father an especially impulsive thirty-three-year-old man or was it that he had been so distracted at that one fateful moment that he couldn’t think straight? He had been talking with Cal Culp, a member of a committee planning the upcoming Community Institute. His horses understood that they were to leave the elevator when the wagon ahead moved on. But the men hadn’t finished talking at that point. Mr. Culp yelled, “Don’t go in there, Stanley! You’ll be killed.” But it was too late. Yelling “Whoa!” he dashed for the reins to stop his horses, thereby pinning himself between the swerving wagon bed and an elevator, instantly ending his life. Stanley Poe had been a charter member of the Rotary Club. It was his second year as president of the Community Institute, called the Farmer’s Institute before he broadened its scope. By the time a shocking headline in the McComb Herald screamed “FATHER OF FIVE KILLED,” and the subhead “Stanley Poe Crushed to Death,” McComb’s 1100 residents and farmers for miles around already knew. According to the paper, “One of the largest crowds that ever attend a funeral in this village was present to pay their last respects. It took 35 minutes for people to pass by. Between 400 and 500 machines were parked for miles around the church.” Our family had gone to a small country church, but the funeral was held in town at the Methodist Church. Long lines of people paused at the casket to say goodbye to this man who had been such a leader in his community. They glanced sadly toward his grieving widow and five daughters wearing their new Easter dresses for the first time. Alyce had a red and white striped sateen bolero dress. I had a stylish new tweed “ensemble”. By the time the paper came out my own shock and grief had ebbed to the point that I–silly young girl–felt momentarily famous when I thought, “I’m in headlines. I’m one of the five.” I was the oldest one. My twelfth birthday had been just ten days before that tragic accident. With a gush of tears, I recalled the favors Daddy had given each Campfire Girl at my surprise party. He gave each one a can containing a sprout which would grow into a Christmas tree. They were from a plot of these sprouts he was growing to sell when they were ready. There was more violent sobbing as a circle of mourners watched the casket being lowered into the grave. Decades later, my grownup daughter Donna asked to see where her grandfather was buried. Though Mother had regularly taken flowers there, I had lost interest in revisiting the scene. But as Donna and I stood there, a long buried memory of that final goodbye came rushing to the surface. I felt again the awful finality of watching the casket go down, down, Daddy gone forever. Back home, the crowds of loving friends gradually diminished, but spells of spasmodic sobbing behind Mama’s closed bedroom door took a long, long time to subside. To be both mother and father to five little girls–Carol, Irene, Mary Lou, Edna and Alyce–and to manage a 350-acre farm was an overwhelming role for this shaken woman to assume, even one as patient, kind, resourceful, and gifted with motherly wisdom as Olive Blanche Smith Poe. But her valiant spirit moved her forward.