Louetta Pyles
Table of Contents
Young Years
In what year were you born?
1907. I’m 98 now.
That’s wonderful.
What do you remember when you were a little girl growing up?
Well, I remember the first airplanes, the first cars. Back then it was hard work. Soon as I got big enough to work, I started working in the fields after school. Just stayed busy. There were six of us children.
Where did you grow up?
In Tennessee. Did you ever hear of the Dianna Singing? Have you ever been? Well, I was raised about two miles from where that is. It is closer to Cornersville than any other city.
There were six (of us children) and the youngest one died first. Now they’ve all gone except me.
Were you the oldest?
No, I was the youngest except for the brother that died. They are all dead now except me. We had a busy life, raised on a farm.
Another interesting thing my daddy and me and Willard were all born in the same place, in the same house, same room. My daddy lived there as long as he lived.
Is the house still there?
No. My brother’s son bought the place and he sold the logs out of the house.
It was a log house?
Yes.
Who built that house?
I don’t know. It was build when I first remember and it was old then.
Your daddy was born there?
Yes and lived there all his life. Now there’s one time I think he moved away and the first child was born and then he moved back. It was his stepmother that raised him. His daddy was married four times. Two of the wives had children and the other two didn’t. The last one never had any children but Papa and a sister of his and another brother was little and she raised them and then he kept her as long as she lived.
School Years
Tell me about your school years.
Well, I liked all my teachers. I went to a smaller school. Wasn’t very many in it, twenty or more. Then I went to Dianna to school in the later years. There was a principal and then two other teachers there and that’s where I finished. I never finished high school. I was milking cows at home. This is before I married. I rode a horse to school and I had a sidesaddle. Where I was raised, Willard went to that same place last year and he said that sidesaddle was hanging there in the shed. All these years. He said he wanted to get it but he thought, “Well I’ve got so many things now that I can’t take care of it”. He said it was still in pretty good shape, looked like.
You rode your horse to school and let him stay in the stable?
Until time school was out and got on him and come home.
How far was it to school?
It was about two and one-half miles. They moved the school from where it was to another place where you had to ride the bus and get on the bus by daylight. My mother wasn’t well and I couldn’t do it all. So I just quit school in the eighth and ninth grades.
What was good for entertainment when you were a young lady?
Well the neighborhood young people would have little parties. Sometimes we would play games. Sometimes they would play what was called Skip-to-my-Lou. Just different games, I’ve forgotten all that part of living. Just in the neighborhood. We walked wherever we went mostly. Sometimes we would have to walk a good ways. We would wear our everyday shoes, we called them, and carry our Sunday shoes to put them on just before we got where we were going.
You would have been a teenager about the time of the 1st World War.
Yes. I had a brother in the 2nd World War. He got shot at several times, never hit him. He carried the mail to the boys out in the field. On and on, one would marry and move off and another would marry. I was the last one to leave home. I was twenty-four when I married. My oldest brother lived to be ninety-six; and, my next brother lived to be ninety-six. They died two years apart. My daddy was eighty-one and my mother was seventy-five when she died. We were just all farm workers. I worked helping to build fences. Hoed corn and tobacco. Then after I married we lived on a farm too, milked cows. Worked
Starting a Family
How did you meet your husband?
Well, it was right funny. The first time I saw my husband to know who he was I went to a little church called Yell. My sister lived and went to church there. We had to go down in a little low place and then up a hill from the church to her house. My husband was up on the bank and he winked at me as I went by. I thought, “Well, good looking”. After that then one of our best friends, girlfriends, was going with a boy that lived there where my husband lived, that little place. My husband asked this boy to get the girl to get me over to her house. He wanted to meet me. So that’s how it started.
Dating was different in those days.
Yes, it was real different. My daddy was a real strict daddy. I was going with a friend of mine to Yell. The meeting was going on. Papa carried me, I was testing cream at the store, and he told me when he carried me that morning, this friend was going to pick me up. Papa told me, “Well, hope you get married while you’re gone. So I come back and I said, “Well I didn’t get married but I got engaged”. So we didn’t wait too long ‘til we got married.
Then after I married we still had a busy life.
When you were a young lady and got married at the age of twenty-four, in 1931, that was during the Depression wasn’t it?
Yes. We felt the Depression. We married right in the Depression. You know, people on the farm didn’t suffer in the Depression like people with jobs. We had milk and chickens and eggs and turkeys and hogs and cows. We had food.
What crops were you raising then?
Corn mostly and hay. We always had cows. We milked cows. My husband and me milked cows.
In those days would a dollar buy quite a bit?
Yes, I guess it did. We didn’t have many dollars. Everybody in the family praised Papa. He was a good man. My husband and me, when we started out we were in the Depression, and Mama sold eggs and bought Josh a pair of socks. People talked about Papa being so good; my husband said Mama’s just as good as he is. He always remembered those socks she bought him.
Who were they bought for?
For my husband.
How much did a dozen eggs bring back then? Do you remember?
I don’t remember. Not much. I worked in a country store before I married one time. They’d bring effs from out in the country into the store, you know, then they’d resell them. Never saw the like of effs I’ve washed. Dishes I’ve washed to put on sale, you know, when we’d have a sale.
Yes
Work Outside the Home
How long did you work at the country store?
Well I worked at one country store several months, maybe two or three years. In that store I was just testing cream.
How did you test cream?
Well you had a whole lot of stuff to go through. All these little bottles you had to fill up. I’ve about forgot how, I guess.
What were you testing it for?
Well to see if it was pure, I guess. People at that time milked cows and the cream would rise to the top. Then people would sell the cream and they tested it, I reckon, to see if it was pure or if somebody put a little milk in it. This other store where I worked I worked just mostly through the spring and fall sales. They’d last about three weeks.
That was around Cornersville?
Yes
How big was Cornersville?
Cornersville is not big at all. That’s where my husband and me lived on a farm until he got where he couldn’t do much work. Then we sold the farm and moved to Cornersville. That’s where he died.
You were married in ’31.
Willard was born in ’32. We had one child, Willard. He had a boy and a girl. They are married and have children of their own. He helped when he was at home. He went to Lipscomb, you know, when he was young and just visited home from then on.
He was too young to go the 2nd World War?
He didn’t go to the war. He was a preacher and that made him not go. My brother went when he could have gotten out on his age but he said he wasn’t any better to go than the ones that were younger.
He made it home all right?
Yes, he made it home.
Did you expect Willard to be a preacher when he was growing up?
Yes. When he was going to school, well, when he was at home, from his little days up, he read the Bible every night. When he went to school the teachers asked him to get up and read; and, they told him, “We want you to be a preacher even though we know you won’t be a preacher of the church that we belong to”. They said, “We still want you to be a preacher”. Well, he started to school at Lipscomb and finished and then he went to Warrior, Alabama for his first church to preach to. He went from Warrior to Montgomery, Alabama and she (Shelby) was secretary to the school president and that was where they met.
My husband worked on the farm and carpentered. He fell and tore his knee all to pieces and he was sort of crippled from then on.
He did that when he was a young man?
No, he wasn’t too young, middle aged.
Relocating
After my husband died, we lived in Cornersville and Willard thought I would come and live with him then; but I was still in good health. I told him there wasn’t any need. I was seventy-five I think. I lived there fifteen years by myself and then I got afraid. There was a little boy that lived close to me that got to setting houses a fire. So Willard moved me in the house with him and I lived with him several years and worked in “his” yard.
Then he went to Nashville to work and he moved me to Nashville to the apartment. I can’t think of the name of the apartment but I had an apartment there and did my own cooking. He was working with the church there. His wife got sick and he couldn’t sell his house here and she decided she didn’t want to move. So he had to come back and had to move me back. I told them, I said, “Now, I don’t want to go back in the house with you. I’ve got used to living in an apartment and just rather get an apartment. “So I stayed in the apartment until I got sick. He was working here. He said, “Mother, I always said I’d never put you in a nursing home”, but he said, “I don’t know what else to do”. To make his life what I thought would be better, by me being here where he could see me every day. That’s what we did. I’ve been here, I can’t even think how long. He’s been working here three years, I think. I lived in the apartment that I moved into when I came from Nashville.
You were talking about the boy and the houses burning. Have you ever had any other scary times?
Well, it was real scary when they came and told me my husband had fell and broken his knee all to pieces. He was working in Lewisburg and the man he was working for offered to come and get me. They said he almost died from shock. When they set his knee, they set it a little bit crooked and it was always, you know, he’d walk with that leg crooked. We worked on, on the farm until he died. He’s been gone fifteen years. He was seventy-nine.
So it’s just sort of been a rough life. Worked hard all of it. I was baptized when I was fourteen and I’ve gone to church regular all my life ‘til lately. They bring me the communion form East Cullman.
Looking back at those times what would you tell young people now?
Well, when they ask me what I owe my old age to, I just tell them hard work. I think that’s the truth of the matter.
So you think that all of us ought to get up off the couch and work a little harder?
Yes. Well, it’s just so different now. Young people, unless they are raised in the church, they get to where they don’t know what to do, it don’t seem like. If they are raised in the church, sometimes they go astray.
So you think they just don’t know what to do. No one has taught them.
Well some of them have got parents that are doing the same thing that they ought to be telling the child not to do.
Well then you would say that hard work won’t kill you.
It hadn’t killed me yet. I don’t do hard work anymore. I’ve done a lot of it. I don’t mean just what you’d think a farmer’s wife would do, keep house and several things. I worked really hard, helped build fences. Plowing, I didn’t ever plow. I couldn’t get the plow to work. We got one of those plows, you know, seemed like it just dug a hole, it didn’t go on. I never plowed with a mule.
Have you had good health most of your life?
No, I’ve had several illnesses that were pretty serious. I’ve had just about every kind of operation. I always got over it. They took one of my kidneys out. I’ve lived with one kidney several years.
That’s been a good while back?
Yes.
I was about to have surgery on my neck and I had been asleep and already in this little cubbyhole and my heart stopped. So they put two stints in my heart and I’ve still got them. They never did do the operation.
You spent most of your life around the Cornersville area?
I said we would never have got out of the state if Willard hadn’t married and moved to different places. Then we’d go to see him. He lived in Louisville, Kentucky, Richmond Kentucky, and somewhere in Ohio. Somewhere in Warrior was the first place. East Cullman, he wasn’t the preacher at East Cullman. He was Minister of Education.
Your family has been in the Church of Christ all these years?
All these years. My daddy, he wasn’t a member of the church when he grew up. There wasn’t a church there where he grew up. He went somewhere where there was a tent meeting. He already had read the Bible enough to know what was right and wrong. So him and Momma had several children by then. I remember Momma telling us children to be quiet now. Papa was going to offer thanks at the table.