Category: Old, OLD Family Stories

Mmmmm, Good Lettuce

My second Mother, Vergie Mae Winn Stith, grew up in Cullman, Alabama, a little town with a population of 2,130 in 1910. When she was a young girl, she told me her mother would send her to buy vegetables from a neighbor, two German sisters who had a big garden.

[My first mother died of colon cancer in June 1947, when I was five.  Dad remarried 20 months later, on Feb. 24, 1949. Vergie Winn, that was her maiden name, was his third wife, or fourth, I’m not sure. She was a 48-year old widow with no children.  My second Mother told me that her previous husband, Leonard Gunn, was killed when a horse he was trying to hitch up kicked him in the head. He died in 1935.]

It might even have been as pretty at this lettuce.
It might even have been as pretty at this lettuce.

Anyway, all the vegetables were beautiful, Mother told me, especially the lettuce.

One day Mother said she asked the German sisters how they grew such beautiful lettuce, what was their secret?

“Oh, vee pour zee chamber pot on zem,” one of the sisters said.

Postscript: The two sisters lost a good customer that day.

Coming Monday: BB Battles

Not Even A Drop

My grandfather, Paul Jones Stith, was 48 years old when he went to his bedroom, alone, and shot himself in the heart. He was born before the Civil War, on Jan. 25, 1858, and died shortly before noon on a Friday, April 13, 1906.

Paul was a “mining expert,”  according to The Birmingham Age-Herald, which published a front-page story the next day explaining why he killed himself.  The newspaper said he was despondent over his inability to obtain a right of way for mines owned by Stith Coal and Iron Co., of which he was president, to a railroad siding he had to have to ship coal.

Paul Jones Stith
Paul Jones Stith, 1858-1906

My father, who was 10 years old, revered his father — he never told me about the suicide.

Dad did tell me that Paul Jones Stith was an alcoholic, the fall-down-drunk-in-the-gutter kind.  On the nights he didn’t come home his wife, Annie Belle Stein Stith, would send men out looking for him, asking them to check the jail, the hospital – and the gutters of nearby streets.

Then, one fine day, Paul stopped drinking. Just like that, according to Dad. Paul made up his mind, told Annie Belle he had decided not to drink any more, and then he didn’t, according to my father.

Dad said after his father quit drinking he went on a U.S. government-sponsored expedition to Alaska to assess minerals there. Paul Jones Stith, a graduate of Virginia Military Institute, was an engineer.

Dad said one of the men on that expedition told him it was bitterly cold most of the time and, at night, the men would gather around a fire in one of their cabins and drink. Dad said he was told that his father would take shot glass of whiskey, hold it under his nose, and smell it. And then put it down without drinking a drop.

I heard my father tell that story several times. It was the only time I ever saw him tear up.

Coming Friday: Storm At Sea