Marking the Birth of Jess Phillip Gates

          A Scared Father, a Smart Son, and Stonewall Jackson originally posted in 2014 on July 27. Today marks 99 years since Uncle Jess's birth on July 31, 1923 making it the perfect time to reprise this remembrance of my grandparent's fourth-born son.

            In 1925, when Jess was around two years old, he had mastoiditis, an infection in the bone behind the ear resulting in painful swelling and serious in nature.  Edmund, Jr., as a little six-year-old boy, recalled vividly hearing his younger brother crying in excruciating pain. Jess was even hospitalized for a night or two. Hospitalization was unheard of back then. The critical illness that ravaged his tiny body really frightened their father.

           From the incident of that illness forward, Edmund, Sr. favored Jess, not requiring him to work as hard as the other children. His sister Ella said Jess was allowed to read the newspaper while the others worked. When I asked my father, Edmund, Jr., about about Jess reading the newspaper, Dad simply said, “Well, Jess always kept up with the funny papers.”  Some reported that their father believed Jess was brighter than his other children.
           Jess’s chore was to walk the milk buckets to the barn. Sometimes his father would holler for the much-needed buckets four or five times but never got too tough on Jess.
           My grandpa, Edmund, Sr., was perceived as much tougher on the kids than Grandma, but this was an example of how closely tied his heart was to his children and how he never recovered from the fear of losing Jess and so sympathized with the pain he endured. Thoughts of his oldest son’s death around the age of two must have flooded his memory as he saw Jess so severely ill.
          Uncle Jess was very knowledgeable about many subjects but dearly loved the study of the Civil War. We shared an admiration for General Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson and some of our last visits focused on discussions about Jackson, the Virginian general. Even though Jess, like Grandpa, was a staunch supporter of the party of Lincoln and of course, the Union, he commented to me about Jackson, “He was a good guy.”
          Ironically, Jess and General Jackson shared some similarities in their death.  Jess, like Stonewall Jackson, died in the spring of the year. Both of them also passed away on a Sunday. He had another unusual connection with General Jackson from an early age. Dad recounted this story.

WHY JESS WAS CALLED SWONEY

            When Jess was around seven or eight years old, Jess’s father observed the shape of Jess’s head and commented how closely it resembled the shape of President Andrew Jackson’s head. Bud Cannon, a neighbor and friend of Jess, evidently confused the two prominent Jacksons in American history of the 1800s and began saying Jess looked like Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson, the famed Confederate general. As school boys will often do, Bud shortened Stonewall to the nickname Swoney, which rhymes with “stony”. It became an endearing family name used by Jess’s father as well as Edmund, Jr.

Group Photograph taken at the Woodland School in the Big Bend Community.
Jess is seated on the front row the fourth student from the right.

            Jess’s eldest daughter, Lynda Gates Zebelman gave me a copy of a poem by her nephew Ben, one of Jess’s grandsons that bears a strong resemblance to his grandfather. This poem evokes memories of the family about their parents and grandparents and the farm in the Big Bend community.

“The Farm” a poem by Ben Gates

Dedicated to Gammy and PawPaw

Gammy and PawPaw

Rolling in hay while feeding the cows,

Riding in the tractor and the old ranch house,

Building forts with Paradise trees,

Wrecking pick-up trucks and getting stung by bees.

It spreads from the river up to the hills,

Exploring its vastness just for the thrills,

Walking and running from one end to the other,

Everything feels like it’s done with a brother.

Learning to hunt and learning to fish,

To breathe the fresh air is the ultimate wish,

Squirrels, birds, armadillos and deer,

The land is alive with nature’s cheer.

 This place in the end is nothing but land,

Trees and brush and dust and sand,

There are millions of acres like this in the world,

But for Gammy and PawPaw’s farm, my heart has unfurled.

Jess on the first tractor owned by his father. 

Mary Rosetta Jarrell and Her Last Trip to Konawa

                The matriarch of the Rainey family, Mary Rosetta Jarrell, was born on March 7, 1868, in Stoddard County, Missouri. Rosa, the name by which she was called, lived to be 85 years old, passing away on May 28, 1953. She lived 44 of those years in the Bend.
                I rediscovered a photo and discussed with Mother, Bernyce Smith Gates, the family excursion on July 8, 1950,* three years before her grandmother’s death. Mother had taken the photo when Lewis Rainey, her uncle, drove her grandmother, “Rosa” Rainey, her mother, Gladys Rainey Smith, and two aunts, Alice Rainey and Emma Rainey Buckley to Konawa.

In front of the car are Mrs. John Townsend and Mary Rosetta Jarrell Rainey.
The arm of Uncle Lewis Rainey is visible on the driver's side of the car.
On the right side of the car are Alice Rainey, Gladys Rainey Smith, and
Emma Rainey Buckley. My mother took the photograph on the family's 
visit to Konawa.

                Konawa had been the home of the Rainey family before they moved to Pawnee County and ultimately to the Bend. Mother laughed when I mentioned that Aunt Daisy Rainey Rice wasn’t in the photograph. She said, “I don’t think she ever went back.” I told her I recalled Aunt Daisy’s lament over her parents selling their place to the Townsend family. My grandma would chide her for regretting the sale.** The primary reason stemmed from the oil discovery on the land their father, Bill Rainey, sold.
                My grandma may have been glad to leave that region of Oklahoma. Several blogs highlighted Grandma’s shenanigans while living in Seminole County. One account tells of Grandma getting fed up with a visiting family’s daughter and how she took the matter into her own hands. It can be accessed at https://bernadeanjgates.blogspot.com/2014/06/the-staycation-that-went-horribly-wrong.html
                Earlier this year, Konawa figured prominently in the republished blog post about the marriage of Daisy and her husband, Ernest Rice. It included the disagreement between Rosa and Bill over relocating from Konawa to Pawnee and Osage Counties. This blog is at https://bernadeanjgates.blogspot.com/2022/02/the-wedding-disaster.html
                The picture provided a study in car styles of the 1950s. Uncle Lewis Rainey was fastidious about most things; from his barn and crops to his garden and lawn to even his well-kept striped overalls. I was not surprised that he drove the family to Konawa in his Chrysler. Only his left sleeve and hat are visible in the photograph.
                I wonder from what millinery shop the four hats came. Even Great Grandma Rainey’s hat stylishly coordinated with her dress. Aunt Alice and Aunt Emma wore tastefully chic hats. Yet I so wish the voguish hat worn by my grandma had been preserved. The saucer fascinator chosen by Grandma screams to me, “Try me on!” I love hats and sometimes long for the days when hats were all the rage. How I wish that hat had been saved 

in her small millinery collection!                 

Alice Rainey, Gladys Rainey Smith, and Emma
Rainey Buckley and their hats.

               My grandma and her siblings always seemed considerably older to me. Yet on this family trip to a childhood home, their ages surprised me. Uncle Lewis was 56 years old, Grandma was almost 50 years old, Alice was 48 years of age, and Aunt Emma, the youngest in the family was only 47 years old. My mother, the one behind the camera, was merely 25 years old.
                Looking at those ages reminded me that all these older family members were so much younger than my age now. King David’s Psalm 39, verse 4 seemed appropriate for this recollection. He was inspired by the Holy Spirit to pen this prayer,

                 Lord, make me to know my end, and what is the measure of my days,

that I may know how frail I am.

              Then David asked the question of the Lord in verse 7 of chapter 39 and responded immediately with confidence in his reliance on the God he served. This question/answer sequence gave David assurance despite his fleeting human frailty.

And now, Lord, what do I wait for?

My hope is in You.

                Our faulty human weaknesses make us so aware only our Creator and Lord can extend the much-needed hope that we so crave. The phrase from Colossians 1:27 gives the surety of the great desire of our hearts for hope.

Christ in you, the hope of glory. 

Only in the sacrificial death of Christ for us do we glimpse what we most desire and most need. Although hardly imaginable, He extends His gift of loving forgiveness that gives us hope to know our end with certainty because we have made Him the Source of our hope.

*This date held significance for my grandma for two other reasons. Grandma noted exactly one year later Alice, her sister, died. Mother's little dilapidated diary has written on July 8, 1978,  "Aunt Daisy's funeral at 10:30 a.m. today."

**Interestingly, my grandpa would tell Grandma that she had to "live within sight of the Belford Schoolhouse." He seemed to think she was too attached to the Bend. 

Summer Heat in the 1930s and 1940s in the Bend

 I discovered this brief recollection from Dad about the excessive heat of 1936.  I realized the adversity encountered by my parents in their youth only hardened them to face future trials in their 90s. Sometimes looking back to the lives of our ancestors gives perspective and strength for living successfully in the present. May we impart to our youth this resiliency and toughness by giving them challenges to confront and conquer.

1936 had 50 days with a temperature at 100 degrees Fahrenheit or greater. The summer of 1936 holds the Oklahoma record as the warmest since 1895 when records began being kept. Edmund Gates, Jr., my father, said the Arkansas River was just a stream. As a seventeen-year-old, he had the responsibility of taking the horses down to water at the river at 11 o’clock at night. Obviously, he and his father were trying to avoid the heat on the horses, making it as easy as possible on the them. According to climate statistics, July 1936 is unmatched as the single warmest month in U.S. history since temperature measurements began.

Mother about the age she was when
Dad finished out her cotton row and
captured her attention.

       Bernyce Smith Gates, my mother and an only child, chopped cotton along with her parents when they leased the land south of her present farm. The land they leased was owned by Louise Butler Jefferson and is now owned by Betty Hutchison. One of the hottest days Mother recalled was chopping cotton in a field on the east side of the Jefferson property. They were near the timber on the creek with the blazing afternoon sun beating down on her parents and her. The thick timber made it stifling hot by blocking any air circulation. She purposed in her heart never to do field work when she had her own home. Below is an excerpt from a previous blog that helped her decide Dad was the boyfriend for her.

 Mother wanted a man who would work. When Dad returned from his tour of duty in Europe and came to take her on a date, he offered to finish chopping her row of cotton so she could get ready. (Chopping cotton meant that Mother and her parents went up and down the rows of cotton, with their hoes, cutting down the weeds and thinning the cotton plants so none were closer than six inches.) Dad’s eagerness to step in and take her place scored points for him in her eyes. She detested the hot, sweaty drudgery of field work. Dad, on the other hand, never encountered a job that was too dirty or too demanding. The weather was never too cold or too hot if the task needed to be done.  https://bernadeanjgates.blogspot.com/2018/03/70-years-ago-beginning-of-something.html

Photo of Dad shortly after 
returning from WWII, about
the time he finished Mother's
cotton row.

      Both Mother and Dad lived most of their childhood and teen years without electricity, so obviously no fans or air conditioning. Mother recalled the temperature being so excessive many summer nights that they had to sleep outside the house on small individual cots. During the summer, they cooked and canned vegetables from their garden or fruit gathered from trees, bushes or vines in the pasture using the wood range in the dreadfully hot house. Nothing seemed easy as I heard recollections of summers in the Bend about 80 years ago.

      As we move through a dry season whether literally in weather or spiritually in our lives, let’s make Jeremiah 17:7-8 the focus of our meditation. Our trust in the Lord makes a unimaginable difference.

Blessed is the man who trusts in the Lord, and whose hope is in the Lord. For he shall be like a tree planted by the waters, which spreads out its roots by the river, and will not fear when heat comes; But its leaf will be green, and will not be anxious in the year of drought, nor will cease from yielding fruit.

Remembering William Marion Rainey as His 154th Birthday Approaches

             William Marion Rainey, the maternal grandfather of my mother, began life on July 15, 1868, in Stoddard County, Missouri. The family history states “Bill” was the only son of Andrew J. and Mary Rainey. In the 1910 Census, Bill listed his father’s birthplace as Kentucky with Tennessee as his mother’s birthplace.

According to his youngest daughter, Emma, this fun-loving man could dance a rousing Irish jig. Bill would become the patriarch of the Rainey family who eventually settled in the Big Bend area west of Ralston, Oklahoma.

He and his fine-looking horse caught the eye of Rosa Jarrell, an impoverished young woman. Rosa, who became his wife, first recalled seeing him riding a horse before even meeting him. Given her meager upbringing, it seemed Rosa had encountered her knight on his charger.*

After their marriage, Bill and Rosa accompanied his parents to Texas and Indian Territory as Bill and his dad worked on the crews that built the railroads north.

Their first daughter, Daisy Dean Rainey Rice, was born in Tyler, Texas, in 1893. Lewis Elbert Rainey, their older son, entered their family at Terral, Indian Territory, in 1894, shortly after Rosa and Baby Daisy forded the Red River to meet Bill.

Bill and Rosa buried their precious three-year-old, Della in Dale Cemetery in Shawnee, Oklahoma Territory in 1899. Then the daughter who loved to tag along with her dad was born. My grandmother, Gladys Vivian, came into his life in 1900, while they lived in a tent, as he helped build the railroad.

Bill’s little spitfire whom he loved to tease, Alice Vertle was born in 1902 but suffered a horrible case of measles, rendering her visually impaired but never lacking in spiritedness.

Bill’s youngest daughter, Emma Maryann Rainey Buckley, wrapped her father around her finger from the moment she was born on the last day of 1903.

According to my grandmother, 1905 brought the last baby and her mother’s favorite, Eugene Robert Rainey, who shared his father’s love of fun.

My mother recalls him as a fun-loving, jovial man. This probably attracted Rosa to him since Mother remembers her beloved grandmother as serious, one who could laugh and enjoy herself but never the “prankster” that Bill was. How frequently do opposites attract!

Grandma only had this photograph of her father in her album. Mother
is seated between her grandparents. She recalled one time as a little 
one that all other family members were upset with her grandpa for some
reason. She was the only one who would talk with him which pleased
him very much! photo was given to Grandma by Aunt Emma Buckley.

        One of the more memorable pranks that my mother recalls from her parents involved a night when they were spending the night with her grandparents. Her Aunt Alice and Uncle Gene were also living there. Thinking it would be grand fun, Grandpa and Gene planned and staged an elaborate ruse. The two of them sneaked outside and began throwing stove wood from the woodpile at each other, raising their voices, and using “colorful” language. They came into the house, with their battle scars, and told their wide-eyed guests that they had been attack outside of the house. Their guests, as well as Grandma and Alice, were terrified and sat up all night talking about what had happened—not daring to close their eyes for a wink of sleep lest the intruders that terrified Grandpa and Gene would return to break into the house and harm all of them. However, Grandpa and Gene slipped off to bed stifling their giggles. The next morning, their laughter could no longer be contained, and they spilled the beans to their weary family that they had faked the whole thing. Unfortunately, no one appreciated the antics they staged and the lengths to which they had gone to entertain themselves: in fact, let's just say, the women folk were downright ticked off!

        My grandma’s little well-worn booklet entitled in her handwriting A Record of All Our Relatives noted her father died of Bright’s Disease, now known as nephritis. This kidney inflammation can lead to the need for dialysis. Her father’s death occurred before dialysis had been perfected.

        Grandma found herself jolted by her father’s death in 1931, at only age 63. She had never thought about death, yet on her 31^st birthday, she attended the funeral of her beloved father at her parents’ home following his death the previous day. Her father’s passing always loomed as a turning point in Grandma’s own spiritual awakening that eventually led to her wholeheartedly receiving Jesus and committing her life to follow Him.

* To learn about Great-Grandpa Rainey's love of horses, go to https://bernadeanjgates.blogspot.com/2014/02/he-loved-and-collected-equines.html. 

Lost and Found in the Bend (Once a Bender Always a Bender)

Last month, our pastor, Mike Brock in his Father's Day message told us to honor godly fathers who are involved with their families. The two fathers behind these two cat-crazy girls in this blog post, Scott Doshier and Edmund Gates, Jr., can be categorized as men who love (loved) being "girl dads." Devoted, loving fathers of principle and character are the backbone of the Bend and our nation. Let's honor all year long fathers, grandpas, and great-granddads who remain committed to building strong families.

Following the much-appreciated rain,  I checked my brother-in-law’s automatic pumping setup installed to avoid flooding in the farm's water well pit and was startled to hear a loud meow. The sound came from Big Bend Road. I glimpsed a tabby face on the opposite side of the road.

I thought Someone must have dropped off another cat. Leaving the water well pit, I heard the grasses rustling. Suddenly, a tiny kitten emerged from the grass towering over its head.

I walked to the house with the wee one bouncing beside me. As I reminded it to avoid my work boots, I wondered where this little one belonged.

             My sister called from Jenks. Since Angie was such a cat lover, I related the recent happening. She offered to contact Kelsie, our nearest neighbor to the west. One of her last comments was, “I may call Shelly.” Angie knew Landee, Shelly’s younger daughter, shared the “Never Met a Cat I Didn’t Like” syndrome with her.

Landee and some of her kittens.

I swished out to finish chores only to hear the same meowing so loud, I knew the tiny feline must have somehow gotten on the enclosed porch, but the anxiety-filled kitten was still outside, pressing its face against the screen, trying to find someone to give comfort. As I retrieved the mail from the mailbox, the kitten ran beside me, never uttering even one meow.

Walking back to the house, I prayed silently, God, please help me know what to do about this kitten. The kitten’s need for its mother tugged at my heart because it found comfort being with me. It lapped the liquid left in our cat feeders. The fur on its little back was damp. What a rainy day to be displaced!

In the house, I flipped through the mail; then turned around to see a feed truck stopping in front of the house. I rushed to the front door as I saw our neighbor, Shelly. On my way to the door, I thought, Angie said she might call Shelly.

By the time I got to Shelly, she was laughing and commenting about hearing the loud meowing. About that time, the little furry feline bounced around the southwest corner of the house. It ran straight to Shelly. It was happy to be in her arms and in her presence.

Angie at age 5 with her two half-grown kittens
born to Snow White, a cat given to her by Wanda
Nix.

         As Shelly and her husband, Scott, pulled away with the runaway kitten reclaimed, Mother was on the phone with Angie. What a blessing to have a sister who was willing to contact our neighbors to make sure the lost kitten got back home! Once a Bender, always a Bender.

The Words of Jesus came to mind from Matthew 18:11, “…the Son of Man has come to save that which was lost.” Are we obeying His command to reach out to the lost? We are surrounded by those who are crying out to be seen, heard, comforted, and reclaimed from awful situations. Do we take the initiative to connect them to Jesus, the only One who can restore lost souls to all God created them to be? He is so much like Shelly and Scott ready to find and rescue; just as His parable of the lost sheep told in Luke 15:5, “…and when He has found it, He lays it on His shoulders, rejoicing.”