More Stories and Pictures from Owensville

 

 

 

 

 

John & Lizzie Tayloe's home on the land adjoining his brothers, William Tayloe

 

 

Thrashing in Owensville circa 1905

Owensville Market

Stukenbroeker's Star Drug Store

Tea

 

Growing Up In The White House

By Leoda Dunton- the daughter or James G. & Clara Sassman Morris

I'm the second youngest of seven- three brothers, three sisters-the oldest was born in the Morris Store across the street from the hotel- the rest were born in the White House Hotel. I was born September 20, 1921 at the White House Hotel in Owensville.

Always lots to do, and lots happening. My two sisters and I slept in a double bed. My brothers shared a room. My older sister had a room of her own except when Aunt Mary came to live with us. I loved to go to her room as she had a real polar bear rug, full size; the mouth was open- most unusual. It was a gift from the President of General Chemical, a friend of the family. She had pretty dresses and shoes that we wanted for playing dress up when she got tired of them.

Mom liked us to play in our own yard, so if each of us had a friend, that made a lot of kids in our front yard. We wore off all the grass playing marbles, so when the wind came up, we had a house full of dust. 

We would always sing while we did the dishes. Mother had a beautiful alto voice. We sang soprano sometimes. Waldemar and Edgar would come in and add bass and tenor. After we'd done the supper dishes, Mom liked to sit on the front porch in the swing. We would join her and watch the night settle in around us. The street lights would come on and folks would start arriving for the theater. People would walk there on nice summer evenings. Such a peaceful scene.

The hotel had 20 rooms. The guest rooms had numbers on their doors. The house had six porches. The rooms that didn't have porches had a rope fire escape with large knots to climb down. The back porch was screened in where we churned butter, made ice cream and ate our snacks. The dining room had one long table and several small ones and a wide border of grapes around the ceiling. It was beautifilly painted by a man passing through. 

When we were old enough, we waited tables and served family style. One night, too late for supper, as I had all the tables cleaned off except a plate of corn bread, a guest came in and said "I see I'm too late for supper." I replied "Yes." Then he spied the corn bread and asked me if I would bring him a glass of milk to eat with the corn bread. He then gave me a dollar tip, the largest I ever received. We had three steady boarders: two bachelors, a bank president and his nephew who was a shoe salesman in the store across the street. The third was a widower, a retired farmer. He dressed ever day in a black suit, white shirt, string tie, Stetson hat, and black shoes (which he would pay me to shine). 

One day I was spending a lot of time on the toes, and he said "Shine the heels too, as I don't always walk toward someone." He would flip me a quarter in front of the two bachelors as they were very tight and wouldn't give even a penny. He was my confidant. One day we were talking about dates. He said "Humph!" as he twisted his handlebar mustache. "Never kisses a girl in my life except I bit her neck and the first one I found that didn't squeal, I married her." I was dating a dentists' son; I didn't know if I was going to get bit or kissed. 

We had a guest from Mexico who was quite dark and had a very interesting accent. His name was Jessie Navaro. He dressed in boots and riding breeches. I loved to shine his boots and clean his room and smell his tobacco.

Speaking of tobacco, my sisters- one older, the other younger- tried smoking. We found all the old throw-away tobacco sacks, and emptied them, Old Hillside Golden Grain; we even put in some of Dad's home grown that hung in a sack behind the kitchen stove. We rolled our own- so strong! I never smoked another cigarette. 

Our lobby was like a family room: big stove, radio, and nearly every night there would be a pinochle game with my Dad, Grandpa and their hunting buddies. They would let me sit and watch. I loved to hear them slap down a good play with their knuckles hitting the table. 

Every Saturday it was the Grand Old Opry. One cold night two very refined ladies came in and asked for a room with a bath. Grandpa said the hotel didn't have individual baths in the rooms, just a bath on each floor. The ladies wanted a room with running water and asked for a few more deluxe features. Grandpa was getting a little perturbed. When she said "Are the rooms warm?" Grandpa said "They were last summer, I ain't been up there since." 

I was raised during the heart of the depression. Lots of bums came for handouts as we were only a block from the railroad. Mother never turned one away hungry and even let them sleep in our barn. 

Our barn was a place we could play. We had shows in the hay loft and sailed our boats in the watering trough. We watched the gypsies that camped in the vacant lot across the street. We would peek through the cracks. Our basketball goal, nailed to the barn loft, was a round furnace pipe with an elbow, so if you made a goal, it would shoot right back to you, no rebound. 

The blacksmith shop was across from the barn; I watched him shoe horses, and he would take a red-hot shoe out of the forge and say "See this? If you give me a nickel, I'll lick it." Of course, it was the nickel he would lick. We only bit once. 

Mother would send me uptown to the store because she knew I would make a quick trip. I ran everywhere I went. A friend gave me the nickname "Speedy" and he still calls me that. It's no longer true. 

We cut our paper dolls out of Sears catalogues, made clothespin dolls, rolled old tires, made a T shape out of wood plaster laths and rolled small hoops down the street. I picked real grass for my Easter baskets and lined it with violets, buttercups, and forget-me-nots. It smelled so sweet. Kids today don't know what they are missing. 

When we got sick, we couldn't stay at the hotel, so we went to Grandma and Grandpa Sassman. She had homemade rag rugs in all rooms but the kitchen. We could start in one room and go all through the house with tiddlywinks and didn't mind being sick. I rollerskated all over town and played softball on a girls' team. We had a movie house that changed shows three times a week. We saw them all. My sister Mildred had an orchestra and two brothers played in it; they would practice in our living room. I loved to sit and listen to my sister and brother, Mildred and Waldemar, make mood music for the silent films. 

We had a music teacher who came to the hotel several times a month. He got free room and board to teach the Morris children, and all the town kids came to our house for lessons; he taught horns, strings and piano. So you can see we had a medley of sounds. He was also a sword swallower. Actually it was a poker, and he really did swallow it. He would stand my sister Winnie and me on the piano bench and let us pull the poker out. I never learned how to play the piano, but I could pull a mean sword. He billed himself as Professor DeLarendo and traveled with side shows and carnivals, so when a carnival came to town, we could ride free and were the envy of all our friends. 

I had one brother, Waldemar, who was a hunter and even molded his own lead bullets. Mom had a lead doorstop for the swinging door between the kitchen and dining room. One day it disappeared and the next time I saw it, my brother had it in the basement making bullets. He'd cut one side off. 

One night Waldemar was out hunting and he ran into a skunk, or it ran into him. Anyway he came home and went all through the house and took his clothes off in the back yard. The next morning when we came downstairs, the smell was overpowering. He was in the dog house. Thats where we wished he had spent the night. 

Virgil was our chauffeur from the time he learned to drive. We never visited anywhere: who in their right minds would have a couple and their seven kids for dinner? The only one who invited us was Aunt Nellie Morris Shelton at Tea, Missouri. She had no children, but boy could she cook. They had the store which is now an old house restaurant. It was fun to go into the store and eat candy without spending our money. My Mom took a correspondence course in oil tinting photos. She gave me her paints, and thats how I made spending money while in high school. I tinted pictures for our local photographer as there were no colored pictures in those days. I will never forget painting six pictures of a woman in a casket. I was glad when the project was done. I was still at home when I got my first job at 17 cents per hour in a shoe factory, now Laclede Christy. It was like being in jail. 

I met my husband on a skating rink. We were married 14 months later on my twenty-first birthday, September 20, 1942, at White Elephant and moved away from the White House to a farm at Oak Hill.