GLADYS TANKERSLEY BAILEY

One hundred years old!  Gladys celebrates her 100^th with friends and family at the Cullman (AL) Civic Center on December 28^th, 2013.  With only a few short exceptions Cullman County has been her home all her life.  She is the last remaining member of the Cullman High School Class of 1931.

What makes Gladys so special is the fact that she still has a keen mind, interested in everything, reading books and newspapers, attending church regularly,  playing cards at the Crane Hill Senior Center twice a week, and pretty well keeping up with her immediate and extended family.  Now that takes in a large number of people, because Gladys is the eldest of twelve children born to Judge and Virgie Fowler Tankersley.  She has outlived six of her siblings.  Her health isn’t great but she rarely complains, and gets around pretty well with a walker.  It is her mind that has remained young and vibrant.

When Gladys finished High School she had a scholarship to Spencer Business School in New Orleans.  Her studies there were cut short when our youngest sister Jo (Morris)was born, and because her mother was hospitalized for more than a month Gladys was summoned home to take care of the new baby, and assist in marshalling the other kids in the family to survival.  That was in March of 1933, shortly after the family had their farm and home foreclosed, an altogether too common an occurrence in the Great Depression.

Gladys’ High School sweetheart, Kert Bailey, had joined the Navy.  They married in 1936 and for a brief time lived and worked in Southern California.  That was where their first child, Betty, was born.   Kert was called back into the Navy during WWII, but after that he became a Rural Route mail carrier in Crane Hill, and  they built a new home in the country.  That is where Gladys lives alone, today.  Son Harold was born just before the war started, and completed their family. Married to Adonis (Long) they live in Decatur.

Both Gladys and Kert were always helpful in their community, always willing to lend a helping hand.  Kert died in 1994, at age 85.  Gladys elected to stay on in their home place, so daughter Betty and her husband Charles Balch built a home across the country road from her when they retired.

Gladys was always more than just a ‘stay at home’ mom.  In turn she taught school, worked in a doctor’s office, became a helper for the Home Demonstration Agent, and was always involved in her church and community, especially in the interests of her children.  In my mind she was always proficient in everything.  When I was a sophomore at the University of Alabama and was invited to a prom, I called on Gladys.  The sisters’ hand-me-downs which were the mainstay of my wardrobe did not include an evening gown.  A few days before the formal I received a package: a red and white checked taffeta evening dress which fit perfectly!  It was admired, and eventually worn, by many of my friends.  Again, years later, when I had returned to the University with an NDEA Fellowship for a Masters Degree in Special Education I was to attend an international Conference in Toronto, Canada.  Again, without my being there for fitting, she made a beautiful salmon colored wool jersey dress and sent it for my trip.  I‘ll bet each of my siblings could relate ‘Gladys stories” to rival mine.

Gladys passed some of her talents and her intellect down to her children and six   grandchildren, almost all of whom are college graduates, a few with advanced degrees, one a doctorate. Among the younger generation are nine great grand children and two great-great grandchildren.

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I’ll bet they all know how to cook, or will soon, and they know a great many other life skills.  Gladys skills include knitting and crocheting, quilting, baking, canning, gardening, and flower grower extraordinaire.  For each child and grandchild she has made quilts, crocheted  table cloths and has always been a wise counsel.  When I visited her recently she had just completed another crocheted throw, for herself this time.  “Oh, it has some mistakes”, she said.  I couldn’t find any.

Did I make it clear?  All relatives, especially close ones, are expected to attend the BIRTHDAY PARTY.

1927 One AMAZING Season in American Life, in MY Life

1927- One amazing season in American life.

The summer of 1927 began with one of the signature events of the twentieth century: on May 21, 1927, Charles Lindbergh became the first man to cross the Atlantic by plane nonstop, and when he landed in Le Bourget airfield near Paris, he ignited an explosion of worldwide rapture and instantly became the most famous person on the planet.

Meanwhile, the talented Babe Ruth was beginning his assault on the home run record, which would culminate on September 30 with his sixtieth blast, one of the most resonant and durable records in sports history.

 In between those dates a Queens housewife named Ruth Snyder and her corset-salesman lover garroted her husband, leading to a murder trial that became a huge tabloid sensation.

 Alvin “Shipwreck” Kelly sat atop a flagpole in Newark, New Jersey, for twelve days—a new record.

 The American South was clobbered by unprecedented rain and by flooding of the Mississippi basin, a great human disaster, the relief efforts for which were guided by the uncannily able and insufferably pompous Herbert Hoover.

 Calvin Coolidge interrupted an already leisurely presidency for an even more relaxing three-month vacation in the Black Hills of South Dakota.

 The gangster Al Capone tightened his grip on the illegal booze business through a gaudy and murderous reign of terror and municipal corruption.

 The first true “talking picture,” Al Jolson’s The Jazz Singer, was filmed and forever changed the motion picture industry.

 The four most powerful central bankers on earth met in secret session on a Long Island estate and made a fateful decision that virtually guaranteed a future crash and depression.

     All this and much, much more transpired in that epochal summer of 1927.  On June 26, The Cyclone roller coaster opens on Coney Island ND in Cullman County Alabama, I, Ruby Catherine Tankersley, was born.

It was told to me that Papa had taken some friends to an ‘ALL-DAY SINGING, BUT Grandpa Fowler, who with Grandma lived nearby, went for Dr. Martin, who officiated about 7:00 P.M.at my birth; who immediately saw my extra finger on the left hand and posthaste removed it.  I was told that someone put it in a matchbox, and buried it in the garden.  Otherwise I was deemed a normal, and as usual, beautiful, Tankersley girl child.

I was the tenth child of Judge and Virgie, with Gladys, Harold, Sarah, Billie, Evelyn, Jack, Ned, Grace and Gordon Lee preceding me.

Fortunately at that point in their lives my family was prosperous for a farm family, and children were a blessing.  Although they cooked on a Home Comfort wood-burning range, there were lights furnished by a carbide plant, which also powered a pump that gave water right into the kitchen sink!  I believe there was also an iron heated by the current from the carbide plant.  There was a telephone which hung on the wall with a crank for calling ‘central’, which would connect you to your desired party.  Judge drove a new Ford about every other year…..and the addition of another child, albeit number ten, was not considered a hardship.  Professor Judge Tankersley was a teacher, respected and admired.  He was also a farmer, with a flock of children to help in the growing of cotton, corn, potatoes, strawberries, and a garden full of vegetables, an orchard with fruit trees, and cattle and other livestock.  The family, while not really affluent, were probably better off than most of their neighbors.

One year and nine months later, March 27, 1929, John Paul was born.  He was a roly-poly, always happy child who loved everyone, and was in turn adored.  When Papa took us swimming at ‘ole Desser’ swimming hole, Johnny rode on his back. Then someone thought to bring along a box which floated, and Johnny rode in the box.  For some reason Uncle Ellis’s kids called Johnny “Petey”, and then “Petey in a box”.  Johnny figured in another of my earliest memories. He and I were playing in the yard. He climbed upon a hay rake, fell and split his head.  I followed Mama as she picked him up and hurried to the strawberry patch where everyone else was working, and got Papa to take him for stitches.  It would not be the last time Johnny required stitches. His early life was filled with such mishaps, and lots of stitches..  His good nature and willingness to get along pretty much stayed with him the rest of his life.

In October, 1929, on “Black Friday”, the stock market crashed.  Ours was not a stock-owning family, so thedepresion didn’t really hit our family for a couple of years.

I pretty much lived for birthday parties in my early years, and invited everyone to come to my next party throughout the year.  I especially liked Gladys’s boyfriends, such as Otis Hall, and invited him, and other swains.  For my fourth or fifth birthday Mam made me a demity dress, sleeveless, for my birthday.  It was white with blue flowers embroidered on it.  Johnny cried because he wanted, “A little red dress with ruffles on it”.  (I think Papa put him up to that one). 

We had a cat named Topsy which Papa would pick up , turning its head and tail inward and say, “Look, I made a muff out of Topsy”, to set Johnny and me to whimpering until he turned the cat around.  Papa Judge was always a great tease.

About that time West Point School had a school Fair, which included a Tom Thumb Wedding.  The principals were Frank Camp and me.  I just remember being put on the stage beside a little boy about my age, and Little Bud Williamson standing in front of us.  The fair also had a movie on the dangers of Hookworms, and it was the only movie I remember seeing until I was ten. 

We regularly got Typhoid Fever inoculations when the county nurse came to the school in the summertime.  Both Judge and Virgie had suffered through Typhoid as adolescents, probably with a narrow escape of death, because it was a serious disease at that time, caused usually by drinking contaminated water.

Our old Home Place was mortgaged for planting money after Harold died, in the spring of 1931 and before harvest time the price of cotton dropped to five cents a pound.  That was our cash crop.  There was no money to pay the mortgage, no money to plant a crop, and the Federal Land Bank foreclosed. We had to move sometime during 1932, and Mama was expecting her twelfth child, who would arrive on March 1,1933.  Esther Jo was named for Papa’s youngest sister, but she was always to be “Jo Baby”. (until she became Mama Jo).