Sixty-Six Years, Thousands of Funerals, and Five Wives

By Ronnie L. Stewart

Everyone who lives sixty-six plus years has a story to tell. This is mine!

My parents lived during an important and difficult period in the history of our country. The Great Depression changed people and changed the way they worked and raised their families. My Daddy worked hard and raised his children to work hard.

This is my story

• Language: English
• Publisher: Authors Press
• Release date: Aug 15, 2020
• ISBN: 9781643143361

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Copyright © 2020 by Ronnie L. Stewart

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

AuthorsPress

California, USA

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Contents

Prologue

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Motto to Live By

Life should NOT be a journey to the grave

with the intention of arriving safely in an

attractive and well preserved body,

but rather to skid in sideways, body

thoroughly used up, totally worn out, and

screaming, WOO HOO, what a ride!"

This book is dedicated...

First of all, to my parents who taught me to work hard, treat my fellowman as I would have them treat me;

To Janice, my sister, with whom I grew up so very hard and with whom I shared a bond that was as strong as any bond between two people;

To Beth, my baby sister who has stood by my side and praised me for every endeavor in my life and supported me even beyond the call of duty for a sister;

To Freddie, my brother for all his untiring effort and work in those early years when he worked ambulance service for days on end without rest;

To Joyce, the mother of my children, for all the hard work she did for twenty years to help lay the foundation for my professional success;

To my children, Jamie and Christi, who gave me many years of delightful pride in being their Daddy, and at times inspired me even to take my next breath.

To all those employees who worked tirelessly and generously, even sometimes without a timely paycheck because they believed in me;

And, especially to each and every family who chose me to take care of them in the lowest and most difficult time in their life;

And last, but not least, by a long shot, to Carol, wife number five, for her love and support to this wild and crazy man who never stops challenging her with multitudes of unimaginable endeavors.

Disclaimer

This is a true and factual account of the events in my life to the best of my recollection. However, the names of some individuals in this account have been changed to protect them and their families. The changing of those few names does not in any way change the facts as they relate to me and my part in the events. I simply do not wish to cause those persons any ill feelings or create any gossip. This is my story as I believe it to be true. They may or may not have a different point of view.

To those who are closest to me and may know the real and true names of those individuals, I would ask you to please resist the urge to discuss your knowledge as it relates to this book.

THE UNDERTAKERS

The midnight hour—the darkest hour

that human grief may know;

Sends forth its hurried summons,

ask us to come—we go.

We know not where the bell may toll,

We know not where the blow may fall,

we only know that we must go

in answer to the call.

Perhaps a friend—perhaps unknown,

‘Tis fate that turns the wheel;

The tangled skein of human life

winds slowly on the reel.

And we—we are the undertakers,

Coldblooded, you and I hear them say,

Trained to the shock and chill of death,

with a heart that’s cold and gray.

Trained—that’s what they call it.

How little they know the rest;

We are human—and we know the sorrow

that throbs in the aching breast.

          —Author Unknown

PROLOGUE

Many years ago a nice businessman and gentleman in Vidalia had a hobby of studying the Coats of Arms for citizens in the area. He enjoyed the history of it and he made it a small habit to present drawings of these historic family symbols to certain ones who had perhaps made some contribution to the community. I was fortunate to have received such a gift. He presented me with a drawing about eight by eleven of the Coat of Arms for the Stewart clan. It is the usual shield with a helmet on top and contains certain objects and designs symbolizing the strengths supposedly indicative of the Stewart family history.

At the bottom, below the shield and above the name STEWART is written on a ribbon the Latin words AUDICES FORTUNA JUVAT. I never really paid it much attention. It was later copied and enlarged and hung in the new funeral home, and even though there was a bit of discussion about the meaning of the words, no one ever took the time and effort to get them translated.

It was not until my good friend Ursula saw it in about 2011 that it became a new issue. She is young and very intelligent and inquisitive and happened to have a friend knowledgeable in Latin, so she called her friend to inquire about the meaning. We were told that it translates to Fortune Favors the Bold. How fitting!

I had lived the life symbolized in that Coat of Arms and didn’t have a clue that perhaps it was all predestined. I have been bold. I guess I had to be if I wanted to make something of myself. My humble beginnings could have taken me down any number of different roads. I was fortunate enough to know from a very early age that I was born to be a funeral director. I am proud to be a funeral director and believe that I have been successful at that, and I hope that when I am remembered, that if they remember nothing else about me, that they, too can say that above all else, I was a credit to my chosen profession.

Yes, I have been bold and I have been very, very fortunate. I hope that all other events that took place during the course of my life never take away from who I am and what I stand for. All the people I have met and helped, I consider to be my friends and I do not take any of it for granted. I work hard, love hard and try to speak softly and I thank God everyday for the many blessings that He has bestowed upon me. I hope to still have many years on this earth, but at the appointed time, I, too shall die and have need for a funeral director.

I hope that anyone who chooses to read this book knows how much I appreciate them and that I know none of this would be possible without the support of those who have come to me over the years.

Chapter 1

WHERE I CAME FROM

He knew far too well how hard it was to have food on the table. He could remember when Sunday dinner, as the noon meal was then referred, consisted of chicken that had been snared and cleaned in the backyard of their modest home and lovingly fried by his mom. They were not privileged to have this every Sunday. It was reserved for special Sundays, like when the preacher came. It was tradition in those days in country churches for each member to feed the preacher and his family one Sunday every so often, and that tradition is probably where chicken got its name in the Deep South as the gospel bird.

My dad, Fred Stewart, was born in 1920 and was reared in Tattnall County in rural, southeast Georgia. The Great Depression began when he was about nine years old. Life was hard. Most meals consisted of whatever could be caught, like rabbit, squirrel, and fish from a nearby pond, and vegetables grown in the little family backyard garden. Nothing was wasted. You ate sparingly so as to save as much as you could for future meals and to extend those as far as you could throughout the entire year.

At the first cold weather, hogs were slaughtered for food. Everyone in your neighborhood came together and helped each other with their killing and preparation. Then, after cutting out enough for one special meal of fresh pork, sausage, hams, shoulders, and side meat, which were bacon-like chunks, were hung in the smokehouse for preservation. This would make for some mighty good eating later in the year when nothing else was available to eat. All was used only as needed—it had to last until next year’s slaughter time.

Beef was likewise slaughtered, and the meat was canned in glass jars, a process that was long, hot, and arduous for the ladies of the houses. No one who lived like my dad ever got to overeat. Nothing was ever thrown away or wasted, and what they did have was appreciated. There was very little money, barely enough to buy flour, sugar, coffee, and other simple things that could not be raised or caught on the farm.

Fred was one of nine children born to the Tollie and Della Stewart family. They were a God-fearing, church-going, Christian family. After losing one child at birth, five boys and three girls remained to feed, clothe, and shelter. Fred had to quit school in the third grade to help with that awesome responsibility.

Tollie was a sharecropper. If you don’t know what a sharecropper is, then remember this! A sharecropper was a person who works someone else’s land for them, and then at the end of the crop year the sharecropper was allowed to take some portion of the earnings of that crop. It was a given that the landowner got the largest portion of the earnings, giving a small share to the sharecropper that would barely be enough to feed his family but still give hope that it would all happen again next year. Also, the sharecropper was provided with some sort of dwelling for his family on this same land. Usually, it was a small, old, wood-frame house made of lumber cut on an old-fashioned saw mill and nailed up with a bright tin top and absolutely no insulation. Most had a brick fireplace that burned hand-cut wood and a wood stove for cooking, which supplied the only heat in the house during the winter when you’d nearly freeze. Also, those same wood stoves used for cooking likewise provided heat in the summer as well, when you nearly burned up. There was no electricity. Air conditioners, as we know them, were not even dreamed of then. There were no fans, no refrigeration, no hot water heaters for warm baths, no indoor plumbing. As I said before, life was hard.

All landlords were not bad. Some of them treated their sharecroppers well, and, actually, I believe the ones that my grandfather worked for were pretty decent to him, as well as the ones my daddy worked for when I was a kid. That was probably because neither my grandfather nor my dad expected anything for nothing. They believed in hard work. There was absolutely no sense of entitlement on their part.

My dad was so proud of his first job as a small lad, when he was probably about fourteen. It was plowing a mule for the grand sum of fifty cents a day. The landlord said to him, Now, Fred, I don’t want to see the mules go to the field, and I don’t want to see them come back. I just want to hear the chains rattle. In other words, they were to leave before sun up and come back after dark. His philosophy as conveyed to my dad was ‘Kill a mule, I’ll buy another one; kill a man, I’ll hire another one.’

In 1933, President Franklin D. Roosevelt and his administration developed the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) as a public work relief program that operated until 1943. It was designed to provide employment for unemployed, unmarried young men, age eighteen to twenty-eight, from relief families who were having difficulty finding jobs during the Great Depression, and at the same time it implemented a general natural conservation program in every state in the United States. The maximum enrollment at any one time was three hundred thousand young men. In its ten year tenure, 2.5 million young men participated in the CCC program, which provided them with shelter, clothing, and food along with a wage of thirty dollars a month, twenty-five of which had to be sent back home to help in the support of their families.

Fred joined the CCC at some early age and stayed there for several years—I believe until World War II broke out and he was drafted into what was then the Army-Air Force. During those years, the money he sent home to his family in Tattnall County, Georgia, was probably all that kept his family from starving to death.

Fred Stewart at CCC camp

During his tenure, Fred was sent to the state of Oregon to cut timber in the wilderness. There were great stories to come out of that experience about cutting the giant redwoods, bears, bee hives, and life in general in an old, tented campground. There was an occasional trip to town, but it was mostly a sightseeing trip as there was very little money to spend.

After being drafted into the Army-Air Force and before being deployed overseas, Fred was stationed in Fort Bragg, North Carolina. About ninety miles from Fort Bragg and eleven miles outside Winston-Salem was a little sleepy town called Kernersville. That is where Dorothy Brown, called Dot by most, was born and lived. Fort Bragg soldiers frequented Kernersville in a selfless effort to give the local boys some relief. It just so happened that Dorothy’s best friend, also called Dot, was dating a soldier, a Texas boy named Ben. Dot and Ben had arranged to bring a couple of soldier buddies with him to Kernersville to play matchmaker for Dorothy. On a cold, rainy night in Kernersville, sitting in a small soda fountain café called Bass’s Café where the two Dots sat listening to a little jukebox playing an old favorite tune, By the Light of the Silvery Moon, Ben walked in with Fred. In later years as my mom, Dot would recall that perhaps for the first time in her life, and very few times in the remainder of it, she spoke a bad word. She said, Damn, Dot. Do I have to put up with this tonight?

Well, Fred was immediately smitten. It took a bit more time for Dot, but she did, in proper time and form, fall for Fred Stewart. Soon afterward, Fred was deployed overseas, and Dot remained behind to join hundreds of thousands of young girls who hoped and prayed for the safe return of their men from the war.

My mom, Dorothy Dot Brown, was the daughter of Elmer and Daisy Brown. Elmer was a sea captain on cargo ships that traveled the world. He was gone from his family for a great portion of Dot’s growing-up years. He would sometimes be home for weeks or months between jobs. Upon arriving home, he would stay straight for a few days, and then he would come home with cases of cheap wine and take to bed, lying drunk for days or weeks on end until word came for another assignment. A few days before it was time to report to his new job, he would sober up and spend a few good days with his family again, and then he was off. It was believed within the family that he chose that lifestyle because he preferred to be away from Daisy. She was a big, boisterous woman who left no doubt who was in charge. She was all wool and a yard wide.

Daisy and her two sisters ran a large, old boardinghouse in Kernersville, about a quarter of a mile from the local hosiery mill, which was apparently the major source of employment in the town. Everyone who lived in the boardinghouse worked at the hosiery mill, and it seems that no one owned a car and walked everywhere they went. Oh, the sweet memories I have of that old boardinghouse from just out of infancy and on until after leaving North Carolina. We visited there until I was a teenager and the sisters three had succumbed to old age and death.

The old house was a huge, two-story structure of wood that never got touched by a paintbrush. It had a large front porch that extended all across the front with a swing on each end and old rocking chairs that filled the gap in between. The people who lived there were simple people. I don’t remember that there were any couples, only middle-aged singles who all ate their meals at the boardinghouse and worked every day at the mill. I do remember one lady, Ruth, and her daughter, Brenda, who lived there. I don’t know where Brenda’s dad was.

I never remember hearing of anyone going to a movie or eating in a restaurant for any kind of dining experience. Once in a while, some might walk right up the street to Bass’s Café, which you could see from that old front porch, and sit awhile to nurse a cup of coffee. Each evening, the residents would make their way to a swing or rocking chair and chew tobacco, smoke their pipes, or dip their Three Thistles or peach snuff. It was a gathering place for the neighborhood, that old porch. There were always several of the neighborhood kids gathered there with their pint jars or Coke bottles, busying themselves chasing and catching lightning bugs and watching them light up inside. It was such a simple life. I never remember an argument between any of those residents or the sisters three.

3 sisters who ran the boarding house in Kernersville

The dining room was large with a long table, about fifteen feet or so, with benches on each side. Everything there was cooked on a wood stove, a large one with a large oven, to boot. Work started at four in the morning for these sisters three to build wood fires in the kitchen stove and to fire up the fireplaces in the remainder of the house with coal—and there were several of them. Breakfast was served sharply at six a.m., and it had McDonald’s beat all to pieces. It was a full meal consisting of bacon, ham, sausage, fried eggs, and scrambled eggs—no grits.North Carolinians had not yet been introduced to grits. But hoecake cornbread and biscuits were always present with homemade butter and syrup. Dinner—again, the noon meal—was at eleven a.m., and supper was served at precisely five p.m. If you were not there at meal time, you did without. The girls did not allow anyone in the kitchen once everything was put away. For dinner and supper, among everything else, was always pumpkin pie, some with coconut on top, some without, and always, pinto beans. As a little boy, I remember thinking that if I was ever lost away from Kernersville and I wanted to get back, all I had to do was find a pinto bean truck and I would surely wind up back in Kernersville.

The Great Depression did not affect the people in Kernersville as it did in rural Georgia. My momma didn’t have it quite as hard as my daddy during those years. Dot’s family always had something to eat and a fairly nice little six hundred-square-foot house to live in, one that they owned. Dot had a brother, Thurmond. Thurmond was the cleanest man morally that I have ever known. He was, by most standards, a health nut and a lightweight boxing champion for two years running in North and South Carolina. He never tasted Coca Cola or similar products until he was in the Army. When he returned from overseas, a party was given for him, and some old buddy asked him loudly, Well, Thurmond, did you drink much beer while you were gone? Uncle Thurmond leaned forward and whispered into his friend’s ear, No, I didn’t, but I did drink a couple of those Pepsis.