An Unlikely Union

By Shirley McDaniel

Shirley was born in the hill country near West Union, Ohio (Adams County). Soon after she was born, her dad was called to serve in World War II. When he came home from the war, they started to move north to find job opportunities. They started at Hillsboro; then to Xenia; and finally to Christiansburg, where her dad retired. He was a farmer, and he loved it.

When she was nine, her family started singing and sang all over Ohio and the surrounding states. In her travels, she met up with a young preacher and singer named Raymond McDaniel Jr. Her friends all told her he was not good enough for her.

But ignoring everyone's advice after she graduated from high school, a few months later, she eloped with him to Sparta, North Carolina. Even under stress from her family and friends, she started a new life singing in evangelism with Ray for five years. He then took a church to pastor and pastored for fifty years at the East Columbus Community Church of Christ in Christian Union. She took care of Ray at home when he took sick and suffered from dementia until he died. They were married for fifty-seven years.

From the beginning, God certainly had a purpose for this young girl's life and used her to make a difference in the lives around her.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Christian Faith Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Sep 16, 2021
• ISBN: 9781638746362

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An Unlikely Union

Shirley McDaniel

Copyright © 2021 by Shirley McDaniel

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 publisher. For permission requests, solicit the publisher via the address below.

Christian Faith Publishing, Inc.

832 Park Avenue

Meadville, PA 16335

www.christianfaithpublishing.com

Printed in the United States of America

Table of Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Introduction

Ray and I have lived a good life, and it is a story I need to tell. After fifty-seven years of marriage and fifty years of pastoring the same church, I want my family and friends to know our rich heritage. I have loved studying ancestry. I have collected pictures and information. I have been interested since my teens when I took a big poster board and did the ancestry of Jesus, starting at the beginning of the Bible. God took a little Southern girl and, through all the moves and challenges, met up with a boy who loved God more than anything else. A most unlikely union.

I have done a lot of research. My mother had an interest also, and she wrote her history down. I want to tell you the story of our families and me and my husband especially.

Chapter 1

Memories of Elsie Marie Pollard Riley (My Mother)

My great-grandparents on my mother’s side were Henry and Lavina Pollard.

My grandmother and grandfather’s house as I remembered it: they lived on a mountain in Adams County, Ohio. It was a three-room log house with one room upstairs. They had one big room. It had a big fireplace. The hearth was made of big stones. It was fixed so they could hang a big iron pot and iron skillet in the fireplace to cook on.

The rest of the room, the living room was the bedroom in those days. In it was a big high headboard on the bed where Grandma and Grandpa slept, and the other side of the room was a daybed or cot. It was close to a sliding window. Some slept upstairs. The kitchen had a woodburning cookstove, a big table with benches, and pots and pans were hanging all over the walls. No cabinets, no running water. They carried water from a spring and had to go a long way to get good spring water. They set their irons on the stove to get hot to iron clothes. But my grandparents were rich not in money, but they were Christians.

They had a big orchard containing all kinds of fruit in which they would make their own jams and jellies. They canned everything and filled the cellar every fall. I remember my grandpa sitting out by the old summer kitchen, which is now the cellar, peeling apples to can. They cooked in there so the house wouldn’t get hot in the summer. They had a big garden in which the ground was old red clay, but they raised everything in it.

My grandma was sick most of the time in her later years. She had leakage of the heart, which was a valve or artery that wasn’t working. They walked to church and shouted all the way back home. She had long red hair which didn’t stay on her head; it fell down her back.

They made beautiful quilts and sewed their own clothes. I can look back, and their heritage—their lives—is what has made us today. They paved the way. It was a hard struggle for them, but they made it to an old age. My grandmother was seventy-five years old, and my grandpa was ninety-three.

When he died, he was singing, Bless all his kids over in the promised land. They kept their youngest son, Turner. He died with some kind of fever. He had six girls, and Grandma and Grandpa raised all of them and kept their mom. They never grumbled about the crowd in their house. But then the daughter-in-law kept Grandpa and took care of him.

I look back and thank God that their lives were well-lived. Our house was just under the hill where they lived. When Delsie—my sister—was little (she told me this), she would go every day to see if she could reach the mantle over the fireplace. Grandma told her when Delsie could reach the mantle, she would give her the earrings that belonged to my grandma. She didn’t give up. One day she reached the mantle, and now the earrings are passed down to us.

Henry and Lavina Pollard were the parents of four boys: Wesley, Walter, Edward, and Turner. Wesley married Lucy Pollard, Walter married Anna Pollard, Edward married Icy Piatt, and Turner married Minnie Taylor.

In those days, there wasn’t any electric. It was kerosene lamps and lanterns. I remember when the radios came out; they were battery-run, and the old record players were the kind you had to crank. Nothing like today. But people were happy then.

Elsie Marie Pollard Riley was born February 22, 1924, the fourth child of Walter and Annie Pollard. She was born at Waggoner’s Ripple, known as Lynx, in Ohio. The house was a two-room house that sat on a hillside. It contained three beds: Mom and Dad had a big-sized bed, my brother a half bed, and Elsie had a cot; and they all slept in the same room.

Delsie, her sister, had already married and left home. The other room was a kitchen with a woodburning cookstove and no refrigerator or freezer or running water. They had to go to a spring and carry the water back to drink. They had to go in the woods and chop the trees down and carry them on their arms to the house then saw or chop them up to burn in the stove.

Dad used to split railroad ties to build railroads, and drive herds of cattle to different places. Never was too far away from Adams County. His dad before him had a fruit orchard, a large one with all kinds of fruit trees (apples, pears, plums, peaches, cherries, and grapes canned for winter).

At age three we moved to Manchester, Ohio, where my dad worked for a man named Frank Ralston. He raised tobacco and would go out on the Ohio River and catch all the driftwood (sometimes nice wood), and he would drive cattle to markets, walking from Hillsboro to Manchester many times. My mother did washings for people at twenty-five cents, washing on the wash board. They had a cow and their own milk and butter.

I started school when I was six. My teacher lived in Manchester, and she drove an old Hudson car to Waggoner Ripple where she taught school. Her name was Lorena Harwood. I rode with her. We moved back to the old homeplace after three years, and I went to a one-room schoolhouse where the teacher taught eighth grades.

Neighbors would gather at our house on Saturday and Sunday to play music. They would bring guitars, fiddles, mandolins, and banjos. There were always at least three fiddle players, including my dad who played. He would sit straight up in a chair, never bending over. He always wore his shirt buttoned around the neck and always wore long sleeves and a pair of clean overalls. They would sometimes have square dances and dance all night. That’s what we did for fun and exercise.

I went nine years to the grade school. My last year was 1939–1940. I learned to play the guitar when I was nine years old. My brother had an old Sears, Roebuck & Co. guitar, and he would hide it from me so I wouldn’t get it. But when he wasn’t around, I would get it out and that’s when I learned to play.

When I was a child, I had long pigtails hanging down my back. I had longhair until I was fourteen years old. I went to visit my sister—whom I never knew—and she paid for my first permanent ($2.50), and it lasted six months.

My sister—Delsie—married at fourteen years old, and I wasn’t born until three years later, so I never saw my sister until I was twelve years old. She never came back home.

The first pair of heels I ever had; I took real good care of them. I would walk barefoot down to the church, which was the Churches of Christ in Christian Union, and then put my shoes on so I wouldn’t get them dirty. I had two pals I ran around with: Mary Hatten and my cousin Audrey (Pollard) Miller. We didn’t go many places—only to the country churches—and we walked several miles and we would sing and play music.

I remember my grandparents. They died early in my childhood; one died two years before I was born and one in 1925 and 1927. Granddad (Henry, my dad’s dad) died in 1936. He was a Christian man. He was always singing, God bless all his kids over in the promised land. That was his song.