Carol Ann Cranford Jones' Memories of Lois
Memories of Aunt Lois
November 24, 1913 – January 27, 2013
Spearsville was my home until I was four. My dad worked shift work at Lion Oil Chemical in El Dorado and on Sundays when my mother was home with my new brother, Aunt Lois and Uncle Toy would pick me up and take me to church with them. Mt. Union is the first church in my memory and I remember standing up in the pew between Aunt Lois and Uncle Toy.
After we moved to Florida when I was four, the trips back “home” were frequent. More so for my family, I think, because my brother and I were the cousins living away who had both parents who hailed from Union Parish. Usually when families leave home, the trips get further and further apart over the years. I was married before that happened in my family. About six weeks was as long as Mother and Daddy could make it without crossing the Louisiana line at Vicksburg and smelling skunks.
In a family of twenty-seven cousins and twenty aunts and uncles, when word got out that one was coming home, thirty-seven people might show up to meet them at Grandmother’s and Granddaddy’s. There were pallets in the floor after the beds filled and then the spill-over-crowd was fortunate enough to get to go to Aunt Lois and Uncle Toy’s house. When we gathered in the dining room at Grandmother’s and Granddaddy’s at meal time, Aunt Lois would arrive in that green truck filled with wonderful things from her kitchen to help Grandmother feed the multitude. All of Aunt Lois’brothers, sisters, nieces, and nephews learned not long after being weaned what their “favorite” food was that Aunt Lois cooked. Many people make coconut pies, but no one made one better than my Aunt Lois and because she knew how I felt about them, there was always one waiting for me after the 441 mile trip from our driveway to her house. My daddy loved her chocolate cake with a little bite of turnip greens all along—“to cut down on the sweet”—and there was always chocolate cake and a pot of turnip greens waiting on him.
She made our favorite jams and jellies for us and those jars of that highly valued sweet substance were wrapped in newspaper to protect them from banging together and we never left to go home without being given that treat. How many Lois Elkins jars are today in Houston, Dallas, Pineville, Minden, Vidor, Farmerville, and Milton because of Aunt Lois’ generosity? Uncle Jim and my daddy loved fig preserves so Aunt Lois made enough pints every year that there was one for each trip home when they left. I loved my jars of blackberry jam and my brother wasn’t very nice about sharing his mayhaw jelly. We were very sad some years ago when Aunt Lois announced to us that there wouldn’t be anymore mayhaw jelly because she was just too afraid of fighting the snakes to get the mayhaws.
Page after page in my recipe files say, “From the Kitchen of Lois Elkins.” I turn to those pages first when trying to decide what to cook
because I know those are the best ones and I count those pages as part of my heritage. I remember being horrified when I was about eight-years-old to learn that my Southern Baptist aunt had had Uncle Toy buy a bottle of alcohol to put on her fruit cake while it aged and that my parents were actually eating that liquored up cake! I wasn’t about to eat any. Having been taught from an early age that we Baptists abstain from all sale or use of alcoholic beverages, I was disappointed in the whole lot of them!
Aunt Lois’ talents didn’t stop at the kitchen door. She was a master seamstress, crocheter and knitter. I have a sweater and tam that she knitted for me in my school’s colors when I was in the 10th grade and it is still beautiful. I have a 38-inch round crocheted doily in a pineapple pattern that adorns my dining room table only onvery special occasions. I think every sister got an afghan from her hands and maybe the brothers also.
As I type these paragraphs, I realize that her life was consumed--not by getting and receiving--but by giving to others. She worked very hard in a hot kitchen many years before air conditioning to make sure that she had plenty to give away to all of us.
One summer when we were here on vacation, my Grandmother West had a stroke. My daddy went back home to Florida and left Mother, Kenny, and me here to care for Grandmother. It was not but a couple of years after Aunt Lois had lost Uncle Toy and it was a time when I didn’t know if she would ever laugh again. Late one afternoon Aunt Lois came for my brother and me to take us fishing. Now fishing was not the thrill of my life but to see Aunt Lois trying to entertain us during a horribly difficult time for her made that fishing trip very special. My mother often
commented on how exhausted she was taking care of Grandmother and how pleased she was to have Aunt Lois take us for a little while.
But to her disappointment Aunt Lois brought us back with about 25 little brim about the size of our small hands and Mother had to clean all of them and fry them for us for supper!
Aunt Lois was responsible for my brother’s first coon hunting expedition. We were on one of our trips home to Union Parish and were at Aunt Lois and Uncle Toy’s house. Old Bruno, the old dog we all loved and remember, started barking and there was no letting up. Aunt Lois and Uncle Toy said he had treed a coon. Uncle Toy got his shot gun and when he headed out the door, Aunt Lois said, “I bet Kenny would like to go.” Uncle Toy jumped all over that, but four-year-old Kenny wasn’t sure if he wanted to go traipsing off into the pitch black woods at night to find whatever this thing called a coon was. (My Granddaddy West often called himself “the Old Coon” to the grandchildren, so Kenny may have
thought that Uncle Toy was going to shoot Granddaddy.) I thought surely my very protective daddy would go along but he talked Kenny into taking that first hunting trip alone with just him and Uncle Toy. Kenny came back telling Aunt Lois how hard it was to keep up with Uncle Toy’s long legs and about all the blood. My brother is not a hunter today—come to think of it, that coon hunting trip may be why I have had to
watched him play a million baseball and football games and often thought he was nuts to chase a golf ball around on days when the mercury is popping out the top of the thermometer. But he’s not a hunter!
After my grandparents were gone, the trips home that all of the aunts, uncles, and cousins made did not end but just moved down the road to Aunt Lois’ house. My husband reminded me that the first time that he came to Union Parish when we were dating that he and I stayed at Aunt Lois’. (Be clear on this. He slept in the front bedroom and I slept in the back bedroom with Aunt Lois.) And could she ever make up a bed!
The military should have hired that woman to teach new recruits how to make up a bed. The sheets were so tight that I don’t think they touched the mattress and if her sheets weren’t tight, Lois Elkins could not sleep!
Aunt Lois and I talked crafts, exchanged patterns and recipes, clipped things from newspapers and mailed these to each other. She loved American History and I brought her a history book from my school to use as a reference. She loved to read and was well read. She had all of the Saturday Evening Post magazines from the 30s and 40s at one time. Well into her 80s she was still climbing a ladder and drying apples on the roof of the barn under cheese cloth to keep insects off: taking the apples up in the morning and bringing them inside in the evening, and those dried apples made the best fried apple pies on earth!!
What Ronnie and Betty, Stan and Sheryl, and Triston and Canyon ARE today is largely because of Lois West Elkins’ love and influence.
But it does not stop there: that influence touched each of her nieces and nephews as well.
Now we have lost our family matriarch. The gathering of the family won’t be as often because we don’t have that magnet that will draw
us back, but I encourage you to make jelly, wrap the jars in newspaper, and give them to YOUR kids when they leave going home.
Sew something for your grandchildren, clip a newspaper article or a new recipe and send it to a cousin. All of those things are our family traditions and Aunt Lois showed us how!
Carol Ann Cranford Jones
January 28, 2013
November 24, 1913 – January 27, 2013
Spearsville was my home until I was four. My dad worked shift work at Lion Oil Chemical in El Dorado and on Sundays when my mother was home with my new brother, Aunt Lois and Uncle Toy would pick me up and take me to church with them. Mt. Union is the first church in my memory and I remember standing up in the pew between Aunt Lois and Uncle Toy.
After we moved to Florida when I was four, the trips back “home” were frequent. More so for my family, I think, because my brother and I were the cousins living away who had both parents who hailed from Union Parish. Usually when families leave home, the trips get further and further apart over the years. I was married before that happened in my family. About six weeks was as long as Mother and Daddy could make it without crossing the Louisiana line at Vicksburg and smelling skunks.
In a family of twenty-seven cousins and twenty aunts and uncles, when word got out that one was coming home, thirty-seven people might show up to meet them at Grandmother’s and Granddaddy’s. There were pallets in the floor after the beds filled and then the spill-over-crowd was fortunate enough to get to go to Aunt Lois and Uncle Toy’s house. When we gathered in the dining room at Grandmother’s and Granddaddy’s at meal time, Aunt Lois would arrive in that green truck filled with wonderful things from her kitchen to help Grandmother feed the multitude. All of Aunt Lois’brothers, sisters, nieces, and nephews learned not long after being weaned what their “favorite” food was that Aunt Lois cooked. Many people make coconut pies, but no one made one better than my Aunt Lois and because she knew how I felt about them, there was always one waiting for me after the 441 mile trip from our driveway to her house. My daddy loved her chocolate cake with a little bite of turnip greens all along—“to cut down on the sweet”—and there was always chocolate cake and a pot of turnip greens waiting on him.
She made our favorite jams and jellies for us and those jars of that highly valued sweet substance were wrapped in newspaper to protect them from banging together and we never left to go home without being given that treat. How many Lois Elkins jars are today in Houston, Dallas, Pineville, Minden, Vidor, Farmerville, and Milton because of Aunt Lois’ generosity? Uncle Jim and my daddy loved fig preserves so Aunt Lois made enough pints every year that there was one for each trip home when they left. I loved my jars of blackberry jam and my brother wasn’t very nice about sharing his mayhaw jelly. We were very sad some years ago when Aunt Lois announced to us that there wouldn’t be anymore mayhaw jelly because she was just too afraid of fighting the snakes to get the mayhaws.
Page after page in my recipe files say, “From the Kitchen of Lois Elkins.” I turn to those pages first when trying to decide what to cook
because I know those are the best ones and I count those pages as part of my heritage. I remember being horrified when I was about eight-years-old to learn that my Southern Baptist aunt had had Uncle Toy buy a bottle of alcohol to put on her fruit cake while it aged and that my parents were actually eating that liquored up cake! I wasn’t about to eat any. Having been taught from an early age that we Baptists abstain from all sale or use of alcoholic beverages, I was disappointed in the whole lot of them!
Aunt Lois’ talents didn’t stop at the kitchen door. She was a master seamstress, crocheter and knitter. I have a sweater and tam that she knitted for me in my school’s colors when I was in the 10th grade and it is still beautiful. I have a 38-inch round crocheted doily in a pineapple pattern that adorns my dining room table only onvery special occasions. I think every sister got an afghan from her hands and maybe the brothers also.
As I type these paragraphs, I realize that her life was consumed--not by getting and receiving--but by giving to others. She worked very hard in a hot kitchen many years before air conditioning to make sure that she had plenty to give away to all of us.
One summer when we were here on vacation, my Grandmother West had a stroke. My daddy went back home to Florida and left Mother, Kenny, and me here to care for Grandmother. It was not but a couple of years after Aunt Lois had lost Uncle Toy and it was a time when I didn’t know if she would ever laugh again. Late one afternoon Aunt Lois came for my brother and me to take us fishing. Now fishing was not the thrill of my life but to see Aunt Lois trying to entertain us during a horribly difficult time for her made that fishing trip very special. My mother often
commented on how exhausted she was taking care of Grandmother and how pleased she was to have Aunt Lois take us for a little while.
But to her disappointment Aunt Lois brought us back with about 25 little brim about the size of our small hands and Mother had to clean all of them and fry them for us for supper!
Aunt Lois was responsible for my brother’s first coon hunting expedition. We were on one of our trips home to Union Parish and were at Aunt Lois and Uncle Toy’s house. Old Bruno, the old dog we all loved and remember, started barking and there was no letting up. Aunt Lois and Uncle Toy said he had treed a coon. Uncle Toy got his shot gun and when he headed out the door, Aunt Lois said, “I bet Kenny would like to go.” Uncle Toy jumped all over that, but four-year-old Kenny wasn’t sure if he wanted to go traipsing off into the pitch black woods at night to find whatever this thing called a coon was. (My Granddaddy West often called himself “the Old Coon” to the grandchildren, so Kenny may have
thought that Uncle Toy was going to shoot Granddaddy.) I thought surely my very protective daddy would go along but he talked Kenny into taking that first hunting trip alone with just him and Uncle Toy. Kenny came back telling Aunt Lois how hard it was to keep up with Uncle Toy’s long legs and about all the blood. My brother is not a hunter today—come to think of it, that coon hunting trip may be why I have had to
watched him play a million baseball and football games and often thought he was nuts to chase a golf ball around on days when the mercury is popping out the top of the thermometer. But he’s not a hunter!
After my grandparents were gone, the trips home that all of the aunts, uncles, and cousins made did not end but just moved down the road to Aunt Lois’ house. My husband reminded me that the first time that he came to Union Parish when we were dating that he and I stayed at Aunt Lois’. (Be clear on this. He slept in the front bedroom and I slept in the back bedroom with Aunt Lois.) And could she ever make up a bed!
The military should have hired that woman to teach new recruits how to make up a bed. The sheets were so tight that I don’t think they touched the mattress and if her sheets weren’t tight, Lois Elkins could not sleep!
Aunt Lois and I talked crafts, exchanged patterns and recipes, clipped things from newspapers and mailed these to each other. She loved American History and I brought her a history book from my school to use as a reference. She loved to read and was well read. She had all of the Saturday Evening Post magazines from the 30s and 40s at one time. Well into her 80s she was still climbing a ladder and drying apples on the roof of the barn under cheese cloth to keep insects off: taking the apples up in the morning and bringing them inside in the evening, and those dried apples made the best fried apple pies on earth!!
What Ronnie and Betty, Stan and Sheryl, and Triston and Canyon ARE today is largely because of Lois West Elkins’ love and influence.
But it does not stop there: that influence touched each of her nieces and nephews as well.
Now we have lost our family matriarch. The gathering of the family won’t be as often because we don’t have that magnet that will draw
us back, but I encourage you to make jelly, wrap the jars in newspaper, and give them to YOUR kids when they leave going home.
Sew something for your grandchildren, clip a newspaper article or a new recipe and send it to a cousin. All of those things are our family traditions and Aunt Lois showed us how!
Carol Ann Cranford Jones
January 28, 2013