How do you Measure Success?

Today’s blog is part philosophy and part mountain history.  Do you ever experience a series of conversations and articles that seem to direct your thoughts toward subjects you might not otherwise even think about?  Ah, could that be The Holy Spirit guiding my thoughts?

Well over the last few days several sources have driven me to consider success.  The Steve Laube Agency blog recently talked about missionaries Jim Elliot, Nate Saint, Ed McCully, Peter Fleming and Roger Youderian who were killed in 1956 by The Huaorani tribe they were trying to evangelize.  Dan Balow points out in this article that the day these men set up camp near the tribe’s village they were in the center of God’s will – at least they certainly were striving to be and they had prayed and sought God’s will in making this bold move.  Three days later the Huaoranis killed all five of them.  Were they successful?  Well, those men have been inspiring Christian people for sixty years with some going into the jungle to carry the Gospel to remote peoples, others coming to salvation and many others drawn closer to God through their testimony.  I could only hope to be so successful.

A missionary was recently touted as a great success while another man was accused of being a depressed complainer.  The latter I know to be a strong man of God, one of those people who runs toward a fight to seek justice for the helpless when most of us run toward a safe corner.  Can this man ever be a success if the world around him calls him names and advertises his flaws?  Probably.  Do we measure our success by our reputation?  If so, Martin Luther was a great failure for he had no acclaim in his own lifetime yet his reforms have shaped the very way we worship today.

A few weeks ago I made a passing comment in this blog from the James Watt Raine book about the mountain man’s love of leisure.  He says in The Land of Saddle Bags (Presbyterian Committee of Publication, 1924) “…if one is satisfied with Nature’s own providing…why reproach him for indulging in philosophic and contemplative leisure?” (pg 70).

Raine makes a good point.  Why must we judge our neighbor’s success by our own goals?  I have a nice home and I’m very thankful for it but just down the road is a man living in a single wide trailer with neither running water nor electricity.  I’ve heard it my whole life but I now question whether I can call him sorry, or do-less, if he’d rather live there.  If one man chooses to work from daylight till dark, earn a six-figure income, drive fancy cars and vacation in Europe should we compare him to his brother who works just forty hours per week, has bald tires on his ten-year-old car and hasn’t been out of town in years?  Seems like you’d have to look a little deeper at these lives and see whether the meager living of the one man is allowing family-time and church-work. 

As I study the history of the Plateau, I often ask “why” and work hard to find the answer.  I say this often, but it’s really hard to understand yesterday when measured by the values of today.  An elderly relative recently remarked that her children “eat-out too much” and that they will never “amount to anything”.  Her depression-era values tremble at our budgets that plan for Sunday dinner in a restaurant or grabbing some fast food on the way to an appointment.  Many of us today aren’t “amounting to much” as our wages are drained by the electric bill required to air condition large homes, cable and cell phone bills that were completely foreign to past generations, and the endless fuel our cars burn.

From an historical perspective, I drive through old towns with stately homes that have stood for generations and I admire them.  In our neck of the woods there are home-places with only fallen chimneys and bright yellow Easter flowers to mark our grandparents’ childhood.  We know from the stories that have passed down there was both joy and sadness in that place and we are the product of their lives.  I suppose the measure of their success is in my life and yours.

History Fair

I recently re-read my “about” page for this blog and remembered that one of the things I intended to present to you was summaries of historical commemorations and demonstrations.  I’m afraid that’s one area of the blog that I’ve been less successful with.  Today we’ll change that.

Last Saturday, The Soddy Daisy and Montlake Historical Association hosted a History Fair which I was able to attend and it was surely worth the time.  I wish I could detail for you the contents of every booth and list the names of every person willing to spend their Saturday talking history with complete strangers.  Unfortunately, I wasn’t even able to meet them all. 

All of East Tennessee has a wealth of Civil War relics and there were lots on display at the fair.  There were lots of musket balls, metal-jacketed shells, even cannon balls not to mention belt buckles, pocket knives and a bayonet.

Coal has long been a mainstay of Tennessee’s economy and there were some great exhibits from the industry.  One booth even had miniature replicas of coal cars sitting on rail lines.  There was a description of coal’s formation and the types of coal found in East Tennessee.

And there were pictures.  Pictures of homeplaces and children in front of houses; pictures of church groups and school children and a pre-Civil War portrait of a full-blooded Cherokee woman.

All of these exhibits were wonderful and a joy to see but the real treat were the people.  They know their stuff.  They spend their leisure time digging through historical documents, walking cemeteries and pouring over aged maps.  That passion gives them a level of expertise that’s often hard to find in local history.

This was a great event and I want to applaud the work of this association for taking steps to preserve our local and oral history.  I know there are a number of historical associations in the region and if they are sponsoring similar events, I sure hope to be a part of them.

So here’s the funny story of the day.  I have a big Cherokee history project I’m wanting to research and write about.  There was a great booth about Cherokee roots and I wanted to ask the gentleman there how he would explain all of the Cherokee blood we still have in the area despite the 1838 removal and Trail of Tears.  I told him a little family legend about an ancestor who as a young man, was able to escape the soldiers and was taken in by a local farmer and given refuge.  He pointed to an adjacent, now empty, table and said, “There was a man set-up over there that you need to talk to.  He told me just about the same story.  His name was Doil Harvey.”  I actually squealed.  Doil is my cousin and I hated that I missed seeing him there.  But how exciting to know that he’s the resident expert.

Officers of The Soddy Daisy and Montlake Historical Association

A Life Worth Celebrating

Gladys Pell

On Sunday morning my husband’s maternal grandmother stepped over into Gloryland.  After 96 years living a faithful, hard-working and service-filled life she reached her reward.  I won’t try to preach to you here but I can’t help but think of what the Apostle Paul said in 2 Timothy 4:6-8:

…my departure is at hand. I have fought a good fight, I have finished my course, I have kept the faith: Henceforth there is laid up for me a crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous judge, shall give me at that day: and not to me only, but unto all them also that love his appearing.

As we waited for this dear, dear lady to pass, I found myself asking a lot of questions – how much did she know at the end?  Was she able to peek over into heaven?  I’ve talked several times about how thankful I am for the advances in medicine that we enjoy today, however, this process of dying is one that science just can’t quite reach.

Still, my history-driven mind wants to draw comparisons between the week my family just passed and similar times over the last hundred years.  The family sat with Mawmaw around the clock for four days because we wanted to be with her, we wanted to celebrate the very moment she was freed from her suffering.  But we sat with her in a medical facility surrounded by competent and compassionate medical professionals.  They cared for the patient as well as the family.  Before, it would have been the neighbors who came and offered this service.  I remember when my great-grandfather died at home over thirty years ago, within the hour several ladies were busily cleaning the whole house.  It was the first time I had been that close to death and I was very moved by these friends who came in to do work that even as a young teenager I recognized was far from glamorous.  In the 1980’s of course we had a funeral home who whisked away the body and presented it to us a few days later dressed in his Sunday-go-to-meeting best and positioned in a store-bought casket.

Can you even imagine the layers of complexity this process of death presented when those neighbors needed not only to clean a little and prepare some food but also to clean and dress the body and place it in a homemade casket? 

Invariably sitting with a family opens windows into lives and I love those moments.  Well this week I heard the story of Edker and Gladys and it’s worth sharing.

Edker lived in Alabama and his brother lived in Dalton where he was preaching at Poplar Springs Baptist Church.  Edker walked to Georgia to visit his brother and of course he went to church with him.  He chose to sit on the same pew with the Crow family – perhaps the beautiful fifteen year old girl drew him to that seat near the front.  As Gladys looked over this stranger she found him barefoot and was embarrassed by it.  Now, why that would bother her is a mystery to us today because her family certainly wasn’t wealthy, but I guess she had shoes for church.

Gladys, Edker and Pam Pell

Edker kept coming back and his charm soon blinded Gladys to his poverty.  I wish I could have heard his version of this story because every picture and every memory of their daughters is him loving her.  He is always wrapping his long arms around her petite shoulders or even sweeping her off her feet – literally – for the camera.  Their love story was all too short for he passed away very suddenly when he was only fifty-four years old.

Theirs was a love worth remembering and Gladys Pell’s was a life worth celebrating. 
 

Gladys & Edker Pell with their daughters Donna and Pam

A Century of Memories: Willie Livesay Ward

This weekend I had the rare blessing of attending a 100th birthday party and I thought I would share this precious lady with all of you.

Willie Livesay Ward was born January 2, 1916 to a family of eight children living just north of Monterey, Tennessee.  Their father worked on swine farms in the area and Willie remembers him and the other local men herding hogs up the mountain to Monterey to be loaded on the railroad. 

They would soon move to Fentress County and Willie would eventually move to Crossville to work in Jenkin and Darwin’s store along with her sister Ruth.  There Ruth and Willie would meet brothers Leonard and Ed Ward who would become their husbands.  From meager beginnings, both Leonard and Ed were hard working and ambitious. 

Jenkin and Darwin’s moved Ed to Trenton, Tennessee to manage their store there.  Soon Ed had a chance to buy his own store in Trenton and he seized the opportunity.  For over forty years, Willie and Ed worked together in that store and built a life in Trenton and at Follis Chapel United Methodist Church.  They raised one son, Jimmy, and his own three children would continue their lives in the West Tennessee area.  Working all day in the store, Willie and Ed would come home where they always had a big garden planted.  They would work half the night breaking beans or peeling apples and canning them.  They had two huge pecan trees and would carefully collect the nuts and sit and hull them out so when they gave them away there was nothing to do but enjoy the gift. 

Early in her time in Trenton, Willie would drive by a brick rancher house sitting on a small rise.  It was not unlike most of the homes in the middle class neighborhood but it attracted her eye.  She declared she was going to have that house – which was far nicer than anything her mother had ever had.  By hard work and thrift, they were soon able to buy the house and lived there until Ed passed away; In her nineties, Willie moved closer to her grandchildren in Alamo.

The mountain is no longer the home place for the Wards, but Willie’s memory often goes back there.  As she asked about people and families she knew many are already gone and some moved away many years ago and are out of touch.  It’s an all-too-familiar story of people who left the mountain in order to make a living but it would always be home.  The sad part to me is that this next generation doesn’t know where their roots lie.  In fact, they don’t even sound like us – instead they carry that unique Mississippi delta drawl which is much more widely recognized as “southern” than our own Appalachian accent.  They don’t know the ways of the mountain and they don’t really know our history. 

Visiting with this part of my extended family reinvigorates my desire to write my stories.  I’m so thrilled that we’ve had Aunt Willie for 100 years, but every year we lose a few more of her generation – and even the generation after her.  With each loss a little more history fades away.  Willie and Ed’s lives won’t be detailed in any history books so it’s up to us to remember it in places like this.