On this date
in 1897 my grandmother was born to George T. and Florida (Day) Castle in Morgan
County, Kentucky. She was named for her
father’s first wife, Frances Nickell, who had died in childbirth in 1893. George married Florida, 15 years his junior,
in 1896. Fannie was the oldest of their
8 children.
When she was
just a toddler, an incident happened that affected my grandmother all of her
life. Her young mother needed to leave
their cabin and go to the spring for fresh water. She tied my grandmother into
her high chair, but on her way back to the cabin she saw an awful sight: Fannie standing on the front porch of the
cabin with burning embers in her hair.
She had managed to get free from the chair and fall headfirst into the
fireplace. The burning left scars that
she would hide for the rest of her life with bangs and hairpieces. This disfigurement was much more obvious to
Fannie than it was to anyone else, and she hid it well. I never even realized she had scars until she
was in her 90s.
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| Stacy Fork School--about 1902 Fannie is in the front row, 7th from left Her brother Forrest is next to her, 4th from right Half-sister Cora is standing next to the teacher on the left |
She clearly
remembered her early school days in Kentucky.
The one-room schoolhouse had two exit doors in the back, one for the
boys and one for the girls. If a book
was placed in the door on the girls’ side, it meant that a girl was occupying
the outhouse; if the book was in the boys’ side, it meant a boy was in the
privy.
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| This photo of the old schoolhouse taken by Aunt Georgia Beebe on a trip back to Kentucky |
After the family moved to
Oklahoma in 1907, Fannie continued her education and graduated from Chandler High
School. After taking the teacher’s exam
at age 17, she began teaching in a one-room schoolhouse near Collinsville. She later completed college at Northeastern
State Teachers’ College (now Northeastern State University) in Tahlequah.
She married
in 1919 and gave birth to twin boys in 1928.
She taught at Park Elementary and for 30 years at Pleasant Porter
Elementary, both in Red Fork. At age 62
she wasn’t ready to retire, but she did so that she could stay home with me and
my brother after our mother died.
Until I got
close to age 60 myself, I hadn’t quite imagined what it would have been like to
take on a 3-year-old and a 4-month old at that stage of my life. It would have been easy for me to miss having
a mother, but she filled that role so well that I never really did. She
supported everything I wanted to do—including hemming up my miniskirts and
attending all my school events. She was
a Cub Scout den mother and climbed up in the bleachers in her 70s to watch my
brother play basketball. I remember a couple of summers when she decided I
needed to learn how things were done in the old days, so we strung peppers and
made grape jam and soap from scratch.
She wasn’t
through raising children. When I went to
work as a teacher in 1977, she took care of my son. Later, she sent him across the street to
school at Park Elementary and took care of him after school until I got home.
She wasn’t
always easy because she had high standards and would criticize me if I couldn’t
do something with the “Castle lick,” the perfect way in which something should
be done—from sweeping the floor to ironing a shirt. When I rolled out of bed in the morning, she
had a list ready of all the things she had done while I was sleeping: breakfast
dishes, two loads of laundry, ironing ten of Daddy’s shirts, etc. She often criticized what I wanted to wear,
which she called my “garb.” She was
terribly hard of hearing and drove us all crazy trying to make her understand
what we were saying. Once she misunderstood something one of us had said and
questioned, “Snow’s on the roof?” (It was summer.) After that, it was our favorite saying when
she didn’t understand something. After
several attempts at making her understand, we’d all yell, “Snow’s on the
roof!” She had absolutely no sense of
humor, so we all thought it was pretty funny when she bought a plaque that said
“I’m not deaf; I’m just ignoring you” and hung it on the living room wall.
She was
still going strong when she turned 90, and we had a big surprise birthday party
for her. As the oldest of George and Florida’s
children, she was everybody’s Aunt Fannie, and I even called her Aunty for
years before I finally figured out she was the only mother I was ever going to
have and started calling her Mom. I
always knew she was a big influence on me, but I don’t think I had realized
that so much of what I’m interested in is because of her. Being a teacher, of
course. But I also share her love of poetry* (in her 80s she could recite long
narrative poems she had learned in 4th grade!), genealogy (she’s the
one who wrote down all the brothers and sisters of my ex-husband’s
great-grandmother), history and culture (my fascination with Indian mounds, cemeteries,
pioneer times, and the settling of Oklahoma.)
Family was always the most important thing in the world to her, and she
would love knowing that I’m making connections with the descendants of her
kinfolks in Kentucky.
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| My grandmother holding a sign painted for her by John Castle, signed by all the Castles, and presented at a Castle family reunion at John's |
*On any
occasion when we were all together (birthdays, Christmas), we would beg her to
recite her poems. I have searched in
vain to find copies of them. My favorite
was about a father chopping wood when his little boy falls underneath the
axe. (It begins, “What are ye askin’,
stranger, about a lock of hair?” and ends with an affirmation of the Biblical
saying, “’the hairs of your head are numbered,’ and sir, I believe it’s so.”)
Another was about a little girl and her mother traveling on an immigrant train
at Christmas time. The little girl worries that Santa won’t be able to find
them, and a man (was he Santa?) gets off the train at one of the stops and buys
her presents. Another was about a little boy who steals a watermelon and gets
in trouble from his mother because the one he stole wasn’t ripe! I also liked the one about an older sister who "is flustered the whole of the day/And gives the silliest answers to what we may say" because "her beau is coming to see her on Saturday night." All of these poems gave us a glimpse into what life was like when my grandmother was growing up.
Fannie
Castle Smith (or Fannie C. Smith, as she signed herself) was a beloved teacher,
mother, aunt, and grandmother. She died
on 12 December 1992 and is buried at Rose Hill Cemetery in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
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