Hazel Tison’s greatest hits

BETTER TIMES ARE ALREADY HERE, it turns out.

This week Hazel Wells Tison, 91, is celebrating the release of her first book, Better Times a Comin’. It’s a collection of her weekly columns in the Holmes County Advertiser about growing up during the Depression in a big family on a two-mule farm on Bonifay Route 1. She published it with the guidance of Sue Riddle Cronkite, 89, an author-publisher from the New Hope community in northwest Holmes County.

“We laugh about it,” chuckles Mrs. Tison. “Two 90-year-olds publishing a book!”

Then she adds: “Maybe it says something good about getting old.”

That ability always to look on the sunny side is the essence of Mrs. Tison’s columns, which she called the Happy Corner, after her nickname, Happy Hazel.

“Looking back on those early days and the little we had in material things, yet we did not feel deprived,” she writes in one story about going to a 50-year reunion at Bethlehem School. “We had our health, our friends and our hopes and dreams for the future.”

In another, titled “I Don’t Know How My Mama Did It,” she recalls the big midday meals her mother cooked on a wood stove “for a houseful of young’uns, field hands and wayfarers,” who were always welcome. The table was crowded with bowls of fresh field peas, corn gathered that morning, fried and boiled okra and sliced tomatoes and cucumbers, always with cornbread and sometimes a peach cobbler or a dish pan full of banana pudding.

But not at night. “At supper, we often could have used the blessing said by Annie Lou Cook: Thank the Lord for the peas and what little bread we’ve got.”

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Mrs. Tison began writing the column in 2004 after she had retired as an English teacher at Bonifay Middle School. In addition to her many church and community activities, she’d gotten involved in a project to gather stories about Holmes County and its families, which was published in 2006 as The Heritage of Holmes County, Florida. 

Word got around.

“Then the lady at the Advertiser called me up and wanted to know if I would consider writing a weekly column,” Mrs. Tison recalls. “I didn’t tell her yea nor nay, but as I began to think about it, I thought I would try a few stories.”

She took them in to the editor.

“She just jumped up and down and said ‘This is exactly what I had in mind,’ ” Mrs. Tison remembers.

She was off and running, and the Happy Corner was a regular feature in the Advertiser every week for most of the next two decades. For a few years the column was nearly the only thing local in the local paper as the Advertiser was handed off among various newspaper chains and run mostly from afar. Now that it’s more local again, Mrs. Tison has cut back and writes only when something moves her.

A recent two-parter was titled “All I Needed to Know I Learned from Uncle Josh and Others.” It included the all-purpose advice her brother Clyde — later Circuit Judge Clyde B. Wells — offered when he was teaching her to drive: “Don’t ever go backward when you can go forward.” 

All in all, she’s written nearly a thousand columns telling the stories of local people and places. She steadfastly avoids politics and controversy. Recollections and homespun humor are more her style.

“Hardly anyone uses cloth diapers today,” she writes at the end of a column on washing clothes in cold weather. She speculates that absorbent throw-away diapers may be delaying potty training, leaving “toddlers wearing diapers well into their second and even third year, when they should be wearing big girl or big boy panties.”

She writes: “I have a personal philosophy that disposable diapers are largely responsible for disobedient children because parents allow toddlers to wear them longer and are denied the access to appropriately swat their hineys, which is too well padded to do any good.”

But here too she finds a silver lining: “There are times when going back to a simpler way of life looks attractive, but when it gets cold, I am thankful for a warm house with central heat, indoor plumbing and modern laundry equipment.”

Many of her stories feature her family. In one about her Aunt Annie — Anna Paget Wells, who wrote the earlier Heart and History of Holmes County — she acknowledges, “My husband has commented that he is sure people are tired of hearing about the Wells family.” But it’s Easter week, she notes, and she’s busy with church work, so she’s once again telling family stories that require no research.

One of the best is about “poor old Uncle George.” If somebody got angry, her family might say they’re “as mad as George Cook.” So she asked her grandmother how mad Uncle George was.

“The story goes, according to my Grandma Wells, that Uncle George was in the turpentine woods one day and he met up face to face with a bear. When he returned home he quickly took a bath and was looking for clean clothes. When Grandma Cook asked him what happened, he replied that he had encountered a bear, and that when he saw him it made him so mad that clean underwear was required.”

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The collaboration between author and publisher that produced Better Times a Comin’ began a few years ago when Sue Cronkite stopped by Hazel Tison’s home and blueberry farm north of Bonifay to drop off a copy of a new novel she’d written that told a local story, thinking it might be something Mrs. Tison would want to write about in her column.

By the time she left, the two felt like old friends. And the idea had been planted for another book: a collection of Mrs. Tison’s columns.

“I sort of had to talk her into it,” Mrs. Cronkite says.

“It was a chore,” Mrs. Tison says of choosing which columns to include and getting them ready for publication. But now that she’s holding the book in her hands and her friends and neighbors are clamoring for a copy, she’s proud she did it, with guidance from Mrs. Cronkite and assistance from her daughter Cindy Tison Webb and helper Mary Ivey.

“Since this one is done, and I see that it’s possible, there may be another one,” she says.