His eye is still on the sparrow

October 2, 2022
Churches, Video
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GOSPEL WAS OUR MUSIC when I was growing up in Esto. In addition to church, we often had community sings, and the Biggest All Night Gospel Singing in the World was a major event every Fourth of July weekend, from sundown to sunup, at the football field in Bonifay, the county seat.

When I was a senior in high school, we went to a revival service at First Baptist Church in Bonifay — the big time in Holmes County. It featured traveling evangelists Ed and Bette Stalnecker and their entourage of musicians. I especially loved Bette’s soaring rendition of “His Eye Is on the Sparrow,” a beautiful song not in our hymnal. I found the sheet music and must have played that song hundreds of times on the piano at Esto Baptist Church as the prelude or offertory or benediction hymn.

After I moved all the way to Tallahassee for college, I saw the Stalneckers again at Thomasville Road Baptist Church. The music was still joyous and uplifting, especially “His Eye Is on the Sparrow.” (But you had to wonder about Rev. Ed Stalnecker’s demand at the end of his sermon that 100 people come forward to make a public profession of faith before the doors would be opened.)

I saw and heard the Stalneckers only those two times, but the memory of their music stayed with me. Once when I was back home, I asked retired school principal Kenneth Yates, then and now the organist at First Baptist Bonifay, if he remembered the Stalneckers. Not only did he remember; he had recorded some of their music, and promised to make a copy. I rarely saw Mr. Yates on my trips home that I didn’t ask about the Stalnecker recording. He always assured me he’d find it someday and make a copy. But it never happened. Decades passed.

And now, all of a sudden, it’s here. I went to the post office on Monday and found a yellow notice in our box that we had a package. The desk clerk came back with a small square padded envelope. Return address: K. Yates, Bonifay, FL. Inside was a CD with the inscription: “A Week of Gospel Music: The Stalneckers. FBC Bonifay. February 1973.” Only 49 1/2 years later!

“This is my story, this is my song.”

That’s the full-throated opening chorus of the first hymn, an old favorite. Then “Love Lifted Me” and “Heaven Came Down and Glory Filled My Soul” and “Oh, the Wonder of It All.” And then, on track 10: “His Eye Is on the Sparrow,” every bit as wonderful as I remembered.

That voice! Bette Stalnecker was a contralto, it turns out, with a big deep husky singing voice that sounds almost like a man. Her soft-spoken sweetness and gentle humor come through between songs. At one point she says, “We get a complaint every now and then that we don’t do enough foot-stomping gospel music,” followed by a rollicking version of “Jesus Is Coming Soon.” And then, near the end, everybody’s favorite: “How Great Thou Art.”

I’ve played the CD dozens of times during the past week. A little searching revealed that Ed divorced Bette a few years after I saw them. He found another Betty and another ministry involving donated cars and boats. Allegations of forgery and other wrongdoing preceded his death in 2007. 

Bette kept singing in Baptist churches throughout the South, successfully battling the throat cancer that took her voice for almost a year. She remarried, to a longtime family friend, after his wife died. Now, at 93, Bette Stalnecker Gibson is still singing — and on Facebook. A few days ago she posted a video of herself before a senior group in Tennessee. She was singing “His Eye Is on the Sparrow.”

"HIS EYE IS ON THE SPARROW" (2022)

FOR TRUE FANS of gospel music, here is a selection of songs performed by the Stalneckers at First Baptist Church, Bonifay, in February 1973.

A taste of childhood

July 30, 2022
Agriculture, Personal History
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Working at the Kirkland Farms roadside stand, just south of the Florida-Alabama line, in the 1960s.

ESTO WENT PEACH CRAZY for a few years in the 1960s and early ’70s. U.T. Kirkland led the move, encouraged by his brother Carson Ray, who lived in Georgia. Several other farmers got peach fever, too, and Esto became known for its peaches.

One of T’s peach patches was in front of our house, just across a two-rut sandy lane. On the other side it faced the main highway that ran through town. Across Highway 79 he built a little wooden fruit stand with fold-down sides for selling peaches and plums from Kirkland Farms. He gave me my first job running it when I was 8. I wasn’t much of a field hand, but I could make change.

The peaches were good, but in my memory the plums were even better. There was a row of plum trees right outside our front door, along the edge of the peach patch. In early June, as school was ending for the summer, those plums came to full purple ripeness. They were the most delicious thing I’d ever tasted, and not only because they belonged to T and not to me. Years later, I asked T’s son Doyle if he remembered that row of plums and if he knew what kind they were. They were Methleys, he said. For years after I moved to California, I kept asking at farmers markets — overflowing with peaches and plums in the summer — whether they grew Methleys. There were many varieties in the bounty of fruits and nuts and flakes that California produces, but nobody grew Methleys.

My neighbor Diana Arsham heard my rhapsodic memories about Methley plums, and set out to do something about it. Here’s her story.

Methley plums from Diana Arsham’s California garden.

A plum like no other

By DIANA ARSHAM

IT all started in the winter of 2010 with a conversation about childhood memories. Mine: While alone in the garden of my great aunties’ midwestern farm, I walked into a vibrant pink flowering peony bush just my 5-year-old height. Likely I had been drawn to Its iridescent glow in the warmth of the mid-afternoon sun — and of course by the intoxicating scent of its fully flowering ripeness.  

My friend Thomas shared his memory of walking out his front door across a small town road lined with Methley plum trees — “a plum like no other,” or at least that’s how he had so fondly remembered the Methley. He recounted how, after moving to California, he had searched for the plum locally in the Bay Area, hoping to relive his early childhood experience. Still longing for the plum like no other, he learned that the local growers had not heard of the plum, let alone grown it. 

The conversation piqued my interest as an ardent urban farmer cutting back 10-foot camellia bushes in my backyard for new plantings of fruit trees. I knew I wanted to plant plums — a favorite of my husband Gary’s — having struck out on figs, a favorite of my own.

Plums are popular in San Francisco, particularly the Santa Rosa. I was determined also to grow the Green Gage plum, which I favored. And I had recently been told about the local prize of them all, the Beauty, a Japanese plum more red than the usual purple European variety. They all needed about 200 chill hours to bloom and bear fruit. In our mild San Francisco winters, that’s about the maximum chill time. Other fruits need 800 to 1000 chill hours, so we are talking about a special breed. 

By January 2011, Thomas, via the miracle of the Internet, had located a source for the Methley. And as luck would have it, it did have a chill hour requirement of 200 hours. Thomas delivered the Methley to our front porch. Bare root, dry and somewhat bedraggled, it had been on a long trip and needed rest and intensive care. As I prepared a soothing compost-enhanced soak for the evening, I told it we were both on the line.

I planted the Methley in the ground next to a stand of five-foot Shasta daisies (named for Mt. Shasta and hybridized by Luther Burbank), where it got the early sun in the first part of spring. The Methley bloomed its first spring and I dutifully removed all of its blossoms, encouraging it to continue strengthening its root system, branches and trunk. 

This year, although initially full of blossoms due to a very late series of rain showers, the Methley set six plums, though only five ripened and turned red.  

“Not the right color,” Thomas declared. “It’s not ripe.” Or maybe not the right species, or maybe an inadequate growing environment, I thought. Full of performance anxiety, I also wondered how I was going to keep the plums safe for the next couple of weeks to fully ripen. By now the rains had ended and I had headed off droves of insects by applying Safer soap. But could the Shasta daisies send out a strong competing scent to confuse predators in the form of birds, raccoons and rats? Just to play it safe, I squirted Critter Ridder on the Japanese boxwood at the north end of the bed. And said a prayer. 

By the first week of July, while continuing to read up on the care and feeding habits of the Methley, I decided to harvest the plums. Early one morning I sat straight up in bed, knowing it was time. Sure enough, flower pots on the fence so very close to the plum trees had been knocked over by invaders in the night. 

Yes, they were a dark purple! Gary and I tasted one. It was very different — dense, with a grape-like texture, jammy almost. It was delicious, but was it too ripe? How are they supposed to taste?

Later that day, I stopped by Thomas’s gallery to give him a tiny half of the harvest. I was ready to tell him my list of triumphs in getting the Methley to harvest, yet prepared to have him find it not as good as his childhood memory. How could it be? Before I could finish the story of my trials and successes, his 8-year-old hand dove into the basket. A second after he popped the first Methley into his mouth, he fairly yelped: “That’s it — the plum like no other!”

She loved her church

January 30, 2022
Churches, Neighbors
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Sybil Taylor was a devoted member of the Church of Christ.

TODAY WAS HER 98th birthday, so I called Sybil Taylor to wish her well and talk about the old days in Esto.

She didn’t answer. A little searching revealed that she died last fall, with no announcement made locally. My Christmas card was not returned.

Sybil Miller Taylor lived almost all of her long life just south of Holland’s Crossroads, where Highway 79 meets Highway 2. She was a devout member of the Esto Church of Christ, absolutely certain of her beliefs and eager to convert others. Late in life, she gave her family farm to Faulkner University, a Church of Christ college in Montgomery, and lived on campus during her final years.

Faulkner University posted this story in its “Supporter Spotlight.”

Sybil Taylor, who passed away October 22, 2021, at the age of 97, wasn’t sure what she would do when her husband Moody Taylor died years earlier and left their farm in Florida to her.

Taylor and her husband had been having financial difficulties with the farm when she heard a sermon on giving and she made a promise to the Lord that she would give half of what she earned to the Lord and his work. She kept her promise and the Lord blessed their farm and increased their revenue.

One night after her husband passed away, Elizabeth Wright Smith, who was one of Faulkner University’s strongest supporters, visited Taylor to share the university’s missions and need for funds. After sharing her story, Smith asked Mrs. Taylor if she would like to support Faulkner University. Her response was quick. At the time, Smith was asking donors to give $1,000 each year for a period of 10 years. The next morning, Taylor gave Smith a check for $10,000.

“I knew about Faulkner University when it first opened in 1942 as Montgomery Bible College and then as Alabama Christian College,” Taylor said. “I received the Gospel Advocate newspaper, as did all my family members before me. When Elizabeth came to ask me for my support, I wanted to give. Faulkner was one of the few Christian colleges I knew about at the time and I wanted to support them.”

Since that day, Taylor was an unwavering supporter and friend of Faulkner University.

When it came time to make a decision about her farm, Taylor, who was well into her retirement years, decided to deed the farm to Faulkner for the university to sell. Funds from the sale went to the university and five charitable gift annuities were set up for Taylor to live on a stable income for the rest of her life. With a charitable gift annuity, Taylor received a return based on her age. This fixed payment was in addition to a large income tax deduction.

She lived on campus for many years before her passing.

A memorial service was held on November 2 at University Church of Christ in Montgomery.

Young Sybil Miller

When the hippies met the Klan

January 30, 2021
Books
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SUE RIDDLE CRONKITE has done it again.

Barely a year after the Holmes County native and pioneering newspaper editor published her first novel, Louette’s Wake, she’s finished and recently published her second. This one is called White Sheets, and it tells of the time a gaggle of long-haired hippies set up camp near her home in the New Hope community, in Holmes County’s northwest corner, and promptly attracted the attention of the Ku Klux Klan.

While it’s a work of fiction, Cronkite says the book is based on actual events she remembers from the late ’60s. “The setting is a real place,” she says. “The names, characters and specific incidents are products of the author’s imagination.”

But you’ll recognize these people.

Rose and Josh run the Daylight Grocery, which sounds as if it could be Hamp Berry’s or one of the other crossroads stores on Highway 2. Their kids, Pidge and Luke, ride the school bus to what sounds a lot like Bethlehem School. Neighbors come and go, stopping to fish a cold drink out of the ice box or gas up their pickup trucks. Even Two Toe Tom, Esto’s legendary alligator, puts in an appearance.

What doesn’t sound quite real is the neighborliness many of the locals show the band of hippies camping in a pasture near the Choctawhatchee River, after they take a wrong turn on their way to protest the Vietnam war. My recollection, from growing up during that era a few miles away in Esto, is that none of our neighbors had any sympathy for long-haired hippies or war protesters. And marijuana, if we’d heard of it at all, wasn’t laughed away as harmless, unlike Camels and Marlboros and Lucky Strikes.

But Sue Cronkite tells a kinder and gentler story. Some of her characters shout:
“Hippies, hippies, sitting on the fence,
Couldn’t tell a dollar from fifteen cents.”
Her locals take in and take care of one of the barefoot hippies who’s about to have a baby, and resist their harder-hearted neighbors who side with the Klan. 

It’s a fun read, intensely local, and it captures the best — and some of the worst — of our neighbors. Not many books come out of New Hope, or elsewhere in Holmes County, so that alone makes it worth the price ($14.95).

And there are more of her books to come.

“Two down and 10 to go,” Cronkite said recently. “I hope to publish at least two a year.” That will get her into her 90s, but she shows no signs of slowing down. As the new year began, she was busy clearing land to build a new home at Lake Victor, near her family’s old home place in New Hope.

But she’ll take a minute to send you a copy if you email cronkitesue@gmail.com or call (850) 653-6965. Or you can order a paperback or Kindle edition on Amazon.

EARLIER: “Louette’s Wake is an uplifting tale“

First brush with art

December 5, 2020
Personal History, Schools
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SARAH SEGREST taught generations of students 7th grade English and Holmes County French. She was also the first touch of culture that came into the young lives of many of us country kids.

At the rear of her room she had a display space for her flower arrangements, usually featuring camellias in the winter from her garden. She was also an artist, and an ever-changing exhibition of her paintings lined the walls. Plus, she had an air conditioner in her classroom when no one else did — no small attraction in the heart and the heat of the Florida Panhandle.

Mrs. Segrest was just the right combination of nurturing and challenging for 7th graders, no longer in elementary school but not quite teenagers yet. When we got to 9th grade and had her again for French class, her elevated aesthetic sensibilities became ever more obvious. French! With a southern accent.

By the time I had an opportunity to try out my French in France, I had also moved to Chicago, far from home. As I got more interested in art, I thought of Mrs. Segrest, and wrote to her asking if I could visit on my next trip back home and possibly acquire one of her paintings.

And so I did. She and her husband, Dr. Ralph Segrest, lived just south of downtown Bonifay in a secluded woodland thick with hundreds of camellia bushes, where she’d often taken her classes for field trips. Their home was filled with her paintings. I especially liked a still life of a sliced watermelon she had just finished.

“Well, you may not want to pay what my teacher says it’s worth,” she warned me: $100.

It was my first original oil painting, and the subject matter made it a perfect way to remember her and home. 

I had also been attracted to an earlier painting of persimmons — especially after she said that another favorite teacher, Mrs. Elizabeth Gavin, who taught 10th grade biology, had brought her those persimmons. As I wrote the check and claimed my prize, Mrs. Segrest took the canvasboard with the persimmon painting on it and tucked it unnoticeably inside the back of the framed watermelon painting. “Dr. Segrest doesn’t like me to give them away,” she whispered.

A few years later, as the art bug was taking hold, I went to see Mrs. Segrest again on another trip back home and asked if I might buy one of her paintings as a Christmas gift for my mother. She suggested an oval of red roses. After mother died, I reclaimed it for myself — and now it reminds me of them both.

The author’s mother with Sarah Segrest’s painting of roses.

Reynolds, who grew up in Esto, has owned an art gallery in California for 25 years (www.thomasreynolds.com). He credits Mrs. Segrest with inspiring his interest in art.

Puttin’ on airs

April 10, 2020
Personal History
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THE ADVERTISER arrived today — my weekly report from home. Holmes County’s weekly newspaper is a lot less local than when it was shepherded by four generations of the Williams family, especially now that it’s ended up as part of the Gannett empire.

Thank goodness for Hazel Tison.

Mrs. Tison was just beginning her career as an English teacher when I started writing for the Advertiser during my senior year of high school. Now, in retirement, she writes a column for the paper she calls the Happy Corner. It’s always a trip back home, usually featuring familiar people or places or things to eat.

This week her headline was “Recipe for Shrimp Bisque.” That seemed like a highfalutin offering in a rural county where we more often eat fried chicken and butterbeans. The column was a lesson in making substitutions “if you don’t have every little thing they call for” in a recipe. When checking to see if she had the makings for shrimp bisque, Mrs. Tison wrote, she found she didn’t have shrimp stock, so she used chicken stock. She didn’t have leeks, but she had a sweet white onion. She didn’t have tomato paste, but she had a can of tomato soup.

She certainly didn’t have one-fourth cup of cognac or brandy or sherry. “Don’t know what the first one is and don’t have the brandy or sherry,” she wrote. “But there is a little scuppernong wine in the refrigerator left over from the Christmas fruit cake. That’ll do.”

We didn’t know what bisque was when I was growing up in Esto. I’m sure of it. At my first important business dinner after graduating from law school, I found myself dining with a phalanx of big-city lawyers, staring down a French menu. Lobster bisque sounded fancy and surely would impress my new colleagues. So I told the waiter I’d start with the lobster beesque. “Very well, sir, the bisque then.” I turned a thousand shades of red, and I’m certain I heard a few snickers.

All these years and miles later, we still call it beesque in our household, even though it’s really pronounced bisque, as in biscuits.

I should have known.

EARLIER: “From Esto to the Advertiser“

Mama’s house

December 31, 2019
Personal History
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Mamas-house

Ethel Hughes stands by the well in front of her house in Esto.

MY GRANDMOTHER LIVED in a little white Jim Walter house just behind the old brick stores on the north side of the railroad tracks in Esto. I loved her, and spent more time when I was growing up at Mama’s house than I did at home. It was a safe and loving place, and there was always something good to eat on her stove.

In 1956 — a year after I was born — Uncle John Hughes arranged for a new house to be built behind the old unpainted wood-frame house that stood in the front yard. My grandmother and grandfather had lived in the old house since 1937 and raised four children there: my mother, known in the family as Doll; Uncle Bill, whose real name was James; Uncle John, who was the most fun; and Uncle Leonard, the baby.

The new house was special for our part of the world because it had indoor plumbing. My grandfather was said to have objected to bringing that sort of business inside the house, since they had a perfectly good outhouse in the back yard.

That story I can’t prove, but I now know the dates for certain. A few days ago an unexpected priority mail box arrived. It contained a handful of photographs, some faded newspaper clippings, and a few old papers that had been saved when they cleaned out Uncle Leonard’s house in Hartford, Alabama, 10 miles north, after he died last year. Among the papers was the application for a tax deed on the property dated August 2, 1937.

Also in the box was the original contract between my grandfather, James Cullen Hughes, and the Jim Walter Corp. dated July 31, 1956. The house cost a grand total of $3,358.40, with $50 down and monthly payments of $55.14 over the next five years.

It was a simple house with three small bedrooms, a small living room, a kitchen/dining room and the aforementioned bathroom, with tub and toilet. The contract says it was a “Capri” model measuring 24×32, or just 768 square feet, but it was big enough to hold a lot of love.

Many people in our part of the world lived in Jim Walter homes. They could be ordered from a pattern book or from the Sears Roebuck catalog. Jim Walter, a Tampa businessman, had started the company in 1946 after World War II ended and soldiers came home to pursue the American Dream, but needed housing. Thousands of Jim Walter homes were built in the following decades on lots people already owned in rural areas throughout the South. The company finally went bust after the 2008 financial crisis.

That little white house provided shelter for our family for many years — and some of my warmest childhood memories.

contract1

contract2

An uplifting tale

November 11, 2019
Books, Personal History
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sue

Holmes County’s own Sue Riddle Cronkite and her new novel.

“There’s a sweet, sweet spirit in this place.”

SUE RIDDLE CRONKITE begins each chapter of her new novel, Louette’s Wake, with a few lines from one of the old gospel hymns popular in our part of the world. She didn’t include this one, but it’s evident nevertheless on nearly every page of her story.

Sue grew up in New Hope, another little Holmes County community just a few miles down the Hog and Hominy Highway from Esto, on the other side of the river. She’s part of the storied Riddle clan. And even though she went on to become one of the pioneering newspaperwomen of her generation — with a decade as a reporter and editor at the Birmingham News, among other stops — she’s never gotten far from home.

Sue came back to the area in the mid-1980s to become the founding editor of a new daily newspaper in Dothan, Alabama, called Wiregrass Today. That’s when I met her, introduced by our mutual friend E.W. Carswell, another notable newspaper reporter who became the historian of our stretch of the Florida Panhandle during his long career as a staff writer and columnist for the Pensacola News-Journal.

Sue turned me down for a job on her new paper. The publisher didn’t want some college boy who thought he knew it all about exactly the kind of newspaper our area needed. Sue said there was no place for me, which left me with no excuse not to take the opportunity I’d been offered to become editor and publisher of a magazine for lawyers in California.

Instead of a job on an upstart Alabama newspaper that folded after its first year, I got a lifelong friend. She and I have kept in touch across the years and miles and had an occasional visit. So it was a treat to hear a few weeks ago that she’d published the novel that had been rolling around in her mind for many years. I ordered my copy from Downtown Books and Purl in Apalachicola, where Sue now lives, and read it on a recent trip back home to the Florida Panhandle.

In short: It’s terrific. The book lives up to its billing as “an uplifting southern tale,” one that takes place in New Hope and across the state line in Geneva, Alabama. It’s a gentle story that centers on Louise Ella Kelly’s decision to throw herself a wake while she’s still alive. Even more impressive than the story is the writing, which manages in its simple words to capture the particular idioms and cadence of the way we talk — without the false dialect and ignorance and ain’ts and y’alls usually larded into books with a southern accent.

You’ll know these people, and their ruminations, and the honest country food they eat. For those who don’t — Yankees, maybe — she includes recipes at the end for chicken and dumplings, collard greens and chocolate fudge cake, among others. “Buy a big bunch of collard greens off the back of Lige’s pick-up truck, if he comes around,” that one begins.

On my recent trip home, after a couple of dozen of Apalachicola’s finest oysters, I stopped to visit Sue and collect her autograph on a few more copies of her novel I’d picked up at Downtown Books. I found her nearly finished with her next novel, this one involving Esto’s own Two Toe Tom, the legendary alligator that spawned an annual festival in my home town.

“I don’t have any aches and pains,” Sue told me, although the accumulation of years would give her every right. It’s a good thing, since she may have to live forever to finish all the stories she’s started to tell.

My advice: Call Downtown Books and Purl in Apalachicola at 850-653-1290 and ask them to send you a copy of Louette’s Wake. They have yarn, too, if you need any. You could order Sue’s book on Amazon, but it won’t be as good. I promise you’ll love it.