Iola Reid, RIP

My maternal grandmother, Iola Wilkinson Reid, died on October 1, in Jonesboro, Arkansas. She was 97 and had been in a nursing home, mentally lost and physically declining for the last five years. She really had been miserable and suffering in the home and though I was very close to her and miss her, I am glad that her suffering is over. I spent the first couple of weeks of the month back there for the funeral and to handle details of her will.

My grandfather died in 1979. My mother was an only child and died in 1984. Iola's older sister, Doreen died twelve years ago, so my Dad (her son-in-law) and my sister Carol and I were really all she had left for family. Luckily my Dad and sister were there in Jonesboro to help her. She was able to be independent staying in her home, playing bridge twice a week, and doing gardening for exercise until she was 92.

We should all be so lucky. Iola lived virtually her entire life in Jonesboro, which is in northeast Arkansas about 60 miles from Memphis. She really had a good long run and a full life, and though she had some hard times when young, she was able to see and do much more than was typical of her time, class and region. As L.P. Hartley said, “The past is another country” and my grandmother was a window into that country for me. Lots and lots of stories were passed on to me. It occurred to me after her death that Theodore Roosevelt was president when she was born in 1908. What a different world that was, what great events she witnessed and lived through.

This picture was taken at a camp meeting in Ravenden Springs, Arkansas in 1912. My grandmother is the blond moppet sitting on the ground on the right side of the photo. Her sister Doreen is the little girl in the middle with her hands crossed over her knee, and my great-grandmother Maude Sullins Wilkinson is the woman immediately to the left of Doreen facing the camera. Camp meetings were a Southern cultural thing - religious revival meetings where extended families and friends would camp out and listen to sermons without the distractions of work-a-day life. It’s striking how 19th century everything in this view appears. The image of Iola is blurred because she moved while the picture was being taken. It's interesting to know that she couldn't keep still at age 4 any more than she could when I knew her!

Some subtle things can tell you a lot about that “other country” of the past. For example Sullins wasn’t really Maude’s maiden name. Sullins was an anglicized form of O’Sullivan – an attempt to evade the anti-Irish prejudice of the day.

My great-grandfather Alvah Wilkinson was a telegrapher for the Cotton Belt Railroad – one of those obsolete jobs like buggy-whip manufacturing. But the telegraph was the information superhighway of the day and in November, 1918, via the telegraph he was the first person in Jonesboro to learn that WW I had ended. He left the depot and went running up and down Main Street, telling everyone the good news. But he almost lost his job for leaving his post. I mean trains could have collided!

My great-grandfather died of cancer in 1922 and shortly after that Maude was diagnosed with tuberculosis. It was the killer disease of the period that we rarely think about any more, that eventually took her and another of my great-grandparents, Augustus Reid. Doreen and Iola took their mother on the train to Colorado and placed her in a sanatorium in Aurora. Though still teens, they lived in a boarding house in Denver, got jobs and went to night school to try to finish high school. They took the trolley out to Aurora on the week-ends to see their mother. They were orphaned in 1925 when Maude succumbed to the disease. In Denver, Doreen had met a Wyoming rancher, Bob Bryant. She married him and stayed out west. Iola took their mother back to Arkansas for burial.

When Iola returned to Jonesboro alone, she wanted to finish high school and found a family that would take her in for the year that she needed to graduate. I have been struck at the improvisational nature of such arrangements that government functions would do today. Today Child Protective Services would have placed her in a foster home. Back then she and Doreen had to figure out on their own how to take care of their mother and how to finish school.

This picture of Iola was taken in 1927, about the time she won the Miss Jonesboro Beauty Contest. The big prize was a trip to Hollywood and a screen test at one of the studios. She never used it as she decided to marry my grandfather Travis Reid that year and help him run his drug store. For their honeymoon, they drove to New Orleans in their Model-T. It took them nearly three days - what today is about a 7 hour drive on I-55. They were nearly arrested in New Orleans for driving the wrong way on a one-way street. They were so "country" they had never heard of a one-way street.

1927 was also the year of the great Mississippi Flood – the greatest natural disaster to hit the South between the New Madrid Earthquake of 1811 and this year’s hurricanes. She told me stories of the flood and we had home movies of evacuees in tent cities on Crowley’s Ridge near Jonesboro.

So many stories of their life. They shook hands with Franklin Roosevelt at a political rally in Little Rock in 1932, and he did his campaign baby-kissing routine on my infant mother. They worked in the political campaigns of a family friend, Hattie Caraway, the first woman elected to the US Senate, that same year and in 1936. They met Huey Long, who came up from Louisiana to help Caraway campaign. They struggled through the Depression with the rest of the country. My grandfather carried people on his drug store account books for years. As he said, “I couldn’t tell sick people they couldn’t have medicine even if they were broke.” Local farmers dropped by hams and chickens to help carry their accounts and they got by.
I’ll close with this picture taken in 1988 of Iola with my wife Connie and our children at Mammoth Spring, Missouri. I’m glad that Lauren and Travis got to know their great-grandmother and learn from her as I did. We all miss her.