Carrie Rettig-Price-Austill was my maternal
grandmother. Grandma Rettig married Henry Price in 1914. In April 1915,
they had one daughter, my mother Marie, and were expecting a second child in
the month of July 1916. On June 5, 1916, a deadly tornado
dipped down on the Price farm in New Madrid County, Missouri. It killed
Carrie Rettig Price's mother-in-law and sister-in-law instantly and severely
injuring her husband, Henry Price. My Aunt Beulah was born eighteen days
later, and my grandfather died twenty days later on June 25, 1916. My
grandmother was a widow at age twenty-two with two young daughters to raise.
She had a hard life with much work and little security. Most impressive,
she never complained and had a warm, caring, and positive attitude about life.
She briefly married Clyde Austill and, along with her daughters,
raised his two sons. She loved Mr. Austill but he drank too much, and she
left him after a couple of years and was again without real means of support.
Upon her death, her two step-sons attended her funeral. She took in
cleanings and did what she could but was often forced to live with one relative
or another during her daughters' formative years. About the time they were
teenagers, she was employed by the International Shoe Company in Sikeston.
That allowed her to rent her a place, and she was much happier.
She was a quiet lady who wore a hearing aid most of the
time. When she had her hearing aid in she was soft spoken. Once
Sunday after church, I went home with her for a few hours. I played near
her with childhood toys she kept in her closet for me. All of a sudden,
she said something to me so loudly it frightens me. My parents said I got
up and ran the three blocks home. She did not have a telephone at the
time, so she walked to my house behind me to learn what caused me to run off.
I told her she had never yelled at me before, and it scared me. My
mother laughed because she knew how Grandma talked without the hearing aid.
I think Grandma was embarrassed. From that point on she never took
her hearing aid out around me and I always looked to see if it was in her ear.
Back in the 1940 and 1950s they were worn outside the ear and were about
the size of a nickel.
Grandma Price-Austill lived in small dwellings in the time I can
remember visiting her. One place was a small duplex with persimmon trees
in her back yard. She told me not to eat them unless they were dark
orange. One day I was in the back yard, and I just had to try one.
I had waited a long time for those persimmons to ripen. I got a bucket to
stand on, and I picked one that was mostly orange, but it had a bit of green on
it too. Oh my goodness! That was the worst thing I ever
tasted. It puckered my mouth for hours. Grandma did not scold me;
she just told me I should listen to her the next time she gave me instructions
about something. From that day forward I listened to her every word.
In the late-1950s, she moved to an apartment in downtown
Sikeston, above the Collins Music Store. I remember taking a set of very
steep stairs to reach her apartment. Once she opened the door to her
two-room, one-bath apartment one was always impressed at how fastidious the
two rooms were. She was a second-generation German-American, and they
believed that cleanness was next to Godliness. You could not find a speck
of dust on her floors. The apartment had a tiny kitchen, with a divider
between the small stove, refrigerator, and dining area. The divider was
where she kept her dishes. The dining area was small, a standard table
and chairs would not fit into the designated eating area provided, because
space was only about four feet by five feet in size. Instead of a
standard table, she had a fold-down table, and two thin benches, one on each
side of the table, where she ate her meals. The table and benches worked
like a Murphy bed. Not once did I ever hear her complain about
a lack of space. She loved the little place she made her home.
On another of my
visits, I remember Grandma taught me to like spinach. When I was about
five or six years old, I was spending another Sunday afternoon with her.
Grandma started cooking supper for us. The vegetable was spinach.
After she had cooked it, she ate some of it and went on about how good it
tasted. She said there might not be enough for me. After it had
finished cooking, she put a big helping on her plate and a small serving on my
plate. That was not her normal way of feeding us. I watched her eat
it and heard her make noises of delight. She had me wait until after
everything else on my plate was eaten before eating my spinach. When I
finally tasted it, I thought it was the best vegetable in the world. I
still like it today.
She taught me many things in her unique style. It is odd what we remember
about the ones we loved after they are gone. My paternal grandfather died
when I was five, and Grandma Price-Austill was the only grandparent I had the
privilege of knowing. She was not well educated, but had good common
sense; she had little in material wealth, but she was happy and a good
Christian lady who I loved very much.
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