Ova Evans

Her mother left behind a husband, six children and a step-daughter. The youngest was 5 months and the step-daughter, Ruth, Mrs. Evans half sister, was the oldest, 15. Ruth helped her father raise the children until she married. Mrs. Evans admired her father for keeping the family together.

"My daddy kept us all together," she recalled. "He made a living for us." Her daddy was a farmer and worked on a road grader. She said "most everybody farmed back then."

"He run a road grader and was good at it," she said. "We didn't have paved roads back then."

She remembers her mother's support when it came to schooling. She told a story of how when she was almost 6 she was afraid of the male teacher of the one-room school house called Cadron Gap School.

"He wore glasses down on his nose and had a mustache," she described. "I was afraid of him."

'I went home and told my momma that I was never going to school. I thought I was ruined.' Miss Evans wasn't sure exactly why she was afraid of the school teacher, but his mustache could have been the reason. Her mother didn't make her go back right away.

"I went home and told my momma that I was never going to school," she said. "I thought I was ruined." She wasn't sure exactly why she was afraid of the school teacher, but his mustache could have been the reason. Her mother didn't make her go back right away.

"Momma, you never did like mustaches," Winnie Vaden Evans Junyor, Mrs. Evans' daughter, pointed out.

By the time the next term began, another room was added to the school and the school teacher's wife came to teach.

"She was real sweet," Mrs. Evans said. "All smiles. I loved school after that." Because of this experience, "I always tried to encourage my children to like school and to stay in school."

All five of her children graduated from Greenbrier High School.

Mrs. Junyor recalled how her mother taught them to read at a young age, even before the family got electricity when she was 11. That was 1956.

Mrs. Evans was raised in "town" and moved to the country when she married a farmer in 1930. A friend of hers introduced her to her future husband, but "I thought he was great before I met him," she said.

Her husband "didn't have his crop" so they couldn't really afford to get hitched and tried to keep the marriage a secret. She said they went to a justice of the peace on a Friday the 13th, got married and then the JP's son told everyone. She was 25, working in a law office, and he was 29, a farmer.

Her father wasn't upset because the courtship had lasted five years and he had assumed it would end in marriage.

She had five children; a boy, who died later in life, and four girls. She remembers when her son was six weeks old and had whooping cough. She saved his life by putting whiskey on his wrist pulse making him cough up the phlegm he was choking on.

She made and designed her children's clothes, as her mother and half sister had done for her. She learned to sew when she was 12, which is when her half sister got married.

"My momma sewed pretty dresses before she died," she said.

In the 1960s, Mrs. Evans' father was getting older and couldn't live by himself so she took care of him. In the meantime, Mrs. Evans had children at home, took care of them, raised vegetables, kept a flower garden and took pictures of everything.

Mrs. Junyor remembered how her mother's hands would break open and bleed in the wintertime when she did the wash with a washboard and tub. She recalled the day her sister, Gail, was born. She said that since her father's mother died when he was 3 during childbirth, he was always concerned. She recited a song she wrote about the day Gail was born:

"Daddy's runnin' so I wonder will my momma be OK ... another little baby's on the way," Mrs. Junyor sang. She remembered changing Gail's first diaper. She was 12.

The neighbor women would help with the births, Mrs. Evans said.

Mrs. Junyor got goose bumps from the trip down memory lane. She talked about her mother's hard work and determination to raise her children right. How her mother made the trips quite a ways from the house to the well to bring water to the house. How she taught them to make quilts when she was young. About the homemade apple sauce cake with blackberry glaze and divinity with the black walnuts from the yard at Christmastime.

Mrs. Junyor told a story of when she was about 16 and she and her sisters took a quilt off the frame and bounced the cat while holding the corner of the quilt. Whoever the cat jumped out nearest to would be the first one married.

"We didn't have a lot of money, but we had a lot of love," Mrs. Junyor said.

Mrs. Evans will be 94 on May 5.