Hillard spent 3 1/2 years in the Army in World War II helping construct air bases for B-29s in Guam and studied carpentry for three years in Pine Bluff. But Twin Groves later called him back to the area where the family has lived dating back into the 19th century.

In 1953 the Ealys had triplet boys, and during the past 25 years they have also gained 16 grandchildren and four great-grandchildren, all living nearby.

Finding jobs

Hillard feels an increasing availability of fair-paying jobs has been the greatest product of the 20th century.

For the greater part of his life he has been a carpenter, brick layer, and builder. He taught brick-laying from 1974 until 1987 at Petit Jean College.

"When I was a youngster," said Hillard, who was born in 1925, "jobs and money were hard to get always. I saw that there were only two jobs in this area. There was a little bit of carpentry work but mostly it was farming. I didn't want to go far, so I had to catch what was there, which was carpentry.

"I worried when I was a youngster about work. All the work you could manage, you couldn't get anything for it. Fifty cents a day or something like that. But 50 cents went a long ways back then, but it wasn't a lot.

"This was a place where you could live, but there wasn't a whole lot going on. We always had to go out at least to Conway for jobs. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, we used to go to Little Rock, back and forth everyday.

"Until Ward bus company, there were few jobs even in Conway. It was a college town. Usually somehow or another in a college town no factories come in. They don't want them. Now it's easier to get a job closer, as close as Greenbrier. There are signs in windows saying they need help."

Technology and lifestyle

The Ealy boys work at GTE, Green Bay Packing, and Rock-Tenn Co. Hillard and Joy are both impressed with technical advances.

"We didn't get electricity until 1949," said Hillard.

"Then we got a refrigerator," said Joy, 69. "It was a used one, of course, but it worked. Before then a man would come around every week selling big slugs of ice, and we'd put it in a wooden ice box and hope it would last a week.

"I can also remember the first man who got a TV here and the first one who got a radio. Freed Criswell was the first to get a radio. We would go to his house at night and listen to 'The Grand Old Opry' and other things."

"I'm still amazed that I can get on an airplane in Little Rock and be with my sisters in California in six hours."

"But crime has increased," said Hillard. "I can remember that folks never locked their doors in this part of the country. You bet we lock them now."

Joy added, "Because we had no air conditioning, ... we used to sleep on the porch at night. No way you could still do that. We used to sit under the trees at night. We don't do that now. People fly by and throw bottles in the ditch."

The Ealys and racism

The Ealys said they feel racism has greatly lessened.

"I have had no problem with racism for a long time," said Joy. "I don't see color. When I became a nurse's aide at the Conway hospital in 1965, a white woman put a newspaper in front of her face when I was supposed to give her a bath. She told the RN she wanted a real nurse. The RN told her I was one."

"Things have certainly gotten better."

Hillard and his father-in-law Will Morris, Joy's now-deceased father, used to travel to Heber Springs to do construction work. "But we knew we had to be out of town by dark," said Hillard.

"Will said that he wouldn't live to see a black child go to school with a white child. But he did. His grandchildren did."

Joy said, "When I was young we worked for white people, picking cotton, chopping cotton, farming. Those white people won our trust and we won their trust. And you know, like you and me get to be good friends and we're having such a good time, then the next person who comes along says, 'They're having such a good time, I think I'm going to do it.' It went like that. Racism sort of changed itself by the way we reacted."

"I just remember one bad thing. It stuck in my mind for some reason and I thought, 'I'm not going to chop cotton all my life.' This was in Corn's Bottom down towards Little Farm and Toad Suck. I was a little girl, and the man that was behind us as we chopped was on a big black horse. Everytime I'd chop a little, he and that horse would walk right up in back of us, and him sitting upon that horse and that sun beating down on us, and us sweating and chopping. And the horse would walk up right behind me. I thought that was real cruel. It was intimidation."

"For some reason or another," said Hillard, "any job that I would get on, if I stayed there a long time, I was required to become one of the bosses by the main boss. I had a lot of people working for me that didn't like it. When I was boss, I would tell the workers what to do and then turn around and leave them. I wouldn't even hardly look that way until they got through."

The good old days

"Food was better, healthier back then," said Joy, who has won acclaim as a cook. "Now everything is treated with something and there's poison everywhere."

Joy sees education as the biggest necessity for the next century, "to cook or sew or do anything," she said.

"But I don't like computers. Push one wrong button and your work is gone. That doesn't happen with a pen."

The future

Joy feels the future will be good.

"I hope it will," said Hillard. "But sometimes it looks like things a year ago were better than it is now. But we're always hoping things will get better for our children and grandchildren. I know in a way it will be better than we had, because we were on the tail end of the hard times."

Now in Twin Groves, Joy works four hours a day at the community center in the child-care section.

"Little children are the life of the future," she said. "I love working with little children. Sometimes they're aggravating, but they just need someone to explain things to them. Whatever you do, the child will do it, too."