DOGWOOD ACRES, 03/30/09

DOGWOOD ACRES, 03/30/09, ELANE CRUM
Hello friends. I guess one should not complain about a record-making snowstorm that was immeasurable. Huge flakes, the size of silver dollars, began dropping from the sky before dark on Saturday evening and continued to fall for several hours. Every time either of us woke up during the night, we were peering out windows to see how much snow we had, but it never accumulated.
Sunday turned out to be a beautiful spring day and dry enough to move LeaAnn’s piano from the barn over to their home. It is one of those beautiful old uprights, but Rick said it was not hard to move. This will make it a lot easier for the girls to practice their piano lessons.
Rick’s mom had a birthday last week and celebrated with a lot of phone calls and visits from her kids. Kenny put her old Chuckwagon Gang 33’s over on to CD’s, which pleased her very much. Rick remembers as a kid, that they went to sleep every night with a stack of Chuckwagon Gang albums on the record player.
While waiting to be snowed in on Saturday, I worked on taxes and helped Rick with scrapbooks about his dad’s experience in WWII. Neal had called to tell us what he had found in online research about “Exercise Tiger”. We all remembered hearing Grandpa Lloyd Crum talk about being on a ship that was torpedoed and sunk during WWII, but never knew any details of the actual operation. Grandpa said the oil-covered ocean was in flames all around him as he found something to hang on to until being rescued.
Now we know that “Exercise Tiger” was a top-secret Naval operation to prepare US Army and Naval forces for D-Day. It went terribly wrong, with 749 confirmed dead. Of that number, 201 of the servicemen lost were from the 3206th Quartermaster Company from the state of Missouri. On April 28, it will be sixty-five years since that attack.
As for our scrapbook, I printed information from the internet and enlarged pictures of Dad in his uniform. We made two, one for Rick and one for Neal.
Donald Ray Walker called to see if I had any old pictures of Pine Ridge Church. Of course I do, as I began taking pictures as soon as I could hold a Kodak Brownie still. I had fun going through the old albums and pulling out pictures to make copies of. I found one picture taken in 1964 of a group in front of the church, but only the left side of the group. Elmer Walker and Grandpa Clarence Bilyeu were standing in the door behind the others. While going through Rick’s albums looking for pictures of Grandpa Lloyd, we found the right side. That side had Lloyd and Betty Jo, and me and Rick. There was a big crowd that Sunday. Rick took the copies down Bilyeu Creek Road to Don and had a good visit.
Leon Hammond had a close encounter with a deer last week. As deer have a way of doing, it just jumped out of nowhere and collided with the left front of Connie’s little Toyota. While Connie is certainly grateful that Leon was not hurt, she is sad that her little car was bumped and the deer ran away, so there are no fresh steaks in the freezer.
Grandma Christie said that Vanessa Bilyeu had to spend her calf money on a prom dress. Now, she is thinking of feeding her Momma cow vitamins so it will start having multiple births.
Rick stopped to visit with Glen and Patsy Kenyon last week. Glen had some heart stents put in recently and seems to be feeling better now. They had a litter of pups and almost talked Rick into bringing one home. I told Rick, no matter how cute they are, he better not even think of such a thing! After all, we are expecting two litters right here in our own back yard. Bye for now.