Les Jones

My maternal grandparents’ wedding announcement from 1913

Tuesday, October 27th, 2009 | Family Tree - Jones Side | Permalink | 1 Comment |

Melissa found this on TNGenWebBlount:

Maryville (TN) Times July 3, 1913

Mr. Wiley G. Everett came to South Louisville last Wednesday, June 24th and claimed as his bride Miss Fannie Gourley McCosh.

Mrs. Everett is a charming and accomplished young lady, who by her winning ways makes friends of all she meets and will be greatly missed at the above named place, and all who have the pleasure of her acquaintance are delighted to know that she will make her future home in Maryville.

Mr. and Mrs. Everett boarded the train Wednesday evening and were pleasant visitors at the beautiful home of the brides sister Mrs. T.G. Callahan of Mentor.

Mrs. Everett is the second daughter of Mr. and Mrs. J.W. McCosh and the writer with a host of other friends wish the young couple all the success, happiness and prosperity this life affords, and hope their troubles will be few and far between as they travel the journey of life together.

My maternal grandmother’s family, the McCoshes, were well off. They owned a marble mine just down the road in Louisville, TN. The Times writer seemed to be a friend of the family, which might make sense for a prominent family. Gourley was Fannie McCosh’s mother’s maiden name.

The McCoshes disapproved of my maternal grandfather, Wiley Everett, because he was of modest means and didn’t come from a prominent family. On my mother’s birth certificate his occupation is listed as “carpenter.” He later worked for TVA.

I have a reproduction of an early Maryville phone listing that shows Wiley Everett living on McGinley Street in Maryville near Five Points and Everett Hill. My parents later lived on Everett Hill and opened their carpet store (Dorolee’s Carpet House) a half dozen blocks away on Broadway.

Fannie McCosh passed away in 1929, three years after my mother was born. The other children were old enough to fend for themselves, but my mother was sent to the Maryville orphanage. Why the McCoshes didn’t take her in I can only guess. She was adopted by the Whitehead family in Walland. Her father later remarried three times. He eventually settled one county over in Lenoir City.

Fannie and Wiley are buried in Grandview Cemetery in Maryville, TN at a monument for Everetts and McCoshes.

Paul Harvey, RIP

Monday, March 2nd, 2009 | Family Tree - Jones Side | Permalink | 2 Comments |

Paul Harvey passed away. When I think of Paul Harvey I think of my dad. He was about ten years younger than Harvey and was a big fan.

After my parents divorced my mom got the carpet store in Maryville and my dad opened one in Knoxville, behind a building on Broadway near Old Gray Cemetery. Sometimes I’d work for him on Saturdays or on weekdays during the summer. He’d pay me a couple of dollars a day. I’d spend most of that on comic books at the Pilot on Alcoa Highway on the way back to Maryville.

We spent a lot of time in the truck with the radio on and he always listened to WIVK and Paul Harvey. At lunch dad would tune in Harvey’s show on a radio he kept in the office and we’d listen to that while we ate our sandwiches. That show was one of the small routines in my dad’s day that gave his life a certain constancy.

Mom’s First Brush with Electricity

Saturday, March 8th, 2008 | Family Tree - Jones Side | Permalink | 2 Comments |

My mother, Dorothy Lucille Jones, was born in 1926. I knew that she was 10 years old before she lived in a house with electricity, and that she learned to cook on a wood stove using a White House cookbook. This morning she told me about the first time she lived in an electrified house.

She described the house as Doc Waters place* on the highway going from Maryville to Walland, Tennessee. What’s now called Highway 321, though some people in Maryville still call it Walland Highway. It wouldn’t surprise me if people in Walland and Townsend call it Maryville Highway, in the same way that what Maryville people call Old Knoxville Highway is what Knoxville people call Old Maryville Pike.

The house was an old three room log cabin that had been retrofitted with electrical wiring. In the early days of TVA and the electrification movement the houses closer to a major road were the first to get electricity. The farther you were from a major road the more years you had to wait for the utility company to get around to stringing wires to your house.

Once the family had a place with electricity her dad bought her mom an electric clothes washer. There was room in the kitchen for the washer, but her mother didn’t want it there. She wanted it on the porch so that everyone could see that she owned a washing machine. I used to wonder why people around here used to have washing machines on their front porches and I guess that’s why. If you had never owned an electric appliance in your life you’d be mighty proud of it and you’d want to show it off.

The cabin had electric lights, which Thomas Edison had invented in 1879. In their previous houses the family used oil lamps. She remembers her mother having to wash the lamp globes every day because they’d get black with soot. That’s how she started telling me the story. She was talking about house cleaning and that led to one thing and then another.

One evening the adults were gone and a lightbulb blew out. Mom knew where the extra bulbs were kept so she decided to change the bulb herself. She stood on a chair and started unscrewing the old bulb, but it seized in the socket and the glass globe broke off.

She decided to pry the rest of the bulb out. With a metal fork. Or as she put it, she planned on twisting the bulb, but the bulb wound up twisting her, and she learned a lesson about respecting this new force in her life called electricity. When her parents got home her mother switched off the light, put a piece of potato in the socket, and used the potato to twist the rest of the bulb out.

* For any local oldtimers who might want to take a guess as to the location of the house, here’s a couple of clues. The log cabin was whitewashed when they moved in and her dad whitewashed it with a mop every spring. Aso, her mom and dad in this story are her adoptive parents the Whiteheads, not her biological parents the Everetts.