Voices of the Ozarks – Sharon Robbins

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My name is Sharon Robbins and I was born in Glen Allen Missouri, July 5, 1948. According to my momma, it was a very hot day and she had a large garden and the corn was about ready and she spent the day picking and shucking and canning corn the day I was born. The corn wasn’t quite ready and she always said she liked her corn “nubiny”, not quite fully ripe which seemed to big. Sharon says that’s what shaped her to love the first, tenderest sweet corn. Her parents were Winfred and Lavern Upchurch that lived on a small farm outside of Glen Allen. She had an older brother who died tragically when they were teenagers. She also had a much younger brother that still owns and farms the family farm.

Her first memory of childhood was getting electricity in the house when she was only two. She and her older brother followed the electrician, Elmer Hahn, around the house collecting the little round metal “coins” that were left over from punching out holes in the metal outlet boxes.

Sharon says that growing up on a farm they often played “farm” on the old front porch where they would play with toy tractors. She mentions the lizards that her brother didn’t like. On the porch there was a hammock and a porch swing and she remembers many hours of reading there and enjoying the stars in the dark skies. They didn’t have a television yet and in the summer it was cooler on the porch because there was no air conditioning.

She mentions that the house faced a gravel road and there was a creek at the far end of the fields. She says the 4th of July was a big celebration but that the dog lucky didn’t like the sounds of the fire crackers.

5:00

She talks more about her folks starting with a 40 acre farm just outside the town of Glen Allen in Bollinger County. Daddy served in WWII in the Pacific, momma worked at a small arms plant in St. Louis. They saved to buy the farm and there’s a funny story about that. The man who sold the farm to them would often come back and would walk around and take stuff from the yard and even took the clothes line and clothes!

Both of her parents grew up around Glen Allen and were engaged before her dad went to the war. When he left her mom went to work in St. Louis at the arms factory where many other women were working and she shared an apartment with some of them. When she got word that he was coming home from the war she went to California to meet him. While waiting there she got a job at a candy factory and Sharon shares a story about her quitting the job because she didn’t want to join the union.

10:00

Sharon talks about her parents’ return to Missouri and Bollinger County where they were full time farmers. She tells a story about how she and her brother would collect the grass clippings which they pretended was hay. They would take it to the barn and use a bucket to haul the “hay” up to the barn with a pulley.

She says that her grandfather (her dad’s dad) was still farming at that time and still used a team of horses. She’s asked about what kind of farm they had and she says that they had hogs, Jersey milk cows, corn, alfalfa hay, wheat. She says they had a milk route in Glen Allen. He would collect the milk and her momma would filter it and bottle it. She says that at least a third of each quart of milk was heavy cream and most people, including herself, really loved the cream. She says Guernesy cows also have a lot of cream in their milk but that Holsteins, another dairy cow, produces far more milk but far less cream. She says they also sold cream and mentions one of the cream cust