Voices of the Ozarks – Willa Dean Combs

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My name is Willa Dean Combs. I was born in 1930 in Bollinger County. We lived in northern Bollinger county and I moved to Madison County later when I married.

Willa says that she and her husband had a farm on Castor River and that he passed in 2017.

She says she was born May 20, 1930 in the middle of the Great Depression. She says that some of her earliest memories relate to her younger brother getting into trouble and she, as the older sister, trying to get him out of it. But then she shares a story of her brother crying and her mother coming to find out that she had bitten him. Her younger brother was the only sibling she had. She says that she and her brother played a lot on the farm where they grew up. She says their main source of entertainment was playing in or near the pond.

She tells a story about her dad telling them that the mail carrier was a government man and that they should stay out of the pond or they would get in trouble. Her brother would hide behind the oak tree when the mail man walked by. She says that he had a nack for getting into trouble and she was the mother hen that tried to keep him out of trouble. She admits that often the trouble was her trying to get him to do things he didn’t want to do. She speculates that perhaps the mother hen tendency is what led her to become a school teacher.

5:00

She went to school in a rural school that was about a mile and a half away from their home. They walked to school for awhile. At some point her teacher that drove by the house on the way to school started picking them up. She says the teacher’s name was Grace Smith and she was her favorite teacher. She want to grade school at South Liberty. She went to high school in Patton and graduated when she was 16 in 1946. That summer she started college in Cape. They were not wealthy but her dad was determined that she’d have a good education. She was hired the next term to teach in a rural school after only one semester of college. She says that was fairly common back then. Teaching at 16 meant that some of her students were almost as big as her. She taught all 8 grades for about 4 years.

She met her husband during her fourth year of teaching. They were married November 25, 1948. She was 18. During that time she would go to school at Cape in the summer and then teach in the fall. She says her school was consolidated into the Patton district. She was married and they were living in Madison County when she got a job teaching at a school at the junction of J and 72 highways, the old Union school which has been gone for many years. She would also do correspondence and night courses working towards her degree. She would car pool with other students to Cape.

10:00

She worked on her degree for over 10 years and got it in 1962.  She says that was somewhat normal during that time, especially with teachers that were teaching while getting their degree. She taught full time for 39 years and 3 months.

She had 2 daughters. Her parents helped with watching the kids. She says her oldest daughter passed of cancer in 2004.

She says that she had both of her daughters as students.

We ask her about why she became a teacher and why education was important to her. She says it was a teacher that she had in grade school that was a model teacher and took her under her wing.

14:00

She talks about the poverty of depression and the scarcity of wartime rationing. She says they always had clothes and food thanks to the farm. She talks about the dresses her mother made her from chicken feed bags. The fabric was often flor