Voices of the Ozarks - Wilma Reed

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Wilma Reed.

I was born March the 3rd, 1932.

I was born at Juliet, Missouri.

Who were your parents?

Clarence and Caroline Fireball.

What about grandparents?

My grandparents on my dad’s side was Emerson and Tampa.

T-E-M-P-A. Fireball.

And then my mother’s side was Noah and Talitha.

I don’t know how to spell that.

Young.

And what do you remember about growing up in Juliet?

Well, it was very, very country, you know.

And my first remembrance was, you know, of course, everybody lived out in the country, you know, and all that.

But we lived in a place and I didn’t ever know it that then.

And I don’t know if people called that then, but in the later years, they called it Fireball Haller, you know.

And, of course, we walked to school all the time.

And it was a little house that wasn’t very big.

And there was a barn and then a wonderful spring that we got our water from.

And it was just so good.

And back then, a lot of people, and we did, other people did too, but they had what they called a spring house because we didn’t have refrigerators and all of that.

So my dad built that.

And this spring was really, it was really a strong spring, you know, a lot of water.

And there was a little creek or a little area of water that runs in the spring.

And dad built that spring house over that water and put a door on it.

And so that’s where we, when we take our milk, we had the old stone jars, you know, like that, you know what that’s like.

And we’d put the milk in that and set that down in that water and it would come running about like it run all the time.

And it was very cold.

And that’s where we kept our milk and butter.

And sometimes if my mom would do a chicken to have for Sunday while she’d dress it out and put it there and put it in a container, cover it and take it over there and put it in that cold water, you know.

And then that creek run all the way down and it would, it went into, which was quite a long ways, but it went way down to where it run in the San Francis River.

Of course, it got much bigger than that because, you know, it started up there.

There was a creek there.

And then this, this water from the spring run into the bigger creek, you know, cause it was a creek that was ready.

And then the spring run into that and stuff.

So when you say you had a spring, did it just bubble up out of the ground?

Well, the way this one was, uh, yes, yes.

Like there was a, up behind it was a little, not a mountain or anything, but little hill, you know, it’s kind of like that.

And it kind of went across and this was kind of a little build up behind that spring.

And the spring just was there, you know, and it started its way down, you know, into the other spring, the one that had come way down from the hills and went all the way down to the big river and all of that.

But anyway, yes, it was, I don’t know how long it had been there.

It was there when we was there and stuff and all, but anyway, it was very, very good.

Now I’ll tell this little, little story.

Of course, you know, we, we never did, maybe our ice cream was mostly in the winter when it snowed and we’d go get, you know, make it as nice, but this, this is another part from the spring.

Like I said, we took their, the milk over there and you know, cream rises on milk, you know, just like that.

Well, we never did.

Of course, mom, she made us cookies