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Ida Hughes to celebrate 100th birthday |
By Deborah Turner
Mrs. Ida Hughes of McKenzie is turning wonderfully
old - or turning old wonderfully - with not only
clarity of both hearing and speech but also an
abundance of love in the friends, relatives and
neighbors who are so important to her. In fact,
regardless of any good genes she may have inherited,
Mrs. Hughes insists that love is what has allowed
her to age so gracefully.
"I was raised to love everybody and to be good,"
says Mrs. Ida. "I try to treat everybody right and
love people."
She was the only child of Annie Jones Manley and
Carlos Bell, born on June 25, 1901. She enjoyed
childhood growing up in "Jones Town", a small,
country community that lay in the fields across the
road from where Max Manley lives today, on Como
Street in McKenzie. The community was named after
the fact that there were so many Jones families
living there.
She still likes to go out on Como Road to reminisce
about days gone by. "That's where I discovered
America, " she says. The big ditch that exists
between where Jones Town was located and McKenzie
Park was also there when Mrs. Ida was a child. She
recalls her mother saying, on trips to town, "Be
careful not to fall in the ditch."
"I've carried her many a time to look at that
ditch," laughs close friend, Doris Woodard. Mrs. Ida
would also like to be able to visit the old cemetery
that lies in that vicinity but she isn't sure how to
find it all these years later.
As a child, she remembers playing "Mary, Mary" and
"Little Sally Walker" with her cousins in Jones
Town. Little Sally Walker, similar to Ring around
the Rosie, starts with a group of children holding
hands in a circle around one child who is crouched
in the center. The children in the circle sing,
"Little Sally Walker, sitting in the saucer; Rise,
Sally, rise; Wipe out your eyes; Put your hands on
your hips and let your backbone slip." As they sing,
the child in the middle rises, wipes out her eyes
and, as she puts her hands on her hips, the children
in the circle join in the motions, moving their hips
from side to side.
Mrs. Ida recalls the boys making, "Tom-walkers," a
sort of stilts made from tin cans that they strapped
to their feet with strings.
She recalled the big molasses cookies her cousin's
mama used to make, doling them out to the children
while she was cooking. The few she kept for herself
she placed beneath her apron while eating them, with
the children clamoring for those cookies as well.
She started school at Salem School in Jonestown but
circumstances soon led her to Bowden School farther
away in Randal Town, down by the old McKenzie stock
barn. She had to live with her uncle's family during
the week in order to be close enough to attend. Each
of the five children in her uncle's family had a
job: one daughter cooked breakfast, two other girls
milked the cows, and the boys took care of the
horses and hogs. The children carried their lunches
to school in buckets that were filled part way with
homemade sorghum molasses and finished off with
biscuits. "We'd go off by ourselves to eat to keep
the others from seeing what we had," said Mrs. Ida.
She moved to town with her family when she was about
ten years old to a home near Enon Church. She
attended McKenzie School, which was located close to
where she now lives on Booker Street. The high
school, situated across the street from the lower
grades school, was later called Rosenwald School.
These were schools that existed before Webb School
came into being.
Mrs. Ida was always particular about her shoes -
regular shoes hurt her feet, she said. Being an only
child, her mother was able to provide for her some
things the other children didn't have, including
patent leather shoes. She loved pleated dresses,
too, but she had a cousin who wasn't as fortunate,
and Mrs. Ida's mother would frequently give her
things to her cousin, Lucy. "She would take my
things and give them to my cousin Lucy. Her mother
got sick and couldn't take care of her, and then she
passed," explained Mrs. Ida, "She would take the
clothes off my back and put them on Lucy's back
because Lucy's mother was sick."
She never received a spanking from her mother but
was required to look her straight in the eye when
discipline meant she would get a talking-to.
Work started early in Mrs. Ida's life. She would
stop at Mrs. Mary Lee Burns' house on Magnolia
Street on her way to school to take in a load of
stove wood, then come back after school, bringing in
another load to cook with. Mrs. Burns and her
husband, Jim, were part owners of the Moore and
Burns Store in McKenzie.
Mrs. Ida continued working for Mrs. Burns into
adulthood and she recalled going into debt for the
first time in her life when she saw a pair of shoes
she just had to have. They were Lifeline shoes, and
cost $2.00. "I paid a quarter a week on them 'til I
got them paid," she said. When she told her employer
about her indebtedness, Mrs. Burns raised her salary
to 75 cents per week.
She worked for Mrs. Burns for many years until her
passing, working also for Mrs. Burns' daughter, Ruth
Cannon, after Ruth was grown and married. Soon after
Ruth married, Ida was also married to her childhood
sweetheart, Percy Hughes. "We didn't court too much,
back then we wanted to get grown too quick," she
says. Mrs. Ida was 18, but she was never sure about
the age of her husband: "He was older than me but he
never would tell me how old he was."
The couple lived with her mother for a time while
Percy farmed and worked at the sawmill. The couple
had one daughter, Ida Mae.
Mrs. Ida enjoyed working for Mrs. Ruth; she taught
her how to sew and how to cook elegant dishes, two
skills that were also enjoyable pastimes for Mrs.
Ida long after her working days were over. "I
continued sewing as long as I could," she says,
"Now, I can't even thread a needle."
"We didn't have no patterns back then - if you saw
people wearing something that you wanted, you cut it
out the best you could and made it. I really did
enjoy trying to sew," she said fondly.
"She learned to make fancy dishes, and that's the
way she cooked. And she was very good at making
pastries," claims Mrs. Woodard, who loved to eat her
pies when she was growing up. Mrs. Ida still has an
old Bethel College cookbook - "a real thick one" -
that has been the mainstay of some of her dishes.
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 The
other partners in Moore and Burns Store were Doug
and Gray Moore. They also ran the theatre and
Tri-County Electric Company in McKenzie. Doug Moore
was Mayor of the town as well, and ran a tire
recapping enterprise during the war that was
situated where the McKenzie City Hall sits today.
Mrs. Ida began cooking for the Moores, still helping
Mrs. Cannon from time to time.
In the meantime, Mrs. Ida's mother had always wanted
a boy, and practically adopted her brother's son,
Morgan Jones. When Morgan grew up, he became a
teacher and taught at Webb School for three years
before he died. Mrs. Ida's cousin, Earl Hughes, also
became as close as a brother, her mother always
calling him "her precious Jewel."
Mrs. Ida continued working for the Moores for 18 to
20 years doing her favorite job - cooking - as well
as washing and ironing and other duties. New
opportunity presented itself, however, when her
friend, Golena Puckett gave up her position as a
cook at the McKenzie stock barn. Mrs. Ida quit her
own job with the Moores to fill the vacancy, cooking
during livestock sales at the restaurant that still
stands on Randal Street. She also worked for Ben
Everett, Sr. for a time.
Mrs. Ida's husband passed away in 1940 and her
daughter, Ida Mae, moved to Los Angeles, California
in December 1941, to work for a lady who was first
cousin to Shirley Temple. The needs of the war,
however, soon took her into the factory. In later
years, Ida Mae earned her real estate license and
became a licensed beautician. Though she married,
she never had any children.
Mrs. Ida moved to California to be with her daughter
and was there when Ida Mae passed away in 1980. She
stayed on a few more years and says, "If I could
have drove a car I'd be out there now."
She enjoyed sight-seeing and going places as a busy
member of a senior citizens group there, once
venturing to Las Vegas: "We played the wheel, me and
another girl, but we didn't get nothing. We played
it one time, and we didn't get nothing and didn't
play but one game - we had to pay a quarter, I
remember."
When she returned to Tennessee, she brought her
daughter's white poodle, Jezebel, with her. "She was
a sweet little dog," recalls Mrs. Ida, remembering
how she would talk to the dog when it would bark at
noises from the neighbors' houses. "Don't bark,
that's not our house," she would counsel Jezebel.
Before leaving for California, she had organized the
Ever Ready Club, a help organization to lend a hand
when people in the community were sick or had a
death in the family, going so far as to seeing that
the grave was dug.
When she returned, she found the club had gone down
in her absence, and she started a new club, modeled
after the Senior Citizens Club she had left behind
in California. "We meet, talked, had food and soda -
whatever wanted to do," she said. They also ordered
seeds and planted them in their gardens.
Besides California, Mrs. Ida has traveled to
Cleveland, Ohio; Milwaukee, Wisconsin; Virginia, and
Washington D.C., where Earl lived during his career
with the Army.
Mrs. Ida is a member of the Mount Olivet Cemetery
Club, a group dedicated to the upkeep and
preservation of the historic cemetery for the black
population in McKenzie that lies beyond the more
visible portion of Mount Olivet Cemetery on
Cherrywood Road in McKenzie. The group has been
responsible for having a drive paved into the
cemetery, erecting a sign and has the lawn mowed
twice per month. "It's right nice out there now,"
she says.
She has been a member of the Johnson Temple
Methodist Church since about the age of 13. Her
mother would give her a dime every week, which Mrs.
Ida would then contribute as tithes, giving a nickel
a piece to church officials, Elder Featherstone and
Reverend Pie.
She has been very active in the church over the
years, serving as President of the Stewards Board as
well as being a member of the Missionary Board and
attending Sunday School.
In her early years of membership, the church was
known as Collins Chapel and was located near Booker
Street where Mrs. Ida currently lives. One end of
the Collins Chapel church was at ground level while
the other side was high above the ground, allowing
the children to crawl up under the church to play in
the relative coolness. The old, useless doors
allowed dogs and cats to come into the building
while church services continued. When the church was
relocated to its present location on Walnut Street,
it was renamed Johnson Temple.
Mrs. Ida is a member of the Webb Alumni Association
and, says Mrs. Woodard, "saves her pennies in order
to be able to make a contribution during Webb's
Labor Day Celebration each year."
Mrs. Ida is thankful for Doris Woodard, Daisy
Dudley, Ora Dean Sneed, Minnie Pearl Haynes,
Fairbell Gilbert and others who she calls her
children. She is also thankful for her cousin, Earl,
who lives with Mrs. Ida since moving back to
Tennessee from Washington, D.C. after retiring from
the Army.
Mrs. Woodard laughingly expounded on Mrs. Ida's
favorite pastimes: "She loves to shop for clothes,
loves to go to Jackson and when she's done all of
this she likes to go out to eat. She eats at Higgs a
lot and she want to go in to all of them to eat. And
if she sends out for food, she wants her chicken
from Raceway, and she enjoys going to Trolinger's in
Paris to get meat skins."
"I don't visit like I used to," Mrs. Ida lamented.
She spends a lot of time sitting in her mother's
chair, looking out the window. "Sometimes we get to
talking about it and I want to cry because I can't
do what I used to be able to do."
Still, she says, "I have so much to be thankful for,
so much."
She enjoys entertaining and having friends in and is
looking forward to her "Centennial Birthday
Celebration" to be held at Webb School on Saturday,
June 23rd between the hours of 4:00 and 7:00. The
special event is sponsored by the Johnson Temple CME
Church. |
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