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The McCullough family
gathers at the road sign that bears their name. From
left to right, front row: granddaughters Cassidy and
Natasha, and daughter Anna and husband Earl Linton;
second row: daughter Natalie, mom Verdie, daughters
LaVerdia and Jeruna, dad Nathaniel; back row: daughter
Psyanita and grandson Nathan, and (behind Nathaniel)
grandsons Brian and Jarrod.
Nathaniel and Verdie Mae McCullough reside outside
McLemoresville on a road that bears their name, and in
the same vicinity in which both were born and raised,
though Nathaniel had a six-year head start on the young
lady who would become his wife.
"I remember her good though," he says, head tossed back
in recollection of a day when she was too young to be
considered as anything more than a friend. "I know she
was a pretty little girl; she was a sweet little girl."
Verdie smiles, entranced in her own memories. Nathaniel
was a post-World War II Army veteran and she was 15 or
16 when the two "first started trying to talk a little
bit."
"I still wasn't receiving company at home," she
explains. The couple courted on and off six years or so
before tying the knot in marriage.
Living out in the country, some of their get-togethers
included walking to Dunbar School, where both had
completed their eighth grade educations, to attend
plays and other community events.
In later years, they would walk to McLemoresville to
catch the bus to Milan, a 25-cent ride to see a movie
that was just 15 cents. They had time to visit a
nightspot before walking from downtown Milan to where
the Dairy Queen is now located, to catch the bus back
to McLemoresville.
The prices were deceptively cheap: "Back then money was
hard to come by," Nathaniel declares. He recalls
hitchhiking to Huntingdon when he was 15 or 16 years
old, watching a 15-cent movie and walking back home.
Walking was a main source of transportation in an age
when the pace of life slowed time in tandem with hot
summers abbreviated by gentle breezes, like the four
and a half mile walks Verdie and her girlfriends made
to Trezevant. There they would rest at the train
station's café to watch the train come in, then stroll
back home again.
Saturdays after work was done folks would clean up and
head for the park in McLemoresville where one could get
a big, double dip ice cream cone for a dime.
Bologna sandwiches an inch thick were just a nickel,
Nathaniel marvels. "We'd have a big ol' time in
McLemoresville."
It was between the years of 1948 and 1950 when
electricity finally came to the rural community. She
recalls it was 1948 when she was a student at Webb High
School, he remembers a later advent. But the two agree
that before that time there was only lamplight in the
evenings and, for a long time, not even a radio for
outside communication and entertainment.
Verdie recalls her mother's first cousin Ella Hall
owned the first battery operated radio in the
community. In their own home, when Verdie was six or
seven years old, her mother, Geneva Williamson, brought
home a Victrola phonograph.
"She'd wind it up, set the needle on it and play the
blues!" Verdie laughs, recalling, "I tried my best to
see those guys playing music inside that little horn. I
finally realized they weren't in there... Mother let
someone else have the Victrola and all the records when
we got lights."
Born August 20, 1932, the daughter of Ms. Geneva and
Waddell Taylor, some of Verdie's favorite memories of
early childhood centered on field day activities at
Dunbar School with games, oratorical contests, plays
and spelling bees among the fun events.
"I won that and now I can't spell nothing," she says,
rolling her eyes.
On display would be projects, art displays and the
needlework girls learned in the sixth grade, including
crochet and embroidery.
Teachers in the three-room school house were Mrs. Mabel
Neblitt for grades one and two; Miss Helen Greer (who
later became Mrs. Helen Warford) for grades three, four
and five, and Mr. Edward (E.A.) Neblitt in the upper
grades, with graduation occurring after eighth grade.
"You had to have that diploma before going to high
school," said Verdie, who was valedictorian of her
class. Graduating eighth graders received gifts just
like those graduating from high school, she said.
Starting high school at Webb High School in McKenzie
was a whole new experience. Instead of walking five and
a half miles to school, she walked a mile and a half to
McLemoresville to catch the bus. During football and
basketball season, the bus trip home was delayed until
after the game was over; kids chose to go to school and
stay until after the ballgame or remain at home.
"High school was a lot different," says Verdie, who was
a member of the basketball team. She was also a
majorette her freshman year.
"You were?" asks Nathaniel, astounded.
And she was the Junior Queen.
Nathaniel looks at her in astonishment, then sits back
and pouts. "She ain't told me nothing," he says,
shaking his head.
During her sophomore or junior year she received the
best honor of all, being selected to travel to
Nashville as the school's New Homemaker of America
delegate.
The appointment was an important one, made more special
by the contributions of schoolmates who wanted to be
sure Verdie had everything she needed to represent her
school well.
"I was supposed to wear a white dress, so one girl
brought a white dress," she smiles. "Everybody brought
something; what I didn't have they brought for me to
wear because they wanted me to go."
Accompanying Verdie was Home Economics Teacher Sleita
Hyder.
"She was real nice," Verdie says, recalling the trip to
the big city. "I'd never been to Nashville; it was an
experience when you've never been away from home."
After graduating in 1951, Verdie moved on to another
big city - St. Louis - where her Aunt Savannah
Williams, her mother's sister, lived with her husband
Gene. She stayed there for a year and a half while,
back home, Nathaniel was working at the Milan Arsenal.
He was born on March 25, 1926 as Lonnie Nathaniel
McCullough, Jr. - the youngest of three boys and two
girls. But just as many folks know him by his nickname,
Tillie.
He was "just a little bitty boy" of six or seven, he
explains, when Dr. Polk came out from Milan to see his
brother. The doctor called him "Tik-a-lik" and it
stuck, eventually being shortened to Tillie.
"People taken it up," Nathaniel says, with the name so
indelibly his own that, when he was older and people
paid him for odd jobs with checks made payable to
"Tillie McCullough", the banks would cash them, no
questions asked.
His parents, Lonnie and Cassie McCullough, were
farmers, though his father worked as well during the
1930s on the highways as part of Roosevelt's Works
Progress Administration (WPA) Program.
Nathaniel, well known for his skill at the piano,
appears to have inherited his talent from his father,
who was a natural on the guitar and might have had
great success had his mother not admonished him, "The
devil has got you, Son."
Lonnie, Sr., was a member of "The Hutch Band" that
played locally and was planning a foray to Fulton,
Kentucky when his mother's warning stopped him short.
Nathaniel was about ten years old when he started
learning to play the piano, with his sister Naola, who
was six years older, at one end and he on the other.
Then one day, he sat down by himself and, he says, "It
just came to me; I started to playing and brought my
mother and dad out of the other room. I just went on
from there."
He could listen to a song one time and play it back, so
in tune were his skills, though he says, "I'm an old
man, it's getting little bit harder now, my fingers are
stiff."
At Dunbar School by the New Reedy Creek Church he and
other boys played a marble game called "pergie" as well
as rubber ball when they were small, then softball in
later years.
"The first man at bat would knock the ball in the
thicket and we'd be the rest of recess looking for the
ball!" he chortles. Those who lost at pergie had to
"give knucks" - let the other boys shoot marbles at
their knuckles. "That hurt, too!" he recalls.
Nathaniel's favorite class was history, a subject made
easier by the stories he'd heard his grandfather, Peter
Hillsman, tell about the Civil War and slavery.
"My grandfather was 90 when he died but he would tell
me all about the Civil War; he remembered the Civil
War," Nathaniel relates, rattling off the names of
Civil War generals.
Hillsman was nine years old when a Yankee officer
offered to take him along as caretaker for his horse.
A slave until liberated by the emancipation
proclamation, he saw his "old master" shot down by
"bushwhackers" intent upon stealing his horse.
"They took him to the back side of the pasture and
every one of those guys shot him and he fell in the
pond," recounts Nathaniel at the end of the tale.
Mr. Hillsman never learned to read and write - he
thought "P.H." were the complete symbols for "Peter
Hillsman", says Nathaniel - but he passed on a wealth
of information to his grandson, including songs of the
era like, "Uncle Abe is a'comin' to bust up Jeff
Davis... O'rally, O'rally..."
But his father's father, Grandvel McCullough, fought
with the South, along with another former slave, Nat
Simmons. When Mr. McCullough returned home from the
war, at 30 years old, he married Nathaniel's
grandmother, who at the time was 13.
Nathaniel's own 27-month military experience took place
as World War II was ending. He attended basic training
at Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri, then technical school
in Louisiana, before being assigned to the Philippines
in the South Pacific in September, 1945, a month after
Japan's surrender.
"It was still dangerous over there; some of those
Japanese didn't know the war was over," declares
Nathaniel concerning units of Japanese soldiers who
were hiding or holding out in the mountains and jungles
of the islands.
Nathaniel's job on the islands as a member of a combat
engineering battalion was to build roads and bridges,
making way for the infantry coming behind them.
"It was hotter than Florida," muses Nathaniel, who says
later visits to the southern state "reminded me of the
Philippine Islands so much."
It was between 80 and 90 degrees in December 1945 when
he left the islands to return to the United States.
Back home, he grins, he started "courting a little
bit", though it was a few more years before Verdie was
old enough to catch his eye.
When she was older, he would ride a gray horse called
Nell to her house.
"I could just turn her loose in the yard," he grins,
"She wouldn't leave."
Ben Shaddock, who was half Indian, Nathaniel says, told
him how to train the horse: "When you get her to come
to you, have sugar in your hand. Let her lick the sugar
and she'll start doing anything you want her to."
Nathaniel began working at the Milan Arsenal in 1949,
when Verdie was in high school. Then came her jaunt to
St. Louis after graduation in 1951. With production
winding down, Nathaniel was laid off in 1953; Verdie
came home, and the two married.
Along with farming cotton, corn, and hogs, Nathaniel
drove the school bus to the MTA (McLemoresville,
Trezevant, and Atwood) and Webb schools for three
years.
In the years to come, the couple had five daughters:
first daughter LaVerdia was named after Verdie's best
friend, LaFrances Bigham. "She was just my sister,
that's all it was," says Verdie of the friendship that
lasted a lifetime.
Pysanita, their second daughter, was named by
Nathaniel's sister, Naola, after a French movie of the
same name. Anna Lou was named for Nathaniel's mother
Cassie Anna. Jeruna, named by Nathaniel's niece, would
have been Geronimo Defonde had she been a boy, or Peter
Granvel after both grandfathers if Nathaniel's oldest
sister Isola had won out; Natalie Yolanda came last,
her name, like Nat King Cole's daughter, derived from
her father's.
"That was the closest to Nathaniel we were going to
get," Verdie says.
The children last year sent the couple on a trip to
visit friends in San Francisco for their 50th wedding
anniversary. "We had a grand time!" they both enthuse.
Jeruna was 11 months old when Verdie went to work at
Rose Laundry in Huntingdon. As transportation was a
problem with Nathaniel driving the school bus, he
eventually advised, "If you're going to work you need
to learn how to drive."
She piled her own daughters - Jeruna, who was almost
two, and the older girls 5, 7, and 9 - plus neighbor,
Mrs. Ardel Newbill's, girls, ages 9, 12 and 14 - into
the truck for driving lessons.
"We had some fun trying to learn to drive!" Verdie
exclaims, recalling the girls taking turns telling her
what to do when none had any experience with driving.
Though she later spent 17 years driving the RSVP
(Retired Senior Volunteer) van before retiring in 1998,
she laughs, "I still can't parallel park."
"It's a wonder I hadn't killed them and me both," she
says, shaking her head at the exploit.
Nathaniel returned to the Milan Arsenal in 1965, from
which he retired after 25 years.
The youngest deacon ever ordained at Reedy Creek
Baptist Church when he was 27 or 28 years old,
Nathaniel is now the oldest deacon and chairman of the
deacon board. He is also superintendent of Sunday
Schools and the church musician and pianist for the
choir. Verdie is president of the usher board and also
teaches Sunday School for ages six through 11.
Reedy Creek Baptist Church is the oldest black church
in the county, the couple relates proudly, and maybe in
the state, dating back before the Civil War to 1836,
when early church members, who were white, first met in
homes before renovating a building the following year
on property purchased for $25.00.
"Black people joined in slavery time," says Nathaniel,
who can quote volumes of complicated history from
memory. The first black pastor during the days of
slavery was Levi Price, he says, who went on to
organize other churches before his death in 1909 and
whose legacy still draws big crowds at the Price
reunion every other year.
In 1867, when white parishioners moved to a new
building in Trezevant, they sold the church to the
black congregation. When the church later burned, a log
cabin sufficed until the membership could no longer be
contained and a new church was built in 1877.
The third Sunday in May 1877, when the congregation
moved into the new building, was one of the biggest
days in the history of the church, he says. Church
gatherings on third Sundays from then on drew huge
crowds, with people from far and wide taking vacations
in order to attend the services.
Reedy Creek became the mother of six other local
Baptist churches, Nathaniel relates, including St.
John's in McKenzie; Wingo in Trezevant; Mt. Everett at
Trezevant; New Reedy Creek in McLemorezville; Mt.
Olivet outside Huntingdon; and Little Grove in Lavinia.
In addition to singing with the RSVP choir, Nathaniel
sings and plays the piano at Oak Manor Nursing Home. He
is also a member of the RSVP Advisory Board. In
addition to helping people in her neighborhood, Mrs.
Verdie volunteers at the Huntingdon Historical Museum.
Nathaniel and Verdie enjoy working in their garden each
year, this past year's harvest being their biggest yet.
They take pleasure in sharing their bounty with friends
and neighbors. "Older people still like to pick and
can," she explains. By 7:30 or 8:00 on summer mornings,
they're coming out of the garden, their day's work done
before the sunshine has time to overheat the day.
"Every one of our children are college graduates,"
Verdie says with deserved pride, "The Lord was good to
us."
The couple have five grandchildren: Natasha, 20; Brian,
16; Jarrod, soon to be 18; Nathan, 19; and Cassidy, who
is in the third grade at West Carroll Elementary
School. |
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