FOR MOST OF THE CENTURY: THE GREEN FOUNTAIN PEN (PART 23)

Jean Bell Mosley's new autobiography, "For Most of the Century," is only available in serialized form in the Southeast Missourian. Return each week for her continuing story.

The great fashion, when I got to high school, was for the girls to wear a fountain pen suspended from a black ribbon worn around their necks. The ribbon was threaded through a ring at the top of the pen and was long enough so that writing with the pen could be accomplished without removing if from the neck. Gone were the old ink wells and scratchy ink pens of Loughboro days, although bottles of ink were still necessary because the fountain pen ran dry and had to be refilled. You dipped the point of the pen into the bottle, pulled down a little lever which squeezed air out of a rubber tube inside the pen. When the lever was released, ink was sucked up into the rubber tube.

I wanted one.

Although times were better for us, Mama said I could have one if I earned the money to buy one myself. Earn money myself! The only money I had earned to date was picking dewberries, and digging sassafras roots to sell to the drug stores. There was that two dollars I earned from the Blue Valley Creamery Company, but it was long gone.

There were several creameries in St. Louis where all the local farmers sent their cream. They all paid about the same. Blue Valley offered a dollar reward to anyone who could get them a new customer. I had persuaded two neighbors to switch to Blue Valley.

No berries were ripe at the time of my passionate desire and it was off season for digging sassafras roots. There was another avenue. There always seemed to be another avenue if one would only put her mind to it.

On a visit with Grandpa to the Farm Bureau Store I learned that you could return good feed sacks to the store and receive a nickel for them. Trouble was, all barns had mice and mice loved what was in these feed sacks too, so a good non-holey sack was hard to find.

"Can they be patched?" I asked.

"Yes."

So, up and down the river valley I went, asking for holey sacks that would otherwise be thrown away.

The green marbled fountain pen I wanted, in Tetley's Jewelry Store window at Farmington, was three dollars and ninety five cents. No tax. That meant sixty-nine sacks--really about seventy-five for some had to be used to cut the material for patches. The twine and darning needle, Mama furnished.

My sack enterprise was carried out in the smoke house after school and on Saturdays. I cut nice square patches, turned under edges and whipped them down over the holes. It was a long, dusty task. Hardest three dollars and ninety-five cents I ever earned.

Princess style dresses had come into fashion. Mama, still with no pattern, made me one of red calico print with white organdy collars and cuffs delicately trimmed with narrow ruffles. This was my favorite dress to wear with the green fountain pen. I think I must have preened like a peacock.

Perhaps I was Clara Bow by that time. No lipstick, though, to change the shape of my lips which took on a rather hard and determined line during all that sack patching.

Leaving the farm

I had no notion that there was an undercurrent in the family, an undercurrent that whispered of such a thing that it might be best if Dad, Mama, Lillian, Lou and I were to move to Doe Run.

Looking back, I can understand how much easier it would be for us girls to get to school and Daddy to his work if we made the move.

The thought had never crossed my mind that we would leave the land. The Land! It is described as real estate as if everything else is artificial. How would anyone ever have any security without land? Land to raise food? Land to raise cattle, hogs, chickens. Woods for firewood and wild turkeys and foxes. I had even fantasized where, on the farm, I would have a future home built. Me and who? Jay? George? Arley? Dink? Willie? Chesley?--boys I had met at school.

Never to go out with Grandpa in the spring to see if the ground crumbled enough for plowing? Never to follow him around the furrows as the plowshare laid back the great brown, satin layers of soil? Never to clean out the wet weather spring to let it run free, handle the fuzzy new chicks, find candy in the buggy top. I was leaving childhood literally and chronologically.

But Coolidge continued to make it better for business, worse for the farmers, so they said. Finally in 1929 we made the move and the separation.

One of the saddest days of my life was when the last load of furniture departed from the farm and I with it, sitting on top of Mama's dresser and waving goodbye to Grandma, standing in the doorway, waving. I turned to look at myself in the dresser's mirror. I didn't look at all like Janet Gaynor, nor Laura LaPlant, Clara Bow or Billie Burke. I could see Grandma in the mirror, still waving. As I waved back, facing the mirror, some kind of butterfly, or leaf or bird passed in the space between us. It was vague. "Was it a comforting message from you, God?"

If someone had told me it was the overall plan for Grandpa and Grandma to sell the farm and come to Doe Run later, I would not have suffered so much from the lumps in my throat, the lying awake at night thinking of Grandma and Grandpa out there alone with that lonesome call of tree frogs in the night.

We moved into a big, interesting, three story house that a family by the name of Neal had vacated. It had originally been built for a Dr. Graves. There were many floor levels, closets and stairways in unexpected places. Two big bay windows on either side of the first floor added architectural grace. There were eight large rooms and two hallways big as rooms at the bottom and top of the stairway. The stairway had a little twist at the top. There was also a stairway off a side porch leading to floors a little lower than the main second story, and then another short flight up to the main second story. These middle level rooms were for servants, so they said. I was unacquainted with servants except those I had read about.

Then there was a stairway leading from the second story to the third story. This third story had a skylight. This was new to me.

A long, brick walk, bordered by maple trees on both sides, led from the street to a wide flight of stairs that ascended to the front porch. This porch spanned the entire front of the house. Swiss Chateau-like banisters bordered the stairs and the porch and the roof of the porch. There was a large, concrete-floored back porch. Double doors, level with the porch floor, opened to steps that led down to the cellar.

A detached summer kitchen, which we used as a laundry room, bordered the west side of the back porch and a few feet in front of it was the well pump. The furnace, under the front porch, that had once heated the house was no longer operable. We erected our trusty heating stoves, fueled now by coal.

The expansiveness of the new home seemed to represent the new dimensions of life I was entering into. I did not go back to visit Grandma and Grandpa as often as I had promised. School and church activities took much time. And I was on that basketball team and could now stay and practice after school along with the rest of the team.

~Jean Bell Mosley is an author and longtime resident of Cape Girardeau.