FOR MOST OF THE CENTURY: TRAGEDY CONNECTED WITH MILK AND CREAM (PART 8)

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.

Stephen Wilson, my brother, was born at home December 20, 1916. I was barely 3 years old so don't remember the event. Nor do I remember much about him except for photos that seem to call up some dim memories and the things the other family members have told to me.

S.W., as we called him, was fond of somehow getting into a two-gallon bucket and letting Grandpa carry him about in it. Also, learning that Grandma put on a hat and carried a suitcase when she went to visit her daughter, Aunt Luzena Bell Bryan, in Bonne Terre, Mo., he sometimes put on Grandma's hat and carried the suitcase, evidently pretending he was going on a trip.

Less than 2 years old, S.W. was playing about the kitchen one day while churning the milk was under way. Although the churn had a wooden lid with a hole in it through which the handle of the dasher protruded, milk did escape through this hole and also around the lid. It splattered onto the kitchen floor. S.W. picked up a dried bean from somewhere and put it into his mouth as little ones are prone to do with such objects. He stepped into some of the splattered milk, slid and fell. The bean went down his windpipe. Mama and Grandma knew instantly that he was choking. No amount of upside down shaking or ther methods of trying to dislodge anything that he might have swallowed worked. He was hurried to Elvins to a doctor; hurried, of course, meaning having to harness and hitch a horse to a buggy and drive 10 miles.

Since S.W. was still managing to breathe fairly well, the doctor felt that everything would be all right. No X-ray. None recommended. I doubt that there was such a machine available within many miles. He was brought back home to "recuperate." The bean was truly lodged and, surrounded by moisture, began to swell choking off breath entirely. He died. It was a tragic death, something one might expect to happen in early pioneer days. This was 1918.

Stephen Wilson Bell, only son of Wilson and Myrtle Bell, is buried at Bonne Terre, Mo., not far from where his grandfather and grandmother, Stephen and Josephine, were to be buried later.

Not only was it the cream and butter that helped to finance my raising, cream, in an indirect way, launched my later writing career.

When older sister, Lillian, was ready for high school, having finished the eighth grade at rural Loughboro School, she attended Doe Run, Mo., High School for her ninth grade. This school was about five miles from our home. It proved very difficult to get her back and forth. Therefore, for the remainder of her high school education, she spent these school years with Grandma Mary Alice Casey at Fredericktown, Mo., about 50 miles south of our home. Here she was within a short walking distance of the school.

When it came time for her graduation she wrote a letter to us at home saying that the graduating girl students were going to wear caps and gowns and black shoes.

We saved enough of the butter, egg and cream money to buy a pair of black shoes for her graduation and with a sense of enormous satisfaction that few would understand today, mailed them to her.

Then, as women sometimes do, the girls in her class decided they were going to wear white shoes. What were we to do? The shoe money had been spent. Lillian was to be salutatorian and would be in at least partial limelight.

As mentioned above, we took our cream to Elvins, about 10 miles away, by horse and buggy or wagon. There it was put on a train and shipped to the creamery in St. Louis. Naturally, by the time it got there it was always sour cream. But for the one and only time it ever stayed sweet on this long trip was the very time we needed extra money to buy a pair of white shoes. Sweet cream sold for almost double that of sour cream! We bought the white shoes and got them there in time.

In 1948, after a short career of teaching and longer career as a secretary, I wrote about this incident and sold it to Women's Day in April 1951. My first story sold! More about this letter.

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