John
Hubert Chandler
1909
- 1963
Some Things I Remember About My Brother, John, From the Day He Was Born Until His Fifth Birthday.
By Snow Chandler Castleberry, 1967.
John and Katie Chandler were expecting their seventh child in the summer of 1909. I was almost eleven years old at the time, but hadn’t even suspected that there was to be a new addition to the family. As in those days, things like that were not discussed around the children.
The only thing that worried we three older children, Mary, Elmer, and me, was that mamma had told us that we were not going to attend the annual picnic and fish fry that year. It was the custom for the entire neighborhood to gather in a grove of trees on the banks of the Saline River on each 4th of July for this event. Each family took a bountiful lunch, and the men seined in the river for fish, which they dressed and the women fried in iron skillets over a fire built on the ground, and also made pots of strong, steaming coffee to drink.
It was something we all looked forward to and we were real disappointed that we couldn’t go this year. I don’t remember just what explanation was given us, but think that Mamma told us that Papa had to work that day and couldn’t take the time off from his plowing. This year the picnic was held on a Saturday (July 3), since the fourth came on Sunday and no one went fishing on Sunday. I well remember that Saturday morning, Mamma woke us three kids up about daylight and gave us our breakfast, and then told us we could go spend the day with Aunt Mat. She and “Pappy” as we called our grandfather, lived about 1/4th of a mile from us. The three of us trudged off, still a little unhappy about the picnic but happy to be spending the day with Aunt Mat, who we dearly loved. Her son Kelsey was about three years old at the time. Anyway we spent the day with them and watched wagon loads of people passing on the way to the river.
We had been told that we could stay until Papa got home from work and came after us, and about the middle of the afternoon we saw him coming walking down the road and were some what surprised that he had come in from his plowing that early. When he got to the house, where we were all out playing in the front yard under a huge Mimosa tree, he told us that the doctor came that day and left us a new baby brother. We couldn’t wait to get home to see him. When we asked Mamma what his name was, she said, “John Hubert”, and that we would call him John. So we felt like having a new baby more than made up for the missed picnic.
John was a good baby all day but just before sundown every day he stated crying and sometimes cried for hours. He had what they called 3 months colic. I can remember holding him against my little skinny shoulder trying to keep him quiet while Mamma would be trying to get supper. She would usually have to give him a few drops of paregoric before he became easy enough to go to sleep. The way she gave it to him, she would milk about a teaspoonful of milk from her breast, then drop the paregoric in the milk and fed it to him.
The next spring Papa bought a baby buggy for him. That was the first time Mamma had ever had a buggy for any of the babies. Mary and I would take him in the buggy down in the woods where we made our playhouses. He would be content to sit in the buggy and watch us around him until he would get sleepy then we would lay him down and push him back and forth until he would go to sleep. In those days, as always since, I dearly loved to read, so a lot of times while John slept and Mary busied herself with mud pies or other childish playhouse activities, I would pretend I was going upstairs and would climb a tree and sit there and read while I kept an eye on the baby.
I usually from the time I was 8 or 10 years old had rather have a book as any other gift for Christmas, and that’s what I got. Christmas was about the only time we received gifts. It wasn’t an everyday thing as it is now. I wonder now what became of those books. They would be such priceless treasures, if I had them now. Papa had to buy all our school books as none were furnished by the school, and they were handed down from child to child. I loved reading the stories over and over in the McGuffey readers.
John didn’t learn to crawl on hands and knees, but sat straight up and scooted along on his little bottom. He could get along real well like that, would even go down the steps into the yard. I remember that he had some diapers made of dark auting flannel since the white ones got so dirty. One day in the fall after he was a year old, we kids came from school one day and Mamma told us that she had been over to Uncle John and Aunt Mollie’s house that day, (they were Ben’s parents) and she said that Uncle John told her she better make that baby start walking, and if she didn’t his legs would “perish” away and he would be like a cripple all his life. She was real worried about it and of course it worried Mary and me so we would stand him up and one hold onto him to keep him from falling and the other get out in front a little way and coax him to take a step toward us. In a little while he was balancing himself and taking a few steps and before we went to bed that night we had him walking across the room. He never went back to scooting after that night.
Along about the first of the year of 1911, Papa had a real bad spell of pneumonia. Then while he was still real bad sick, Jack had an attack of membranous croup which ran into what the doctors then called catarrhal fever. For several days they didn’t know if either of them would live. Then about the time they began to get better Mamma came down with pneumonia which ran into a typhoid form. For weeks she lay between life and death.
Aunt Joe lived with us and took over the care of all of us along with help from other relatives and neighbors, but the care of the baby fell on Mary and me in the main part. I remember during that time one night he had one of the crying spells with the stomachache, like he had when he was a tiny baby. While he was crying the doctor came to see Mamma and he gave him a dose of something that eased him. I don’t remember him ever having a real bad attack after that although all along he used to complain of stomach aches when he was older.
About the time Mamma was getting better, one day Uncle Gene and Mamma’s half-brother, Jess Craddick, gathered up a big washing and got out behind the smoke house, built a fire under the big old wash kettle to heat water and proceeded to do the laundry. They used a lot of lye in the water and failed to give the clothes a good rinsing, so the first thing we knew John’s little bottom was broken out in little blisters from the diapers. Can’t remember what Aunt Joe did for it but do remember that we washed all the diapers over again.
Mamma was still weak and sick and was worried about the baby and one day she told me to be sure and be real good to John because he wasn’t going to live very long. It almost broke my heart and I hugged him up and went and told Aunt Joe what Mamma said and she explained to me that Mamma just didn’t realize what she was saying since she was still so weak from the typhoid. Anyway I was somewhat comforted but still worried about him.
The next thing that stands out in my memory about him happened on his 5th birthday. Papa got up early that morning and went fishing. John had had a chill the day before. There was a lot of malaria in Arkansas then and some of us kids were always having chills and fevers in the summer time. Mamma always made us a cake on our birthday and that morning she made one for John A neighbor boy was over playing with Jack and John and when Mamma got the cake made, John asked if she would cut it then and give them all a piece of it before the other boy went home. At first she said no they would have to wait and we would have it for supper when Papa came home, but then she relented and cut it and gave each of the three boys a slice. That was before noon, and about noon John took another chill. His fever went real high and all afternoon we drew cool water out of the well and Mamma kept wet cloths on his head. He was threatened with spasms which the high fever from the chills would cause a lot of times. We were so worried about him as he was unconscious all afternoon. Finally along toward night Papa came home and when he saw how sick he was he called a doctor. Seems to me that by the time the doctor arrived he was a little better but still very sick.
Up until that time we didn’t know anything about people taking shots, but this doctor said that it just wouldn’t do for John to have another chill the next day and that he could give him a shot that would prevent him having one, but if he just gave him medicine he was afraid it wouldn’t keep it off. So Papa told him to go ahead and give the shot. He did and the next day John was better, but the place on his hip where he gave the shot made a big old sore that was a long time healing and I imagine the scar was there as long as he lived.
I have heard Mamma say many times that all that afternoon and night when he was so sick and she thought he was going to die, she kept being so glad that she let him eat some of the birthday cake.
Note: I copied the above exactly as written by John Hubert Chandler’s older sister, Snow Chandler Castleberry in 1967.