My name is Alice Applegate. I am one of those red neck hillbillies from the hills of Vanceburg, Kentucky. I was the tenth of twelve children. I have eight brothers and three sisters. We were raised on 84 acres of hilly country, so we had plenty of room to roam. When I was little the snow lasted all winter, so we did not have to worry about waiting to go sleigh riding. We made our own sleds out of timber so they wouldn’t fall apart no matter how many trees we hit or how many hills we ran over.

When I started school, it was a great day in a one-room schoolhouse with a potbelly stove in the middle of the floor. My friend Janet Riley and I were the only two in the first grade. We had one teacher that taught all grades. We were quite mischievous. Some of us went early to school and climbed through the windows and locked the teacher out. I lived about a half mile from the school so we would walk home for lunch, skating on the ice the whole way. We would pull the big icicles off the slate bank and suck on the way home.

My dear, beautiful mother, wonder she did not have a break down trying to raise us children. She was a wonderful, loving, Christian mother. She made up for my dad he was as mean as a rattlesnake. We did not have electricity until I was about eight. Therefore, we had to draw our water out of a well. I remember when they drilled our well. Some neighbor guy carried a forked stick and if the stick pulled downward, that is where the water was. Our well never went dry when everyone else’s did. Mom used to scrub our clothes on a washboard. We had the clothesline full every day. People said she must be awful clean or awful dirty. I think us kids were the dirty ones. The boys logged and chopped wood to keep the stoves going. We had a stove with a warming oven in the top and a reserve on the side. My girlfriend told me just last year while visiting her in Florida that when she would come and visit me she was always jealous because we had the reserve on the side of our stove to heat water. She thought we must be rich. We were poor as church mice.

My mom had all of us at home with a doctor or a midwife. My last sibling was my youngest sister, Shirley, which is seven years younger than me. The day she was born my aunt came down from up the road to be with mom and help. Mom said, “I think you better go play.” I gladly went down to play in the branch. Soon the doctor came and when I returned home, I could hear this little baby crying. While she was growing up, it became one of my jobs to take care of her. When I would ask mom if I can go somewhere she would say that I would need to take care of Shirley. So I would get my little white rocking chair out rock her to sleep, gently slip her in bed and away I would go.

At Christmas time, us girls would usually get a doll. That is about all we could afford. Then when the boys got mad at each other they would grab it and hit each other until they tore the head off. For a Christmas tree, we would go out in the woods and cut our own. Dad did not want us to put one up, but us kids always did. We wrapped sycamore balls with aluminum foil for our ornaments and strung popcorn, which we raised out in the garden.

We always had a gigantic garden. We had a strawberry patch, watermelon patch, and big field of potatoes, sweet potatoes, and a patch of sweet corn. We canned every thing you could stick in a can. We had pickled corn in a big crock-pot and green beans. When winter came, our upstairs was full of jars of food and our seller was full of potatoes and sweet potatoes. We did not raise cattle or beef. What meat we had was bought from in town. The cows were for milking and I done plenty of that.

I always loved flower beds, when July came we always knew it was black berry picking time so we took every bucket and tub available and we would walk for mile up the hill until we got to the top and it had the biggest berries. We would pick until everything was full. Then I would have to help wash them and can them. They sure tasted good on those hot biscuits mom baked every morning. She always baked hot biscuits. The leftover cold ones, she would crumble up for the birds and chickens. Guess that is where I got my love for the birds. I feed them all the time and love to watch them. My mom’s blackberry cobblers were delicious too, and she use to make big pans of chocolate pudding.

I met my husband at 13 years of age. We dated through high school. I always had to leave the house with my older sister though, because my Dad did not allow me to date or go places. So I was very discrete about it. By the second year of high school, I had a brother and sister who lived in Columbus, Ohio, so in the summer I came up here and worked baby-sitting to get money to pay for my school books, which we had to buy back then, and clothes. When I was about 13 or 14 a truck would come up the holler, and pick up a bunch of us kids and take us to different strawberry patches. We would get paid so much a basket. This gave us a little money to go to the movies, which was $.20 at the time. Sometimes we would all get together and go to a drive-in movie. We would pile as many as we could in the back of our trunk until we would get through the pay booth.

I dropped out of school my senior year and got married. When we first were married, we lived in a 2-room apartment in Maysville, KY. I had to scrub our clothes on a washboard and hang them out to dry. My husband got a job in Newport, KY. working on the dam. During this time, I had two beautiful baby boys two years apart, Dale and Jerry. I had my boys at my Mother’s home with a midwife because we didn’t have insurance. My husband and I separated for a short period, so me and the two boys came up to Ohio to stay with my sister and family. My husband came to Ohio and we worked things out. He got a job here and we got an apartment. Within those two I got pregnant with my first sweet little girl, Tonia. I was ready for a girl after two boys, but she was as rough as them; she could play touch football with the best of them. Then, two years later, I had another sweet baby boy, Jeff. My husband kept saying it was going to be a girl, but I just felt it was going to be a boy. He said I did that on purpose.

When Jeff was 4 years old, I got a job at Western Electric. It was hard to make it with only one person working. The company changed hands over the years many times, from AT&T, Lucent, and then to Celestia. I was laid off 3 times over the years and obtained other jobs to keep the income coming in. I had worked at Anomatic in Westerville for 1 year and Riverside Hospital for 5 years. We purchased a house right after Jeff was born and made a permanent residency in Ohio. While being laid off and called back again over an eight year period, I had to put my baby skills back to work when I found out I was pregnant again. God blessed me with another daughter, Christine. She was a joy to the whole family.

In my fifties, I went back to school and obtained my GED. They held a real graduation with cap and gown. The best part was having my children and grandchildren there to share this special time in my life.

I hit my sixties and retired from Lucent. My friends and I still get together once a month for lunch. I have fifteen wonderful grandchildren, and my first great-grandchild on the way in January. Between the Lord’s work, my Lucent friends, and my new friends the Red Hatters, and my family, I still stay as busy as ever.

My favorite love is my gardening. I have made a refuse in my back yard with over 100 different flower varieties, small fish pond, a bridge, and several resting areas. I have over twenty figurines that I paint to look like my children as babies or my grandchildren. I work many hours pulling weeds and just enjoying the fragrance and beauty of God’s works.