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What the Town of West Union Means to me Essay Contest has a winner - see Press Release

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What West Union Means To Me
By Patricia Denner

The “I Remembers”

The remembering of a West Union incased, enclosed in a time period from the early Thirties to the early Fifties where family members and the people who were then the Town of West Union lived and laughed and loved.

Those twenty years of rich, pure and wholesome days in a place in time between Eighteen Hundred and Eighty One and Two Thousand and Six.
West Union.

What does the Town of West Union mean to me?
Now the opportunity anytime I choose to travel back, to return by way of the ‘I REMEMBERS’ to those marvelous joy filled days of childhood innocence spent in the Town of West Union.

This is what the Town of West Union means to me.

I REMEMBER walking with mama from Grandma Knight’s house to Riley Gain’s store, passing by George Morgan’s house just this side of crossing the bridge over the creek. He would tell mama that she was going to make me sick because she bathed me so much.

I REMEMBER there had been a fire at Riley Gain’s store and when daddy and I ate the 40% Bran Flakes, they tasted like smoke.

I REMEMBER the Underwoods and the Smiths lived up the road from grandma’s house. Bernice Smith would stop in her car and ride me to school. I sat in the back of the one room school building.

There was a barn across the road from grandma’s house where daddy would take Pet, the Jersey cow, to milk her and put her in for the night.

There was my dog Queenie and grandma’s cat, (whose scars are till with me because I insisted on petting her while she was eating).

I would cut out the people from the funny paper and they were my paper dolls.

I REMEMBER there was a smoke house in the back yard with a sleeping room upstairs. When the company came all the girl cousins slept there and the older ones truly scared us with all the ghost stories.

Grandma’s house was pretty with bay windows and lots of ornate trim.
There was a big snowball bush in the front yard.

I REMEMBER the Sundays after the noon meal when the adults gathered around the piano and sang hyms and the cousins played.

I REMEMBER mama being baptized in the creek that ran in front of grandma’s house.

I REMEMBER Grandma and Grandpa Hursts little house. You had to cross the creek on a high, swinging bridge.

I REMEMBER my cousins lived up across the meadow. They had a smokehouse too. We cut out the strips from the comics and ran them across the upstairs windows. They were our movie show. We took turns watching and climbing the ladder to slide the strips across the window.
We played from daylight until dark.

I REMEMBER the lightening bugs in quart JARS.

Daddy had a green Chevrolet sedan with wood spoke wheels. He would stop at the Gulf station on the way into West Union. They always had a free comic page and daddy would go in the station and get one for me. Then he would pump the gasoline up to the line on the glass top of the pump with the big handle on the side. The gasoline always smelled good.

I REMEMBER coming into West Union and just at the top of the hill by the railroad track there was a skating rink. When Alf Landon ran for President of the United States I went with daddy to the skating rink and the walls were filled with giant sunflowers It was the Republican Headquarters.

I REMEMBER the bank on the corner where my two cousins were tellers. The drugstore, the mysterious mansion, the covered bridge, the dress shop, the stores and the busy atmosphere of the main street.

I REMEMBER West Union.