According to Ruth Godwin Gadbury, in Godwin-Hill and Related Families, page 156, Minnie Scoggins Gunter, age 85, relates: I'm doing as well as you could expect. Don't get around too good yet. But I don't expect that at my age and falling like I did. [She broke her hip 4 January 1975 at age 83] As to Mother and Daddy and their times - Mother was born and raised in Tennessee, married in Comanche and I have their marriage license. - There were ups and downs in their married life. Daddy taught school. For as money... they just didn't have it. I never went to school the first day {of a term] in my life. And Daddy would keep us out to work their own crop and everybody's crop around for us to have a little bit of money to buy thins. We never did go hungry, but there were lots of times we'd liked to changed diets, I'm sure. And they sold eggs. Mother would raise a big bunch of chickens. Mother made all of our clothes. Nine times out of ten you could go to town, and for 10 cents a yard you could get the nicest - what was called print that day and time - or calico. And she made all our clothes and everything until it helped, I know, real well. - You could get 20 pounds of sugar for a dollar, get 20 pounds of rice to the dollar, which went a long ways in that day and time, but money didn't go... In fact we didn't hardly have any money to go anywhere. Daddy would buy a barrel of sugar, 360 pounds for $22.00. It would cost a fortune now. - Nine times out of ten we milked eight or ten cows. And the only school I ever went to in my life, I walked four and a half miles, night and morning. We didn't start until we were eight, but Mother let Jim go a year before and paid on him, because Daddy would have him out a-plowing and everything, and he wouldn't get to go to school much, so consequently he was a year ahead of me. Only he'd come home at night and show me the reading he'd done. But I didn't like arithmetic and wouldn't have nothing to do with that.
And I can remember when my mother was baptized as well as if it was yesterday. Her and Grandpa Hill was baptized at the same time. I was only five years old and that was in 1896. I guess the reason it made such an impression on me, I'd never seen anyone baptized or nothing, and taking her out in that water and all. I remember how scared I was that they was going to drown her. So little things like that is in a child's mind a whole lot more than a feller realizes that it is. - And Grandma and Grandpa, I can remember [being told about] when they first came to Texas and he was plowing a little field across the hill there and run onto a polecat and he'd never seen one or heard of one, so he taken his lines and whipped the thing to death. It just made him sick and his team sick and he went to the house and wanted Grandma to tie a rag of turpentine around his head so he couldn't smell that smell. Just things that way, why, stays with a kid when other things don't. - That Jeff and Ann, why I've heard Grandma talk of them so much. They were slaves, you know, and grandma and Grandpa had 'em and Jeff was taken off to the army. And he stayed so long and he come back and taken the team from the plow and hitched 'em to the wagon. There was a whole bunch with him. He told the to load up everything because they were his, and they weren't no more his than nothing on earth. He'd say, "Get that! It's mine! Get this! It's mine!" And this whole bunch, Grandma was churning out on the back... it was kinda a rock outfit where she was churning and kept her milk and butter... they had cups tied to their belts where they could get water to drink and each one taken his cup and they uncovered the]at there churn that Grandma was churning and was just drinking that milk, cream and all. And when Grandma seen their backs turned one time, she just slipped over and taken her foot and turned that there churn over and spilled all that... poured all that milk on the rocks and everything. And when they come back around and see it, oh, they was mad and the cussin' taken place. - But, well, I don't know, Grandpa heard several months after that if he'd come to a certain place, he could have that wagon and team, but Grandpa was afraid to go and they never did go. - Grandma thought lots of Ann... and Jeff, too, until he went off to the army. She thought Ann was a good person. - When we worked in the field for the other fellow, we would take out dinner, we didn't get to come home, just rest in the shade of a tree and go right back to hoeing or what ever we was a-doing. - Daddy would go to the gin with a load of cotton. There'd be so many there and with just one gin, that maybe he'd be gone all day and all night before he could get his cotton ginned. - Daddy accidentally shot his arm off one time when he went to shoot an antelope. They were 100 miles from a doctor, They traveled day and night 'til they got to where this doctor was and it was just hanging by a little flesh. He finished cutting it off and they buried it in a cigar box. He was about 17 years old when that was done. - Lots of things he couldn't do. He couldn't tie his shoes and lots of other things. but there were lots of things he could do. he could cut wood and he could hoe and he could plow. He drawed water out of the well with a bucket and rope. He had a hard time doing that. He would pull it [the rope] down for as he could and then he'd reach back and catch it before it flew back and he'd finally get the water up to the top. There were so many things. - He used to make syrup, all that we could use and sold lots of it too. All of us kids just hated syrup making because we didn't like to work at the syrup mill. It was at the syrup mill we'd like to eat the foam off the syrup before it got too cool. We;d get us a piece of can and eat that. One time me and Jim run on to get some of the fresh foam that had just been run off that morning. Jennie was a-tagging away long behind. When Jim touched that bung to that there little barrel, it flew out and just covered him with the warm syrup. - Well Jennie could see that some ting wan on him and she thought a cane knife had fell out of the tree. She screamed back to the house that a cane knife had fell out of the tree and cut Jim's head off. Well, it just scared Mother nearly to death, but it was just the syrup on him. That's all there was to it.