family historians on golo's blog

memories of my great great grandfather and other family members as told by my cousin jewell

 abuse

One time we went back home to Kentucky to visit my father’s parents on the farm. A spur of the moment idea came to have a family reunion. With only twenty-four hours notice a hundred and fifty people showed up.

I remember my grandfather John Robert Farris (see photo taken circa 1870) dressed in a white linen suit and sitting in a white wicker chair in the yard. He had a white beard down to his waist. My grandmother, Evaline Petty Crawford was quite a large woman.

When we were visiting, I slept in Aunt Addie’s room. Addie was blind due to a doctor administering the wrong medicine when she was very young. I offered to do whatever was needed to get the room ready for night time, but Aunt Addie wouldn’t hear of it. I watched Aunt Addie carefully hold her hands in front of the fireplace to check it for even heat. Where it was too hot, she shoved coals to the back with a poker. She blew out the kerosene lamp then held her hand over the top to feel that the flame was out. Then she got into bed and told me good night. Soon I heard little scratching noises and I thought there might be mice in the house. As my eyes adjusted to the dark room I could see that Aunt Addie was reading her Braille Bible. The noise was Aunt Addie reading and turning the large thick pages.

My father (Dr. Robert Crawford Farris) offered to take out the garbage for Aunt Addie one night. She told him she could see in the dark better than he could, and she took it out.

Aunt Addie came to Tulsa once to visit us. She came all by herself on the bus. My Uncle John Farris came once, also. He lived on the farm next to grandmother and grandfather. Our house had a gas heater set into the fireplace. Since Uncle John chewed tobacco he couldn’t spit into the fireplace as he was used to doing, he had to go outside. We also had indoor plumbing, a convenience that hadn’t came to the Kentucky farm yet. He said it was the first place he had ever been where you had to go outside to spit and inside to "go outside."

My father recalled coming into the house on the farm one day when Addie was about eighteen months old. She was sick with roseola. His mother (Evaline Petty Crawford) sat in the livingroom with Addie on her lap. He slammed the door shut and Addie started to cry. His mother screamed and said that Addie was blind.

Father wanted to be a doctor from the time he was a small boy. He saw the local doctor drive down the road in his black carriage and he wanted to drive one just like it. He got a certificate to teach by passing a test. No college education was required. Father planned to teach school and save his money so that he could go to medical school. He needed fifty cents to cross the river to go to the school where he would teach. His father wouldn’t give him any money for the river boat.

Since grandfather had twelve daughters to raise, but only two sons. He wanted both boys to stay home on the farm. So he refused to help his son’s with anything that took them away from home.

Father taught seven years in order to go to medical school in Louisville, Kentucky. After that he moved to Oklahoma. Father also served as a doctor in World War I and was stationed in Michigan.