November 11, 2018
Her name was Ethel Julia Stockton Crocker, and she was born in Lone Elm, Arkansas, in the foothills of the Ozark Mountains, on November 11, 1881. She disliked the name Ethel and always used Julia. By all accounts, she never was a pretty girl, having red hair and freckles and a strong-boned face that showed her Scottish roots. She was suspicious of beauty yet she married a handsome dark-haired man with three vain and pretty sisters (or so I was told.) “Pretty is as pretty does,” she’d sniff and say to my mother. I was the first born granddaughter and a pretty child, with two boys before me and two more after in the family, but I don’t remember her petting and cuddling me. She left that to my grandfather who spoiled me terribly.
She took me on trips instead,: down the mountain to see her sister Eudora and her brother Warland in Lone Elm, or sometimes on mysterious trips of mercy in the Red Cross jeep that she drove proudly and expertly.
As a special treat, I sometimes spent the night at my grandparents’ stone cottage on the top of Mount Sequoyah in Fayetteville, Arkansas. I would lie in bed at night and listen to my grandmother’s soft breathing and watch the fireflies dance against the ceiling, knowing that in the morning there would be cereal in my Blue Willow bowl and there would be my grandmother in her cotton apron faded to softness, moving from stove to table to sink.
My grandmother was not much of a cook or a housekeeper, but she could ride a horse and raise a vegetable garden. Even in her eighties she had a large garden with neat rows of corn, beans, and tomatoes, and she kept her horse Ginger in a small barn on the property. As a young woman she had planted and picked a field of cotton to pay for the cost of teacher’s college, and she had ridden a horse to and from her country school.
My grandmother wanted to see the Equal Rights Amendment passed, and she never failed to vote in elections. She would have been very proud of the number of women who won offices in the election last Tuesday. She thought women were treated unfairly and at first disapproved of my marriage right after college: she saw no point in my hitching my fate to that of a man’s. She herself had married my grandfather with the expectation that they would go to the Philippines where she would teach—unmarried women school teachers were not allowed to go to the islands—but my grandfather did not want to leave his mother and after their marriage decided they should not to go. They did go to Mexico, to see my aunt Kara who was painting there, and they traveled long distances in the United States. They lived in New Mexico, Missouri, and Washington, DC, before settling on Mt. Sequoyah in Fayetteville before my birth.
After my grandfather died in 1974 and the house on Mt. Sequoyah was sold, my grandmother made her home first with my aunt Carmen in Cody, Wyoming, and then with my aunt Kara near Los Angeles, California.
When my grandmother was 96, she and my aunt Kara flew to Washington, DC for a visit with us.
She liked our house. She would sit in a chair in the sunshine by the rhododendron bush and say, “This is just like my old house.” It wasn’t, but yes, there were trees and space and clean blue sky. She told long stories, sometime the same stories over and over, about her girlhood. I wish I had listened harder. I wish I had tape-recorded her stories.
Sometimes I think that if time were a river, I would be able to swim upstream, back to the kitchen in the stone cottage, and find my grandmother in her soft blue apron, giving me cereal in a Blue Willow bowl.
Julia Ethel Stockton Crocker died August 7, 1979, in El Segundo, California at the age of 97 years, 8 months, and 27 days.