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Memories of Golde Dicks Markham (1996) Golde Markham Dicks 22/125

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Pa bought a used piano so I could take music lessons. When the school term was over

in 1919,1 was 11 years old. Pa asked Miss Myrtice Witt, an elementary schoolteacher, to
stay at our house to give me music lessons for three months. She went home every Friday
afternoon. During the week she taught me eight hours a day. We started at 8 a.m., took an
hour lunch break—unless we planned to go fishing that afternoon—and had lessons for four

more hours in the afternoon.
Her teaching confused me because I had attended a singing school a few summers
before at which the teachers used shaped notes. Miss Myrtice taught by using lines and

spaces. I had to forget what I had learned about shaped notes. I knew that Pa really wanted
me to learn to play gospel hymns for church services. There wasn’t anyone who could play
for Sunday School or the once-a-month church service.

The first week she taught me to play one hymn. The following week at Sunday School
I played that one hymn on the pump organ with Grandpa Dicks leading the singing. The next
Sunday I learned to play another hymn and continued learning a new hymn each week.

I played for every service at the church for the next 50 years. This job included playing
for Sunday School, Training Union, funerals, and putting on Christmas programs.

Grandma Dicks always wore black clothes, a1 long gathered black skirt with two or
three petticoats under it, and an underwaist of black under her blouse. She made her own
blouses and fancied them up with little tiny tucks on each side of an opening down the center

front. For her Sunday blouses, she sewed black lace on the edges of those tucks. She always
wore black leather, flat-heel, step-in pump shoes. Her long black hair was balled up on top of
her head, held together with hairpins made of bones. I have some of those hairpins today—

they’re more than 100 years old. I also have her cameo ring.
She occasionally put on a show for me just to hear me laugh. She danced across the

room. I can see her still gliding with the long black skirt. I couldn’t even see her feet. It was
as though she was floating in the air, without any effort. Her movements were so graceful—
as if she were dancing to music and keeping perfect time. When she stopped, I would tell her
to do it again. At that time Grandma had twelve children.

She must have had a good education. She played the pump organ and read shaped

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