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notes. Grandpa Dicks also read shaped notes and could1 teach himself a new song. He prac­
ticed at night after supper.
When he learned a new song pretty good1, he said, “Alice, play this song and let me see
if I can sing it.”

She replied, “Henry, let me practice over it a time or two.”
When he got it down pat, he led the song service at church when they had Sunday
School or a church service. He led the little congregation in singing the song while Grandma

played the pump organ.
He sang so loud! I can still hear him singing “When the Roll Is Called Up Yonder,”
“I’ll Be There,” and “Till We Meet Again.” He would rear back and let his voice ring out.
He certainly wasn’t self-conscious.

Grandma’s family loved her very much, especially her brothers. Uncle Webb visited
her all the time. He told me the story about visiting her one afternoon. He went with her

down in the field where the branch ran from the prairie to the Dicks’s pond. Alice and Webb
were picking peas for dinner when all of a sudden they heard a woman laughing hysterically.
They looked around but couldn’t see anybody, so they started picking peas again. When this
woman started laughing again, they looked up and saw a panther out on a limb ready to

pounce down on them. He told Alice to run for her life. He grabbed her pea sack and took
her by the hand to help her get away in a hurry.

She always had to gather peas, get them shelled and washed in the afternoon in order
to get enough to feed the big family. Those big iron pots were placed down in holes where
the caps were removed just to put the pot closer to the fire in the big wood-range stove.
On another occasion when I was up at Grandma Dick’s house, she made preserves out

of bittersweet oranges, using brown sugar that Grandpa made. She had at least five wooden
washtubs filled with oranges, already halved, seeded, and preserved. She let me eat all I

wanted—they were so good! Grandpa had planted all1 kinds of orange trees in the yard and
down as far as the bam.
I couldn’t leave Grandpa’s brown sugar alone. Many times I went into his smokehouse

where he stored eight or ten brown sugar barrels. I would lift the lid and get myself a handful
of delicious sugar.
I loved watching Grandma churn butter in a crock jar, which was twenty inches high

and as big around as a gallon jug. The jar had a lid with a round hole in the center in which
she could stick a wooden rod. It looked like a broom handle with a round wooden disk on
the bottom that just fit in the jar. The handle came up through the hole in the lid. She sat

there in a straight chair lifting the handle and disk up and down through the cream until
butter formed. Then she spooned the butter out of the buttermilk, washed the butter with

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