by Rocky Macy
Ruby Florine SREAVES was born on July 14th, 1921, at the home of her parents, Daniel Alexander and Nancy Jane (ROARK) SREAVES in the Swars Prairie area of rural Newton County, Missouri. She married Garland Eugene MACY in Columbus, Kansas, on March 31st, 1946. Florine, as she was known to family and friends, passed away at her home in Noel, Missouri, on the morning of December 8th, 1986, at the young age of sixty-five.
Ruby “Florine” (SREAVES) MACY was my mother. I was her oldest child, born in 1948, and her only other child was my little sister, Gail, who was born in 1950. (Gail legally changed her name to “Abigail” later in life.) Florine was also the grandmother of seven, all of whom were born during her lifetime.
Mom was the middle child in a sibling group of seven that included three boys and four girls. Her siblings were Harold “Dean” (1914-1968), Mary “Ruth” (1916-1995), Ned Roark (1920-1970), Virgie “Christine” (1922-1999), Betty Lou (1926-1996), and Floyd Edgar (1930-2017).
My mother’s formal education included eight years at the Thompson Grove School in rural Newton County, a school which only went through grade eight, and then she completed high school at Seneca, Missouri, graduating in 1939 in the same class as her brother and next older sibling, Ned SREAVES. Later in life in the 1960’s, Mom attended and graduated from the Neosho Beauty College in Neosho, Missouri, and passed her exam to become a licensed cosmetologist. She worked as a “beauty operator” for several years.
The Great Depression and World War II were the prevailing influences of my mother’s youth. She often remarked that by living on a farm during the Depression, she and her siblings were not as aware of how desperate times were because their lives did not change that much.
My mother worked at a defense plant in Parsons, Kansas, during the war, and she also worked at an Army PX - possibly at Camp Crowder near Neosho, the largest in-land military base in America during World War II. At one time during the war she also lived with her younger sister, Christine, and her husband, Bob DOBBS, near an army base in Texas where Bob was stationed.
Although my mother and father grew up in the same rural Missouri county, they did not meet until after the war when Dad, who was recently home from the war in Europe, and his cousin, Dalton MACY, were operating a taxi in Neosho. When Mom and Dad were married on March 31st, 1946, in Columbus, Kansas, Dalton and his bride, Betty Lou - who was my mother’s youngest sister - were the witnesses to the marriage.
The hard-scrabble times that my mother lived through during her youth on the farm influenced her work ethic for the rest of her life. Not only was she always employed, even while raising her two children, she also cooked most of the family meals and made many of the clothes that she and my sister wore. Mom loved to sew and would often sit up late at night crocheting doilies or making things like quilt squares. Her hands were seldom idle! For a while she also worked at the J.C. Penney store in Neosho doing alterations. The meals she cooked nearly always included golden, crispy fried potatoes, and there were often desserts, particularly coconut pies and her wonderful spice cakes - all made from scratch.
I never knew Mom to throw away a used piece of aluminum foil or plastic eating utensils. She would wash things like that and save them to be used again.
Later in life Mom took painting lessons and was a member of the Riverside Art Guild in Noel, Missouri. She did many beautiful paintings during the final years of her life, leaving a legacy that her children and grandchildren share and exhibit to this day.
My mother and father owned several businesses. They leased a grocery store and gas station in Neosho just after they were married, but when they got the store cleaned up and it began making a profit, the owners wanted it back. The following mention of that enterprise ran in the Neosho Daily News on March 25th, 1947, on page four:
“Macy’s Grocery and Station”
“Mr. and Mrs. Garland Macy have taken over the Phillips 66 Station and Grocery at the junction of highways 60 and 71, one mile south of town. Formerly known as Trussell’s.
“All business, old and new, is appreciated.”
A few years later my parents built and owned a truckstop and gas station in Goodman, Missouri, along with Mom’s younger sister, Christine, and her husband, Bob DOBBS, and they eventually sold that business to the DOBBS’s before moving on to Noel where they bought and ran an 8-unit cabin court on Elk River for six years. My dad leased and ran a DX gas station in Noel to provide an income to the family for the winter months when there were no tourists in town. Later he started an appliance store - and then a real estate brokerage - both of which my mother helped to run.
One of the incidents that I remember well from my family’s days at “La Bella View,” the truckstop and gas station outside of Goodman, occurred when my mother caught our new home on fire. The house, one of the nicest in the Goodman area at that time, had just been completed. I was out playing on the hillside behind the cafe when I saw my Mom run out of the house screaming and waving her arms in the air. She was yelling for me to get my dad. I found him in the cafe having a cup of coffee with friends and told him that there was something wrong and mom was jumping and screaming in the yard. This is the follow-up story which ran on page three of the Neosho Daily News on July 15, 1955, regarding that near catastrophe:
“Mr. and Mrs. Garland Macy are back on their jobs in the cafe and service station at Linwood, on the western outskirts of Goodman. Most folks think it’s something of a miracle.
“Tuesday was the day it happened. Someone told Mrs. Macy that the printing would come off of the feed sacks readily if they were first dipped in gasoline. The liquid was handy and the dipping accomplished within minutes. She carried them across the way to the Macy home, planning to finish their washing in the machine.
“She was not unaware that she was handling the ingredients of liquid fire, but she checked carefully. There were no open flames, not even a pilot light, and she did not start the machine.
“She had lifted the first of the sacks into the machine when the entire kitchen seemed to explode. It happened so quickly that she doesn’t know whether the explosion came from the container or the machine. Not only did the flames envelop the room, but they took a quick run across the floor into the living room, burning the nap from the rug.
“Mrs. Macy called her husband who came immediately, with the Goodman fire department arriving next. Mrs. Macy sustained severe burns on both legs, from her knees to her feet, and her husband also had deep leg burns and serious burns on his left hand.
“The machine was destroyed, but quick action on the part of the family and firemen saved the house and other furnishings.”
In hindsight I believe that our parents tried to keep the seriousness of that situation away from my little sister and myself, but I do have some memories of follow-up visits to the hospital where they were having their burns treated.
Mom was also an involved school parent. There was an article in the May 15th, 1957, edition of the Neosho Daily News which mentioned the new officers for the Goodman PTA, and it listed her as the treasurer of the group.
Because our mother had to work some mornings at the cafe, my sister and I would often have to get ourselves ready for school and then walk to the cafe for breakfast. One of our occasional family treats was a night out at the Edgewood Drive-in Theatre which was located about ten miles away near Neosho, Missouri. On those nights we would take a bag of sandwiches from the cafe to eat during the movies. One night as we were preparing to go to the drive-in, Mom took our sandwich order to the lady who was cooking that night. When the cook asked her what kind of sandwich she wanted for herself, Mom replied, “Oh, I don’t know. Surprise me.” Later that night in the darkened car when Mom bit into her sandwich, she discovered that it was a potholder slathered in mayonnaise between two slices of bread! The “Surprise Sandwich” became a regular item in the family story collection, and recently my youngest son, Tim, told me that his grandad, my father, had told him the story as well.
We took three vacations during our final four years in Goodman, one to San Diego, California, just after I completed first grade, one to New Orleans and the southeastern United States when I got out of third grade, and another to California after I finished fourth grade. On the two California trips we stayed with relatives, and I remember once the entire family slept for a few hours in the car outside of a gas station somewhere in Arizona. During the trip to the southeastern US we got to stay in a few actual motels because we had no relatives in that part of the country!
When my parents bought the Riverview Court in Ginger Blue Village, just north of Noel, Missouri, in the summer of 1958, we left Goodman and became permanent residents of Noel, the Christmas City of the Ozarks and a summer tourist mecca for weekenders out of Kansas City and Tulsa. My mother ran the 8-unit cabin court for the six years that she and my dad owned the place because much of that time he was working at the gas station trying to supplement the income from the court.
And running a cabin court, even a small one, was no easy affair.
Mom and Gail cleaned the cabins in the mornings as people checked out. I emptied the trash and garbage and did most of the mowing - and there was A LOT of mowing. We went to the house for a late lunch and Mom took time to watch her soap opera - “As the World Turns” - and then in the afternoon we did the washing. There was a separate building just for laundry where we washed the sheets and towels from that day’s cabin cleaning. Everything was washed in an old ringer washing machine and then run through two wash tubs of rinse water. Bluing was added to the rinse water to make the white towels and sheets brighter. The washing was all hung outside on the clotheslines to dry. On days when there was lots of laundry, some items would have to be taken in as soon as they had dried so that others could be hung to dry in their places. The clean towels were folded and stacked in a large cupboard, and the clean sheets were folded in half and then run through a “mangle” that only Mom got to operate, before they, too, were stacked in the cupboard.
Laundry was quite a process, and it was every day, seven days a week, from Memorial Day through Labor Day - except for those wonderful days when it rained. On a rainy day we caught up on other chores and then did double laundry the following day. No rest for the wicked! We all worked hard, but none as hard as my mother.
There were no family vacations for the Macys while we were at the cabin court because the summer was our busy season. Mom and Gail and I did go to Springfield, Missouri, during Christmas break a couple of times. We stayed in a motel out on College Street about fifteen blocks from the city square and would walk to the square to shop the after-Christmas sales. I remember those trips as being good times.
My mother was a small, wiry woman who had a nervous disposition. She once told me that the most she ever weighed in her life was a hundred and twenty-nine pounds - and that was the day before I was born - and I was a nine pound baby! Mom had stomach issues much of her life, and she had four-fifths of her stomach removed in the early 1960’s due to stomach ulcers, an operation which left her in better health, at least temporarily.
Mom’s health, however, was no match for her smoking habit of a couple of packs of unfiltered cigarettes a day for most of her adult life. She was diagnosed with multiple brain tumors in the spring of 1983, and her condition steadily worsened over the next three-and-a-half years until her death on December 8th, 1986.
The following obituary ran in the Neosho Daily News and the Joplin Globe:
“Florine Macy
July 14, 1921 - Dec. 8, 1986
“Ruby ‘Florine’ Macy, 65, Noel, died at 10:30 a.m. Monday at her home after an illness. Mrs. Macy was born July 14, 1921, at Seneca. She had lived in Noel since 1958, moving from Neosho. She was employed in two family businesses, Macy Appliance Store and Macy Real Estate Co., both in Noel. She was a member of the Riverside Art Guild and the Swar’s Prairie Methodist Church.
“She married Garland Eugene Macy on March 31, 1946, at Columbus, Kan. He survives.
“Additional survivors include a son, Rocky Macy, Noel; a daughter, Gail Smith, Mountain Home, Ark., a brother, Floyd Sreaves, Seneca, three sisters, Ruth Marble, Hemet, Calif, Betty Lou Macy, Joplin, and Christine Dobbs,Grove, Okla,and seven grandchildren.
“Services will be at 2 p.m. Wednesday at Ozark Funeral Home, Noel. Rev. Randy Gilmore will officiate.
“Burial will be in Noel Cemetery. Pallbearers will be David Gudgell, Louis Fiorito, Louis Hansen, Billy Dobbs, Nicholas Macy, and Wayne Macy.
“Friends may call after noon today at the funeral home, where the family will receive friends from 7 to 9 p.m. today.”
Mom is at rest in the Noel Cemetery next to my father who passed away twenty-three years and seventeen days later. It is a peaceful location next to a small farm acreage which they once owned, and where they are surrounded by a multitude of friends and acquaintances from their many years in Noel. It gives me peace of mind to know that she is among many who knew and cared for her.
Rest in peace, Mom!
