Viola May (Hunter, Koker) Jones

I was born in eastern Tipton County, IN. All my brothers and sisters were born in Hamilton County, but I was born in Tipton County. All of us were born at home. Dr. Carter had a wreck coming to our house for my birth never made it till after I was born, only my Grandma Hunter was there, so Dr. Carter only charged $3.00. My dad, Raymond Hunter, was a farmer. He also helped build State Rd. 19 and worked for Kinney Moving Company out of Kokomo, IN moving people and businesses. When I was little, maybe 7 or 8, I can remember herding cows along the road with my brother, keeping them together so they didn't wander off. That's also when I embroidered my nursery rhyme quilt for a double size bed. I don't know how I learned to embroider. They printed patterns in the Indianapolis Star and that's where my mom got the pattern for my quilt. It wasn't until after I got my first job in 1947 or 1948 that I got somebody to quilt it for me. My family moved around almost every two years. We rented property, so we had to keep moving. From Tipton County we went to Hamilton County and stayed there. In first grade I went to Walnut Grove school. The first semester of 2nd grade I went to Cicero, then the second semester of the second grade I was in Arcadia. I was in Jackson Central in Arcadia until I graduated in 1946. I played saxophone in Band and Orchestra from 7th Grade till I graduated. We would go to State Fair and march around race track and we took second place ,when I was in 8th grade. We didn't have a bathroom in the house until 1951 when my parents owned their first place. It was my job every morning to empty the pot and clean it out before I went to school. I can also remember using Kool-Aid and pretending it was ice cream when we were playing under a bush where no one could see us in our yard. I was the babysitter for my brother Lee on down. Lee was six years younger than me. Marjorie was my sister that I played with most growing up. We were the closest in age of all of us. She died when she was in 2nd grade and I was in 3rd. Marjorie and Marie died within 2 or 3 days of each other around Christmas of 1936. My parents sent Lee to stay with our grandparents Orla and Julia Hunter so that they wouldn't lose him too. It was pneumonia they died of. Wayne was jealous of me from the time I was born, trying to shove me off of mom's lap. I got along with Charles, but Wayne never liked me. Marjorie was born with a harelip. She had 3 surgeries before she was a year old. We made a lot of homemade ice cream, and that was my favorite food. I loved it. I loved it all my life. My favorite friend in school was Carolyn Jacquier. She married an Etchison. We stayed at each other's house during school. She lived in town in Arcadia and loved riding the school bus. We were the best of friends all through school. We used to plant beans in the cornfield. The beans would vine up the corn. I remember one time when we were doing that at the back of the field, we brought a sugar cream pie back with us since we were going to be out there all day. My mom made all of our clothes, When I was in high school I used to babysit for a neighbor and did housecleaning for Becks. Beck is the family that owned the big seed corn company. Her name was Pauline Beck. I was interested in genealogy when I was still in high school before I even had a typewriter. I wrote it all down. I never had a typewriter until I went to work for Wainwright Abstract and saved up the money for a typewriter. I picked a hundred hampers of tomatoes one day. I rode on a machine planting tomatoes, too, back in the forties sometime. Two of us would sit on the back of the machine and you'd put the tomato plants in the ground as they were driving. I worked at the Arcadia Glass Factory, I think it was called Jenkins Glass Company, for one month before it shut down after I got out of school. Packing glassware--I hated that job! One time I was working there, a glass bowl was coming down the conveyer belt and it had a glass shard on it that cut my hand so bad that I couldn't get my ring off. My first real job after I graduated was at Wainwright Abstract Co., and I loved it. I became assistant manager while I was there. I was there about 8 years and then I went out to Firestone to be a secretary for the Traffic Manager. I bought my first new car before I went to Firestone, a 1954 Chevy. Charles Sohl, head of the insurance company at Wainwright, teased me that they'd have to print Firestone on the side of my car when I went to work there, but I knew better. Wainwright tried their best to get me to stay, offered me a raise, but I was going. Firestone paid $100 more per month. I dreaded switching because I'd been out of school for a while and had never used my shorthand. I learned so much at the abstract company. I thought, why don't they teach this stuff in school? Before my first new car, I had a used car. My dad didn't want me to get a car because he used to drive me to work and ask me for money when he'd get me alone. He didn't want mom to know it. I married a farmer, needless to say. My brother Charles was a taxi driver in Noblesville, and I'd go down there with him. I had a girlfriend down there named Evelyn Sells. She's the one who knew Harry and introduced us. I don't know how she knew him. I met my 2nd husband Delbert right after I got out of school while I was babysitting at cousin Lawrence Tuder's house. I lived with them and babysat, and Delbert was working at the same factory in Sheridan that Lawrence did. I dated him for about 6 months until he broke up with me. He had been dating a girl, Mary Lee Stewart, and her mother didn't like Delbert, so Mary Lee broke up with him. He went back where she was working and she snatched him back. She said you're not going to get away no more! He married her and had 5 boys. I dated Harry for years before we got married. He had been married before and it didn't work out, so I think he was afraid it would happen again. We got married April 28, 1956. I married Delbert on April 25, 2010. We were going to do it sooner, but Delbert had had a kidney out and I had bronchitis, so we had to put it off. We were going to get married on my birthday, the 12th, but we just weren't up to it. I thought, oh lord, I don't want it to be the same day as my first wedding, and we were within 3 days, one more day and we would have had to get a new marriage license. I didn't tell him that, but I thought it. Harry died in November of 2004. In January of 2005 I went on my nephew's honeymoon cruise in the Caribbean. I remember saying that I can't go on that. I have to take care of Harry! When I married Harry, we moved in with his parents, at the new house they built on State Road 28, where I lived for the rest of my life. They built that house in 1951. My dad was building a new house after a fire in Hamilton County at the same time. I was at Harry's for the weekend, back at the house they called the Old Place in Tipton County, when they had the fire, so all I had left was what was in my suitcase. My family lost everything. We got our ice cream freezer out of a junk pile when we moved to a new place. We always checked the junk pile whenever we moved. I used to pick up bottles out of the junk piles. I loved bottles. Delbert told me that when he went to visit his cousin and told him about me, his cousin said, you better marry her. I always wondered, what did he tell him? I was working full time at Firestone while we was living with Harry's parents. Harry went to work for them too. He worked in the Receiving Department. Harry's mother did most of the cooking, but Harry would sometimes say, I'd like to have some chili soup if you'd make it. He didn't like the way his mom made it. When she ate it, she'd only eat the juice, but she'd turn the fire up as hot as she could get it and boil it all away! His father died in 1960 and his mother died in 1961. He was working at Firestone then. Nancy was born in 1962 and died in 1969. Everything happened in the 60's. We had to take Harry's mother to Kokomo every weekend to take her chicken eggs to sell. Nancy never met a stranger. One time we went to Donna Whisler's house and Donna was making potato soup. Nancy said, that stinks, I don't believe I'd like that!, but she ate it. Me and Donna was together a lot then. We carpooled and froze sweet corn and canned vegetable soup from both our gardens. When Nancy was little we'd have Christmas at home and then go over to my folks for Christmas. The whole family would be there except Joyce. One time she let her little boy stay there with mom. Mom practically raised him because she was still working. Nancy was the 13th grandchild of mom and dad and was the first one to be born with a head of black hair. Everybody said she looked like Shirley Temple. Me and Harry both wanted a girl, and we got one. Harry quit smoking when Nancy told him that she didn't want him to die. She'd seen something on TV. After she was gone, Lee and them would come out almost every weekend. We rode motorcycles, made apple cider from the orchard, ate, we always had to eat, you know! They planted a garden out there. Harry told David one time, if you pick the little white flowers off the beans, you won't have to shell as many! David got into it with his dad when he was in high school and stayed at our house until he went into the Marines. Carol told him to pack, but when he came and stayed with us, they wanted him back. He was getting too much attention at our house. Harry taught David to drive the tractor before he could drive a car. I had two good husbands. I don't know what else to say. I got lucky, I guess. Harry was always a-joking. There was a snowstorm on a weekend February 24, 1961. People started to come to our house that were hung up in the snow and couldn't go no farther. We had 30 overnite guests. There was a cop right in front of the house. We thought we'd get help now, but his radio went dead. You couldn't get any sleep all night because of the chatterboxes. The men played cards in the back porch by the space heater since we had no power, no telephone service, and no water until the power came back on about 5:30 p.m., Saturday evening. The cop's mother slept on the living room floor and his mother-in-law. Harry's mother had the time of her life talking to everybody. It got printed up in the Firestone newspaper. One man brought meat in from a locker and we made chili soup. We cooked 5 dozen eggs for breakfast next morning We didn't have a freezer then and had not been to grocery store so we didn't have no extra food. People had been to grocery store and brought in groceries for all of us It seems like everybody stayed the weekend. We had a man there that delivered milk, a woman that was a beauty operator, a teacher. I used to haul grain to the elevator while I was married to Harry. I never heard tell of hunting mushrooms until I met Harry. In '56 the year we got married we found dishpans full of them. We found so many in our woods that I had to take my shirt off to carry them all! David had a house in Princeton, IL in the 2000's and I would come and stay with him and his wife every spring. One year we found over 600 in his woods. I remember that I was 78 years old and saw some mushrooms on the other side of a barbed wire fence in the woods. I climbed that fence. I wasn't going to let them go! I'm 89 now as I'm telling this and I still would climb that fence to get those mushrooms. And I could do it too! Harry had a non-malignant brain tumor that he had removed, and then he ended up in ill health and I had a long siege of taking care of him. He would be in and out of the hospital, on a feeding tube and off of one, he'd remember and he wouldn't. I had a hospital bed for him in the living room toward the end. I enjoyed working the polls for the Democratic party as a sheriff until they did away with that and then I was a clerk. I like knitting. I made over 600 dishcloths in 2017. I used to knit Barbie clothes for Nancy's dolls. They were little double pointed needles about as thick as the lead in a pencil. I knitted Nancy an aqua coat and lined it one year. I've made house slippers, capes, a striped skirt, baby blankets, afghans. I've crocheted potholders, but once I learned to knit, I never wanted to crochet again. I learned to knit from the principal's wife. We were making squares for the Red Cross while the war was on. After Harry died, me and Guyla Kirby and Donna Whisler were together a lot. We went shopping, made noodles for the church, worked the crossword puzzles in the Globe. Me and Guyla would be hooked on the phone working the puzzles. In 2009 Delbert's grandson found me on the internet. Delbert asked him to look on his cellphone and see if he could look up Viola Hunter and he found me. We dated before I met Harry. Jon said Delbert walked out of there like a 18 year old again after he found me on the cellphone. After Delbert and me got married, we would stay at his house in Missouri part time and part time in Indiana. We got married in his church in Missouri because my preacher had a stroke and wasn't up to it. We traveled a lot to go see his 5 sons. We went to Iowa, Missouri, Oklahoma. When he became a fifth generation, that's when I got my cellphone because my camera broke and I asked David what I should do, and he said, get a cellphone. We also went to Branson on a bus trip once. I've been to Branson so many times I've forgot. I took a bus trip to Washington DC with one of the women at church, I've been to Mexico Alaska and Carribean on cruises. My favorite was the Caribbean where it was warm. I took care of Delbert through his health problems .I'm sure I made the last 5 years of his life a lot happier and I was very happy with him.

Narrated October 17, 2017

Monument Location