Chapter 4: A Beautiful Wedding

Our marriage took place under a rose-clad bower in the parlor of my parent's home at seven-thirty in the evening.  One of my girl friends, Elva Foster, sang "I Love You Truly," accompanied on the piano by my sister, Rosa.  Then came Mendelssohn's "Wedding March," also played by Rosa.  My brother,

Berry, was best man.  He accompanied Robert from Mama's and Papa's bedroom while Velma Snider, my matron of honor, accompanied me from the guest bedroom.  The four of us met under the bower where our pastor performed the ceremony.  Little Marjorie Snider entered at the appropriate time with the ring, on a silk pillow, to be placed on my finger.

After the ceremony, a fat tea was served to the sixty guests attending.  A "fat tea" is another name for a festive dinner.  Two long tables were decorated and loaded with an abundance of food including turkeys, hams, salads, rolls, pies, cakes and other desserts.  I shall be eternally grateful to my parents for this occasion; it meant so much to me to have a beautiful wedding.

In those days it was proper for the bride and groom to stay in the home of the parents the first night after the wedding.  By midnight, after the guests had left, Robert and I retired to the guest room where we spent our first night together.

Shivaree

According to custom, we expected a group of young people to return during the night for an old fashioned “shivaree” with kettles, pans, and horns – all kinds of noise-making equipment.  We kept our clothes on, turned off the lights, lay across the bed, and waited.  I thought of the perfection of our wedding day:  The ground was covered with a thick blanket of snow, there had been a gentle breeze, and the sunshine caused the snow to sparkle as if it were penetrated with jewels.  It was a beautiful peaceful day to remember always.

Around one-thirty in the morning, we heard some loud clanging noises — our friends had arrived with their cymbals, drums, horns, lids, pans, and bells.  We rushed into the living room and opened the door to greet twenty young people ready to continue the festivities.  We led them into the dining room where they served themselves leftovers.  After jollying around awhile, they went home without even rolling Robert in the snow.

Newlywed Corders

With little money and Robert's teaching duties, we did not go on a honeymoon.  We stayed with my parents three days with open house.

After Christmas, on a Wednesday, Robert and I moved into a two-bedroom apartment in the Ramsey community.  Almost immediately I discovered I had left my face powder at home and announced to Robert that we would have to go the store and get some.  "No, Brown Eyes," he answered, "We have no money.  You will have to wait until we visit your parents or until pay day."

Robert had purchased a round dining table, six dining chairs, a stove, a dresser, a bed, two rocking chairs and a kitchen cabinet.  (This was before kitchen cabinets came built into the wall.)  After buying the furniture and other necessities for housekeeping, he was ninety dollars in debt.  Although Robert owned an old Model T Ford when we were married, he walked the mile and a half to school each day to save on expenses.

My parents gave us another bed, mattress and quilts for the second bedroom.  By the time we had finished unpacking and decorating with our gifts and the needlework from my hope chest, we thought our home very attractive.

 

My lifestyle changed.  I left my piano students behind and joined Robert as a student teacher.  All of the musical training my parents had provided for me proved to be a great asset to my teaching career.  Robert had many talents, but, like my father, music was not one of them.  In the two- and three-teacher schools in which we were to spend many years, our talents seemed to compliment each other — where his were weak, mine were strong; and same with the reverse.  We worked very well together.

Our landlords, Mr. and Mrs. Charles Bennett, and other adults of the community were very generous and kind to us.  The Bennetts loaned us a cow and the use of a pony.  We went horseback riding almost every day after school.  We were also given a pig that grew into a nice fat hog to be butchered.  I remember going to get the last ham hanging in the smoke house.  We found a hollow hull of a ham but no meat inside.  Rats had made one little hole in the bottom and, unnoticed, had eaten the whole thing from the inside.  What an unpleasant surprise!

We became close friends with several families during the 1922-23 school term.  Fishing was our favorite pastime with one family, while table games, including “forty-two” were the more regular entertainment.

The Bennets were young and fun, and we spent a lot of time with them.  One day, while playing a game of “forty-two” with them, a stranger came knocking on the door for help.  He had turned his car over on the road nearby.  Naturally, Robert and Charles went back with him to help with his problem.  Later, as a token of the gentleman’s appreciation, we ladies received a box of candy and the men got a box of cigars.  We four celebrated at our next game by sampling the gifts.  Everyone, including the ladies, enjoyed smoking the cigars and eating the candy — except Robert.  He got sick and spoiled our game — and he never smoked again that I know of.

This was also the year we of our first airplane ride.  One day, when Robert and I went to Floydada to cash his check and take his monthly report to the county school superintendent, we discovered a pilot in town with an open-cockpit demonstration airplane.  He was taking passengers up for fifteen-minute airplane rides at the cost of seven dollars and fifty cents each.  Robert, of course, was determined to go.  I decided that if this were the time for him to die, I wished to die with him, and so up we both went.

 

My long cherished dream of teaching was beginning to be realized even before I had done any of my college work.  Although I often stayed at home studying, grading papers for Robert, and baking goodies for our evening meal, there were many days that I went to school with him to give the younger students extra help.  I learned fast under the supervision of my husband, and I loved it.  I thought I was especially good at teaching reading skills.

At recess we played games with the children including "Stealing Sticks," "Flying Dutchman," "Ante Over the School House" and "London Bridge."  We made the ball that we used for "Ante Over" from a rock wrapped with strips of cloth and twine string.

During a visit to see my parents, my mother read a letter from Frankie, my brother Barney's wife, asking her to find a doll that looked like Barney.  She wanted Mama to dress the doll like Barney was dressed as a baby.

My mother took Barney's baby picture and cut a replica of his dress from the picture.  Then I took the pattern and made the dress for the doll that Mama had bought.  I enjoyed this experience so much that it made me also want to collect dolls.  Little did I know at that time just how extensive my doll collection would become and how much I would use it in my teaching.  Many years later, Frankie sold part of her own doll collection and sent that same baby dress back to me.

Robert and Willie Lee Corder

Now that we were married, we began to study together.  Robert's first teaching term closed, and summer found us in Canyon, Texas to attend West Texas State Teachers College.  Teachers were paid only nine months of the year at that time, not twelve months as they are now.  When Robert had paid our house rent, we had only ten dollars left.

This posed no problem for us because Robert was a skilled tinsmith and he already had a job.  Between his school responsibilities, he worked for Mr. T.C. Thompson in his hardware business.  Robert had gained good experience with his father and brothers in the family sheet metal business.

Mr. and Mrs. Thompson became our life-long friends.  We felt toward them as God-given second parents.  Mr. Thompson paid Robert twenty-five cents an hour that year.  He was one of Mr. Thompson's most trusted men who worked alone at night in the tin shop to supply needed articles for homes in Canyon.  Robert also went into homes to install fixtures.  He put in many hours of work, and this paid our summer expenses and schooling.

Very few students went on to college after completion of high school at Lone Star, where I attended.  Unfortunately, the school had no accreditation.  This meant that Lone Star School had not been officially measured as to its curriculum or its students’ achievements.  And it was not affiliated with other accredited schools.  If a graduate of Lone Star High School wanted to go to college, it was necessary to pass an entry test.  Since I had been out of school for over two years, I took a refresher course of high school subjects through the Teachers College in Canyon.  I passed the test and was given official high school credentials for college entry.  As it turned out, this extra training helped to make me a stronger college student.

When summer school was completed, we returned to Ramsey where conditions had improved.  Robert had been given an assistant who taught the first three grades, and we were able to rent a five-room house close to school.  I visited school often and did student teaching again.  I also continued my academic studies.  That year I took geometry by correspondence.

 

In the middle of the road, on the way to see my family that Christmas season, our old Model T died and simply refused to go any farther.  We walked a half-mile in the snow to get help, and for his trouble, Robert gave our old car to the man who took us home.

It was still a good Christmas, but Papa was in ill health.  He had Bright’s disease [a historical classification of kidney diseases that would be described in modern medicine as acute or chronic nephritis], a heart condition, and other complications.  It wasn't long before he was bedfast in my brother Harvey’s home.  Then he was in and out of the hospital in Tulia until his doctor told my mother that she should take him home to stay, that there was nothing more to be done for him.  So Papa went home where he wanted to be, but he was in great pain in spite of the medication.

Friends and relatives came in large numbers during Papa's illness.  It never occurred to these guests that they might be unwelcome.  They even slept outside my parents’ home in their own cars.  Though these good people worked a hardship on Mama in many ways, we all understood and appreciated the love and support they showed.

Papa did not die quickly.  Robert and I were called home several times before he died, and I stayed a week near the end.  My heart ached for Mama, Rosa, Barney and Doyle as well as for Papa.  They were all afraid and frustrated.  Their responsibilities were almost unbearable.  I remember one incident well.  Papa was at the point of death and help was needed.  The telephone was not working, so Doyle, who was thirteen years old, set off by foot across a field in a driving blizzard to call a doctor.  He walked about a mile when he realized that the wind was blowing too hard to see where he was going.  He was lost.  He wandered around and around; his hands and feet were freezing, his face was stinging and burning.  Finally, he came upon a fence and followed it to a neighbor's house where he finally got through to the doctor.

On Easter Sunday morning in 1924, Papa just closed his eyes and fell asleep for the last time in a most quiet and peaceful way.  The easy times were over for those remaining in my childhood home.  After Papa's medical expenses were paid, very little money was left to hire the needed farm help.  Even Mama and Rosa helped Doyle shock heavy bundles while Barney cut the feed with the row-binder.  It was particularly hard for my little sister, Rosa.  She was so tiny. (To this day, her husband describes her by saying, “She stands on a box to look under the bed.”)  She had been musically precocious — the pride of our family sitting high on a piano bench – but she was not built for farm labor.  It was too much for all of them.  Their struggle weighed heavily on my heart.  Some time after Papa’s death, Mama was able to trade the farm for a ten-room house and ten acres of land in Tulia.  There she was able to manage by keeping roomers and boarders.

 

After the school term ended, Robert gave up his job, and we again went to Canyon where we were both able to attend school for fifteen months straight.  I took a test on thirteen subjects and received my first teaching certificate during that summer term.  Robert continued working for the usual twenty-five cents an hour and Mr. Thompson also furnished us with an apartment free of charge.

My first ideas for using dolls as teaching aids were given to me by one of my teachers, Dr. Lowes, as I worked to earn my first degree at West Texas State Teacher's College in Canyon, Texas.  Dr. Lowes kept a doll on the piano to answer yes-and-no questions.  That doll seemed to be able to say things that a real person could not say and get ideas across that would have been otherwise ignored.

Dr. Lowes was my favorite teacher.  She taught education.  I did my practice teaching under her.  When we met, she was only thirty years old and lived with her parents in Canyon and had never married.  I know that she liked me personally and as a student.  She probably liked the fact that I knew why I was going to college.  I knew why I was studying and she appreciated the serious attention I gave to her information.  One time, she invited me to join her and other teachers on a field trip.  It was very special for me because I was the only student to be asked to accompany the teachers.

She treated all of us students like friends as well as students.  If there was any teacher that I wanted to be like, it had to be Dr. Lowes.  She showed a real interest in us.  She loved her students and didn't forget us after we went into our own teaching careers.

When her parents died, she still felt close enough to me to write and tell me about it.  She even brought a group of her student teachers to my classroom to observe my teaching methods many years after my graduation.

Robert and I began our first year of teaching together in the fall of 1925 at Kaffir Switch, a rural school near Tulia, Texas.  In order to apply for that first job, we went out into the fields to be interviewed by members of the school board where they were working their farms.  We stood in the furrows while they asked personal questions about our character traits, church affiliations and any other subjects they deemed essential to the making of good teachers.  They also had to be satisfied that we would remain in the community at least three weekends of each month for service.  Regardless of where we taught, we were expected to spend almost as much time with church and community activities as we did with school activities.  Fortunately, this was never a burden to us.  In fact, time spent with the young people outside of the school setting brought some of our greatest pleasures.

Our schoolhouse was a two-room frame building with a nice large stage and piano.  That stage and piano were real assets to the school and to the community.  In the Twenties and Thirties, rural schools were simple:  Four years of math, four years of English, four years of science and four years of history were required for graduation.  There were no electives in high school, but there were many community and church activities that took place at the schoolhouse.  These activities were important.  Many had elements of the electives later offered through the schools.

Barney Hooten

Mama's home was located only five miles from the school where we taught.  So during this term, we stayed with Mama and my two brothers, Barney and Doyle, who were still at home.  The five-mile distance to school posed no problem because we had a new 1926 Sports Ford.  We paid Mama a nominal fee for room and board.  I think it was twenty dollars for each of us a month.  This was a good year for us at school and with my family.  Doyle attended school with us while Barney farmed the land for Mama.

Robert and my brothers had a good time living together.  My husband turned into just another adventurous boy when he was out with my brothers, and some of their games seemed a bit too daring to me. Mama's farm had a lake that stayed frozen practically all winter with a thick layer of ice.  In place of ice skates, they used an old Model T Ford that winter.  The boys started the car on the side of the lake and headed for the ice.  Then, once on the lake, they threw on the brakes.  With absolutely no control, they went sliding in every direction.

 

First house, Canyon, Texas 1926

At the end of that school term at Kaffir Switch, we again returned to Canyon and our college work. During this summer in 1926, we bought our first home.  It had a large living room with a bed that folded up into the wall when not in use, a kitchen, a bathroom, a service porch, and a bedroom large enough for two beds.  There was a front yard and a back yard enclosed on the north side by a storage room.  The house also had a partially enclosed entrance porch on the front.  This was our haven, our port, and our shelter as we returned to Canyon to attend college in the many years to come.

Cornerstone remains of Capitola schoolhouse, ca. 2010

When fall arrived, we moved to Capitola, near Sweetwater, where Robert taught four years.  We lived in the schoolhouse.  One of the large rooms of the brick school building had been converted into a two-bedroom apartment in which we lived.  The other three rooms were used for teaching.

We hardly noticed the modesty of our living circumstances; during those early years our plans and dreams were immodest enough to compensate. I remember the time that Robert invented his insulated suit.  He had designed it for protection in certain hazardous environments.  After we both labored long and hard building the prototype of that suit, we mailed it in to the patent office only to discover that a few short weeks before our completed application arrived, patent rights had been issued to someone else for almost the same design.

I taught only three years at Capitola because I took time out to have our first child.  We had continued each summer to return to Canyon to study, and it was one summer at nine-thirty in the morning on August 13, 1928, that we became the proud parents of a baby son, Kenneth Wayne.

Fifteen guests had been in our home for dinner the day before.  They brought fresh corn, fried chicken and other good food.  After everyone was gone, I began to have pains; but I didn't mention my discomfort because I thought the fresh corn or something else I’d eaten caused it.  Robert was very progressive and had insisted that our baby be born in a hospital, so we had made plans to go to St. Anthony's Hospital in Amarillo when the time came.  We lived about twenty miles from the hospital.

Finally, by early morning, I was convinced that this was more than “fresh corn.”  We left for the hospital in an electrical storm.  Rain was pouring down; the dirt road was slippery. It seemed our baby would arrive any moment.  Robert drove through all the red lights, and I barely made it into the delivery room.  I vowed to have any future babies safe at home in my own bed!

Kenneth Corder

When Robert wrote to my mother telling about our son’s perfection, she answered promptly, “Every crow thinks his birds are the blackest.”

My son and I spent the next ten days in the hospital.  It was considered good for a new mother to have this period of complete rest.  But it was not very restful for me or anyone else.  Kenneth cried and cried.  I could not make enough milk to satisfy him.  He was constantly hungry, and my doctor refused to allow him any milk in the hospital other than my own.  He did not believe in bottle-feeding babies.

Kenneth continued to cry at home.  Finally, Robert said, “Our baby may as well die full as empty,” and immediately went out to buy bottles and milk to make baby formula.  Kenneth filled his tummy and slept at last.

I had not planned to teach during my son's early childhood, but the school board members kept asking me to reconsider.  I finally agreed to teach on one condition that Mama would stay with us and care for Kenneth.  She agreed and it worked well for all of us.

 

At the close of the 1929-30 school year at Capitola, Robert decided to give up teaching and return to Canyon to accept a steady position with Thompson's Hardware where we could also go to school.

I was glad for an opportunity to return to college, but it didn’t work out that way.  Mr. Thompson wanted Robert to manage a branch hardware store in Happy, Texas.  Although Happy is only a short distance from Canyon, it proved to be impossible for me to get back and forth easily.  It was necessary for me to withdraw from school again.

We bought a home just one block from the high school in Happy.  It was here that our second child, a daughter, Mary Roberta, was born at three-thirty in the afternoon in the late summer of 1933.  This time it was not necessary for Robert to write Mama about our second child.  Roberta was born at home and Mama was there.  I had wasted no time getting to a hospital.

My husband resigned as manager of the hardware store that year and we both commuted to college.  Kenneth went with us.  At that time, West Texas State was a college dedicated to the training of teachers.  Kenneth attended the teacher’s demonstration school in the same department where I did my practice teaching.  Meanwhile, Mama was in our home taking care of Roberta.  It was an ideal child-care situation.

Mary Roberta Corder, age 2

The nine-month teaching term allowed an opportunity to further our education in a way that was not possible for Robert as manager of a hardware store.  And so the fall of 1934 found us back teaching at our first school, Kaffir Switch.  A brick building had been constructed with an auditorium where singing conventions and other entertainment took place.  Kenneth was in the first grade, and Mama continued to take care of Roberta.

Once again, we returned to summer school at the end of the teaching term, and Robert finally received that hard-earned B.S. Degree.  Mama gave him a white dress shirt as a graduation gift.  Robert showed such appreciation for it that it became his standard gift from Mama for every occasion.

When Roberta was two years old, she began to seem insecure about my leaving her.  So that year, I stepped out of teaching to spend more time at home.  Robert accepted a position at Stockdale, Texas.  He was principal of the grade school and taught science in high school.  His salary was eight hundred and ten dollars for the nine-month term.  This was at the time of the Great Depression and many teachers were out of work.  Robert's pay was so low that each month we had to borrow money before his voucher could be cashed.  Those years of the Depression are some of the most traumatic that I remember.  We like to talk about the “good old days,” but these were terrible years for many.