My sister is no chicken
By Martha Wright

Martha Wright is a long-time employee of the Logan County School System, working in the Central Office. This article is about her sister, Mary Nelle Noe, and her husband, the late Charlie Mac Noe.

This was written as my sister’s husband of more than 60 years was dying in February 2007. I was telling her how strong and brave she was being and she said, “I’m just a chicken.” Later she said, "Would you write down those words you were telling me?"

I have been watching my sister face a heart breaking, life changing situation since the second day of February. I have determined that she is a lot of things but none of them are “chicken.”

I watched her late one Friday afternoon when she called and told me they had moved Charlie Mac to intensive care. Danny, Becky, Kristen, Joe, and I were there with her when Joyce came in and said, “We have to talk. This is a bad thing and we have decisions to make.” My sister didn’t fall apart; she sat there calmly with her family discussing what must be done. Of course, she wanted the best for the love of her life - her husband of more than 60 years.

I saw her when they came to get the family to go to him in intensive care at Logan Memorial. She had a bad leg and didn’t even need to be standing on it but, of course, she did. When Charlie Mac was saying, “Help me! Help me!” and fighting his oxygen, she stood beside him and said, “We are helping you - this is your oxygen don’t pull it off.” Her heart was breaking and her body was barely able to stand, but she stood tall and she stood firm.

She followed that helicopter to Nashville where she spent the next 17 days beside him. She offered him hope and love and comfort, and she was there for him. She had to be brought back to the doctor in Russellville a couple of times during this time, but her first thought was of him and could she leave for that long. My sister is no “chicken;” she’s every inch a strong, strong woman.

The doctors were good, kind and very encouraging. They thought he could overcome this heart attack but the strokes were too much for his body to handle. My sister, who has worked so hard for more than 20 years taking the best of care of him, watching for pneumonia or anything that might go wrong with him in order to catch it before it got so bad, now realized and said, “He is in God’s hands now we can’t do anymore.” She stood tall and she stood strong.

Yesterday when we realized this was the day our loved one was going to leave us and see his Savior face to face, I realized just what a strong sister I had. She calmly held his hand. She treated the people who came in graciously and with love. She still had her sense of humor (dry and corny as the Coursey sense of humor is), she ate and drank because she knew she should. She watched her children as they grieved and she hurt for them because they were losing their father. He was a sweet loving person - a good father, a loving husband. She told the hospital chaplain interesting things about him with a smile on her face when the chaplain asked her to “tell me about your husband so I will know him a little.” She was every inch a lady and exemplified Christ. My sister stood tall and she stood firm, her Anchor Held. She’s “no chicken,” maybe a turkey, but certainly no “chicken”.

A Valentine of Olde
By Sue Williams Spurlock

Sue Spurlock is a native of Epley Station and a graduate of Lewisburg High School. She and her husband John live in Bowling Green.
"When a man loves a woman / [He] can't keep his mind on nothing else . . . . He'd trade the world for the best thing he's found . . . ."
No matter how faded one's love life has become, when one hears Percy Sledge wail these lines he wrote some 44 years ago, one will simply have to fall in love all over again. As Valentine's Day approaches, the disc jockeys are keeping the disc hot. It is, as one admirer declared, "the holy grail of love songs." Recently, the song brought to mind a love story close to my heart--a story that had its beginning in a country schoolhouse in north Logan County many years ago. It goes like this.
During the first quarter of the 20th Century, there were two country schoolhouses located approximately three miles apart. One was at Edwards Station and the other at Epley Station. One day, the girls and boys at the Epley School conceived the idea of inviting the girls and boys from the Edwards school to be their guests for the day. With the teacher's permission, an invitation was extended and was quickly accepted. For a special entertainment, the host school prepared a play to present.
As it happened, there was in the play an attractive eighth-grade girl with long black wavy hair and, according to all accounts, she performed her part in an exceedingly fine manner, with much grace and confidence.
In the audience, attending from the Edwards school, was a young eighth-grade boy, who, though soft spoken and usually somewhat shy and of few words, pointed to the little black-haired girl and proclaimed he was in love. "I am going to marry that girl," he reportedly told all those within hearing distance.
The children enjoyed a wonderful day together, and shortly thereafter the Edwards schoolteacher suggested to her students that they extend an invitation to the Epley students to visit their school at Edwards Station. She also suggested to her students that they, too, perform a play at the event. The young boy immediately decided he would--by hook or by crook--win the lead role in the play, as such a part would be certain to win him notice by the pretty girl with the long black wavy hair.

Although the boy was in no way one of the better students in the school, the teacher was impressed with his sudden enthusiasm for the arts and awarded him the role. Thrilled and excited, he rehearsed his lines until he could deliver them with perfection. Each day, the teacher bragged on his dedication and progress, for until this time the boy too often spent a good part of the school day gazing out the several windows, searching for a squirrel or a rabbit (his shotgun was usually leaned against one corner of the classroom and his shells in his pants pocket).

Finally, the special day arrived--the day the Epley students would arrive in a gay and expectant manner, in wagons filled with loose straw, pulled by horses belonging to various of their parents. That morning, the young boy arose early, wolfed down his breakfast, took a little extra time with his grooming and headed out over the dirt path to school. He was within sight of the school building when a terrible case of stage fright suddenly consumed him. What if, he suddenly considered, instead of impressing the pretty girl he forgot his lines and she witnessed him desperately searching his empty mind? The thought of such stopped him cold in his tracks. The pretty girl would have no choice, he reasoned, but to think he was the dumbest boy in the whole wide world. Why, he berated himself, did he ever think he could perform in front of her?

What to do? He couldn't return home--his mother would demand an explanation. He couldn't go on to school--the teacher would insist he assume his role in the play. There was nothing to do but stay in the woods all day and wait until the proper hour to return to his home. It was, as the young man would explain years later, his first experience with the overwhelming and controlling forces of love, and, as Percy Sledge warns us, "When a man loves a woman," he can sometimes do rather strange things --"He'd give up all his comforts and sleep out in the rain," or, in the young boy's case, set on a rock in the woods all day with one of Cupid's arrows lodged deeply in his heart.
It was a rough, rough day in the young boy's life, but, happily, he "licked" his wounds and held his focus. Over the next few years, as he matured into quite a handsome young man and became more disciplined in the art of courting a young lady, he managed to win the heart of the intriguing young girl with the long black wavy hair.
These two were my parents. Not long before he died in 1977, my father Ernest Williams recorded this sweet story of his quest to win the heart of my mother Bessie Nash, the girl he fell in love with at first sight and vowed to make his wife.

Katie and the Valentine Kiss
By Cathy Carver (and Kate Tegmeyer)

Cathy Carver, a 1969 graduate of Russellville High School, lives with her family in Las Cruces, N.M. where she owns Carver's perfect score, a music engraving company that provides camera-ready music coopy to music publishers. The daughter of the late RHS music legend Hazel Carver, she also provides arranging and composing services. Her son, John Tegmeyer, has just released his debut album "Can't Never Go Back Home Again" This memory is about her daughter Kate.
One of my favorite Valentine’s Day memories concerns my daughter Kate, who at the time of this story was still “Katie.” I believe she must have been about eleven years old or so, in her first year of middle school here in Las Cruces. Valentine’s Day was approaching and she was excited. She had a little boyfriend and this would be her first year to exchange a Valentine gift that was more than just the generic packet of cards that she had taken for her whole class in previous years.
She knew exactly what she wanted to buy. I believe this probably came after days of consultation with her girlfriends on the playground at recess. The perfect gift, it seemed, would be one of the giant Hershey kisses in its own gift box. We made a trip to the local Walgreens, purchased the giant kiss, and on Valentine’s Day, she headed off to school with it safely stowed in her backpack.

When I picked her up after school that day, she was clutching a small white stuffed Teddy bear which held a little plush red heart between his paws. Sure enough, the gift had come from her boyfriend. When I asked how he had liked her gift for him, she replied that she hadn’t given it to him.
“Why ever not?” I asked.
It seemed that he had given her the gift of the Teddy bear in the morning, but at the time she hadn’t had his gift with her. Then (as so often happens) they broke up over the lunch period. So, naturally she couldn’t give him the giant kiss.
“So what became of it?”
“Oh, my friends and I broke it into pieces and ate it,” she said.
She was in such a good mood (after all, she had ended up scoring both gifts!) - that I knew right at that moment that she would always demonstrate very sound judgment in the relationship department. A no-nonsense girl.
And I was right.

After I wrote this, I sent it to Kate for her approval. These are her remarks:
"Haha, yeah that's pretty much how it happened. But it was a stuffed green frog with a heart between his hands, not a teddy bear. But that's not really that important.

"I don't know that I've developed sound judgment in the relationship department, but I think what I learned is that I sure do love a giant hunk of chocolate! Life lessons..."