
Thursday, August 5, 2010
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Society

City Personals
Mary Clay Brooks

Vacations over – school begins

Happy birthday wishes go out to Ben Seale and Walter Webb! Vicki and Walter travelled to Franklin, Tenn., Saturday to spend his birthday with his daughter, Carole Webb.

Nancy and Ki Jones and children, Mary Neely and Jake, recently returned from a wonderful vacation at DisneyWorld.

Anita and Heath Barnett and children, Amanda and Rosamond, returned Sunday from their beach vacation in Destin, Fla.

Summer is coming to an end with schools starting this week and next. Football fields are full, with most schools starting full pad practicing this week. Pretty soon, the Friday night lights will be glaring all over the county! Be sure to go out and support your local schools!

Fast-pitch softball for the Marshall Academy Lady Patriots cranks up this week, with one home game, one away and a tournament in Grenada over the weekend. The ladies have been beating the heat most of the summer with practices. Coached by their fearless leaders, Susan Rodgers, Carlton Gibson and Marcus Moore, the girls have endured the heat in order to hone their skills. Y’all go on down to the Lady Patriots field and show the girls some support!

Soccer has also been running full throttle at Marshall Academy.

The girls have had practices all summer getting ready for their upcoming season. Several days one week, they had a professional soccer player come to work with them.

It looks to be a promising start for all areas of our local schools in sports! Good luck to all the players, parents and coaches on their ventures this fall and congratulations for enduring hours of practices in the grueling heat - it will pay off on the field!

(To put your news in City Personals, please e-mail maryclayb@yahoo.com; mail to City Personals, The South Reporter, P.O. Box 278, Holly Springs, MS 38635 or call 662-252-4261. You may also e-mail your City Personal news to south@dixie-net.com).

Emily Brady and Tim Church will exchange vows August 27

Emily Brady and Tim Church

Emily Brady and Tim Church announce their engagement and plan to marry Aug. 27 in San Francisco, Calif.

Brady graduated from George Washington High School in Charleston, W.V., and Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University in Blacksburg, Va.

She is a member of the Institute of Industrial Engineers and is employed with eBay in Zurich, Switzerland.

Her parents are Dennis Brady of South Charleston, W.V. and Kerry Brady and Chuck Lirette of Holly Springs.

Church graduated from Elkhart Central High School in Elkhart, Ind., and Duke University in Durham, N.C. He will attend ETH in Zurich, Switzerland, for graduate school in the fall, studying computer science. He is a member of Sigma Nu. His parents are Geoff and Kathie Church of Elkhart, Ind.

Museuming
Lois Swaney Shipp
Museum Curator

Vacation – South American style

Wow! Congratulations on surviving the hottest months in history here! We’re having a heat wave and July has been the hottest month on record.

Can you imagine that a while ago, there was no air conditioning? I remember fans in each room, the windows raised, and we waited for a breeze to ripple the curtains. Screens covered the windows and doors. We didn’t even shut the door at night we just hooked the screen.

In the 1930s, during the Great Depression, summers were intensely hot with temperatures steaming in the upper nineties and quite often over a hundred degrees. Also, at the same time of the heat wave, there was a terrible drought; it didn’t rain for weeks. I heard my mother intensely praying on her knees to the Lord for rain. I waited to see if the Lord listened for Mama’s petition. In a few days it came a flood. Even the Lord listened to Mama’s petition. I felt the community owed Mama a debt of thanks for breaking the drought but maybe a lot of people were praying for the same thing.

As we reported before, Storm I hit the museum the last of June and killed the computer, printer, two telephones, and credit card machine. Altogether the replacement costs were about $800. Storm II hit the cotton patch and the cotton was exhausted from it and was sprawled out on the ground. Husband Ira fixed it by picking it up and building a fence around it. It’s beautiful again. Then Storm III broke the front yard pear tree limbs off. One fell over the picnic table. So now, we are going to cut both the cherry laurel and pear tree (the no fruit kind). It was given by the Town and Country Garden Club 20 years ago with two other pear trees in memory of Eva Hurdle and Nell Crocket.

The birth of a volcano

This is the story told in Costa Rica and it was in Reader’s Digest at that time. Most volcanoes are thousands of millions of years old. In 1958 a farmer in Costa Rica noticed smoke coming out of his field. He watched it and each day it grew bigger and began to rise up and more smoke was pouring out. It was a new volcano. John Kennedy came to visit Costa Rica. The day he arrived, the new volcano erupted for the first time and the people considered it a good omen. They named a school and other public places after their hero, John Kennedy. The volcano is in a line of dormant volcanos and it is the only one moving and shaking. It is the world’s most active volcano. It used to spew every 30 minutes, until it blew it’s top about a decade ago. Now, it spews every couple of hours, around the clock.

We have just returned from Costa Rica and what a trip it was. It was our second honeymoon. We went to the active volcano, which has its head in the clouds like an obstructive curtain; but to be there by a mountain that is angry, roaring and shaking the earth is unreal.

We swam in the Pacific Ocean where the surf is some of the largest in the world. Surfers were everywhere. We didn’t swim there as the deep undertow would have carried us away. Sea shells are big here. Seashells are disappearing all over the world elsewhere.

When we got to the zip line which swings 100 feet above the jungle floor, we didn’t do this either. I wanted Ira to do it to break all records as the oldest person (92) to swing over the jungle. The guide said, “Oh, no, a man 94 went on it yesterday,” to which Ira replied, “If I can’t break any records, I’m not going!”

Ira was amazed at the farming crops and pastures going up the mountains. All the mountains started out as volcanoes a million years ago and they look like first graders drew them as the are cone shaped up into a point.

Coffee is their biggest crop and it grows on the mountain where it is cooler. Pineapple and rice are big crops too.

The temperature never goes much lower than 70 degrees. This trip it was really hot.

Ira loved the beautiful horses. We happened to be driving through the town of Liberia and stopped for a parade celebration of the county’s birthday. The horses were Corollo horses, with curved necks like the Tennessee Walkers. They lifted their front feet really high and their back feet go round in circles like wheels. They are really prancers and so beautiful. The townspeople were riding them -- older men and one beautiful lady. The stallions had flowing manes and the mares and geldings were clipped short.

I likened it to our Tennessee walking shows mixed in with a rodeo. The difference is everybody is a winner.

We were having a heat wave while we were gone and the museum did fine without me. Business picked back up when I got back. Billy Peel’s grandchildren were in. Mr. Moody from Montana was in looking up his Pott’s Camp relatives. Not too many decades ago, he lived in Dr. Hale’s “Hilltop” and had a photo studio in the basement there.

Miracles always amaze me and the fact that people know about us from all over still astonishes me. Cell phones are really the miracles of our age, as now-a-days, cell phones are computers and cameras combined.

They already have phones that will picture you as you answer the phone.

Right now I can dial Costa Rica or Europe, Australia, China and in a few minutes can talk to somebody on the other side of the world.

At the museum, we are trying to plan a history tour on Van Dorn’s Raid but we need narrators who want to have a real adventure delving back in time to trace the footsteps of the past. We have planned the tour for October 9. The tour will be marvelous and we will travel 75 miles in Marshall County and you’ll see sights you haven’t seen before.

We will also have a Christmas Tour of homes, which will be delightfully elegant, but we need your help and support.

Anything will die if all food supply is cut off. Pray for help for the museum as we are needing help again. The Lord sent us John Paul Teel for a while, but now he is moving on.

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