Allene Teel reprints ‘My Memories’

Dinner was announced by a bell. Kids played red rover and kick ball on a field of patchy grass. They wandered around in sand ditches, just a bunch of country kids looking for a fun time out in the middle of nowhere. Schools were small and country, with limited resources going straight from the Great Depression into the Second World War.

This was what the small hometown of Mount Pleasant was like that Allene Gardner Teel grew up in. It was quaint, nothing ever really going on, and if you needed something you had to drive all the way into the big city of Memphis, Tenn., which her father would do occasionally.

Allene is short in stature with her short curly white hair, blue eyes the color of the Southern sky and dressed in her Sunday best for any guest.

She said she wanted to be a writer and for her that meant sharing her stories. In her spiral bound book, “My Memories,” she talks about her mother’s death when she was 6, growing up as a farmer’s daughter and how she wouldn’t trade it for anything, her love story with WW II veteran Clyde Campbell Teel, and what it’s like raising kids in the country.

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