A Woman of the Century, Frances Minerva Nunnery (1898–1997): Her Story in Her Own Memorable Voice as Told to Cecil Dawkins

3: I Head West

But Mother had a little different plan for me. Mother said,“If you’re going to have to go out west, you can’t go out there by yourself.”That’s how she decided to get me married off to this preacher person from Colorado who had been going to school there in Pittsburgh at the Bible Institute. That’s where my mother knew him. But I didn’t know him. I’d only seen him once. We took a walk in Shenley Park, looked at the dinosaurs in the Museum. I guess Mother thought I would probably be safe out west married to a preacher.So I went out there on the train and he met me in Denver. When you go to a place as celebrated as Denver, you expect to see a city. Didn’t look like much of a city to me. There were street cars, not many passenger cars, lots of horses and wagons and buggies and people crowding the streets. But there weren’t hardly any big buildings at all. Even covered night and day in smoke from the coke ovens on the hills, Pittsburgh was a big town with tall buildings and cobbled streets.After Pittsburgh,Denver looked very primitive,like somebody had mashed the whole town into the ground. I learned this preacher and I were going to live with his people up at Timnath, Colorado. That ended any hope of treatment by the Westinghouse 3 ❙ I HEAD WEST ❙ 32 ❙ ❙ I HEAD WEST ❙ doctors in Denver, which was my whole reason for heading west in the first place, but there I was.And as Timnath was some way off, we had to get married right away in Denver because single girls in those days didn’t go running around spending the night on the road with some guy she wasn’t married to. This preacher claimed his marital rights that first night. And that was the worst experience of my life, this marriage business. I couldn’t take it. I was so damn stupid I didn’t know about those things. I’d lived on the farm and I thought people did like the animals —when you got ready to have a calf you took the cow to the bull, so when you wanted to have a child you had the sex act. Well of course that very first night I found out that wasn’t so. It was a different situation altogether. And that was the beginning of the worst time of my whole life. So here I was, living in Timnath in back of his parents’ house in a little frame shack with a privy, when what I’d come west for was treatment in Denver for my tuberculosis. This preacher’s name was Elmer Parker, and he was very vain. He had good teeth and a beautiful head of red-blond hair that he put up in waves at night. He beat egg whites and put his comb in it and ran it through his hair. Then he patted his waves in place and tied a rag over his head to keep them set for church the next day. I had no use for such as that.And I never could do anything to suit his mother. I wasn’t her idea of a model wife. Right from the first I knew I had to get out of there. With seven hundred and fifty dollars I had saved in Liberty Bonds while I was working for Westinghouse,pretty soon I bought a Model T Ford Touring Car.The car was mine but I didn’t know how to drive it. Parker was supposed to be a Sunday School missionary, a sort of circuit preacher.He right away took over my car to do his circuit riding . I made up my mind I’d go along and watch what he did and learn how to drive a car. He drove all around up in Colorado to these outlying farms,where 33 ❙ A WOMAN OF THE CENTURY ❙ people gave him food.And he took it from them instead of working and buying his own food himself.Every time Parker got some of these groceries from these poor farmers or some widow woman, he said the Lord was supplying his needs. I told him he ought to go out and work and supply his own needs. I told...