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

1: My Early Days

1 ❙ MY EARLY DAYS ❙ 9 ❙ I’m sitting here enjoying the fireplace. I do that every day comes the wintertime.I think it’s the most comfortable thing there is.Of course you always have to be jumping up putting wood in it. That’s part of the game. But a fire is so much company. How did I come to live in New Mexico? I came down through Trinidad in a Model T Ford Touring Car with my baby in a basket on the seat beside me. She was nine months old. I was running away from a rotten marriage. Climbing up the Raton Pass was no easy matter. The Model T refused to make it up that steep grade because the gas was gravity feed. So I rolled back to the bottom, put her in reverse, and backed all the way to the top. Once at the crest I turned around and coasted down into New Mexico, a place I’d never seen. It was the spring of 1921.I was twenty-two years old,older than New Mexico, which joined the Union in 1912 and would be home to me for the rest of my life. I am going to try to tell you the story of my life, starting out with the history of my existence beginning back when I was hardly more than a baby, long before I ever thought of heading west. I was born Frances Minerva Nunnery in Covington,Kentucky on ❙ A WOMAN OF THE CENTURY ❙ September 12, 1898, but the first thing I remember happened after we’d moved to Pittsburgh. The lady my mother had taking care of me dressed me up and told me we were going down to see a train go by because President McKinley had been killed. When the long train came rolling through Pittsburgh, we were in the big crowd lining the railroad tracks. The train was all decorated in black drapes. I don’t know where it came from, but it was on the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad. It seemed to me like whatever had happened was a terrible thing. Everybody was crying and carrying on like they thought the end of the world was coming. I was three years old,but I still remember it like it was yesterday,just a sorrowful impression I got as a child that’s stayed with me the rest of my life. I remember seeing a picture of me about that age, with pigtails, one hanging down on each side, kind of fuzzy looking, stringy looking, and I had on a pair of shoes I guess was handed down, looked like about three sizes too big and the toes all kicked out. I was sitting on a pair of steps. That’s the only picture I ever saw of me when I was a little kid. I don’t know what became of it. I had two brothers, Carl and Lewis, and two sisters, all older and pretty well all grown up excepting Irene, the one about four years older than me. I really had a rough time with her. She gave me a lot of static. Once, when I was about three, they put a new dress on me and I went and slid down a muddy bank in it, didn’t know any better . Well, my oldest sister, Arva, grabbed me by the arm and flung me down on the couch. Broke my arm. They had to take me to the hospital and get it set. After that it was in a sling. We never had any affection whatsoever shown in our family, but Mother was partial to Irene.She said Irene was delicate.When Mother had her migraines, Irene was the one took care of her. I felt like an orphan. After we moved to Pittsburgh,Nunnery,my father,got sick.He died 10 ❙ MY EARLY DAYS ❙ when I was less than a year old. I later heard that George Nunnery’s folks came from England as stowaways. I never heard anything else about my grandparents on either side. My mother married again when I was about three. Mother was a striking-looking woman. Her maiden name was Amelia Jane Hill. My mother’s second husband, Mr. Bichel, a widower , was a Pennsylvania Dutchman with a long handlebar mustache drooped over his upper lip. Once my mother married him he was my...