Cora's Rocker

Cora's Rocker Jonathan McGory, great-great grandson of Cora by Jamie Griggs Tevis I spent the weekend getting acquainted with an old friend. The friend has been in the family for over a hundred years, rocked four generations of babies, comforted the sick, and helped the family pass many a pleasant hour before the open fire on cold winter nights. The friend is the old, homemade, ladder-back rocker with the split bottom seat that first belonged to my grandmother, Cora, who came from Doylesville on Muddy Creek in Madison County, Kentucky. No one in the family is sure who made the sturdy, hickory rocker and the companions -six straight-back chairs-but it was said that the chairs were bottomed by the inmates of the state prison at Frankfort, Kentucky. Cora and May were given the chairs when they married . Every spring Cora gave the straight back chairs a fresh coat of white paint, trimmed the backs and legs with red paint and covered the bottoms with another layer of oilcloth to match a table cover of the same material. The chairs were made of green wood and leaned as if a fat man had sat in them and caused them to tilt backwards. 60 Or the tilting may have been caused by a lot of rocking of babies-jolting backwards and forward-for want of a real rocker. Since there were six chairs in the beginning and probably not that many babies at one time, I hold to the green wood and fat man theory. The chairmaker sought the straightest small oak he could find to cut down. He then stripped off all the bark and cut long pieces of flexible strips about an inch wide from the tree trunk. These he used to make the woven bottoms of the chairs. (Similar withes are used to weave split-oak baskets.) We treasure such work today but when Cora and May were given the rough, handmade chairs they were told to use them until they could do better. Thus they were known in the family as the "Til you can do better chairs." Cora and May used them for forty years and then they did better and moved off of Muddy Creek up the road to Union City. Four of the chairs were sold at the moving auction and two they brought with them to their new home in Union City. Somewhere along the way antiques became popular in the family. The many coats of paint were stripped, the oilcloth covers torn off to expose the split bottoms, and varnish was applied. They were used as extra chairs at the company table on Sundays. Still they leaned backwards and were not regarded as having much worth. A granddaughter married and one was given to her to "use 'til she could do better." The other was given to a newlywed foreign student who was rooming in part of the house and neither has been heard of since. The rocker was another story. Cora, a stout, tall lady, was especially fond of it and took it as her favorite chair-rocking babies in it, knitting in it, and listening to the radio soap "Ma Perkins" in it. In her later years, the ladder-back was just right for holding her head for catnaps before the fire after lunch. In her younger days she made a cradle of the rocker for her infant son by filling the bottom with a feather pillow. Once she left her little sister, Stella, to watch the baby while she ran ahead of a storm to gather in the turkeys before the young ones drowned. Stella rocked the homemade cradle so hard that the sleeping baby rolled out on the floor, causing her to believe she had killed him. When Cora died no one wanted the old rocker so I brought it to my home in Ohio. By this time my house was full of furniture and it never did fit in well. I tried it in the small TV room but the rockers stuck out and took up too much space. It looked tired and worn in the living room so I retired it to...