What's so Grand about Grandparents?

Okay peeps, you better pour yourself a cup of coffee and put on your walking shoes because this post is likely to be a LONG trip down memory lane! I apologise in advance if you find yourself wading through soggy sentiment. LOL! I'm all about "stones of remembrance" this week and seeing God's faithfulness at work throughout my life. I recognize that a great deal of my initial beliefs and concepts about God came because of my spiritual heritage and the influence of godly grandparents.

My paternal grandparents, Arlie Thomas Greenway (1894-1955) and Mattie Mae Davis Greenway (1893-1969). They were known to me and their 16 other grandchildren as Big Daddy and Mammy.

Big Daddy and Mammy came to Tampa, Florida from south Georgia and raised six children together in their 44 years of marriage before he died.

Big Daddy was a hard working (and by some accounts, hard-drinking) railroad man before he came to Christ. A short while after becoming a believer, he felt called to preach and pastored Pentecostal Holiness Churches in the Tampa area while maintaining his job with the Seaboard Railroad.

I was 9 when Big Daddy passed away. I remember him as a big, strong man with a hearty laugh. I remember being intrigued by the flat carpenter pencils he always carried in his overall bib. My mother says that Big Daddy only talked about two subjects; the railroad and the Lord. I kinda like that singleness of mind! I remember him in the pulpit and my mortal embarrassment one Sunday when he corrected my brother's and my misbehavior from the platform right in the middle of a sermon! I remember the gusto with which he sang the old hymns and always thought "When the Roll is called Up Yonder" must have been his favorite by the way he sang it and often requested Aunt Nancy to play it.

Big Daddy and Mammy always sat out on their front porch after supper and as soon as it began to get dark, Big Daddy went to bed. He didn't believe in wasting money on electric lights! Doesn't that seem funny by today's wasteful standards? But, here's the thing I remember most about him, when he got ready to go to bed; whoever was at their house (and I mean WHOEVER - it wouldn't have mattered if it was the president of the United States!) had to gather in the living room and kneel around the furniture while he prayed. As a child, I thought he would NEVER quit praying! Today, his lengthy prayers are a treasured memory for me and I wonder how many of the things he prayed for his family God is still in the process of answering generations later! What a heritage!

Mammy was raised Baptist and never fully embraced her husband's pentecostal beliefs. She was a fun-loving, gregarious woman who fiercely adored her family. She had a "the more the merrier" philosophy and my dad used to tell me their yard and house were always full of neighborhood kids. He and his five siblings knew they were always welcome to bring their friends home and their mother would cook for them. She was 45 years old and already a gray haired grandmother when her last child was born. There was a 12 year gap between my Aunt Nancy and her siblings. Mammy didn't want Nancy to miss out on the fun her other kids had experienced with siblings, so she simply borrowed grandchildren and kept them sometimes for VERY lengthy periods. Aunt Nancy and her cousin, Mary Ethel, grew up more like sisters than cousins.

This is Mammy in 1945 holding me and my cousin, Donnie Jean who was born 3 months to the day before I was.
















This is me (about 2 years old) with my mother and both grandmothers.













This is my maternal grandfather, Hal M. Tucker (1887-1947). Granddaddy was a photographer by trade and settled in St. Augustine, FL from his family home in Ohio.



Granddaddy was 30 years old when he married my grandmother and they raised three children together in the 30 years of marriage they had before he died suddenly at only 60 years old.




Granddaddy was raised in the Methodist church and became active in the Pentecostal Holiness denomination after moving to Florida. My cousin, Lois Hoyle, (to whom our whole family owes a debt of gratitude for her massive amounts of family genealogy research) found and reproduced for us a book, So Firm a Foundation, which is a history of the Tucker Methodist Church founded by Granddaddy's ancestors before the Revolutionary War in Washington County, Pennsylvania where his family originated.





I was only 2 years old when Granddaddy died but my mother remembers her father as a man of great faith who lived for Christ boldly and unashamed.

This was shortly before Granddaddy passed away in 1947. Pictured from left to right: Uncle Leonard (my mother's brother), Mother, Daddy, cousins Hiram and Lois Hanson in Grandmother's lap, me in Granddaddy's arms, Aunt Ruth (Uncle Leonard's wife) holding their daughter Linda, Aunt Eleanor (my mother's sister) holding her daughter Elberta and her husband, Uncle Howard (Hanson). [Don't we look like a Norman Rockwell painting? GRIN!]

This is my beloved grandmother, Mary Elberta Stitt Tucker (1893-1987). You caught the word "beloved", didn't you? Of my four grandparents, she was by far the dearest to me and memory of her is one of my most cherished treasures.



I'm sure I am including more pictures of her than most of you will be interested in seeing but what I want to convey is what a vital part of my life she was, ALL my life. We lived 200 miles apart most of my growing up years - she in St. Augustine and me in Tampa - and I yearned for and anxiously awaited the times we would go see her.









I am about three in this picture, we still lived in St. Augustine. I believe this phot was taken around the time my brother was born and soon after the Lord had healed Grandmother of cancer.

At 5, I was still my Grandmother's "girl" - a "malady" from which I've never fully "recovered."

We had moved to Tamp by this time in my life and I had to be content with seeing my grandmother less often.

By 11, I loved to go spend weeks at a time with Grandmother. She lived with Aunt Eleanor and her family and having a house full of cousins to play with (especially Lois) when I was there only added to the fun.

In Florida's humidity the old wire coat hangers had a tendency to rust and transfer that rust to your clothing. Grandmother would spool yarn onto pencil stubs and taught Lois and me to use them like a shuttle and chain stitch the yarn over the coat hangers. She paid us 10 cents apiece for every coat hanger we covered for her. Lois and I would work madly on our coat hanger projects in the mornings and as soon as we got our dimes would hurry off uptown to Woolworth's to buy paper dolls. We'd spend all afternoon cutting out the paper dolls and then play with them for hours on end. What a wise grandmother we had! She gave us an honorable work for our hands that enabled us to purchase our own "reward" - thus, earning the things we got. And, at the same time kept us out of mischief while filling her own closet with nicely covered coat hangers.

Grandmother ran a little camera and photo developing business in the front of the family photography studio. Her shop was on the first floor of the two story house where she and Aunt Eleanor's family lived upstairs. She outlived her husband nearly 40 years and supported herself by working in her camera shop and in the photography studio. When I stayed with her in the summers, she would rise long before this little sleepy-head granddaughter. She would go down to her shop an hour or more before opening time and have her quiet time there. I can remember tiptoeing down the staircase behind her, still in my nightgown, and seeing her in her chair quietly reading her Bible.

When I stayed with her in the summers I was pretty much "one of the kids" in the daytime (Aunt Eleanor had 6!). But, at bedtime, it was Grandmother and me. It was my favorite time of the day. After my bath, I would crawl into bed and wait for her. Before she got into bed she always knelt by the side of the bed and prayed. Sometimes I knelt beside her, sometimes I just laid in the bed, watched and listened. She would crawl into bed beside me. I'd snuggle close and say, "Grandma, tell me a story about when you were a little girl." She would thrill me with stories of growing up on a farm in Pennsylvania, skating on the frozen pond in winter, jumping from the hayloft, breaking her arm playing baseball with her brothers . . . I would try to imagine my prim and proper grandmother as the rowdy tomboy she described but it was more than my mind could grasp.

In various Bible studies I have been asked the question: "Who had the greatest spiritual impact on your life?" I have always answered that question: "My Grandmother Tucker." As I've explored the "why" behind my answer, I've come to realize that it was FAR MORE than the things she said; for she was never "preachy" about her beliefs. The life I saw her live was the testimony that bore witness to my heart. She walked out her faith "with fear and trembling" (Phil. 2:12) day in and day out, in good times and bad.

I remember when I accepted Christ as my savior when I was 8 years old, the first person I wanted to tell was my grandmother and I begged Mother to let me call her long distance. She played a part in many of her grandchildren's salvation. My cousin Elberta Dyer wrote a beautiful poem about her several years before Grandmother's death and it was read at her funeral. One of the lines says: "I remember a Sunday night when as a child of six I reached up and touched your arm,'Grandmother, I want to go down . . ' I said. You put your arm around me . . together we knelt and prayed . . Jesus came into my tender heart . .together we gave thanks to God."

I've often asked myself why I loved my grandmother in such a special way. She wasn't a perfect person (though I pretty well thought she was!). I've come to believe that it was her love for me that paved the way for my love for her. She loved me devotedly. She loved me unconditionally. Isn't that the same way it is in our relationship with God?

Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us . . .

I John 4:10

These were Grandmother's five grandchildren in 1947 when Granddaddy passed away. Over the years, she would have five more. We are (l-r) Me, Linda (Tucker); Lois, Elberta and Hiram (Hanson). I included this photo mostly because my mother remembers every time she sees it how proud Grandmother was of the fact that she made all four of the little dresses my cousins and I are wearing from only 6 yards of fabric. (The seamstresses among you will be impressed. GRIN!)



These are pictures of my precious Grandmother with my children. (Lori in 1967 [her first GREAT grandchild] and all three of them in 1972.)

From having grandparents to BEING one!

The way I loved my grandmother and the way she loved me established in my heart a passionate desire to be that same kind of grandmother to my own grandchildren.

May 25, 1989 my fondest dream came true. Mallory McGeary Millsap was born and with her a whole new world of love opened for me. The wonderful world of grandparenting.

Who would have thought that in only three short years my grandchild count would quickly reach FOUR!

Hillary Mills Shaw arrived 16 months after Mallory and was my first opportunity for local, every day, hands on grandparenting.

Joy unspeakable!

October 1992, I got to be in Fairbanks, Alaska for Maggie's arrival. Little Margaret Tucker Millsap!

None of us could have imagined when this snapshot was taken how this child would bless our family with the inherent "happiness" inside her.

John Hampton Shaw arrived seven weeks later in December. Hamp - our first grandson - all BOY - the logical one to catch the blame for all the mischief.

Good thing it's NEVER really his fault! ROFL

Christmas 2001. After nine years with no "babies" Mira Elizabeth Wooley was born in November and Gran's arms were joyfully full again!

Eleven months later our daughter, Lisa, gave birth to twins, Race and Hallie (Davis).

I have had the joy of being their day care provider while their parents worked all of their lives. What an adventure it has been!

Frankly, this snapshot has a lot of symbolism where their now 6 year old personalities are concerned. Race - facing out and reaching away in independence and Hallie - still happiest as close to Gran as she can get and holding on for dear life.

Megan Anderson Wooley was born one month before her sister Mira's second birthday and brought our grandchild count to 8.

She is our little "entertainer" and like her cousin, Maggie, has an effervescent joy within that bubbles out on all around.

So . . . What's so Grand about being a Grandparent? For me, it's the hope of being a Christian influence on my grandchildren and passing on to them the spiritual legacy that has been my heritage.

What about you? What was grand about your grandparents? What do you think is grand about being a grandparent?

But from everlasting to everlasting

the Lord's love is with those who fear him,

and his righteousness with their

children's children -

Psalms 103:17