Annie Elizabeth Wyatt is my loving, great grandmother, also known to me as Granny.  She’s 81 and still going strong, which is more than I can be thankful for.  She was born February 11, 1920 on High Point Road in Forest Hill, Maryland.  The greatest thing about Granny is that she is always there when I need someone to talk to and she has never let me down once.
        Granny says, “I got along with my family just great.”  She had two brothers, and they all played together.  Her oldest brother watched after her in school.  Granny and her brothers played a marble game they called Fox & Geese.  It was similar to Checkers.  Granny and her older brother, Chester, also played a card game called Rook.  It’s played similar to some of the games we play nowadays.  However, after too many spats about who was cheating, Granny’s dad finally took the cards and threw them into the stove.  Granny also played with her dolls, which were her favorite toys.
        Granny and her family didn’t do much vacationing except for when they went down to Virginia once in a while to see her grandmother.  There was a time when this was a dangerous trip.  Granny’s family would have to travel over Bent Mountain in their Model T Ford.  Of course, the cars would be traveling at a slow pace as they reached the top of the mountain.  At one time, there was a band of thieves robbing people as they approached the mountain top.  Granny’s mom would keep a sharp bread knife close by in case they met up with the robbers.
        Granny went to a one-room school and it had seven grades in it.  She had a lot of good friends and she liked her teacher.  Since there was seven grades in one room Granny really had to concentrate.
The family had a farm with 50 or 60 acres. Granny recalled that there were two horses on the farm and one or two cows.  They were fortunate in this way because they could provide their own milk and butter.
        For fun Granny would play a lot of townball.  They used a soft, spongy, rubber ball.  When they hit it, it would go way out.  Her friends and brothers would also play hide and seek with her.  She says there were some professional sports, but she didn’t play any.  Granny’s favorite hobbies were playing dolls and house.  She would find an old building and clean it up and play house or pretend the tree was her house.  As far as Granny’s favorite pet, she says they had cats and dogs and loved all of them.
        As a young child Granny was very bashful.  She tried to overcome this by talking and playing more with people when she met them.  As a little girl, Granny didn’t have any boyfriends.  Granny says “I didn’t really care for them as a boyfriend, just as friends.”
         “It was a plain home, nothing fancy like they have nowadays,” Granny replied when I asked her what her house was like.  Granny said there were five rooms in the house.  She says she had good parents and the family always had food to eat.  As a child, Granny was forced to wear dresses and stockings to keep her legs warm because it was a long walk to school.  Pants weren’t made for girls back then, just for men and boys.  Granny wore the same apparel to church, but it was nicer.  Granny says she liked what she wore and she was comfortable in it.
         In December of 1937 Granny was married. After Granny married, she worked in a sewing factory for a while.  As far as Granny liking her job she replied “Not especially.”  Granny was mostly a housewife, though, who enjoyed baking pies every Thursday as a special treat for her daughters.  Sometimes, Granny worked at a canning house during the summer, where she enjoyed canning tomatoes.
        It was 1944 and Granny had been married seven years when her husband was drafted in World War II.  He was in the service for a year.  Granny was very lonely during the year and she cried a lot.  She had to watch her two daughters by herself, who were very lonely, too.  When Velna, her oldest daughter, saw her dad for the first time in a year she started crying.  The kids at school asked why she was crying if her dad was back home.  The teacher said she was crying because she was overjoyed.  The kids didn’t understand this, though.