Celebrating a 101st birthday. (original) (raw)

Over the years, I have collected stories about dozens of East Texans who have been fortunate to reach their 100th birthday and most of them have some wonderful tales about the early history of East Texas.

Bertha McDaniel of Jasper is no exception. Her relatives and friends gathered recently at the activity center of Jasper�s Church of Christ to celebrate her 101st birthday.

Maybe Bertha�s longevity can be attributed to the fact that she goes to church every Sunday.

She grew up in a rough log cabin with crude, homemade furniture. The family�s stove was a fireplace with a stick-and-mud chimney and water had to be carried by a bucket from a nearby spring.

Bertha�s parents, Charley Berryman and Helen Ada Veatch Berryman, built the cabin as their home on the Texas frontier near Yellowpine in southern Sabine County and never left. Bertha was the youngest of thirteen children.

Known affectionately as �Ber Ber,� Bertha always has a twinkle in her eyes and has memories few other people her age can only imagine.

Bertha recalls one Christmas when there were no presents, and her mother was deeply concerned.

But on Christmas morning, as Bertha and her siblings rushed to the fireplace, they found that their stockings contained eggs that had been wrapped in colored paper by her mother and boiled in a bucket over the fire to make colored eggs. There were also a handful of hickory nuts, a syrup cookie and �lots of love.�

Bertha also recalls an animal cemetery by the spring. It was a quiet, secluded place shaded by beech and gum trees. There, the Berryman children buried each of their pets: kittens, birds, puppies and chickens. They gave the animals �a good buryin�, prayed, cried and sang songs like Red Wing and Oh, Happy Day.

School at Yellowpine consisted of harsh cold days in the winter and hot burning summers. Their dinner pails usually had biscuits, boiled eggs, a cold piece of meat, potatoes and syrup. The syrup was usually stuck in a glass with a biscuit squeezed inside to cover the syrup.

Bertha remembers the family�s wagon with its paint bleached off by the sun, wobbly wheels, broken planks in the bed and a spring seat that had collapsed on one side. It was the family�s only means of transportation and when the kids went along, a quilt was carried so they could lay down when tired and covered when the air was cold.

�I�d like to go back and ride that creakly old wagon along a shady country lane, far from the highways and the cities and the cars. That was a place where every tree and every sound was familiar,� she said.

Bertha married Thornton W. McDaniel and they enjoyed sixty-one years together as store keepers in Pineland and Jasper. They had no children, but nieces, nephews and friends became their extended family As she looked back at 101 year. Bertha noted that she rode in a covered wagon, saw men walk on the moon, and lived through two world wars and the terms of eighteen presidents.

But, most of all, she is thankful for �the beauty around me,� for tall pines, winding trails, autumn leaves, winter sunsets and the evening star.

�I am thankful that my life has had more sunshine than shadows,� she said.