Happy National Pfeffernüesse Day!

Pfeffernüesse Cookies are one of the oldest and most popular holiday cookie in Germany, Denmark and The Netherlands. Known as Pepernoten in Dutch (plural), Pebernødder in Danish and Pepper Nuts in English, Pfeffernüesse cookies are so beloved in many European Countries that there is a National Pfeffernüesse Day, held each year on December 23rd honor of these little cookies.

Pfeffernüesse are great for dunking in hot mulled cider, amug of hot tea, hot chocolate or a steaming mug of Gluhwein.

Pfeffernüsse Cookies are spicy, small, round cookies, made with butter, molasses, and lots of spices. Pfeffernüsse are hard when they come out of the oven but soften with time....if they last that long! Pfeffernüesse cookies are a variant of the German Lebkuchen or gingerbread. Pfeffernüesse are a special treat, left for children by St. Nicholas!

"Sid Scott, What A Man"

Laying Sid to rest yesterday was one of the hardest things I have ever had to do, but the service was exceptionally great, especially the words of Sid the Kid and Courtney. Loved it. Sid's death is the end of an era for me. He was the last of a group of a group of broadcasters I grew up with at WANY radio. It is an era that I did not want to see come to an end. Sid was such a huge part of my life and life is not going to ever be the same again. I am not looking for sympathy, but it has been a rough year, with the loss of my aunt Pat on June 3rd, followed a week later by the death of my sister. Sid was in the hospital during the entire month of July. He kept bouncing back, as he had done years before during a previous episode with sickness, but God's will is not always what we wish to happen. Sid came from Lillydale, Tennessee. His family were neighbors to my great grandfather Hige Boles and they were sharecroppers. Both families migrated to Clinton County when Dale Hollow Lake was created. Sid first met my dad during the middle school years and the rest is history. Both shared passions for basketball, baseball and music. But, Sid's biggest love out of those three things was basketball. He would stand on a crate and peer into the small window in the door and watch high school basketball games because he did not have enough money to pay the price of admission. Years later, he would become a local basketball legend. The great Kenneth Conner said not he but Sid was the greatest basketball player to ever play for Clinton County. He got into broadcasting, which led to him becoming the 'Voice of the Bulldogs.' There will never be another like him. For me, walking into Lindle Castle Gymnasium will never be the same. If I was not helping him broadcast the games, which I did for several years before he retired the first time, I was sitting beside he and Sid the Kid at court side. I was drawn to him and I loved him. Yesterday, the preacher said Sid is probably already trying to organize a basketball game in heaven. On the inside I had to laugh, because I knew that Sid's punchline to that statement would have been, "There are no basketball games in heaven, because there are no referee's in heaven." My first real memory of Sid is dad asking him to touch his nose to his chin (one of his early claimed of fame's). I thought, "What a freak!" It was wasn't too many years later that my opinion of him changed to, "What a man!"

In Memory of a Legend

I started in radio in the spring of 1976 and was blessed to work with or be close to many legendary on air personalities and radio executives around the area. People like my grandfather, Cecil Speck, my uncle, Wallace Allred, my dad, Darrell Speck, Welby and Mae Hoover, Elmer Goodman, Ray Mullinix, Eddie Neal, Bob Glover and Eddie Paul Coop. And then, after a couple of decades I started having to write most of their obituaries. Writing obits was part of my job, but what had been routine became difficult when I found myself writing them for the very people I had worked with and idolized. Today, I wrote one more and it was hardest of all. Hard because Sid Scott was like a second father to me. Hard because his passing marks the end of an era that I was not ready to shut the door on.

Grace

This photograph has lots of memories for me. All through my childhood, up into my earlier adult years living at home, it hung on the wall facing our kitchen table. Times, life in general, were simpler back then. Sometimes I long for those days to return.

Grace was photographed by Eric Enstrom st his studio in Bovey, Minnesota. Most sources note the year as 1918, though Enstrom's daughter Rhoda, born in 1917, claimed to remember being present when the photograph was taken, and it may have been taken closer to 1920. The man in the photograph, Charles Wilden, was a Swedish immigrant who lived in nearby Grand Rapids, earning a meager living as a peddler and living in a sod house. While the photograph conveys a sense of piety, the book shown in the photo is a dictionary, not the Bible.

What happened to Wilden after the photograph is unclear. In 1926 he was paid $5 by Enstrom in return for waiving his rights to the photograph. He disappeared thereafter. After the photograph became popular, Enstrom attempted to track Wilden down but was unsuccessful. Various family members and local historians have also attempted to determine what became of Wilden but have not been able to locate definitive evidence.

Enstrom first licensed the photograph to Augsburg Fortress in 1930. In the 1940's, his daughter colorized the photo by hand. This version was used in prints produced in the 1940s onward and became the more widespread and popularly known version of the photo.

Enstrom earned a modest sum from the photograph for the remainder of his life. He died in 1968.

John Mulkey Reneau (1844-1910)

"Bear up all you can, the hardest stroke falls to me..." John Mulkey Reneau was born in Clinton County, KY on June 25, 1844. The son of Rev. Isaac Tipton Reneau, John married Eleanor Ann "Nelly" Means, daughter of my 3rd great-grandparents, Azel and Susan Wright Means, on January 10, 1867.

Nelly had been born a week after John, on July 2, 1844. To them were born 3 children: Alice, born in 1867, Susan, born in 1869 and Azel Tipton, born in 1871. On August 18, 1873, Nelly died giving birth to twins. Both babies died two days later.

A few hours after his wife's death, John wrote the following to his father:

"Dearest Father:
It falls to my lot to record to you the death of my loving companion and your affectionate daughter, Nelly. She died about sunrise this morning, praising her God and maker. She was not delivered. She flooded to death. I would be proud if you could be here, but you could not get here in time, and I thought you would not wish to be gone so long and know nothing about it. Bear up all you can, the hardest stroke falls to me, my little motherless babes, for whom I crave your earnest prayers.

Your bereaved son,
John Mulkey"

Of their children, Alice never married. In 1920, at age 47, she was living in Union County, New Mexico with her brother, Azel. Susan married Dr. Richard Claborn of Clinton County in 1890. They moved to Knox County, Texas.

Eleven months after Nelly's death, John married Mary Dillon Mullins of Fentress County. They had seven children:

Elmore (1875-1940), Thomas (1877-1947), John (1879-1954), James (1882-1960), Margaret (1885-1889), Elizabeth (1888-1889) and William (1890-1951). Most of them moved to areas in and around Texas.

John Mulkey Reneau servd two terms as Surveyor of Clinton County.

On April 6, 1910, at age 65, John Mulkey Reneau died at his home in the Huntersville community after an illness of just three weeks. Mary died four months later.

(John Mulkey's sister, Mariba, is the great, great grandmother of actor Johnny Depp, who was born in Owensboro, Ky in 1963.)

Ronnie's Apple Cake

It was not always known as Ronnie's Apple Cake. Originally, it was simply known as the delicious apple cake that mom baked. We all loved it, but Ronnie, my brother, loved it the most and let it be known that it was his favorite dessert. Only later did that matter, because that apple cake would be the very last food item of moms that  Ronnie would ever eat. It was on the late afternoon of May 6, 1981. He died the following morning in a car accident just five-tenths of a mile from home. Not long after that, mom announced that she could no longer bare to bake another apple cake again and that was the end of it. We understood.

President Dwight David Eisenhower once said, "There's no tragedy in life like the death of a child. Things never get back to the way they were." But, one day, 30 years after my brother's death, one memory did come back. It was Sunday, Thanksgiving Day week. J.D. and I had driven to mom's house for lunch. I wasn't expecting to see that apple cake sitting there on the food bar that day, but there it was. Naturally, a ton of memories came flooding back. I never expected things to remain the same after Ronnie's death, but who would? I'm not real sure when exactly it happened, but somehow, over the years, I had found a place in my mind to store the memory of him and those days, and eventually had won the struggle to go on with my life.

I suppose the same thing could be said for mom. Standing there, staring down at the apple cake I said to mom, "Wow, you baked that apple cake!" She said that she had found the recipe in her box, but did not know why she had not baked it. I reminded her how much he loved it and would always say he it was his favorite dessert. It was on that day that I renamed mom's apple cake, 'Ronnie's Apple Cake.'

For those of you who are curious as to why my brother loved that apple cake so much, here is mom's recipe. I hope you will enjoy it as much as he did.

Ronnie's Apple Cake

Ingredients:
3 cups diced apples
1 1/2 cups of oil
2 cups sugar
3 eggs well beaten
3 cups self-rising flour
1 tp cinnamon
1 tp vanilla
1 cup raisins or nuts (mix well)
optional -1 cup powdered sugar
1/2 cup of milk for a glaze

Instructions:
Using a baking pan, bake at 350 degrees for 45 minutes to one hour.

Daddy's Postcard

The postcard, dated September 20, 1944, was sent by my grandfather to his daughters while he was stationed at Camp Peary, near Williamsburg, Virginia.

Hello girls,
How are you. I'm still fine. Sure will be glad to see you. I'll be home in 7 more nights. Won't that be fine. Be good & help mama & I'll bring you a little present. I will be glad to see your new sailor dresses and new shoes. Lots of love. Daddy.

As you see in the photo, he indeed came home and got to see his daughter's in their new sailor dresses and new shoes...

Everybody, Somebody, Anybody and Nobody

"This is a story about four people named Everybody, Somebody, Anybody, and Nobody.

There was an important job to be done and Everybody was sure that Somebody would do it.

Anybody could have done it, but Nobody did it.

Somebody got angry about that because it was Everybody's job.

Everybody thought that Anybody could do it, but Nobody realized that Everybody wouldn't do it.

It ended up that Everybody blamed Somebody when Nobody did what Anybody could have done."

Need a Stamp?

Of course, it is fake...

A New T-Shirt Design?

A Resting Place

Today, I visited Mill Springs National Cemetery at Nancy, Kentucky. My mother's uncle, who served with the U.S. Army during World War I, is buried there. There are over 4,000 graves at Mill Springs, including many of the Union soldiers killed in the battle that took place just across the way on January 19, 1862 during the American Civil War. It was a somber experience standing among all of those graves. It was a day full of proud emotion and respect for our soldiers. Red roses mark the grave of my loved one.

Jesus, Saviour of my soul
Let me to thy bosom fly
While the waves of trouble roll
While the tempest still is high

Hide me, O my Savior, hide
Till the storm of life is past
Safe into the haven guide
O receive my soul at last
(Charles Wesley, 1740 - from "Prayers Suitable For The Times In Which We Live," Charleston: Evans & Cogswell, No. 3 Broad Street, 1861)