Person:Louellen Rose (1)

Delayed certificate of birth issued 2/18/43.

Buried at Hamilton Memorial Gardens, Hixson, Tennessee.

Written 17 February 1999 by Deborah Seale Hebert -- Memories of Louellen Rose Seale by Deborah Seale Hebert.

  "My mother was the youngest daughter of six childlren.  She grew up in a poor family; her father worked hard in the coal mines, but drank up most of his pay.  Two of her brothers died as children, one only a baby when he died.
  I didn't ever hear my mother say much about her childhood.  I do remember a funny story she used to tell about learning how to drive in an old pick up truck with no brakes.  Their house was down in a "holler" and she had to keep circling this old truck until they could manage to stop it near the house. 
  In her early 20's, she went to work at a "beer joint" on Old Hixson Pike near the creek bridge for Muriel Phipps, a local businessman.  She took the train from Soddy to Hixson each day to get to work.  She worked as a waitress there for a while and soon went to work for Mr. Phipps' wife, Alley.  She would drive Mrs. Phipps downtown for shopping.  I have a photo of them taken on a Chattanooga street.
  She met my father at a local restaurant.  He was stationed at Fort Oglethorpe with the Army.  He was the calisthenics director at a base, a Tech Sergeant by rank.  They dated off and on until my father was transferred to Fort Monroe near Charlotte, North Carolina.  When the news came that he was being sent overseas during World War II, my mother, accompanied by her sister Ruby, went on the train to meet him and they were married.  They had a military ceremony with another Couple, "Duck" and Sue.
  Mother came back home to live while Daddy was overseas.  When he returned, they rented a duplex in Hixson on what is now Old Hixson Pike.  The couple that lived in the other side of the duplex, Earnest and Mary Sanders, later had a daughter, Joy, who has been my lifelong best friend.  I've heard lots of funny stories from the time Mother and Daddy lived in that duplex.  They didn't have indoor plumbing, so Daddy hung quilts from a frame and ran a garden hose over the top to have a makeshift shower.  Daddy loved to tell about some of Mother's early cooking attempts -- biscuits so hard even the birds and the hound wouldn't eat them!  Then there was the time that Daddy's hound dog caught and killed Mother's pet albino squirrel.  I understand there was quite a fuss over that one.
  After Mother and Daddy had been married a few years, Mother had a tubal pregnancy and almost died.  They were at the lake fishing when she became ill.  Doctors told her she would most likely never become pregnant again.  But after almost 9 years of marriage, she did become pregant again and that child was me.  She asked her doctor, Dr. Reisman, to name me.  He named me after his mother, Kay, and his daughter, Deborah.  Mother said I was born on the hottest day that year and that was in the days before air-conditioning.  It was around this time that Mother and Daddy moved to the house on Hixson Pike.  They rented it from Mr. Phipps.  He used to come visit us and would always give me a silver dollar to keep.
  Mother spent a lot of time, in vain I might add, trying to prevent Daddy from making a "tomboy" out of me.  Daddy bought me my first horse when I was four and Mother was terrified of them and for me.  But Daddy and I won out much to Mother's disgust.
  Daddy liked to fish and hunt, so Mother and I spent a lot of Sunday afternoons at Granny's house in Soddy.  When I was older, we used to camp with our friends, Georgia and Jim Martin, on the lake.  They had a duaghter, Diane, a little older than me, and we were great pals.  Our neighbors on H ixson Pike during that time were Hugh and Alta Hartline and their daughter, Gilda, and also Fred and Mary Lee Campbell and their daughter "Cookie."  All three of the houses we lived in have been replaced by a strip shopping center and the educational wing of Central Baptist Church.
  For several years, Mother bred and sold AKC-registered Collie puppies.  Occasionally if there was one we couldn't sell, I would get to keep it.  One of my favorites was an almost solid white one we named Duke.
  Mother had only attended school through the eighth grade at Soddy High School.  She had various jobs during my childhood.  She worked at two greenhouses in Hixson, Snow Nursery and Messick Greenhouses and also did some housecleaning for Mr. Phipps and for a family named Crow.  Before Granny came to live with us, a lady named Mrs. Williams on Gooden Lane in Hixson kept me.  I couldn't say Williams, it came out as "Vims."  Ms. Williams and her husband, Shorty, were almost like grandparents to me.
  In 1963, Daddy bought 14 acres of land on Hixson Pike close to our church,  Burk's Methodist.  It stretched from Hixson Pike all the way to the top of Big Ridge.  He bought from Mrs. Walker in Hixson.  He and Mother had a house built and we started moving in on the day of President Kennedy's funeral.  This was close to the time that Mother's sister Ruby died and it was decided that her daughter, Nada, would come to live with us.  Ruby had kept her distance from the family and before she came to live with us, I had only seen Nada a couple of times.  But Mother was declared her guardian and soon she moved in our new house with us.
  Mother and Daddy had one of the two bedrooms in our new house --- a huge room with two double beds -- on the front of the house.  Nada and I shared the smaller bedrom with bunk beds.
  Our neighbors at the new place were Henry and Ruby Sutton, the Marshalls, Iva and Jim Painter, the Shelbys who rented from the Painters and the Greys.  The house was next door to the Sniteman family cemetery.  Daddy always said that we had good neighbors in the cemetery folks -- they were quiet and never asked to borrow anything.    After Nada and I had married and left home, Mother and Daddy decided the place was too big to keep up and they bought a little brick house at 6016 Ridgeview Circle off Cassandra Smith Road.  This was their last home.  Once, on a trip to Mississippi to visit Uncle Hot and Aunt Mary, Mother had an accident that required knee surgery.  She and Uncle Hot managed to turn over his golf cart and it shattered her right knee cap.  A couple of years later, she had a mild heart attack and was hospitalized at Red Bank Hospital.  She also had triple heart bypass surgery later on.
  In 1980, Daddy had a paralyzing stroke and Mother and I spent the next year caring for him up until his death.  I'll always believe this was the beginning of the end for my mother's health.  Only close to the end, when she was exhausted trying to care for him, did she agree to put him in a nursing home.  Even then, she drove from Hixson to Collegedale every single day and spent the day with him.  When he died in August of 1981, she was devastated.  He was a very protective, old-fashioned  husband and she was quite helpless without him.  I took his place, made funeral arrangements and helped her sort through all the insurance matters in the months to come.  Only after my mother died, did I grieve for my father.  I felt like I needed to be strong for my mother and that I couldn't allow myself the luxury of being emotional.
  She was the best of grandmothers.  Although she hadn't been too happy when I married young, she loved each of her grandsons from the moment they arrived.  She loved to fix their favorite foods and buy things for them.  She loved Nada's children, Todd and Annie, just like they were her own grandchildren.
 I think Burk's Methodist Church at Hixson was the only church my mother was a member of.  I know she started going there when I was still a baby.  She enjoyed her Sunday School classmates and was an active member there until her death.  She also was a member of the Hixson chapter of the Order of the Eastern Star for several years.
  Mother's neighbors on Ridgeview Circle were Shirley and Garnet Pell, Florence Boynton, the Hudsons, the Burrises, and the Howards.
  I'm not sure how well I understood my mother at times, but in her later years and as I got older and wiser as well, we became much closer.  She was one of the most caring and generous people I have ever had the privilege of knowing.
  In the fall of 1988, my husband and I moved back to Chattanooga and Mother and I had some of the best times together we had ever had.  It was good being home again and though my son Michael had gone into the Army at this point, she still enjoyed having my other son, Dana, around to cook and buy for.
  She was a diabetic by this time and also had a disease called lupus.  When she began having chest pains and shortness of breath, we knew that it must be her heart.  She called me on a Thursday  night, after she had eaten dinner, and was crying because of her chest pain.  I called an ambulance for her and then with Dana in hand, met them at Memorial Hospital.  They checked her in the emergency room, but could not see any immediate problems, so with their encouragement, went home for the night.  The phone call that woke me at 4:00 a.m. was the worst of news.  Mother had a massive heart attack and was now on external life support and not expected to live.  Since my husband was out of town, I called my friend Joy and asked her to check on Dana later, left him asleep in the bed, and rushed to the hospital to be with Mother.  During this time, my cousin Nada was living in Louisiana and Michael was in the Army in Texas, so there was no one to go with me.  When I arrived at the hospital, I was taken to a room and one of the wonderful Sisters of Charity came and held my hand and prayed with me.  The doctors told me that the damage to her heart was extensive and that if she lived, she would be an invalid.  I had to make the choice of whether to remove the external life support from her or not.  I made the best choice I could, trying to imagine what she would have wanted, and asked them to remove it.  I went to her room but she was unconscious and it seemed to me that this body was no longer my mother, that she was already gone to heaven.  Amazingly, she lived on without the external pacemaker for several hours.  Being worried about Dana, I decided to leave the hospital to drive the short disitance home to check on him.  I arrived home about the same time that my husband did.  I went to take a quick shower before I returned to the hospital.  I heard the phone ring, Randall answered, it was the hospital calling.  Mother had died a few minutes earlier.
  Mother had a great sense of humor and she LOVED good food.  She used to joke and say not to bring flowers to her grave, but to bring a bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken.!
  Some of my favorite dishes that she cooked were potato salad (the best I've ever had), pecan pie, and beef stew.  She was so thoughtful of people who were sick or in the hospital.  She really lived a good example of Christian kindness.