We picked Roy up and my father inquired as to the condition of his car. “Distributor vibrated loose and threw the timing way off,” Roy said.
“I have a screwdriver in the glove compartment. We can go back and fix it,” my father offered.
“You can do what you like but I don’t work on cars anymore,” Roy said.
I first became aware of Wilna Hervey in the 1950s. She was hard to miss, being close to six feet six inches tall and just about the biggest person I had ever seen, man or woman. Wilna and my grandfather Ishmael were good friends and she, along with her companion Nan Mason, would often come to sit in chairs out on the front lawn and visit. The women were successful artists at that time but had weathered the great depression as house painters. Ishmael had sometimes found them jobs. I tried to picture these two climbing ladders with buckets of paint but couldn’t.
My grandmother, Elfleda, always did her sewing on a treadle machine. She had plenty of opportunity to modernize but never cared to. At one point repair parts for her old Singer became almost impossible to find or fabricate. Wilna heard of Fleda’s predicament and offered a machine she had in storage. My grandmother was delighted. Wilna’s machine was a Singer 201-K. The 201-K was introduced in 1936 which meant that Fleada had been wanting one for over 30 years. It was a win/win situation. My grandmother’s machine was much older and esthetically more valuable as an antique, which was how Wilna and Nan viewed it.
I loaded my grandmother and the old machine into my van and drove down to where Wilna and Nan lived among the hemlocks under the hill. It was not to be an easy swap. The machine we were after was in storage above the garage. I unloaded Fleada’s machine and muscled it up the steep, narrow, wooden stairs. I worked alone as my grandmother and Nan were a bit too old to be doing stairs unless absolutely necessary, and Wilna, although a very strong woman at one time, was reduced to walking on two canes.
There was quite a bit of room in the loft above the garage and it was packed with the most marvelous things. I felt like Howard Carter looking into Tut’s tomb. Along with the usual objects collected by older women, were props and posters from the early days of silent movies. There were bowler hats, top hats and one hat that sported an artificial sunflower the size of a dinner plate. Everything was over-size from umbrellas to handbags and suitcases. The movie posters featured Wilna as a much younger woman. She was one of the stars of a series called the “Toonerville Trolley” and was featured lifting things like safes, telephone poles and the trolley itself.
I brought the replacement sewing machine down and loaded it in the van. The three old women stood by the door to the garret. They made no attempt to break up the clutch. “Could you do something for us?” Wilna asked. “We were wondering if you could bring a few things down for us to look at,” Nan added. It was obvious that neither of them would ever make it up the attic stairs ever again. There was no way I could refuse. I spent the next hour going up and down the stairs bringing down one item of movie history for their inspection and then returning it back up only to retrieve another. They told me stories of the objects and how each related to the days of silent movies. Sadly, I remember none of those stories.
David Rose, a lifelong Woodstocker who now lives in Hot Springs, Arkansas, contributed this remembrance of growing up in Bearsville in the late 1950s.
