General Notes

As a young girl, Sallie was probably curious and a little enchanted by the wild McLain boys and when her own sister, Roxie, married Grover McLain, it must have seemed right for her to fall in love with Grover's younger brother, Gray. Neither relationship was encouraged by Sallie's and Roxie's parents but that of the even younger lovers, Gray and Sallie, was even more strongly discouraged. Gray and Sallie resorted to leaving love notes to each other in their secret tree in the woods and meeting in secret. Finally, they eloped. They were certain that Sallies' father, Nathaniel Berry Porter, would come after them. When he, in fact,did, they hid in the preacher's home until he left. They managed to keep their marriage a secret for only a week.

I could not find the marriage records in Mississippi. Whether they married out of state or the records were lost in the tornado of 1936 or whether they were never recorded by the preacher will probably never be known. The honeymoon ended in 1930 when Gray was tragically killed in an industrial accident at the Carnation Milk Company. While the company never admitted any culpability, they did agree to an out of court settlement. Court records reveal that the settlement was $15000 [using a formula of $1000 in 1930 = $10,309, that would equate to $154,639 in 2000 dollars], of which the lawyers received half [$77,319]. After that, the remaining money went into a trust and every cent spent was both approved by the Court and unentered into a ledger, which, court records indicate, were lost during the tornado of 1936. Early on Sallie loaned money out to assorted people. While this appears initially to be poor judgement on Sallie's part, she did at least earn interest on her money (assuming the loans were ever paid back) at a time when many were losing everything in the stock market. Despite, having a small sum of money, Sallie was forced to take in boarders, one of whom was Curtis Pennington, the brother of her deceased husband's brothers's (Johhnie Lee McLain) wife, Lillian Pennington.

In 1933, Sallie, still a young woman of 33, remarried, this time to Curtis Pennington, also 33, the marriage ceremony performed by Gray's father, James E. McLain. Cousin Edna Earl McLain recalls that Melba and Amy were quite distraught by the marriage and ran over to Uncle Grover and Aunt Roxie's house and just cried their eyes out. The consensus among family members was that Sallie could probably have done better than Curt yet Curt was religious and tithed regularly at 10%.

Since Curt moved into the house Sallie and the girls had purchased with the Carnation Settlement money, there can be little denial that Curt benefited from marrying a woman with a home and some modest means, especially during the Depression. Melba seems never to have harbored any kind of grudge in that regard but Amy did. The settlement had established a trust for each of the girls to do with as they wished at the appropriate time. Amy used hers to attend Blue Mountain College and Mississippi State and to purchase a car at the appropriate time. In due course, the car was purchased and Curt took a liking to it and, in Amy's view, gave short shrift to the driving training Curt was to give them, hustling them out of the driver's seat in short order so that he could take of the driving of the beloved car.

In 1936, Tupelo was hit by a tornado which old-timers still refer to as the Great Tornado of '36.  It destroyed the house Sallie had built on the hill and carried Amy away. When Uncle Grover, Aunt Roxie and cousins Ruby, Sybil, Edna Earl and Jewel came to check on the family, they found that the house was not only destroyed but completely gone. Sallie, Melba and Curt were all in different locations and Amy was nowhere to be found. Sallie and Melba were convinced that she had been killed when another relative announced that he had just left the train station where numerous victims had been boarded onto a train for Memphis and treatment. Fortunately, he recognized Amy and passed the information on. Amy's injuries included a thumb, which many thought she would lose, but the doctors felt that a thumb was so vital that muscles were transferred from other fingers to her thumb, even though the movement would be somewhat unusual, awkward and noticeable even to the untrained. Infection and dangerous swelling were prevented by applying maggots to her wounds. Throughout the rest of her life her thumb movement, instead of being an out and in movement, was one which brought her thumb toward the fingers from under her palm.[AmyMcLain.FTW]

Sallie and Curt managed to get the house put back together and, in time, it became a place where all of the grandchildren liked to go. Years later, Diane and Linda recalled the back steps, the glass panels at the front door and, especially, the great pecan tree in the front yard, the home of many squirrels which had, over a long period of time, become sufficiently tame that as soon as Curt would shake or tap on the tree, they would scurry down to eat pecans out of his hand. Until young Ricky brought his cap gun and fired it every time they came down the tree. For this infraction the cousins never quite forgave Ricky, who seems to have some of the McLain Prankster blood in him. The neighborhood in which the house was located was unique. From the street, all the houses were middle class nice but down one of the alleys, hidden from view from the street, was an all-black shanty town where Sallie took the grandchildren to get treats, play with the black children and go with her to buy snuff.

In the early 1950's, Sallie went to Houston, Texas and stayed with her daughter, Amy, and her family while she underwent shock therapy. Edna seems to think that Sallie had had trouble coping even prior to this point in time and may have come by that tendency by heredity. [See notes on Easie, Curtis, Reed's and Roxie's children or grandchildren] Still, for a person who had a difficult time coping, twenty years after becoming a young widow until undergoing therapy is along time.

[See Facts for Court Minutes regarding Estate of Melba and Amy and authorization to spend, invest and repay. Copies of all transactions from Chancery Court Minutes in Lee County Courthouse, in possession of Jane Bonny. Numbers in facts refer to Chancery Court Minutes Vol No. and page number. The Case Number Regarding the Settlement is 6536.]