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John and Lois Pugh of McKenzie are
writing their memoirs for future generations to enjoy. |
John and Lois Pugh are
undertaking a labor of love that will be treasured by their
family for generations to come; they're compiling
information in a "life review": a collection of events and
Lois' own poetry reflecting the remembrances of a lifetime,
in all its pain and glory.
"Your past comes back to you in snatches and, when it does,
I write it down," says Lois, her dark eyes smiling beneath
grey hair, once black. John says writing his memoirs has
given them something to talk about as together they rekindle
past experiences.
In one of many poems, a remembrance of herself at four years
old visiting an elderly neighbor, Lois describes the comfort
of being loved by "Miz Gertie" in terms so real that the
experience becomes personal: "When she sat, no lap had she;
but cushions soft from chin to knee ... Her breath would
come in short, hard spurts; And shower me with scent of
earth; or snuff or coffee or tea; Enough, she breathed
blessing over me; I drank in her warmness; and called it
Love."
Love is the enduring theme of life shared between Lois and
her husband, Methodist minister John Edd Pugh, who says,
"When I met that Louisiana girl, it didn't really change my
life, but life started then."
Yet John had lived before, growing up in McKenzie the first
of two sons born to Grace and Hulie Pugh. John was born
seven years earlier than his brother, Curtis, who now lives
next door to John, in the home on West End Avenue where they
were raised.
John and Lois' home wasn't in existence at the time. It was
built on what once was the cow lot of the old homeplace that
housed the extended family, including his grandparents,
Edgar Eudolphous and Ida Pugh. Chickens had the run of the
back yard that bore not one blade of grass. It was during
the Great Depression, although John recalls, "We didn't know
we were poor, most everyone was."
He and his friends played baseball with a "string ball" made
by wrapping string around a rubber ball.
"We had a lot of fun back then," he recalls.
He spent a lot of time alongside "Granddad" who had a fix-it
shop, upstairs from Jim Baker's meat market, where he
repaired clocks, rebottomed chairs, and the like. Despite
the depression, John remembers, "I never knew Granddad to be
without money in his pocket."
He recalls as well, however, the thriftiness of his
grandfather who--at the meat market, after the bulk of the
huge chunk of hoop cheese was carved away--would bargain for
the hardened core. He also bought bananas when their mottled
and darkened skin was unappetizing to many customers.
"I learned to like extra ripe bananas and hoop cheese," says
John, without complaint. "We had our cow and a smoke house
where he would salt hams down and put them up. We did our
washing in a wash pot.
"I had a good life then, it was sort of like country life in
town," he continues. "My dad was a carpenter. Granddad and I
were close, dad worked all the time, but granddad was
around."
John was a student at Bethel College near the end of World
War II when, he says, "I decided I'd just as soon not be
drafted."
He and his friend, Thomas Parnell, chose instead to sign up
for Officer Candidate School, which was to have allowed them
to graduate before attending OCS to become officers.
However, John says, "It didn't work out; they needed men so
they took us early." He was in his last six months of
college when his education was abbreviated by a three-year
stint in the Army.
While stationed at Camp Livingston, Louisiana, John attended
a get-together for soldiers and other young people hosted by
Emmanuel Baptist Church in nearby Alexandria. Lois was the
first girl he saw upon walking into the church.
"She was the prettiest thing I ever saw," he says, "She's
still pretty. The first time I saw her, I said to myself,
'I'm going to marry that girl if she'll have me and is not
taken.'"
Lois and John met when he was
a soldier stationed at Camp Livingston in her home state of
Louisiana.
Now 78, the raven-haired beauty was 19 at the time and John
was 22 or 23, by quick reckoning. They dated several months
before he left the infantry replacement training center in
Louisiana, bound for Fort Sill, Oklahoma, where he worked in
field artillery, training soldiers to use the 105 howitzer.
The pair kept up a steady correspondence for a time before
John returned to Louisiana, where they were married June 10,
1945, in a ceremony held in her living room and officiated
by her brother, Coiedia Reynaud, one of two of Lois'
brothers who are Baptist ministers.
The amazingly gifted couple--both are skilled in art and
handiwork aside from Lois' literary talents--couldn't have
been better paired, though love and devotion have not spared
them the difficulties life sometimes brings. Nevertheless,
John says with a full measure of faith, "We've had a good
life together and it just gets better all the time."
The couple moved to McKenzie following his discharge, just
before David's birth in 1946. John returned to Bethel
College, completing his degree while picking up the
opportunity to teach part time when the high school science
teacher wanted to leave her post after marrying a Camp Tyson
soldier.
"I taught one biology class and two general science classes
while finishing college, then taught full time for three and
a half years before entering the ministry," says John, who
was awarded a permanent Tennessee teaching certificate, a
designation that no longer exits.
John's leadership provided a renaissance of change as he
assumed helm over the science department, teaching general
science, biology and chemistry and reinstituting the biology
and chemistry labs once started by teacher Clara Dishman.
During this time, his grandfather stopped keeping cattle and
gave the cow lot to John on which to build the home that
John and his father built together.
"He started the choir, too," Lois chimes in, proud of her
husband's accomplishments.
Never a proponent of study halls, John had used that time to
teach students to sing in a newly formed glee club that met
in the gymnasium.
He sang, himself, in the choir of the First Methodist Church
where he was youth director, as well. He'd felt the tug to
fulltime ministry then, but notes, "It took a good while; I
resisted quite a bit."
In the meantime, when David was five years old, John and
Lois made the difficult decision to take him to the Crippled
Children's Home in Memphis where he lived for a year.
Previously unable to sit or walk, he learned to stand and
walk after first learning to fall in a way to prevent
injury.
"That was the most help to him, but we missed him so much,"
says Lois, explaining that David, a victim of cerebral palsy
following an injury at birth.
John was working in his grandfather's shop the day he
finally surrendered to the call. It was an act of obedience
not without consequence, though he recalls, "Paul Lyles was
our pastor; he helped me and Lois was supportive, too."
She grins playfully, noting, "I married a soldier and then
he became a teacher and then suddenly I was a preacher's
wife."
Her own upbringing had prepared her for the role, however.
Often humorous, she tells how, years later, she was mopping
up spilled milk--a daily chore in a family that had grown to
include five children--when she recalled her own surrender
to foreign missions at the age of 13.
"It seemed I was always mopping floors with spilled milk,"
says Lois, laughing. I thought, 'Lord, I promised you I
would go to Africa as a missionary and take care of those
heathens and here you have given me five heathens of my
own!'"
In that "busiest, first year" of his ministry, John
completed the school year teaching and read eight books of
theology, critiquing each in writing to prove his readiness
for Bible college.
That accomplished, the couple had other preparations to
make. They sold their home in order to buy a new car, a much
needed commodity in their work for the church, but one that,
John says, "broke Granddad's heart."
In June that year, they moved to McLemoresville, where they
served as ministers to the First United Methodist Church as
well as the smaller churches of Carter's Chapel and
Trezevant's Methodist church.
With David's homecoming at hand, Kenny three years old, and
Susan on the way, Lois says, "I called for mama. She came
and stayed until Susan was born and got me on my feet again,
and that's when John started seminary."
He rode the bus to Nashville on Mondays, where he was
enrolled in seminary at Vanderbilt University, then came
home again on Thursday each week.
"That first year was a hard year; it was enjoyable and
exciting, but hard," says John. "We had two boys and Susie
was born and there she was in that house by herself. I
always went back to Nashville with a heavy heart."
The situation was alleviated when John transferred to the
Cumberland Presbyterian seminary at Bethel (now Memphis
Theological Seminary) for his last year of studies,
launching a ministry that lasted more than 40 years.
Concerning their inaugural experience in the ministry, John
and Lois are in agreement: "They were so good to us," she
says. "McLemoresville taught us how to be ministers."
"They've raised more ministers than anybody," he adds.
In the ensuing years, they served in a dozen churches in
West Tennessee plus two in Kentucky, moving to Murray just
after their fourth child, Sandy, was born.
He also worked for three years with the Jackson Tennessee,
District United Methodist Church Conference Board of
Education, where he taught leadership classes, helping many
Sunday School teachers improve their skills. During the
summers, he ran Lakeshore United Methodist Campground in
Eva, near Camden.
"The children were very young," says Lois. "We stayed there
all summer; it was the ideal life for the kids."
The Pugh family in 1990
included John and Lois, David, Ken, Susan, Sandy, and Grace.
They returned to Dresden, where they had formerly served,
just before Grace was born . Nine years removed from her
youngest sister, she was the final addition to the family.
Six children would have constituted "a bunch," Lois laughs,
recalling how her mother, who had nine children, always said
she "wouldn't take a million for the last one and wouldn't
give a dime for the next."
After four years at Dresden, the family moved to Memphis
where John ministered to two churches: one in the inner
city, for five years, and one in the suburbs near the
airport, which he served for six or seven years. It was a
difficult time during the era in which Martin Luther King
was killed.
"That was really a hard experience to go through," says
Lois.
From Memphis, the couple served three or four years in
Paducah's Reidland United Methodist Church before moving to
Milan, where they remained for six years until John's
retirement. Lois had served in her own ministry through the
years as an expert in Sunday School and children's
activities. In addition to writing curriculum material for
Sunday School classes, she taught teachers in labs all over
West Tennessee, Arkansas and Louisiana as well as New York
other places. The couple also enjoyed a trip to the Holy
Land.
They had planned to build a home near McKenzie on land
purchased outside the city limits, near the airport,
but--after John experienced a heart attack--they rethought
their plans, instead buying back the house John and his
father had built together for the same price they had sold
it for 40 years earlier.
They built an addition to the original framework and John
set his woodworking hobby to work, building custom oak
cabinets and an attractive stairway leading to two upstairs
bedrooms.
The cozy home includes a study for John and a small area
between the kitchen and bedroom that Lois dubbed her art
studio. Her fine watercolor paintings add character and
beauty to the home as well as providing another artistic
outlet for Lois, whose interest in art began when she was
just three years old.
"I remember people bragging on my rabbit; it was just a
circle with two humps on it, but that encouraged me," says
Lois, who audited art classes at Bethel taught by Kathy
Sacks. Her paintings have been featured in art displays
hosted by Carroll Arts. She has also dabbled in photography.
Her art studio overlooks the Pugh's lovely back yard, which
has been a Godsend to Lois during hard times, offering what
she calls "back yard therapy." Painting in the well-lit
studio and maintaining the gardens first helped her work
through the anxiety of losing Susan to cancer seven years
ago. Five years later, the couple lost Ken, as well, to
heart failure.
Among the other children, David lives at home with John and
Lois, while Sandy teaches music at Memphis schools and Grace
lives in New Jersey; both have degrees in music. Six
grandchildren have been added to the family, two in New
Jersey, two in Memphis and two in Tupelo, where last week
John and Lois' first great-grandbaby was born.
Since retiring, John produces a big garden every year,
though, he says, the last few have been somewhat smaller.
He's been aided in that endeavor by neighbor and kindred
spirit, Alan Cross, who is a professor of music at Bethel
and who, John says, insisted upon taking over the tilling of
the garden this year.
Both John and Lois have remained faithful in their service
to the church since retiring. John early on pastored the
smaller churches of Liberty in Macedonia and Chapel Hill in
Pea Ridge for three years, until his hearing loss became so
pronounced that he was unable to continue.
They were also active in the Hispanic tutoring ministry at
the First United Methodist Church in McKenzie and now assist
with the Meals on Wheels ministry that they led for a time
and which is now directed by Mildred Colotta. John teaches
the church's Friendship class which caters to the older
members of the congregation.
John was named pastor emeritus at the church in honor of his
long and faithful service. In his study, rows of shelved
cassette tapes bear witness to his sermons over many years.
"All his sermons were teaching sermons, or most were, which
was appreciated by the people," says Lois. He adds that the
worst thing about leaving the ministry was leaving friends
in one place and learning new names the first year in a new
church.
"It's been a good life; I wouldn't trade it for anything,"
he says, It's been kind of a hard life--in the ministry you
don't ever have the satisfaction of feeling like you're
through with anything--but it's been a rewarding life and
it's been a joy."
Speaking in the past tense comes naturally to folks John's
age when reviewing their life long years after retirement is
another memory. But Lois has put to paper the truth that,
though years wear on the body, the spirit remains the same.
On her 71st birthday, she penned this insightful treasure:
Seventy One Today
Seventy one today! Imagine!
I am not what I thought my old-self would be
Nor my child-self who thought the aged were wise
Nor my youthful-self who thought them senile
Nor my young-adult-self who wondered
Why my elders wasted time sitting
Nor my middle-aged-self who began to visionate with envious
longing
This time of no demands on self, energy, hours.
My now-self stands aside in awesome wonder upon learning
I am the same-self grown wrinkled.
So I remove my glasses to look in the mirror
And I see myself as I have been, am, and will be
Until God calls me home and
Peels off this silly cocoon.
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