BATESVILLE — The first automobile Pearl Bounds ever saw like to have scared her to death.
"I was in first grade and was walking home from school," said the 103-year-old Bounds. "This car came up behind me. I didn't even hear it coming and all of a sudden he blowed that horn and I looked around and there was no horse."
"All she could see were two big eyes," said her grandson, Darrell Sandy, who has heard the story many times. "Two big eyes, and no horses."
"I almost went over the fence into the field," Bounds said.
Less than 10 years later, she was driving a car that her mother had bought.
"After getting scared, she learned to drive that thing," her grandson said.
Sandy's mother, Bounds' daughter Lucille Sandy, said her mother "drove a car a long time before she got married."
Cars came and went, though, in the family.
"When I was growing up, we went in a wagon - a covered wagon," said Lucille Sandy, recalling a time when the pin holding the wagon tongue came out as they were crossing a low bridge. "The mules went on," she said, and the wagon rolled backward, settling with one wheel off the bridge. No one was hurt.
Bounds, born in Rector to Jim and Mary Vowel, grew up in the Lepanto-Leachville area and attended Coldwater school. Although sickly for her first 17 years, she said, she chopped cotton and helped farm.
When she was in the seventh grade, the family moved to California for a year.
"Then (World War I) broke out, and Grandpa thought he needed to come back and help the boys out here," she recalled.
She continued school through the eighth grade.
In 1925, she married Claude Bounds, who was from the hill country of Missouri. He moved to the area where Pearl had grown up and they raised cotton and hay.
Eventually, though, they moved around, living at Hornersville, Mo., Manila and Forrest City in Arkansas and a couple of different times in St. Louis. When in St. Louis, Claude worked in a factory.
They had four children - Lucille, the oldest, of the Sandtown community; then Betty LaCroix, who died in a vehicle accident last fall; Gerald Bounds, who drowned at age 12; and Buford Bounds, now a dentist in California.
Bounds was a housewife, although at one time, she worked for a short while in a shoe factory.
And, Lucille Sandy said, "When I was a baby and they lived in Forrest City, (the family) had a doughnut shop there for a while. Daddy delivered his own doughnuts."
"I remember him coming down here visiting us one time and making some of those," his grandson said.
Lucille Sandy also remembers her father and mother having a farm about nine miles south of Manila, where they raised watermelons and other crops.
"He would take the watermelons and trade them for fruit" and other things, she said. Her mother would can the fruit for family use or sell it.
Bounds' first experience with electric lights was in California. After moving back to Arkansas, though, she had to go back to kerosene lamp light until rural electrification came to northeast Arkansas about 1949.
She said she's seen a lot of changes. Air conditioning, she said, is a pretty good invention. And old-timey telephones, when they first became widespread, were as exciting a way to communicate as cell phones were when they first appeared.
She also lists the rise of the automobile and global Internet service as major inventions during her lifetime.
And airplanes.
Although she doesn't remember the first airplane she ever saw as vividly as she remembers that first car, Bounds and the air industry grew up at the same time.
She was almost nine months old when Orville Wright made his historic first powered airplane flight in 1907 at Kitty Hawk, N.C.
By the time Bounds was in her 60s, she was riding to California and back in jet passenger planes.
"I'd rather be on the ground, though," she said earlier this week, with a twinkle in her eyes.
She was 9 when the Titanic sank. "I heard talk about it," she said.
Asked if she had any secrets for longevity, Bounds and her family said she "eats right."
"She doesn't want to eat a lot of junk food," Lucille Sandy said. "She just eats a good, balanced meal."
Bounds remembers her husband as "a good Christian man" who was "a good husband and a good father to the children."
He was very personable, she said.
"He loved to talk to people," Bounds said, joking that "he'd lose a crop a-talking."
She has 11 grandchildren, 33 great-grandchildren, five great-great grandchildren and one great-great-great-grandchild.
For more information see Monday's Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.