LITTLE ROCK — Lona Fay Smith Lancaster was Number 17 of 20, the last child born in the family’s house that didn’t have electricity until Miss Lona Fay was 10 years old.
Or thereabouts.
Lona Fay’s story is like most stories of life before electricity - kerosene lamps and all that.
But there is this difference: Lona Fay was born in 1950. The Great Depression and the bombing of Japan are history to her.
Lona Fay is by all measure a baby boomer.
By the time the Smiths went electric in Mountain View, Chuck Yeager had broken the sound barrier (’47), Raytheon had patented the first microwave oven (’47), Buddy Holly had been dead a year (’59), Albert Sabin had developed the oral polio vaccine and Jack Kennedy was president elect.
While Lona Fay’s family still lived in the dark, Elvis Presley already had served his abbreviated tour with the U.S. Army and had 18 number-one singles and six number-one albums.
Electricity, however, didn’t mean the family had arrived in the 20th century.
Richard Nixon had already been elected president before the Smiths ever had indoor plumbing. “A year or two before I married,” says Lona Fay - something like 1968 - “we got an indoor bathroom.”
Before Lona Fay was born, her family lived in a house north of Mountain View in a dense forest near Calico Rock, the better to conceal their father’s original occupation as a distiller and purveyor of liquid fire in bottles.
By the time the family lived in the house where Lona Fay was born, Zola Smith had birthed 14 boys and six girls; no twins, no miscarriages. Only the youngest three were born in a hospital. At the 1956 birth of Hazel, the youngest child and the only daughter whose name doesn’t start with an L, electricity was still four years away.
“I remember sleeping six to a bed,” Lona Fay says, noting that one of their bedrooms had three beds.
After Harvey Smith quit working by the shine of the moon, he trapped animals, dug ginseng, and cut and sold firewood. In late summer, he stacked the older children into the back of his camper topped pickup and drove north to Michigan and Indiana to harvest cherries, strawberries, tomatoes and rhubarb, then back south to pick cotton.
Zola birthed her first, James Earl, in 1926, and 19 births later, Hazel showed up. The Smiths gave L.C.
(’27) and J.D. (’29) initials for names. Their last-born three sons - Johnny (’48), Gary (’51), Donald (’52) - share Wayne as a middle name.
James Earl, Harold (’39) and the second James (’45) died as infants; a fourth son, Carrol (’40), his wife and their daughter died in a house fire when he was 22.
Lee (’35) died in 1999.
All six sisters and the surviving nine brothers are close and gather in Mountain View at least twice a year. That is as grand a thing now, Lona Fay says, as it was when they were children without electricity or water indoors.
“When I was growing up,” she says, “if you got mad at one, you always had another one to play with.”
Arkansas, Pages 11 on 09/30/2010