MY LINKS
WELCOME PAGE!
Milton McPhetridge
Alone
Virtual Cemetery
Letter from Milton
Tall Tales
Memories of Childhood
I Remember Grandma
Greens I Have Known
An E-Mail from Luann
Shootout At Buckridge
OFFSITE LINKS
My Family.com
MY GENEOLGY
Three of the green boys also entered the US miltary service and maybe four I'm not sure. Two of my Pender Uncles also were in the Army during this time. All of these uncles but one came home after the war.
Louis Pender was killed in sicily in Pattons Command. Patton was mighty Proud of my uncle Even though he never met him and didn't know his name. He was proud of all of his dead soldiers.He had so many of them.
Iva E. Pender returned home to his family August 9th 1945 as did his brother James.
Lewis Pender is buried in Sicily With other brave men of his battalion.

Greens I have Known!

By William Pender
      The Green Farm was 120 acreas of Missouri Scrub oak and ten to twenty pound rocks mixed with hill sides and hollows as they were called. In spite of that, my grand parents raised eleven kids and sent them all to school to graduate if they could. They did it all without city jobs, mostly living off of what they could raise on the farm. When the boys were old enough they sometimes had employment out side of the farm because they wanted spending money and hardly ever got any allowances at home. As the boys got older they seemed to drift away from the farm and find jobs and start families of their own.
      I was born on the Green farm, near Fordland Missouri, in May of 1942, six months after the bombing of Pearl Harbor on December 7th 1941, and one month after my father was drafted into the US Army in March of 1942. My mother stayed at the farm with her mother and family during the last weeks of her pregnancy. Later my mother and I moved to Lebanon Missouri, about fifty miles from the Green Farm. She went to work in a factory called Rice Sticks as a seamtress. she worked there to support the two of us until my father came home in August 1945.
      My uncle Larry, and I were born only a couple weeks apart, he was my cribmate, and later my playmate, while I was on the farm. Both my mother and my grandmother were nursing babies at the same time, if one was hungry one of them nursed us, it didn't matter which one, we were all family. This all happened before I was old enough to remember anything but, there was still a bond formed because of it.
      My Grandma Green was a simple person. She enjoyed life and she loved large families. My Grandmother was sometimes like a teenage girl and sometimes a comedian. Grandpa, when I was a small child, was a gruff old man of about fifty. As I grew older I began to see him as an interesting person who loved to tell fascinating stories about his life. He had been in the US Army in WWI. and told us many stories about being in the trenches in France and Germany. I was told recently that he used to play a fiddle for the troops in his company. I wish I could remember one of his stories now so I could pass it on to my children.
      This farm and the farmhouse was, when I was there, a very warm and lively place. There were always a lot of aunts and uncles there. I remember Sunday dinners of fried chicken, home made biscuits, gravy, mashed potatoes or potato salad and apple pie, sometimes home made vanilla ice cream. I remember carrying water in a bucket, from the spring in the hollow, for the kitchen. They used to smoke thier own meats, in a smoke house. Eggs came from chickens, that ran around the farm, as did Sunday dinner. They all got up before daylight to milk the cows. I would get up just to watch, but I never learned to milk. They never had a toilet house, so when we had to go, we went out back behind the chicken coup and used oak leaves to clean up afterwards.
      My uncle Larry and I, when we were around ten or twelve, were allowed to roam about the farm. We did a lot of fooling around, as free roaming boys will do and got into much mischeif, sometimes getting caught. Occassionally, when I was there for a week or two at a time, Grandpa would give us jobs to do. I don't think we ever got much work done. Grandpa used to say:
"one boy is one boy, Two boys are half a boy, and three boys are no boy at all"!
I think Grandpa over estimated boys.
       In the early fifties Mom and dad moved to California, taking me and my three siblings with them. My Grandma and Grandpa moved from that farm into Rogersville in the early sixties. California was nothing like Missouri, also it was 2000 miles from the farm. We used to visit every two or three years, but every time we went back things were not as remembered.
      Grandma (Edith May Evans Green) died in 1977 and Grandpa (Lewis Elias Green) in 1987. They are buried in Union Chapel Cemetery only a couple of miles from their beloved farm. My Mother (Eleanor Irene Green,Pender) Died Febuary 3 1984 and is buried near my home. I miss them all greatly!
      We drove by the old farm in March of 2002, just to look. The old house was still standing, the yard in front of it had several children playing in it and adults sitting on the porch as we had once done. I was envious....


Photo is of the front porch of the green farm about 1955 or 56. The girls are from left, my sister Earlene, my younger aunt, Bonnie Green and an unidentified cousin. The figure on the porch is me.