Another Year In The Books
EC woman has watched world change for 104 years
By BRENDA SOMMER bsommer@leader-news.com

Lealer Dabney checks out a present brought on the occasion of her 104th birthday Wednesday. Dabney, of Garwood, was joined by family and friends to celebrate the occasion with a party at Garden Villa Nursing Home, where she resides and is the oldest resident. L-N Photo by Brenda Sommer

Booker T. Dabney, who's 85 years old, had somewhere important to be Wednesday - his mother's birthday party.

The Garwood-area resident was joined by other family members at Garden Villa Nursing Home to celebrate the 104th birthday of Lealer Black Dabney.

Lealer Dabney, born in Arkansas in 1903, grew up in a world almost unimaginable today.

The average worker earned between $400 and $500 per year, but the average unskilled worker in the South earned only $300 in a year. Only one in five American women worked outside the home.

In 1900, the population of Houston was only 44,633 and there were only 13,824 registered automobiles in the entire United States, meaning rural people still relied upon horses, mules, wagons and buggies during Lealer's early years.

L-N Photo by Brenda Sommer And Many More Gathered Wednesday to help 104-year-old Lealer Black Dabney (seated, center) of Garwood celebrate her birthday were her son, Booker T. Dabney of Garwood, seated at her side, and granddaughters, from left: Gladis Hawthorne of Dallas, Esther Fitzgerald of Garwood and Ethel B. Stewart of San Antonio. Lealer Dabney lived on a farm near Garwood until age 91.

She grew up on a plantation in Eldridge, outside Garwood, that employed the sharecropping and ten- ancy system that came into place on large Southern land-holdings after the Civil War. After she married Walter Lee Dabney, she remained in the Garwood area as a farm wife, rearing three sons and a daughter.

Although age has dimmed her physical abilities, Lealer's sparkling eyes still take in all of those around her. She also retains her spunky spirit, said granddaughter Ethel B. Stewart, 64, who came from San Antonio for Wednesday's party.

"Oh yes, she's feisty," Stewart said. "She always was."

As Lealer was taken to her room to change into a bright red dress before the party began, she looked up and saw her eldest child, Booker T.

"That's that boy, momma's little boy," she said, creating gales of laughter from relatives gathered nearby.

Raising a garden was part of the farm family economy in the early part of the last century, and farm wives cared for milk cows and poultry, canned and dried foods for winter and even made soap from lye and lard.

As well, a farm wife such as Lealer Dabney did laundry, usually outdoors over a boiling kettle filled by carrying water from a nearby well and made most of the family's clothing, buying fabric or recycling the cotton sacks that held flour and chicken feed.

Farm wives in those days sold surplus milk, butter, eggs and other commodities and most farm women, including Dabney, worked in the fields chopping and picking cotton.

"She did all those kind of things that goes with farming: picking cotton, chopping cotton, killing hogs, canning," said granddaughter Esther Fitzgerald, 64, of Garwood.

"She picked a whole lot of cotton," said granddaughter Gladis Hawthorne of Dallas, age 61. "And during hunting season, she'd pick those ducks."

The three granddaughters reminisced about accompanying Lealer into the cotton fields, where she would pick cotton by hand, placing it in a long sack she pulled along with her.

"During cotton picking time, I didn't have to pick much because I'd ride along on her sack," Hawthorne said.

"She'd let Gladis do anything," Ethel replied, and both then laughed.

Esther said one thing her grandmother told her over and over has always stayed with her.

"She always said, 'Don't never say what your children won't do, cause they'll disappoint you.' Just say, 'I hope they don't.'"

Lealer Dabney moved to Garden Villa 13 years ago, after living independently for 91 years.

At age 104, there's a 101-year stretch in the family's six living generations: Lealer now has bragging rights to a sixth generation baby, her great-great-great-grandson Jadarius Fitzgerald, age 1.

"Is mom the oldest one in this home?" Esther asked the Garden Villa staff. "She is? You go, Momma!"