Sepia Saturday Mom.....

Zella Marie Brown Burgus was born in 1919.  Her parents were Leroy Martin Brown and Mabel Zella Wheeler Brown.  They were poor. Zella was born in a farmhouse somewhere between Afton and Lorimor, Iowa in Madison County. Yes, the same county as the movie"Madison County Bridges." She had two older brothers Marvin and Kenneth Brown.
Her dad had many jobs but the ones that I remember most was the he dug graves.  He also owned a barber chair and cut hair, but usually no one paid him for the work.  Mom said that she never stayed in the same school longer than just one year during here elementary years.  They seemed to move every spring to whatever house that they could find available.  My own idea was there were times that they didn't have the rent, so they had to move. As my mom was going into high school, my grandmother got a job at the restaurant in Murray. It gave them money to start to own a house.

For some reason, my grandmother thought my mom should have the best education, so they put her in a rented room in Osceola, a county seat town, and she went four years of high school there, coming home on weekends. Her senior year she took Normal Training so that she could become a country school teacher.

Her senior picture above shows her in a fancy bobbed hair cut and I am assuming that this photo was her graduation dress. She was barely five foot tall so this dress makes her look like she has long arms.
Her dad died in 1937, of a lung condition, which was her senior year. 

As a country school teacher, she told how the families would bring food and they would have a large picnic near the end of the school year. Mom is older here standing with a couple of her students.  I like the background of this photo with the car and a set of parents behind her.
I have decided to tell only about the photos and not the whole story of her life.  She did become a wife and a mother of four boys.  She lived to be 89 years old and died in 2008.

While removing her senior photo from it's frame I discovered something that must have been put there back in 1937.  I will share the pressed flower bouquet in Sunday's Photo a Day. I have a couple of theories behind the flowers in the back of the picture.

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