Feisty Jane (Howard) Decker looks back over her 90 years

Feisty Jane Decker looks back over her 90 years

Published In The April 30, 2008 Edition Of The St. Albans Messenger
By NAT WORMAM
Photo Courtesy Of Nat Worman
Messenger Correspondent

ST. ALBANS - Jane Flora Howard, 21, was ready for evening chores. The hired man was nowhere in sight. Her father and brothers were in the fields. The 30 cows had to be milked without delay.

It was 1939. Hung from rafters down the middle of the barn, the only light at nightfall glimmered from kerosene lanterns.

Jane's surname is Decker today and she is as full of life now as she was then. She likes to tell stories with a punch line and sum up a person's character with a jolt.

She said her father was a slave driver.

Of her husband, she said, "He was good in some ways and in some ways he was miserable, but he died first, so I'm still here." March 26 was "just another day," she said, even though it was her 90th birthday.

She was born in 1918, in Fairfax, "up the hill" from what today is well-known dairyman Doug Webb's house. Back then, Delbert Howard, Jane's father, owned the farms in that area.

Webb was raised on the Sam Webb Road, named after his father. Jane knew Sam well.

Later she would reveal that Sam knew what to do when she split the air with her special Jane Howard scream.

She is 10 years older than Doug, (Actually according to my records, only 4 years older), but both were proud to know the Baptist minister who baptized them, George Russell. Jane remembers that she was one of 14 when Russell baptized her.

"He was a very good coronet player and had played in the John Philip Sousa Band," Doug said of Russell, over the phone the other day "We had a great band when he was here."

When he arrived to take over the Baptist pulpit, Russell was already going blind.

"He used to count the steps from the parsonage to the church," Jane said.
"And when he became blind, his wife read the lessons and he gave the sermon."

When at 21, Jane was looking for that hired man, she had known her grandfather, John S. Howard ever since she was a tot. He was a veteran of the Civil War.

Jane Decker's son Newell, a railroad and War of Rebellion buff, picked up the story from there.

John enlisted in the 11th Vermont Volunteers at age 21 in 1862, shook hands with Abraham Lincoln, was captured at Petersburg, imprisoned in Andersonville, and died at home at age 93, in 1933, the year Franklin D. Roosevelt was sworn in as the Nation's 32nd president.

John's active nature runs in his granddaughter's veins. She is asked, "Did your mother hug you?"

"Didn't have time," she replied. "We were out the door to work. Those were the good old days. We had to work, but we all knew how to work."

Nights were short year round. "You'd go to sleep, the next thing you'd know you're up again. The night went by fast. Sunday? We just went to the Baptist church in Fairfax and came home and had our dinner." At 1 p.m., Sunday was over, she said, meaning, it was time to get back to work. "My sister Ellen and I, my youngest sister, she and I were -- very close. If we went horseback riding, she and I would always go together. Oh, sure, we rode the same horses we used in the sugarrbush."

The fire of Jane's memory burns bright on that sweet sugar and the meals her mother made. "We used to make a lot of maple candy, maple cream," she recalled, adding, "One time ... . that horse ripped right up to the window . . . and when nobody was looking, she stuck her nose and mouth in and took the maple candy right off the table."

Nobody was looking? Jane was six at the time. She saw it all.

She speaks more about her life.

"Well, I tell you, I don't smoke and I don't drink." And then: "I couldn’t see any sense to it. I tell you I tried just once to take a taste of beer and that tasted worse than..." Jane doesn't provide the comparison. "I did smoke a little bit, but I couldn't see any sense in it," she added.

Jane rode on the school barge, the conveyance that carried local children to school, whether by sleigh or wagon. "I was always getting into trouble when I was on the barge. I (talked) more than you could shake a stick at."

A dozen or more children, sat on the barge as it jolted and groaned over gravel roads that were level in the lower places and climbed long hills rutted hill in others, squirming through tight growths of pine or spruce.

Jane continued her story about one day on the barge and what Sam Webb felt he had to do.

"I think it was a bear they saw and I hollered. ... Sam was driving the barge and he said to me, he said, 'Jane, you get out and walk.'"

Jane wormed her way between the knees of schoolmates the length of the barge. A friend looked up, shook Jane's hand, and said, loud enough for Sam Webb to hear, "Come again," as though one punctuating scream hadn't been enough.

Sam Webb had had enough. "You both get out and walk," he ordered.

Turning to another topic, Jane's mind was occupied by thoughts of her mother's cooking.

Winnie Minkler Howard was known all around for her pies, cookies, cakes, steamed Boston brown bread, her baked beans, and hash. She created meals over a stove fueled with splits of wood, picking just the right lengths to keep the heat just right.

The fragrance of baking bread always filled the house, even upstairs where in winter Jane curled up with a sister or two beneath horse blankets.

Seated here in her Grice Brook Road home, she continued the story about that day in 1939 and the missing hired man.

She hollered for him and stood there in her overalls. Then tried another Jane Howard holler. But the only greeting was another couple of bellows from the cows. There was no hired man and no one else to answer the call.

"I milked all 30," she said. "By hand, too!"