Judy Mabe, Marti Helfrecht, and Jill Oswalt

[00:01] JUDY MAYS: Hi, my name is Judy Mays I am of ripe old age of 79. This is Wednesday, May 4, 2022, and we are in the Ozarks in Missouri. And I'm here with my partners, my two sisters, Marty and Jill.

[00:22] MARTY HELFRICH: Hi, I am Marty Helfrich I'm 72. It is Wednesday, May 4, 2022. We are in the Ozarks in Missouri. And my partners are my two sisters, Judy and Jill. Hi, I'm Jill Oswald and I am 67 years old. It is Wednesday, May 4, 2022. We are in the Ozarks in Missouri, and I'm here with my sisters, Marty and Judy.

[00:56] JUDY MAYS: That's all.

[01:01] MARTY HELFRICH: Are we ready to talk? Okay. Okay. Sorry. So I wanted us to kind of just visit today about daddy and some of our memories and recollections, because I want to learn from you guys things that I don't remember or I remember incorrectly because I thought he was married in a place that it wasn't. So we need to talk to figure out where they got married, where our parents got married. So one of the things that I was interested in is that daddy, we've always thought of him as being so. So very strong. And I just recall, you know, our life, that he was always our strength. And just thinking back, him being the youngest of five children, do you think that that kind of helped him become stronger to. Or was it the fact that mommy's was widowed so young and daddy had to take responsibilities? Or did he ever talk about any of that?

[02:03] JUDY MAYS: He never talked about any of that. All I can remember basically goes back to this age of 18 when his dad died. Dad was the youngest of the five. Mama Mays took over the runnings of the store with all the boys behind her except dad, because he was at the University of Arkansas. And I think just the entire family, brother, sister, and grandmother, were all a very strong willed personality because they all worked hard. They never gave up. They always had seemed like a goal in life to better for themselves. Dad never wanted to be in the family business. And when he got out of college, his first job was in hope, Arkansas, as a county agent. And he used to talk about the huge watermelons that they would bring into the office to be weighed.

[03:06] MARTY HELFRICH: And what was the county agent?

[03:07] JUDY MAYS: Was it like the agriculture department was. His degree was in agra agriculture at the university. And the county agent was like your agricultural supervisor, basically, in the county of hope. But then while he was working there is when he was called up to the service.

[03:30] MARTY HELFRICH: Okay, I'm gonna write myself a note. I wanna go back so when he was thinking about Mama's, though, the fact that she ran the store, and I'm sure back then, so that would have been like, 1937.

[03:52] JUDY MAYS: They married in 36, so he was 18 in 1936.

[03:56] MARTY HELFRICH: So that when his dad died and when Mama. Mamas took over the store, I bet there were not very many women at that point. A store, as a female in the 1930s. Well, they had the cotton gin and the feed mill. They had all of that besides just the store right down the hill there. So can you imagine? I don't know how she would have been, but that would. Even in today's age, I think that's quite an accomplishment. So possibly the strength was directly from her already being able to.

[04:30] JUDY MAYS: To do that.

[04:31] MARTY HELFRICH: Well, I asked mommy's once. I think the grandpa died. He was very young. And I asked her if she. Why did she have a boyfriend after? Did she ever. Why didn't she remarry? And she said, oh, my, you know, too much to do. And women of that era never remarried. They just took care of the family.

[04:58] JUDY MAYS: Yeah.

[04:59] MARTY HELFRICH: I think part of daddy's strength came from sibling survival, because he told me one time that he always had to try to get to the kitchen as fast as he could because they ate the cold biscuits and gravy that was left on the stove all day long. And his chair at the table was a nail kick. Oh, my. So being the youngest, you know, he had to scramble for survival. So the house that I know of, where they grew up, is that where they lived? No, they lived down.

[05:40] JUDY MAYS: I think they lived in Uncle Ansel's house first, because that was the old family home, and I remember.

[05:50] MARTY HELFRICH: Right.

[05:50] JUDY MAYS: And then they moved on up to where Mama Mason's house was. But I think they started out, maybe not daddy, but started out a lot younger at the old Uncle Ansel house.

[06:02] MARTY HELFRICH: So was the house that I know, was that Maze's house, or was that Aunt Faye and Uncle Ed's house?

[06:08] JUDY MAYS: It was mama Mays's house. And then Uncle Ed came in and remodeled, and he remodeled it in the early fifties because it was being remodeled before we left Springfield.

[06:22] MARTY HELFRICH: So thinking back about the hope and my confusion, I thought they got married in Hope, Arkansas. But since I know mother was in high school, and I know the stories that she was 16, and I know that the marriage license got sent to Uncle Buck or somebody, so it couldn't be a secret wedding. But did she have another year of school? Do you guys know? Because I know she must have gone back to finish high school after they got married. In December or was she done? I don't know. Did she finish high school? I've always assumed she did, but if she was.

[06:56] JUDY MAYS: Yes, she did finish high school. I do know that probably. I don't remember when. When they say she went to Fetteville, it was because they worked. If dad was a freshman in high school, a freshman in college when they got married. And I know they worked together in a grill, a cafe the whole time he was in school. So I would just. I assume that she finished school and then went family in the next.

[07:34] MARTY HELFRICH: And, you know, I know school was so different then that maybe 16 would have been when she would have graduated anyway. Maybe it wasn't so much a junior senior type thing.

[07:42] JUDY MAYS: Maybe she.

[07:43] MARTY HELFRICH: Well, he came home for Christmas break, is when they ran away and got married. I think she stayed in Marshall. I think she did, too. I think she did for the spring. Yeah. I just didn't know at 16 whether she had another year of school. I don't know. I just always kind of wondered about that.

[08:00] JUDY MAYS: No, she did graduate, and I know she played on the basketball team.

[08:03] MARTY HELFRICH: I do remember that. Okay. And I've heard you guys or somebody talk about when they lived in Fayetteville, at the university, that she lived in, like, the house with daddy and a bunch of the other students. Was that right? Because I know he used to talk about they would save their bottle caps or something to get pop, and that the other kids and the house would roll the bottles down the stairs to bother her.

[08:31] JUDY MAYS: I think they just lived in, like, an apartment house. It wasn't like a dorm or anything like that, just an apartment house. And she was the only female.

[08:39] MARTY HELFRICH: And I don't know if it was at that time or my name being Martha Jim. I always thought I was named after Daddy Jim, but I. He told me, or one of them told me, that they used to babysit a little girl in some apartment they lived in, and her name was Martha Jim. You're kidding me. And that's. And, I mean, it's all tied. Of course, I want to think that I was named after Daddy, but that little girl had. And I think we're the only two Martha Jims ever in the whole world.

[09:19] JUDY MAYS: Well, I was almost Jimmy Marie.

[09:21] MARTY HELFRICH: I know. Well, I was going to be Stanley Buell, so I think we're pretty happy that Stanley Buell after Stan, usually. So when I think. You know, I kind of mentioned you guys, I think about kind of different segments of life, of when we moved from Arkansas. Of course, I don't remember because I was little bitty. And then we lived here in Springfield, and then mother died and he moved to the lake and then we fell and we moved him up here. So those are kind of my three segments. But I don't know anything about when we lived in Arkansas on the farm. And I know I love to garden and I always think it's him here inside me doing that.

[10:09] JUDY MAYS: What's mother?

[10:10] MARTY HELFRICH: It's mother.

[10:11] JUDY MAYS: Mother had beautiful rose gardens.

[10:13] MARTY HELFRICH: Well, I do remember her roses.

[10:14] JUDY MAYS: And they. Daddy would say all the time, the reason they're so pretty is because of all the cow manure.

[10:20] MARTY HELFRICH: Well, yeah.

[10:21] JUDY MAYS: And her iris were beautiful. We had. Iris and Marshall don't remember much in what I call the little blue house, the house that had the blue roof. I remember we were nine when we moved to the farm and there were. But we were outside a lot and mother did the gardening. Daddy basically, well, he started out with beef cattle and then went into the dairy farm. He did grow, you were talking, wondering about crops. We had alfalfa field and then he had r1 pretty pasture next door to the house, which was winter oats. And it was really green all winter long.

[11:11] MARTY HELFRICH: Is that the place there along the highway to Atlantis? Is that the farmhouse?

[11:15] JUDY MAYS: Farmhouse. That farmhouse there. And. But he loved. He loved the outdoors, animal part of the farm. But then he couldn't concentrate just strictly on the farm. He had to be a multitask. Right. Which at one time, I think we had a farm and also a farm.

[11:41] MARTY HELFRICH: Yeah. The chicken grill. So you were alive then when they moved to the farm. Where did you guys live before that? Well, if Jeannie was nine, I was three. Yeah. So I don't know.

[11:53] JUDY MAYS: We lived in what I call the little blue house when we started out, when mother, Daddy got back from the service, when we got back from Victoria, we lived with Mama treated and we had a little four room house. And it was Mama treat, Uncle Bill, mother, sister Alba and Uncle Clayton, Linda.

[12:16] MARTY HELFRICH: All in that house.

[12:17] JUDY MAYS: Daddy and mother and myself.

[12:19] MARTY HELFRICH: Oh, my gosh. I didn't want my luck.

[12:20] JUDY MAYS: And I don't remember if we even had a bathroom at that time because I remember an outdoor toilet, but I know that the bathroom. But we had, it was a living room, two bedrooms and a Ydezenhe big dining room and then the kitchen. Goodness gracious. And then after that, we moved down, down the road to what I call the little castle house because it was owned by a castle family. And it was like a little three, three or four room house. And about the only thing I can remember that house is sitting out on the front porch playing dolls by myself. And then we moved to, well, I guess I was about six, I think, right before Marty was born, when we moved up to the little blue house. And I don't remember much about that house at all, although I can remember the dining room, small dining room with their dining room table that had the leaves that would pull up.

[13:18] MARTY HELFRICH: Yeah. And, you know, I. I mean, we know that mother had a mental health and different kinds of difficulties all of my life and starting young in your life as well. And so daddy had to be that support and strength for us. And so when Dan and I first met, he was so surprised that I called mother mother and Daddy Daddy, and I didn't think anything of it. And he just said, it's kind of unusual that daddy is such a close familial name and mother is such a formal name. Was there ever any time that she was mom or anything? Do you guys. No.

[13:59] JUDY MAYS: Well, in Arkansas, everyone was daddy.

[14:02] MARTY HELFRICH: Well, I know I'm sitting here thinking, I think everyone was mother.

[14:05] JUDY MAYS: I think so, too.

[14:06] MARTY HELFRICH: All the cousins, they were all mother and daddy.

[14:09] JUDY MAYS: Mother and daddy, because it was always Uncle Buck. Instead of being called papa, he was called Daddy Buckley. So I think that was just a.

[14:19] MARTY HELFRICH: Tradition in that county, probably searchy county thing like Martha, Jim and Kathy, John and Rebecca James and all that. Mary Jill. Mary Jill. Something else, too, I think about with daddy that there when I sometimes, you know, again, such a strength to us. But there are memories of things of that I get an image of him. Do you guys, if you close your eyes right now, is there an image? I'll tell you. I mean, mine just now was when he moved to the montclair and had the tomato patch there that he grew for the kitchen. And there is the. There are two images. One, it's such a goofy picture there that he's standing out there against the tomatoes and holding a ripe tomato in his hand. And the other goofy one is in Kimberling city at the lake. He's holding. It is Wendy, the white poodle that did not live long. He's standing there with her, and he had one of his cigarettes in his mouth, and I had on blue, like a blue overall. He wore jumpsuits. Jumpsuit. Blue jumpsuits. Yeah. Yeah. So anything that just pops into your head? Well, I was way little on the farm, but he used to go bird hunting a lot, and, and we ate those things and kicked out the buck out of them. But he had a hunter's vest, and if he had a successful hunting time. He would come in and those birds, they just had pockets, and you stick the birds down in them. Was it quail?

[15:59] JUDY MAYS: Yeah, quail. Oh, my mother did. We had the best quail dinners of anyone in Marshall. In fact, everyone would come to the house to have the quail dinners that mother would cook. Yeah, because Doctor Evans and Edwin Weaver and Lawrence, last name is Battershell, and they would all hunt together. And one night, it was really late when they came home, and mother said, well, I didn't know that quail had headlights, because it was way after dark when they got home, they were out a little bit too long. But we had. We had Lady Red, which was a beautiful irish setter. Then we had just this regular hunting dog, lady. But when we lived in the little blue house, we had gyp, which was my bird dog. Jip didn't stay with us very long because he got caught dragging the neighborsburg boat home one day.

[17:05] MARTY HELFRICH: Well, what dog was it on Prairie Lane that used to jump our fence and steal the people's milk from across the street? We had some kind of. Are you sure that's not a dream? I think it was really true. It was. It was Shirley Fisher. Kathy Fisher's. Well, maybe it was after I was gone. Maybe so. I'm Prairie. Maybe so. Yeah, because we'd come home and there'd be milk jugs in the backyard.

[17:27] JUDY MAYS: I don't remember that you guys were both gone.

[17:31] MARTY HELFRICH: You know, he. We used to leave Marshall. I'm probably off the subject here, but his strength. Leave Marshall and drive all the way to St. Louis to a cardinal baseball game, and then all the way back home that very same day. And that was before double highways. You know, we were on windy, windy roads, but. And it must have been before speed limits were enforced, because he used to drive 80 miles an hour. Well, they were just kind of on up towards St. Louis. But that's. That was almost like his. I'm Jim Mays. Get out of my way. I've got control here. And, you know, I'm determined. We're going to get there.

[18:16] JUDY MAYS: And like the night he drove back to Harrison, which was a hard hour drive in 25 minutes because I was in the hospital.

[18:25] MARTY HELFRICH: That's amazing.

[18:27] JUDY MAYS: But no, he always drove fast. My daughter Terry likes to tell a story about Papa Mays. Her dad would always scare her driving to Marshall and back, because Paul drove so fast. So we were all getting ready to come back home, and Terry says, I'm not going to ride with daddy. I want to ride with Papa.

[18:51] MARTY HELFRICH: Oh, she liked that better.

[18:52] JUDY MAYS: Papa scared her so bad that she rode in the floorboard of the car all the way back home.

[18:59] MARTY HELFRICH: Oh, I remember. I mean, I wasn't very old. We'd be driving home from Marshall, and mother would yell, Jimmy, slow down. They're going to take that curve. Jimmy, slow down. But he just would fly around those curves. So I was just thinking of all the kind of the goofy stories about pets, you know, that. That one, stealing people's fur coats or whatever. And then do you remember, I don't know when this happened. He and mom A's. Mom A's was visiting, and they had gone to wash the car and which dog was it? Mandy. They left at the car wash. Mandy.

[19:37] JUDY MAYS: We never did find Mandy.

[19:39] MARTY HELFRICH: Yeah. Little ugly dog.

[19:40] JUDY MAYS: We searched and searched. We went back down to that car wash day after day and asked questions, and someone picked her up.

[19:48] MARTY HELFRICH: Well, I remember a. It's not such a happy story, but it's the way things were then. And if you're a farmer and you've got cows to feed and girls to feed, and one of the dogs had a litter, big litter of puppies under the house, and lady daddy put them in a gummy sack, toe sack, feed sack. And we had a pond. Oh, mom. But, you know, that wasn't a proud thing. But that's what he. That's what he had to do. That is one of my. Yeah. Because she had more.

[20:22] JUDY MAYS: More pups than she could take care of or to feed.

[20:24] MARTY HELFRICH: And that's probably. I mean, it's a humane thing to do. It's more than starving somewhere. So we moved. I know. I guess I was alive when we moved to Amarillo for those 13 days or whatever it was. We were there three months. And the story I heard was that Uncle Armand, or one of them, Armin, or one of them had. Uncle Arlie had offered him a job at the bank. And so daddy moved everybody. And then he found out it was custodian, basically.

[20:58] JUDY MAYS: Yeah. He was supposed to gotten into their finance company and worked his way up and make money like the rest of them had.

[21:06] MARTY HELFRICH: And he did have a history of banking because he banked in Marshall at the same time. He was teaching night school and farming and, I mean, you know, everything and multiple jobs at the same time.

[21:18] JUDY MAYS: He was vice president of the bank for a year in Marshall.

[21:21] MARTY HELFRICH: Yeah.

[21:21] JUDY MAYS: And he would have to go to Little Rock sometimes to get money, and he would bring the big bags of coins home in the backseat of his car.

[21:31] MARTY HELFRICH: So there were no armored cars. Jim May's car. So when you guys, when we moved there, did he still have a farm and you guys, we moved back to the farm, or did he sell it.

[21:43] JUDY MAYS: Or we sold the farm before. Before we left Marshall, while he was still working at the bank, while he taught school for a year, too. He had the agra class at Marshall High School. But we sold the farm and we moved into town to a house next door to where Sandy and Suzanne. Suzanne lived.

[22:09] MARTY HELFRICH: Sandy passed away and then we lived.

[22:11] JUDY MAYS: There until he decided we first, it was we were going to move to Springfield first. And the opportunity came up in Amarillo and he thought that sounded like a better deal than investing money here in Springfield.

[22:27] MARTY HELFRICH: So many hated. It's dry and. Yeah, ugly. And the big baptist church. I remember going to the baptist church, but it was. We didn't.

[22:37] JUDY MAYS: Yeah, I loved it.

[22:39] MARTY HELFRICH: You liked Amarillo?

[22:40] JUDY MAYS: Oh, I loved it because I had, I had cousins my age and I got to do all the fun things, all the church things, and went to camp.

[22:47] MARTY HELFRICH: And then we moved to Springfield where you knew nobody and everything was huge. So I know he worked with RG when he moved here. Did he move here because RG had wanted him to go in with him or how did that come about?

[23:04] JUDY MAYS: We had. The business was available. Mister RC Claxton has started this little company in the back of his drugstore.

[23:16] MARTY HELFRICH: Over on Carney street.

[23:19] JUDY MAYS: And RG had come up from Arkansas and had invested with Mister Claxton. And they tried to get dad to come up with them at the very beginning and buy out Mister Claxton. And then after the Amarillo deal didn't pan out is when dad was in contact with RG again and bought out Mister Claxton. And that's when we moved down on Boonville street then. And that partnership lasted for several years, but it wasn't a good partnership.

[23:57] MARTY HELFRICH: He worked hard, would leave five in the 430 in the morning and come home. And I was sharing with my friend the other day about working in the warehouse for two whole summers in the hot, dirty warehouse. Every once in a while he'd give me a $20 bill. But after the second summer is when he, he gave me my little car, that Ford Fairlane 500. I remember that fair lane. It took me to school a lot. Yeah, but hard, hard, hard worker. And I know as he aged, he often apologized that he was gone so much. And it did make me think more recently as a grandparent and how we played with the grandkids and their parents play with the kids. And it may just be because I don't remember. But do we remember them playing with us? I remember Christmases when we would get toys and Daddy and Paul would play with the toys. Was it a racing turtle or something?

[25:02] JUDY MAYS: We had a two headed turtle.

[25:04] MARTY HELFRICH: My mother was responsible for buying those. She did pick out those gifts, so. Oh, I remember the first year she was gone when he tried to buy us gifts that it wasn't as big of a Christmas. Yeah. Yeah. Did he play with us or our kids?

[25:21] JUDY MAYS: Us.

[25:21] MARTY HELFRICH: Do you remember him playing with us? Well, I mean, it had to be after dark. I know he was always so busy working, you know, I remember a snow sled that he put a flat ladder behind the g and took it over to the ball field by Maze's house. And that was. And he pulled a us. And the, you know, he would do stuff like that. But as far as, like, playing with us, I just remember doing chores. I shoveled poop out of the dairy barn, you know, and he had me gather the eggs, I remember, in the snake. Yeah. But as far as playing, playing, I remember. I mean, we were obviously in Springfield and we would play checkers a lot. I remember that. And mother played, too. But then I would get mad and I lost. And so he wouldn't play with me anymore. But I do.

[26:16] JUDY MAYS: I spent a lot of time with mother, daddy, in the younger years, I mean, but the St. Louis trips, that we would just. It was just us going up before even Marty was around. And. But like I say, the sled, he spent a lot of time. He loved the teenagers that hung out at the grille. And so I was involved with all of the teenagers here. I was like seven, eight, nine years old. And I was with all these juniors and seniors in high school, and they would always congregate and make the big floats for the strawberry parade. And one night they were getting ready to close up the grill and dad said, we don't have a float for the parade tomorrow. So one of the guys, I think it was Tommy Martin, had a little red MG sports car convertible. So they pulled it into the grill and decorated it. And then they said, well, what are we going to do now? We don't have anything to put on top of it. They said, well, Judy can ride on the top of it. So they had me riding on top of the motor of that car in the parade until my little hang in got too red. So they took me off. But they said something about, let's see, strawberries are red and green, and here's our chicken girl queen.

[27:35] MARTY HELFRICH: Oh, how funny. Well, that you know, maybe I know how when he. When mother died and he moved to the lake and then retired, selling the mart there, and he worked at the boat dock and how he loved the kids there.

[27:49] JUDY MAYS: He loved the bikinis.

[27:50] MARTY HELFRICH: He loved the bikinis. And he loves. And volleyball in the Olympics, like their uniforms. That reminded me of something else. It's leisure time, though, in the older years. I mean, we were too old to play with. He played softball for years, and he, you know, they had their bowling teams, too, and he had to be a winner. And the one story that maybe not everybody knows is when, in the early years, when he was playing baseball, and he would tell David, I was a good baseball player because he was very fast, not being very large man, he. But he slid into second base rounding the bases, and slid in and broke the second baseman's life. Oh, my gosh.

[28:37] JUDY MAYS: I remember all the barns from his baseball days in Arkansas. And, I mean, he'd wear those. They had these big.

[28:45] MARTY HELFRICH: They call strawberries, you get on their legs. Yeah.

[28:48] JUDY MAYS: And they had some kind of a. A big cloth type deal that had a sack. Yeah, that's another word I can't say. Okay. You know what I'm talking about? That was the art made on type, and he would put that. Mother would put it on his legs to ease that. But no, he was a good baseball player, and he had to. Since he was left handed, he had to wear his watch on his right arm while he played ball.

[29:13] MARTY HELFRICH: Well, I. When? Oh, it was much later, and he was older and feeling that, you know, how you may have regrets as you age. And he often said he worried so much about the fact that he worked so hard, and we didn't really talk about it, but I do wonder if, I know, with mother's medical bills. So it was a combination. I didn't know whether he was working so hard to help with that as well as it was a safe place, because I know I buried myself in school as a safe place, and maybe work was a safe place for him. So it was a combination of.

[29:51] JUDY MAYS: They were both extremely hard workers in Arkansas. They worked extremely hard. The seven years that we had the cafe, it was, you know. And mother worked right alongside him. And I think that was the summer that I was for, when she ended up with an indolent fever and spent the summer in Barnes hospital. They told dad at that time that her neurological makeup would probably never be the same. And I think she had some problems as a young girl to start off with. I think some. Possibly some of her, what we probably call abuse now from her upbringing. And after we moved to Springfield, she was a wonderful homemaker on her good times. Yeah.

[30:46] MARTY HELFRICH: I mean, yeah.

[30:47] JUDY MAYS: And would work. Work extremely hard with dad. She worked at the warehouse with him some. When we opened the stores, she drove back and forth to Monet. But no, I think a lot of his. When we basically, when he moved to Springfield, his hard work was because of income and her medical bills.

[31:16] MARTY HELFRICH: He worked hard because that was his work ethic just to begin with. You know, that's. That's just the bottom line. And I think people look to him for so much support other than the family. I know past employees he had. He would loan them money, and he never saw it again. You know, he was so giving that way.

[31:36] JUDY MAYS: I used to always say that he was too honest to be a good businessman.

[31:40] MARTY HELFRICH: And he was. Yeah. Just was too generous with everything.

[31:42] JUDY MAYS: Too generous with everything.

[31:44] MARTY HELFRICH: And you know that saying that he gave in that life journal for my graduate student. And she wrote that, I am happy today. I was happy yesterday, and I'll be happy tomorrow. I do see that of him through all of my adult life. Was he that way growing up? Do you remember? I think he was a happy person. Yeah. I mean, even in the latter years, our daily phone call. And I would say, hi, daddy. And he'd go, hi, baby girl. And I say, how are you? And he'd say, oh, I've had a good day. Been a good day. It's been a good day. And one time I said, what made your day so good today, daddy? And he said, well, it's Wednesday. We got a banana. Or they had bingo. And he won toilet paper. So, no, I only remember him being sad and angry through the mother issues, you know? But even I do remember a couple of times of anger when we. He'd taken me to the fair, and the guy playing the game, daddy caught him cheating, and mother had to hold his arm so he wouldn't jump over. Oh, well, we.

[33:03] JUDY MAYS: We at one of the fairs in Arkansas when I was little, uh, he had got a little horse about, oh, two, three inches tall. Cost him $60.

[33:11] MARTY HELFRICH: Oh, gosh, it tried so hard.

[33:13] JUDY MAYS: Cause he. He just couldn't. He was determined he was gonna beat the odds there.

[33:17] MARTY HELFRICH: Well, one. One thing I wanted to say about him, um, is the grace he gave us when we needed to move him. And that he was not happy that he had to leave his home. But he just said over and over, girls, if this is what you think we need to do, I'll do it. It's not how where I expected to be, but I will do it. And I just, you know, we were so blessed to have that. So anything else you guys want to say? Any other little stories? Well, the one that I think we'll all remember the day that we were getting ready to take him back home after we'd taken him to the doctor, and they said, your kidneys are filling. We can put you in the hospital or you can go home. And she asked him three times, mister Mays, what do you want to do? And he said, I want to go home. So we all said, okay. And then she said, is there anything I can do to make you more comfortable? Are you. Do you have anything else? And he goes, well, I do. And we're all quietly listening. He goes, I have a drippy, drippy nose. So that was the end of the doctor visit. And we took him home and box of Kleenexes. And the rest was. He was okay. Yeah, he was ready to go home. Well, thank you, sisters. I just wanted us to have a little bit of time to reminisce and, you know, we don't do this.

[34:44] JUDY MAYS: And I just wish I could remember more.

[34:48] MARTY HELFRICH: Well, you remember a lot more.

[34:50] JUDY MAYS: There was so much of my younger years that as you, you all know, have mother's illness. The last, when the. In spring fell, I don't remember much, but I can. I know that she fainted a lot. She passed out a lot. And I would be home by myself. And so, so much has been blocked out. And I think we've all blocked out as the reason that we all need to continue to get together to see what each one remembers about different things.

[35:24] MARTY HELFRICH: Kind of a puzzle that we can all put together. Well, he always had better scotch Werthers in his candy dish. And I started that. My little ones, my grandkids, they asked for Papa Mae's candy a lot. So that's a truth that's handed down.

[35:39] JUDY MAYS: Well, Mike's wants them too. He keeps them out on the back porch.

[35:43] MARTY HELFRICH: That's great. I saw. It's really kind of funny because there was something I saw the other day that said, do you want kid candy or do you want Grandpa candy? And they were using Werther's as the grandpa. Oh, they were. We just did a great ad for Werther's. Alrighty. I guess we're. I guess we're good.

[36:05] JUDY MAYS: Okay.

[36:08] MARTY HELFRICH: So thank you, guys. It's been really long. Thank you, Mary Jo Mays and Judy X. Maybe.

[36:23] JUDY MAYS: I think we're good.