‘Don’t be an OLD GRUMP’
Centenarian reflects on three great loves: Farm, family, faith
Hebron United Methodist Church stands stark and white against a gray Arkansas afternoon. Founded in 1870 and perched between Carlisle and Hickory Plains, the church houses a small collection of the faithful. Nellie Parks, 101, knows this place as well as just about anywhere on Earth. As a girl, she watched a team of mules pull the building from one side of the road to the other, rolled on logs. She’s been tied to the tiny church ever since.
“We went to church every Sunday,” Parks said. “We didn’t have no car to go in, neither. We went in wagons and tied ’em up to them trees out there for church.
“A lot of times, we’d have dinners, but we didn’t have tables and things. We carried our tablecloths and spread them on the ground. That was our picnic. And everybody brought fried chicken.”
At this memory, Parks laughed. She laughs a lot, calling it one of the secrets to not just a long life, but one worth living.
“All I can tell you is be happy,” she said. “Have a happy marriage and children. “That’s right. Don’t be an old grump.” For all she’s seen, Nellie Parks talked most about three things that have brought her life meaning: her faith, her family and life on the farm.
“I loved the farm,” she said. “You could grow your own food and have your cows and hogs.”
Her parents, Homer and Eve Pinson, raised cotton and corn on the Prairie County homeplace near Hickory Plains. An only
child, Parks reveled in the open spaces and fresh air of country life, she said. Despite the hard life of pre-tractor farming, her parents didn’t enlist her help, by her recollection, until she was, “maybe 10 or 12.”
“I guess they kind of favored me,” she said. “I got by; guess I was kind of lazy.”
Parks was educated in a little country school in Plainview through the eighth grade. She said she doesn’t remember being a particularly good student or having a favorite subject. What she does remember were the plays that students would put on from time to time.
“We had plays quite a bit,” she said. “Yeah, I done pretty well, I guess.”
She met the love of her life early, an Illinois transplant named Ralph Parks. They would marry and set up housekeeping.
“I married Ralph Parks when I was 16 and he was 18,” she said. “We lived on a farm in the backwoods. It wasn’t far from his parents or mine, either — just a little house and a little farm.”
For as abiding as her parents were, Parks still developed a steely work ethic growing up, she said.
“Horses,” she said. “Listen, if you’d seen me, I followed a team of mules and horses breaking ground to plant cotton and corn. We had no tractors. I was doing that and raising three little kids. I had a son and two daughters.”
“She’d put a quilt down there at the field and put all three of us on that, said Shirley Harrison, the brood’s middle and only surviving sibling. “There’s about a-year-and-something difference in all three of us. She’s out there working, and my brother’s just a year and one month older than me, and he had to pull me back on the quilt to keep me from getting in the grass.”
With three close-set mouths to feed, the farm operation expanded to include a dairy, and with it, the workload of hand-milking 20 cows.
“I didn’t like that,” Parks recalled. “It’s just hard work. On the last year or so, my husband worked at the rice mill, and that was a double on me, handling those big milk cows. It wasn’t funny.”
Parks was equally known for her domestic skills, Harrison said. A skilled seamstress and quilter, Parks routinely made her children’s clothes, often out of feed and flour sacks. While that work is behind her, her selftaught cooking and baking skills are still the stuff of local legend.
“Mother is a cook. She loves to cook,” Harrison said. “I wish you could see some of the cakes that she baked and decorated. She decorated all the grandkids’ wedding cakes.”
“Granny would invite us to eat at her house, still does,” said Roger Crouch, pastor of Hebron UMC, using the pet name the congregation has given Parks. “She makes the best fried chicken, and she makes the best fried pies. My kids wouldn’t get excited about a lot of things, but if they knew we were going to Granny’s house to eat lunch after church, they were excited because they knew there would be fried chicken and fried pies, and it would knock their socks off.”
Crouch’s wife, Shari, said she enjoys a unique relationship with Parks, who was close friends with Shari’s late grandmother, Grace Caviness. Shari says the woman she calls Granny displays a Christlike love to those in need.
“I went through breast cancer starting in 2016, and [Parks] called me about every other day, and then it got to maybe twice a week just to check on me to see how I was doing,” Shari said. “She’s concerned about others, and she always had to ask me how I was doing, how I was feeling.
“I’d always tell her, ‘Granny Granny, I love you and I pray for you each and every day,’ and she says, ‘Well, I pray for you, too.’ That just melts my heart. Sometimes it brings me to tears.”
Parks’ concern for others extends to their spiritual well-being, too. She said her late husband’s fingerprints — Ralph died in 1997 — are all over Hebron UMC. According to Roger Crouch, the Parks and another couple, Ed and Neola McNew of Beebe, built and furnished a church addition almost single-handedly. Parks likes to show it off to visitors, especially the kitchen, which gets heavy use for church functions.
Inside the sanctuary, there’s more — a stained-glass window bought in Ralph’s memory and a pew in the couple’s honor and in memory of Nellie’s parents, as a brass plaque reads. While that pew is acknowledged to be hers, there are rare occasions when she’ll give it up to someone, like the time a woman who hadn’t come to church in a while unwittingly sat in Parks’ spot. When Parks heard other congregants whispering about who would ask the woman to move, she shushed them.
“I told them it’s fine, I can sit somewhere else,” she said. “If it makes her start coming to church regular, she can sit there.”
Roger Crouch said the story speaks volumes about the impact Nellie Parks has on the faith community, including him.
“If you want to talk about a real cornerstone beyond that of just attendance and making sure your family is there, it’s her faith,” he said. “I’ve seen her cry; I’ve seen her laugh. I’ve talked to her about so many deep subjects, and never once did I think to myself, ‘Well, I know more, and I should be advising her.’ Every single time, I knew she knew more than I did. She’s teaching me. She is helping me for the days to come.”
Today, Parks’ three great loves are still intact. She hasn’t lived on the farm in years, but she still acts like she does. Just recently, Roger drove by to see her raking leaves out of a ditch in front of her Carlisle home to keep the ditch from backing up. Her faith is fed by Scripture and what she calls her pastor’s “God-called preaching.”
And as for her family, it officially includes nine grandchildren, 16 greatgrandchildren and eight great-great-grandchildren. Unofficially, it’s much larger than that, as her 100th birthday celebration in 2018 revealed.
“That was the biggest crowd we’ve ever had,” Roger said. “We had 150 to 200 people. We couldn’t count them all. They came for church and then had a great potluck. …
“She is the one that kept the church going. Whenever I first came out there, we were having seven and eight on Sunday. She was always one of them, and she’s helped it come back. How will we remember her? She helped hold us together.”
Asked about the most impactful things she’s seen during her lifetime, Parks returned a simple shrug and a smile. The immediacy of raising babies, tending crops and giving witness overshadowed much of anything else, she said. Everything she had — that she ever wanted, she said — was right here, and so here she stayed and saw to them, simple as that.
How she’d like to be remembered is similarly plainspoken, tinged with laughter: “Just as a tough old woman, I guess,” she said.