LASTING IMPRESSION
We had to mind our p’s and q’s, until the Ponder Quads changed everything.
How the Ponder quadruplets made her life easier.
When Daddy became the new pastor in Murfreesboro, Arkansas, population 1,075, he warned my brother Leslie Ray and me that our behavior would be watched and reported around town. We would have loved to dig for diamonds over at the crater, for instance. Years earlier someone had found diamonds in the dirt on a farm outside town, and the property had become a tourist attraction. You paid a fee to search for diamonds all day, and what you found you kept. But Daddy said it wasn’t becoming for the preacher’s kids to be out there digging for profit. (The site is now Crater of Diamonds State Park, and the finders-keepers policy still applies.)
It didn’t help that we were the only kids with red hair in our church. We were constantly noticed when what we wanted most was to blend in. Lucky for us, our town was on the brink of change with an event that would distract attention from two freckled redheads.
On Jan. 14, 1952, the Ponder family instantly expanded by four with the birth of quadruplets: Donna Fay, Danny Kay, Dewey Ray and Dickey Gay. Dr. Duncan delivered the babies at the cabin where Mr. and Mrs. Ponder lived with their eight other children. The Ponder Quads, as everyone started calling them, were big news in town, and a newspaper reporter interviewed the family. The story said the Ponders didn’t have enough chairs to sit on; they hadn’t had enough for their children even before the quadruplets were born.
“Well, I never,” Daddy said when he read the article. “We have to get that family what they need.”
But before he could get his charity effort going, the Ponders had become famous, and businesses began to give them all they needed. The quaduplets were photographed with Pet evaporated milk, and the company built the family a new house with a wall-to-wall window in the front room so the public could see the babies. Now the whole nation could point and stare without being considered unkind. Mr. and
Mrs. Ponder went to New York City to be on television.
The Ponder Quads did my brother and me a great big favor. While they were lying around being famous, we could fade into the background, getting away with mischief. The town turned out to have exceeded our hopes and dreams. As far as we were concerned, there couldn’t be a better place to live in 1952 than Murfreesboro—new population 1,079.
The town turned out to have exceeded our hopes and dreams.