Grave Records (Hicks side of the family)

My grandparents, Lorie Ted Hicks and Anna Lee Hicks (Offutt was her maiden name; one distant relative on this side of the family had Offutt Air Force Base named after him, by the way) are buried at Smith-Morgan Cemetery a few miles away from Ebenezer Cemetery where the Smith relatives are buried.  It is named for Washington B. Smith, a wealthy landowner (with 7000+ acres of land pre-Civil War and also a slave owner) who was a relative but NOT on the Smith side but rather the Hicks side.

There are lots of Offutts buried in Smith-Morgan.  Here is the headstone of my grandmother's brother Hughie and his wife; he was killed in a car wreck before my time. Mama (our name for Grandmother Hicks) told me about it once and she was still very sad in the retelling of it.

<<Click on the pictures to enlarge and see more detail>>

 Here are a couple of headstones of relatives I know nothing about; one was a 3 year old child and the other a veteran of World War II:

Gina, Kristie, Mother and I took a trip to Arkansas in 2008 to visit the cemeteries  Here is Mother looking on the grave of her parents....she didn't know the pictures were taken.  She was battling lung cancer when this was taken; remarkably, she recovered from it.

My grandparents were both very remarkable people. "Ted", as we called him, was a very gentle, kind and intelligent man who loved music and composed some that he sent to the then-popular Tennessee Ernie Ford radio show (this was way before television).  Ted also was an inventor who developed some sort of mechanism that held up a single bottom plow so that the man who walked behind it didn't have to fight it to keep it upright.  When money was needed, he would make one or two of them and go to town where he could sell them for a few dollars cash---hard to come by on little farms in south Arkansas during the depression era.  He was also a carpenter and built a beautiful walnut table out of a walnut free he chopped down in the woods; after hitching the log to a mule team, he dragged it to an old steam powered sawmill who cut it into lumber for him.  The table is hand carved and pegged together with hand-whittled pegs.  I remember crawling around under that table when I was a toddler as it sat in Mama and Ted's front little room of their two room apartment in Pine Bluff.  He also made a "crooked leg table" as Mama called it by taking a crooked limb off of a tree and somehow splitting it into four identical legs which he then arranged around a circular top--it is a very unusual and interesting old piece which I still have.  One of my strongest memories of Ted was of him sitting in a rocking chair reading his Bible.  He did this very often and I can picture it vividly today.  As I said, he was a kind and easy-going man with a personality much like my own mother's.

Mama (or "Old Mama" as we called her once my own children Jeff and Dan were alive) was VERY MUCH LIKE "Granny" off the Beverly Hillbillies TV show.  She was very similar in size and was very healthy and spry into her 80's.  Mama had a germ phobia and believe me, her house was always extremely clean.  She would climb up in a chair and knock any spiderwebs down out of the corners from the 10 foot ceilings in their old apartment!  She was a simple woman who dipped snuff (a common habit of women from that time and place!) and who really loved me.  She would often "brag" about me, about how good looking or smart I was; what she was really doing was simply building me up so to speak, a kind and loving thing to do. When Ted had a series of strokes and essentially became almost a vegetable, she sat by his bed everyday for 4 years or so until he died.  She was terrified of lightning storms, even until her own death at 90 plus years of age.

This stone is that of her parents:

I vaguely remember her father ("Papa", she called him).  He lived on a small farm in south Arkansas and was very tall, slender and dignified.  I remember him sitting in front of an old open hearth fireplace at the farmhouse in a rocking chair, quietly looking at the fire.  At this time, he would have been at least 90 and I was a little kid....

There are some really big trees down there in south Arkansas.  Here is one near their graves.

In this same cemetery, there is a very sad thing.  To your left as you walk in, there are several graves in a row, of varying ages but the date of death is very close to being the same.  These graves are those of many of the victims of Ronald Gene Simmons who essentially murdered his entire family and several other people--16 all together-- over several days around Christmas in 1987.  The whole awful story is here:


Just before Christmas 1987, Russellville, Arkansas, Ronald Gene Simmons made a conscious decision to kill all the members of his family. On the morning of 22 December he first bludgeoned and shot his son Gene and his long-suffering wife Rebecca; then he strangled his three-year-old daughter Barbara. After having a beer, Simmons dumped the bodies in the cesspit he had made his children dig. Now Simmons sat back and awaited the return of his other children. When they arrived off the bus he said he had presents for them but wanted to give them one at a time. First to receive her ‘gift’ was eldest daughter, seventeen-year-old Loretta, who Simmons strangled and held under the water in the rain barrel. The three other children, Eddy, Marianne and Becky were dispatched in a similarly callous manner.
Around midday on 26 December, the remaining members of the family arrived for their planned Christmas visit; it was to be their last Christmas. The first to die was Simmons’ son Billy and daughter-in-law Renata, both shot dead; then his grandson Trae was strangled and drowned; then daughter Sheila and her husband Dennis McNulty were shot. Ronald Simmons’ child by his own daughter, christened Sylvia Gail, was strangled, and finally grandson Michael. Simmons laid the bodies of his whole family in neat rows in the lounge. All the corpses were covered with coats except that of Sheila, who was laid in state covered by Mrs Simmons’ best tablecloth. The bodies of the two grandsons were wrapped in plastic sheeting and left in abandoned cars at the end of the lane. After popping out for a drink in a local bar Simmons returned to the house and, apparently oblivious of the corpses lined up around him, spent the next two nights and the Sunday drinking beer and watching television.
On the Monday morning Ronald Simmons drove into Russellville and at a law office shot dead a young woman named Kathy Kendrick, who for some reason he blamed for many of his problems. Next stop on his murderous tour was an oil company office where Simmons shot dead a man named J.D Chaffin and wounded the owner. He then drove on to a store where he shot and wounded two more people. Now on to another office where he shot and wounded a woman. And that was the end of his killing spree. Simmons simply sat in the office and chatted to one of the secretaries while waiting for the police. When they arrived he handed over his gun and surrendered without any resistance.
Simmons was charged with sixteen counts of murder, found guilty and sentenced to death. On 31 May Arkansas governor (later president) Bill Clinton signed Simmons execution warrant, and on 25 June 1990 he died, as he had chosen to do, by lethal injection.

If anyone doubts the presence of total and Satanic evil in this world, consider what Simmons wrote:

"You have destroyed me, and you have destroyed my trust in you . . . I will see you in Hell." (Taken from a letter written to his daughter after she reported him for molesting her.)


It is a bitter thing to stand by those graves.


Outside the cemetery, there is a little open area with several large pine trees where family reunions were held that I remember attending as a child.  They were pot-luck affairs with lots of food and mostly a lot of adults who I really didn't know very well.  It seems like nearly all of them would come up to me and say, "Well, you are little Jay!  How much you have grown!!"  It is a pleasant memory.  It is though provoking to consider that nearly all of the folks that would have been at those reunions have passed into the next life by now. On our visit there in 2008 with Mother, , Gina, and Kristie, I saw one of those old trees, now cut down, with new life springing out of it.  It seems a fitting way to end this post: